Singapore Grip - J. G. Farrell [92]
As Matthew paused to study it his arm was suddenly taken by a tall and slender Tamil girl with a pigtail (in which jasmine flowers were intricately braided) hanging to her waist. He nudged up his spectacles to see her better, gazing with surprise into her dark face where a silver stud gleamed in the whorl of each nostril. She was very pretty and he would have liked to talk to her, but the others were already disappearing; and so he disengaged himself apologetically and hurried after them, his heart thumping. How exciting it all was, how much more interesting than Geneva!
Now, hurrying through the crowds in search of his friends, he almost ran full tilt into a makeshift stage (merely boards and trestles) on which a Chinese opera was taking place. Actors and actresses in glorious costumes were declaiming in a penetrating falsetto, impervious to the scene-shifter in khaki shorts and singlet and with a cigarette dangling from his mouth who was rearranging the furniture around them. One of them, with a forked beard reaching to his knees, stalked off into the wings, rolling his eyes in histrionic rage, and a murmur went up from the crowd of Chinese who had gathered to watch. On his way round the side to rejoin the alley which he had left Matthew found himself gazing into the dressing-room, for the sides and back of this miniature theatre were covered only by cloth hangings blowing about in the breeze and allowing him a glimpse of the actresses making-up for the next scene: elaborately rouged and pink-powdered faces glared at mirrors while tweezers prepared a further assault on already well-plucked eyebrows. Several tiny Chinese girls clung to wooden spars also peering in at this arresting sight.
Afraid that he had lost his friends altogether, he pressed on; his progress was slow, nevertheless, for his attention was captured by various wonders which sprang up one after another: a man selling bunches of dried frogs tied together by their legs, a family of acrobats turning somersaults, a stall selling the juices of unfamiliar fruits by the glass, a wizened cashier in a bamboo cage, satay morsels skewered on hundreds of bamboo spills roasting over charcoal, sellers of soto soup, and won ton mee, and apple fritters fizzing in rancid-smelling oil, and nasi goreng, and heavenly ice-cream flavoured with mango and durian, and the durian itself, so desired and so dreaded for its peculiar odour, piled in pyramids like cannonballs … and other astonishing sights and events beyond description, taking place, too, in a street crowded with men and women of every shape, size and colour, from a family of performing pygmies, to the graceful, delicate Chinese, to floury, bucolic British and Dutch in voluminous khaki shorts; and accompanied by a cacophony of musical instruments and gramophones in an atmosphere heavy with perfume, incense, sandalwood, sweat and tobacco smoke in the soft, humid air of the tropics.
Matthew recalled the conversation he had had earlier in the evening with Walter and began to ponder the commercial enterprise which had brought about this extraordinary mixture of races and cultures. It was as if the sudden appearance of Western capital in Malaya had created a vacuum which had sucked in people from all the surrounding countries and from much farther away. Would this nation of transients who had come to seek a livelihood under the British Crown one day become a nation with a culture of its own, created somehow out of its own diversity? It had happened in America, certainly, but would it happen here where the divergences of culture were even greater than they had been among the American immigrants? Was a colony like Malaya, as the Communists claimed, a mere sweat-shop for cheap labour operated in the interests of capitalism by cynical Western governments? Or was Western capital (which included his own capital, too, now that his father had died; he must not forget that!) … or was Western capital, as Walter insisted, a fructifying influence bringing life and hope to millions by