Had he been dressed in an open nylon shirt and long trousers, Sen, walking on the streets of Singapore, would have looked exactly like a university student, only perhaps more refined, slimmer than the hefty, boisterous yet timid extroverts which English schools seemed to produce out of Chinese youngsters. He walked in and out of the camps, appearing and disappearing, heralded half an hour before arrival by a bodyguard who would squat waiting for him. Quiet, unconcerned, apparently unarmed, he strolled in to stay a day, or two, at the most a week, and off he would go. None asked his destination, nor questioned the orders he brought, the Policy he would explain, and after he left the camp commandant would once more repeat the orders and the Policy, so that everyone would know that he had understood.
Ah Pak did not know whether Sen would be gone when he returned from his watch. But tomorrow he was sure to be gone. Old Mother would also be gone. Ah Pak’s mother had come last night, by the devious ways she alone seemed to find, turning and twisting and always eluding capture, carrying messages. She had given them to Sen, small, identically tiny pellets of tightly folded cigarette paper concealed everywhere upon her, monotonously reciting where each one came from. Ah Pak had been on guard duty near Sen, and had nearly cried out Aiyah in astonishment when Old Mother had extracted a message from her belt and said: ‘And this is from Small Cloud, given me at the market fruit stall.’
Ah Pak’s eyes went up, piercing the swift darkness, looked upon Sen’s face. Certainly he would see something … some shadow of feeling upon that thin and careful face.
But there was nothing to see, absolutely nothing at all. And in this nothingness, this huge calm which Ah Pak would never fathom, he found his strong sure faith perfected against all weapons, hunger, and defeat, and failure, and, of course, death.
- Makan: food. ↵
- Jaga: door-keeper. ↵
10
SEED OF ANTS
Soft in violence, a silken-handed compulsion as of breath moving with secure grace to the idiot slackness of its end.
Rosie Yip, now Chief Wardress in charge of female detainees, sniffed the sleek resistless air, honeyed with the pink-gold surge of sundown, looked at the indigo hills framing the horizon of the Straits, and heard the near and docile voices, the tittered obedient laughter from the class-rooms of the camp. Within the mask of her wrinkleless round face, devoid of those rippled emotions which betray the European, she appraised the intangible with unnamed sense, a spiritual bloodhound on the trail of impending violence. Violence was sediment of long immobility, compact spark of fire from the smouldering placation of endless caging. There had not been trouble in the camp for a long time, and trouble was due.