Among The Believers Part 19

Some Malay words pa.s.sed between them, and the girl in pink went out again.

The girl in black said, "Two years in this school is a short time. Because there are so many things to learn." Then, as though making up for her uncertainty about women's feet, she said, making a gesture down her body, "A man is aurat from the waist to the knee."

The girl in pink came back and said, "The feet are aurat."

(Who was sitting outside, ready with the answers? Could it have been the Australian?) The girl in black said, "Some girls cover their face. There are many in this school. Though it isn't necessary."

"Why do they do it?"

The girl in pink said, "Maybe they know more."

The girl in black smiled, less nervously now, as though amused by how little she knew.

Her friend, plump and tidy, seemed altogether solider. She said, "The main aim of these philosophies is to preserve the beauty and gentleness of the women. We can preserve our beauty. It's not for showing off. It's very bad."

"Why is it bad?"

The girl in black, the frivolous one, as I now thought, said, "All I know, it's very bad." She laughed. "I know, but I can't express it."

"Would you like to cover your face?"

"Maybe one day. When we know more."

"And when we find it necessary," the girl in pink said.

"What more do you have to learn? You've been here two years."

"There is so much to learn," the girl in black said.

The girl in pink said, "We don't know Arabic."

"So you don't understand the prayers you say."

"We understand those. But the Koran is in Arabic and we would like to read the Koran in Arabic."

"Would you have liked to stay on in the government school if you had pa.s.sed the examination?"

The girl in black nodded.

The girl in pink said in her plump, stately way: "Right now in the government schools the education system is more towards academic."

"Science," the girl in black said, now apparently disapproving of the government school. "Science. Technology. You have to pa.s.s all the examinations to get a place in the varsity-if you want to have a good job or having a high standard of living, to have a good earning. This religion they are not really taught in schools. The girls don't pray. They have forgotten how to pray. And you must pray."

"Do you tell the girls they are going to h.e.l.l?"

"Oh, no!" the girl in pink said. "We never say that. We have to be gentle with them. We have to talk to them gently."

"Do you feel sorry for them?"

"Well, yes," the girl in black said.

"Is it bad to want a good job?"

"It isn't bad," the girl in pink said. "But we can't be forever chasing materialistic things in life. Because there is life after death. So in our life we must balance ourselves between life on earth and life after death."

I said to the girl in black-with her high-heeled shoes-"Aren't you too young to be thinking of death?"

The girl in pink answered for her. She said solemnly, "Death can come at any time."

"And you want to go to heaven?"

"Of course. In heaven we mix with good people. Not only with good people. We can mix with our Prophet. Have you heard of our Prophet? Everything is good and beautiful in heaven. I can't tell you how good it is. Our G.o.d promised us. You can't compare it with things on earth."

"Do you find time to read?"

"Yes, we read," the girl in pink said.

"We read so much," the girl in black said, with a hint of complaint.

"What was the last book you read?"

The girl in pink said, "Far from the Madding Crowd."

"That's a schoolbook. I don't mean that. I mean something you read for yourself, for the interest."

The girl in black said, "With all the schoolwork now, I haven't read recently. I can't think."

The girl in pink said, "We read Barbara Cartland, Perry Mason."

"James Hadley Chase," the girl in black said, suddenly remembering.

"Denise Robins," the girl in pink said, her round face brightening as it had brightened when she described the life in heaven.

"Harold Robbins?"

The girl in black said, "I didn't like Harold Robbins and I stopped."

She giggled. The girl in pink smiled.

"Why did you stop?"

The girl in black said, "I can't tell you. I can only translate what we say in Malay. We say, 'The book is dirty.' "

"What about Barbara Cartland and Denise Robins?"

"Oh, no!" the girl in pink said, melting. "They are not dirty." And then, with a curious primness, "They are for young girls."

"But aren't the people in the books too far away from you? They are English, European, white. They're Christian."

The girl in pink said, and I began to detect another character below her solidity, "I read just to pa.s.s the time."

"And our teacher made us read them," the girl in black said.

"To improve our English," the girl in pink said.

I said, "The Mills and Boon books-do you get them here?"

These short paperback light romances, known by the name of their English publisher rather than the names of the authors, have been successfully promoted in many countries of the Commonwealth. They meet the imaginative needs of people new to education and city life; they appear to instruct in modern ways of feeling and are read even by university students, and even by men.

"Mills and Boon!" the girl in pink said, softly, melting again, as at the memory of some especially sweet and rich food.

"Why are those books so nice?"

Formal once more, the girl in pink said, "When we read, the love is nice because it's all fantasy."

"You mean you wouldn't like that sort of thing to happen to you?"

"No."

"But what's the fun, then?"

"We just read to imagine how nice their life is."

"Nice?"

"They're rich," the girl in pink said. "They have a big house, big car." Her voice went soft and round: "And they're in love."

"Love? Wouldn't your marriage be arranged?"

"Oh, no! Not with us."

The big house, the big car: were these Islamic ducklings-though learning the rules, contemplating the afterlife-already secret city swans?

