‘I am acquainted with Fong Kiap,’ she said, her face of childish innocence lifted to mine. ‘The baby is really her husband’s child, and he is of the People Inside. She let the People sleep at her hut … she gave them food, and on their way up north, the couriers stopped there to rest. Fong Kiap does not admit that the child is the son of the man in the jungle. She is afraid that the red-haired devils will hunt him through her, force her to write to him and thus trap him. So she has told the red-hairs that the child was by a travelling salesman. Of course, everyone knows it is a lie, except the red-hairs. They were not sure until they asked me.’

‘Why do you tell me this?’ I asked.

Ah Mei did not reply. She appeared not to have heard. I did not want her to fear me, and so did not repeat my question. Rosie Yip returned with Fong Kiap, and all three left in a black police car driven by a Tamil chauffeur.

*  *  *

Unpremeditated, night falls. Here is no long-drawn parting of the worlds, light and dark. Night’s black doors close suddenly upon a sunset universe of strident colour, an orange and purple conflagration tangled in swamps of opal water, stretches of pink sky rimmed by deep blue hills. At once the splendour goes behind shutters, is lost to sight, sunk in the thickness of night without the respite of evening and the slow-paced arrival of early stars. Later the stars will shine, the moon appear; but at first it is only plain, immense night over Malaya.

At night, the Hospital, already vast by day, becomes enormous, a fantasy of disproportion. All the public buildings are of prodigious size, as if giants had planned to work in them. From one end of the tiled corridors to the other end, my footsteps snap at me, dead, flat, devoid of echo, for in this gargantuan heap of stone, brick, and cement, reverberation is choked and smothered. Walking the corridor at night I am filled with panic, that I shall never reach its end. While pacing thus I have felt unreal, as if life had lost meaning, as if, at the bottom, living was only that, the walking of one long night-filled corridor, the treading of an endless, shallow, dark ravine.