The word Malay means Javanese, Sumatrans, Indonesians, people from Minangkabau and many another East Indies island, Arabs and Arab-educated Mohammedans, as well as Malays proper from Malaya itself; Chinese include half a dozen subgroups from the southern provinces of China, by feature and emotion Chinese, but divided by dialect into Teochews, Hokkiens, Hakkas, Cantonese, Hainanese, and smaller groups. Indians include Tamils, Punjabis, Sikhs, Pathans, Bengalis, and many others. In each ward of the hospital at least three kinds of food must be served. In each ward the nurses must act as translators as well as nurse, and where they fail, an orderly, or an amah, must be found to interpret, with all the inaccuracy and the florid inventiveness of the illiterate Asian. Among the doctors few can speak to all the patients, for in Malaya a university education, by its very insistence upon excellence in English, hampers a doctor from acquiring the vernacular languages of this country.

And thus at night, when the patients confide in the darkness and in their own tongue what they have withheld from physician and nurse, I begin to understand the terror, the confusion, the essential need to prevaricate of those who are always at someone else’s mercy, because they cannot communicate with those who decide their fate, except through an interpreter.

In the process, how many deviations, changes, siftings, warpings, and twistings; how many opportunities for blackmail and corruption, before, transformed, sometimes unrecognizable, the stories of the poor who do not speak English reach their rulers, who are hand-picked, among their own peoples, on the basis of their knowledge of English.

Pacing the corridors, night dark, of the hospital, I heard the poor talk, Malays, Indians, Chinese, and asked myself whether out of this babel reassembled, a pattern would emerge.

*  *  *

In the hospital prison ward the young terrorist was dying. The hospital attendant in charge, a handsome Malay with the tranquil refinement of voice and feature which endears the race to so many, said: ‘He is going, doctor. Soon mampus, lah.’ Mampus is a word for death which is used for animals only.

I had seen the terrorist arrive, brought in strapped to a stretcher. The armoured car with the regimental badges painted on the back, with the soldiers leaping out so briskly, had stopped at the back gate of the hospital. The young English sergeant, his green jungle uniform rank with sweat, his pink face thick and bloated with tiredness, still carried a gun in his hand and waved it, as if he had just used it. ‘Steady, mates, steady, don’t knock them about too much,’ he called, as the stretchers were lowered. On one was an older man, with sharp sallow face and fiery eyes, and a leg enveloped in bandages through which the slowly seeping blood spread, a widening blot. On the other the young boy groaning, half unconscious, with bullets in the belly.