I said, "Would you like to live in a village? I have spoken to some people here who think that village life is best."

"No," the girl in black said, "I want to live here."

The girl in pink-solid again, well trained-said, "The village is more peaceful. I would like living in the village."

The girl in black seemed to change her mind. She said, "Yes, the village is more peaceful." Then she changed her mind again. "But I would like to be in the town because everything happens here."

The girl in pink said soulfully, "It is more peaceful in the village."

Like someone who now knew her own mind, and had found a way of saying what she felt, the girl in black said, "I would like to be in the town because it is also the centre of the religious movement."

I said, to provoke them, "But there are so many strangers in the town."

"Yes," the girl in black said, and she was quick and firm. "We have too many immigrants." It was the word used by Malays to describe non-Malays-Chinese, mainly; it was the word rejected by non-Malays, who claimed a century of residence. "The immigrants cause trouble. It's the British who brought them here. The British introduced the British system. Before that it was all Islamic system."

I had thought of the girl in black-with her messy tu-dong head-cover, her high-heeled shoes, her uncertainty about the Islamic rules-as the more frivolous of the two. Now I saw that politically, racially, she was the fiercer. She took over this part of the conversation. The girl in pink merely listened, with her fixed sweet smile.

The girl in black said, "The Chinese try to monopoly our economy. They are good businessmen. We are left behind. It isn't true what they say about Malays being lazy. We know it isn't true, but it hurts us to hear these things. If we don't have the Chinese we could be a good business people. If you look at history, in the time of the Malacca sultanate we Malays are very well known as the best business people."

"Why do you worry so much about the Chinese?"

"The Chinese have China, the Indians have India. We only have Malaysia."

"Don't you have Indonesia and all the islands?"

She made a face; her young forehead creased. "Indonesia is full of Christians-you don't know."

"Were you born in Kuala Lumpur?" I asked the girl in black.

She was, but her family came from Indonesia, from Java. "Long ago," she said.

"Before the war," the girl in pink said.

So the girl in black, or her family, had come during the British time. She was Indonesian, but that meant she was racially akin to the Malays; and she was also Muslim. After forty years she could consider herself a Malaysian. After a hundred years and more, the Chinese-who had made her country-were still immigrants.

The inner offices were in darkness. The men were still at the mosque. The girls walked down to the road with me. The girl in pink crossed the busy road to wait with me until I got a taxi. The girl in black remained on the other side, in the doorway, the idea of feminine allure not far from her now, smiling, giving occasional little waves, friendly to me, an outsider; but full of her confused pa.s.sions. Her slack, inexpertly tied tu-dong did not hide her hair; and below her long, drab-coloured, sacklike cotton dress-the garb of Islamic modesty, the symbol of her aggression-her pretty little high-heeled shoes showed, with their straps and buckles.

To be Malay was to be Muslim-it was written in the laws of the new state. But to be Malay was also to be denied the great rich British-Chinese city, where everything happened. Money had come to the tropical land of forest and river and villages; and money created new frenzies and frustrations.

3.

Between Malacca and the Genting Highlands

The land was rich: rain and heat and rivers, fertile soil bursting with life, with bananas, rice fields, palm trees, rubber. Gra.s.s grew below the rubber trees; and cattle, which would have suffered in the sun, found pasture in the shade. The heat which in the town was hard to bear was in the countryside more pleasant. Water and sun encouraged vegetation that sheltered and cooled; and green quickly covered the red earth where it had been exposed by road works or building developments. The Malay villages were never far away; the houses, with steep pitched roofs and low timber walls, were set in little gardens. And regularly there were the little towns of the colonial period, Chinese settlements: two-storey shop-houses, concrete and corrugated iron, the shops set back, the pavement sheltered by the house above. The dates-painted on the shop-houses, or in raised concrete numerals-were recent; many were from the 1930s; the colony was developed late.

I saw this on a drive one Sat.u.r.day from Kuala Lumpur south to Malacca. I went to Malacca for the sake of its historical name: the Malacca Straits, the Malacca cane, Malacca pepper.

In the centre of the town there was a red-painted church dated 1753; there was a museum beside the gateway of a ruined old European fort. But elsewhere history seemed to have been burnt away in the heat. The sh.o.r.e at low tide was wide and flat, of soft black mud; drains from the town poured into it; and the black mud was dotted with the holes of small crabs and marked with the trails of amphibious creatures, little leaping minnows and finned black creatures that wriggled.

A ship was anch.o.r.ed far out. A line of barges, each with a barebacked, saronged Malay at the tiller, was being towed into the town ca.n.a.l-an open sewer, grey rather than black or brown, that was lined with the warehouses and houses of the recent colonial period.

The European past was older than that picture suggested. Malacca, guarding the route to the spice islands of the East Indies, was once thought valuable; and the Portuguese conquered Malacca (seven months' sailing from Lisbon) in 1511, eight years before-on the other side of the world-Cortes marched on Mexico, twenty-two years before Pizarro went to Peru. That was hard to grasp now; what was even harder was that Portugal and the West arrived here not long after Islam.