This is the enemy, Brobdingnag, second empire of the living, growing its sheer preoccupation with survival and reproduction into every joint of thought and emotion; wrapping effort in a miasma of numberless repetitious leaves, the extravagant monotony of unceasing verdure; spawning, cradled in its own decay, the foam and surge of new plant life; never to be stripped by winter, never to be relieved in the starkness of death; never to know the resurrection of the spring. Gone the pendulum of the four seasons, poising in harmony the searching mind, providing in each bud’s fruition contrast and comparison, effecting through human senses a sting to alert perception, renewing things well known into magic strangeness, breeding young dreams and visions.

By the ever-recurrent downward-sweeping rain of the roots of a banyan tree lounges a tethered sick elephant, owned by the Happy Chung Circus, touring South East Asia with Japanese and Filipino amazons, ringworm-encrusted lions, seals, and a cruel young man with a long whip which swirls and snatches at lamentable tigers. The elephant, moving bony haunches, tramples a bunch of large golden bananas (tasteless the larger, and less savoury, as women, say the men of Malaya) which a curly haired Bengali boy, sandy loin-cloth about him, hooks away with a bamboo stick, then squats by the elephant’s fragrant molehill of dung to eat.

‘I am sending my eldest boy to tour with the circus; it is an education, a valuable education,’ says Lam Teck, a Chinese towkay, businessman, in the front seat of the car next to the white police officer driving the Wyvern. The windows of the car are down, and the grey torrid metal carapace would insulate us from the softly pulsating life streaming past on the road, but that Lam is with us, and Lam is Malaya, with his nylon transparent shirt, worn outside trousers, through the breast-pocket of which can be seen an envelope with brush-neat characters, some rolled dollar bills, and the red folded jacket of his identity card.

Lam has plastic teeth, a fact to mention first because he is so proud of it. He owns four sets, one so good, so expensive, so American, that he wears it only for funerals. He has a face unlined and smooth as his son’s; dark shining hair waved and polished with Yardley lavender oil; only one lung. One lung saves him when two years later he is imprisoned for dealing in gold and opium, and trying to bribe the Harbour Police during six long months; one lung is enough to spare him rigorous hard labour. Lam is a friend, alive, cheerful, informative, and sending his son with the Happy Chung Circus, out of Malaya into the world, Indonesia, Siam, Burma, perhaps the Philippines, the world of South East Asia.