Peacocks as comets catapult across the tarmac road in a tailflurry of blue-green and gilded palm-frond feathers, to drop staggering, clutching, swinging their meek sharp heads upon the wire fences which ring the Sultan’s Zoo. Tulips, poppy red, grow in clusters forty feet up towards the sun-bleached sky, on the round-leaved glossy tulip trees. In the Sultan’s gardens the verdigris statue of an arrow-spending cherub springs from the centre of a water-lily pond where stagnate black-scaled timorous fish. Two ponies rough-maned and gentle, amble from the gardens, with discerning hooves high-lifted among the bayonet-serried grass, to graze the cropped lawn of the Judge’s house, where a white board props up the English word private, and a doorless yellow structure, privy-narrow, exhibits the open visitors’ book. The Judge himself walks the road towards the Zoo, a cane on his arm and a purposeful missionary look upon him, the emotional garment with which the whites invest even their laziest leisures. In his white shorts’ pocket reposes an egg for the sad and furious Indian mongoose in his cell. Everyone but the Judge has forgotten the narrow sinuous animal with the muted war-song in his throat, for there are three tiger cubs, caged golden sunsets, lolloping in an enclosure with their two dog mothers (wet-nurses, their own mother dead), whose bellies are pink and milkful; faithful thin and dark wet-nurses barking fondly at their monstrous golden pups. All around the low enclosure the children climb the fence, and Leica-dangling men aim and aim again at the lovely burning-bright felines rippling in the harsh mid-morning glare of sun over Malaya.

So many other things are Malaya: the mosque, triple-domed, Victorian, always embellished on photographs by the appropriate distance and fake moonshine (a special red filter produces the milk-soft whiteness of moon-washed walls). From its high cupola the protuberant black trumpets of a four-mouthed loudspeaker lament five times throughout Friday; the muezzin at the microphone, praising and blessing the Lord Allah. On their bicycles the soft-moving, quicksilver Malays slither and whirr, silver-soft, down the road towards the entrance pillars of the mosque, which carry no gates and no bars. They are all male, going to the mosque, wearing black velvet round caps called songkoks, and sometimes a white stitched Haji cap for holiness, badge of a pilgrimage to Mecca. Their breeze-swollen, loose shirts about them are pastel turquoise, cinnamon, and apple green; their sarongs are woven with large squares of pink, blue, mauve, gold, purple, cinnabar, and orange; their white trousers fall to the naked ankle, and the nude feet are clad in shoes of black and brown leather, plum and grey suede.