The Hospital is garrulous by night. Within the four dense walls of darkness, flat, without echo, rises the formless muttering, soft clamour of the sick, who talk and shout, laugh and sigh, weep and whistle and sing. Inside the precincts of night these various utterances, even the startled screaming of children, blend into one, coagulate into a phraseless modulation without meaning, which seeps and floats, up and down the building, a flat tide lapping at sandy shores, unseen.

Those who lie here are Asians forced in the cleft between two magics, the new and the old. Western medicine may be potent necromancy by day, to be invoked desperately when older, time-potentiated charms have failed, but the same audacity holds not at night. Then the old beliefs wax strong; then the invulnerable root and the blood-stained claw make mock of the new mystery, day’s syringe. Then conjuration with thorns and the spell of enchanted names will fend the witch that drinks blood by moonlight. Polongs and shaitans, daemons and ghosts appeased by the magic formulae scribbled in daylight by white-coated magicians wielding that new enchanter’s wand, the stethoscope, wax strong and wrathful with darkness. The patients walk about, since the irksome command of repose prevails only by day; they eat forbidden and highly spiced food smuggled by relatives; they gamble; they transact business; they anoint themselves with ointments and swallow remedies from the herbalist, the witch doctor, or the Chinese medicine man. I came upon two large Sikhs doing some forbidden deed, and felt a spy, unclothed of authority. They turned on me their bearded faces, and the glance of their night-sure, other-world eyes made me continue walking, past them, and out.

From ward to ward, up and down the stone stairs, the sinusoid of sound pursues me. Words, words, words, all adding up to this soft cacophony, this unending flat unquietness. Words in all the dialects and languages which are spoken in Malaya. Is not so much of what happens in this country a recriprocal confusion, rooted in ignorance of each other’s language and customs, producing blindness, intolerant inhumanity? I begin to feel, uneasily, that Malayan episodes are a comedy of errors due to this division between the ruler and the ruled; not one in a hundred of the rulers can boast to speak well the language of the ruled. A few speak it so badly, and on such a low scale, that thereby only another source of error is created.

Malay, Chinese, Indians, English (count the latter I must, though they persist in not belonging, and place their loyalty not in this land); Chinese, Malay, Indians, three words, three sweeping generalizations out of which it has been planned to forge a new nation, to create a country called Malaya, a single people to be called Malayans (always to be confused abroad with Malays, one of the three ingredient races).