The Orientalist and the Ghost Read Online Free PDF Page A

Someone must have put it in my skirt when it was out on the washing line
.
    Name: Miss Tammy Lai
    Contraband: Vial of morphine and syringe, placed in her baby’s nappy.
    Statement:
I am a busy mother of five children. I cannot be expected to keep an eye on them all of the time
.
    It was very depressing when a villager was sent to detention camp. I doubt many of them were genuine supporters of the Malayan Races Liberation Army. They smuggled because they’d been blackmailed into it by terrorists who stole up on them while they were tapping and pressed knives to their throats. Or because they had fathers and sons among the jungle bandits and they didn’t want them to starve. Far more was smuggled beyond the check-point than we detected. Sergeant Abdullah had a theory that most contraband was smuggled in the lower-body cavities.
A woman of child-bearing age could take up to half a katis of rice
, he told me,
and the men never waddle like that on the journey home
.
    The unfortunates at the end of the queue had to wait an hour or two to get beyond the check-point. Every inch the sun edged over the horizon was several
ringgit
lost. (
I won’t make enough to feed my family this week!
the last in the queue complained.) I was always relieved to flee the east gate at eight, not least because that was the hour the market gardeners set off for work, presenting the guards with buckets of pig excrement to inspect.
    Every morning I took my second breakfast on the veranda with Charles. It was never the most pleasant of meals, for Charles possessed a dichotomy of character and the morning saw him at his worst.
    In the hours of moonlight Charles was Bacchus, roaring his heart out as Wagner trumpeted from the gramophone. He’d raise his glass of whisky (or gin or rum or
crème de menthe
) and make magniloquent toasts to the future independence of Malaya, to the victory of the Allied Forces or to the afternoon his Japanese jailers huddled around hand grenades and blew themselves to smithereens. Then he’d get a bit silly and raise a glass to Winston Lau’s spicy
laska
, or the piebald mongrel trotting by the officers’ hut. In the evening time, assisted by his old friends Johnny Walker and Jack Daniels, Charles was in buoyant spirits.
    But in the cruel morning light he was crapulent and bestial, as if he’d descended a few rungs of the evolutionary ladder. He’d scowl in his rattan chair, his shirt buttoned up incorrectly beneath his red braces, his sparse curls wet from the bathing hut. I’d eat my condensed-milk sandwiches and try to ignore Charles as he took wincing sips of his coffee (twice-brewed to tarry potency), Radio Malaya playing tunes of breezy
joie de vivre
, in mockery of our grim repast.
    I think it was a misguided sense of duty that made me endure Charles’s gargoylesque turn of mouth and yellow-tinctured skin every morning. The hungover Charles seemed to exist in demonstration of some universal principle concerning the conservation of pleasure:
he who inducts the fire of whisky into his veins so the warmth spreads throughout in mimicry of joy shall awaken to a bolt of pain in the skull
… I had no sympathy for Charles’s self-inflicted misery. While I’d been up since before daybreak, inspecting trouser waistbands for hidden glucose tablets as part of ‘Operation Starvation’, Charles had been in his bed, snoring those deafening snores of his, infamous throughout the village.
    Once sufficiently caffeinated by his special twice-brewed coffee, Resettlement Officer Dulwich would put on his seersucker suit and we’d go to the office to attend to the administrative business of The Village of Everlasting Peace. First I’d read aloud the incident reports filed by the night patrol; of sniper fire from the hills, or villagers arrested for hurling boots over the perimeter fence for the bandits. Then Charles would dictate letters to the District War Committee and the Malayan Chinese Association, requesting funding for