The Harmony Silk Factory

“Oh no, of course we appreciate your work,” Alvaro said, using his best placatory voice. “We were just thinking about the practicality of this arrangement. These plants all seem quite exotic to me — where are we going to get them from? Wouldn’t it be simpler to use ordinary native plants?”

I drew a deep breath and sat erect in my chair. “Native?” I said, my voice authoritative but kind. “Let me explain to you what ‘native’ means.” A great many of the plants that we commonly take to be native to the Malay archipelago were in fact brought here by early colonisers, I explained, trying to remain calm. Christopher Columbus was given a bristly cone-shaped fruit by the people of Guadeloupe when he visited them in the fifteenth century; it reminded the Spanish of pine cones, so they called it “piña”—yes, the pineapple, which now fills acre after shabby acre in the flatlands all around us. (Gasps of surprise and exclamations of “Are you sure? Did it really come from — what’s that place called again?”). More recently, in the late nineteenth century, Hevea brasiliensis, the rubber tree, came from Brazil via Kew and changed the fortunes of this tinpot little country. (Cries of “That’s not fair — we had other things besides rubber, you know, damn you Britishers.”). Oil palm from Africa, chillies from Mexico — what would our lives be without these exotics? Personally, I would be very glad never to eat another mouth-burning bird’s-eye chilli for the rest of my life, which, incidentally, I hope will not be very long; but I daresay that much of this country’s cuisine would become extinct if the chilli was eradicated from the menu. (Much head-shaking and general grumbling.) And as for flowers, well, where do we begin?

“Bougainvillea,” someone said, “that’s a nice flower — and definitely native. Why can’t we just have that on the verandah, instead of this — what is this thing?” He pulled my sketch toward him. “Passi-flo-ra.”

“Bougainvillea,” I said, stressing the French vowels. “Does it sound like a Malay name to you? Brought here from Brazil by Louis-Antoine de Bougainville. So sorry to disappoint. Why should we have passionflower? Because it’s perfectly suited to this climate. It’s bolder than bougainvillea and doesn’t shed its petals like cheap confetti. And since we are, after all, living in a house run by the Church, I thought it fitting that we should have a flower that reminds us of the crown of thorns. Every time we take tea, we shall look at it and think of Christ’s suffering.”

Quiet, uncertain glances.

“Bunga raya,” Gecko said. “That’s our national flower, so you can’t goddam tell us that’s not native.”

“Most botanists think that particular strain of hibiscus originated from China, hence its common name, Chinese rose. No one knows for sure, though, but who cares? It looks like some strange half-evaginated hermaphrodite genitalia, gloriously labial, with a thin stamen that droops like a failed phallus — the whole thing desperately vulgar.”

Uproar.

“Okay okay okay,” Alvaro said, emollient as ever. “I’m sure Peter’s only joking. Aren’t you, Peter?”

“Of course,” I said. “I was only trying to illustrate a point.”

“And what was your point?”

I sighed. “That things thought of as native aren’t always what they seem, and that we shouldn’t be constrained by ideas of what belongs where. Some might say, for example, that since this is where I have lived for almost three-quarters of my life, I may be considered native.”

A deep silence fell over the table. I thought that perhaps finally I had won my battle. But then a chair scraped against the floor and an obese old troll stood up. Errol was his name; I had barely spoken to him in the past. “You are not native,” he said, his fat voice suffused with grease. “You just go fuck-off back home.”

As I left the room I heard Alvaro playing umpire amidst the melee. “Okay, okay, calm down,” he said as I walked along the darkened corridor back to my room, where I sat alone before the open shutters. The sea breeze had calmed and the air in the room was still. I lit a mosquito coil and placed it by my bed to keep the tiny winged vampires away. In the dark I could not see the flotsam that lay scattered on the grey, muddy sea. At night only the light of fishing boats is visible on the purple-black waters, and the sea almost looks beautiful. I lay down on my bed, watching the jewelled specks of light on the faint horizon. I did not fall asleep for quite some time.

THERE WAS NOTHING this island could not offer us. The forest was rich with wild mango, custard apple, breadfruit, and coconut. Huge shoals of tiny silvery fish shimmered in the shallows; they did not swim away when we cast our net over them, but swum lazily in different directions, flashing iridescent in the sun.

“This place is very strange,” Johnny said. “It’s an island, but somehow doesn’t feel like an island.” We were out walking together, exploring the low shoulder of hills that rose above the sheltered bay in which we had camped.