The Harmony Silk Factory

I wanted to look back but didn’t. Cows cantered clumsily alongside the car until the herd parted and the open road lay before us. It began to drizzle, a light flurry of brilliant watery jewels glinting in the sunlit sky. I lifted my face to the open window, feeling the gathering breeze on my skin as the car sped through the glittering afternoon.

“When the ships sailed into Singapore there were so many people there to greet them,” Una was saying. “It was just like Portsmouth, wasn’t it, Gerald, Portsmouth in Navy Week? And now it’s all gone.”

MY TAXI IS LATE and I am impatient. “Hujan,” rain, the porter-cleaner-cook said, shrugging, when I went to complain a few minutes ago. It explains everything, the rain. Power cuts? Hujan. No post? Hujan. What, no vegetables at dinner? Hujan. Why are you looking so sad today? Hujan. It drips steadily from the eaves outside my window, forming trembling pools on the flagstones below. Out over the silent sea the rain falls in fluttering pulses, like great lengths of translucent cloth caught by the wind. The shapes float across the broad and empty sky, chasing after one another until finally they fade, sinking into the sea.

I sit at my desk and survey my room. Nothing is out of place. The bed is neatly made and not a single objet appears on the surface of the tables. Inside the cupboards and drawers only a few items of clothing and two pairs of shoes remain. I am certain that these will soon find new owners amongst the impoverished, eagle-eyed staff here (who, mercifully, appear untroubled by sartorial trends). When I am removed no one will be able to tell that anyone lived here. All that will remain is a large room of spartan furnishing. The new occupant will move in and fill the place with his own dismal ephemera, and all traces of me will soon be erased.

I am taking nothing with me to Kampar. Only a small box, carefully wrapped in a piece of moonlight-blue cloth. Before I secured the parcel with string I paused and looked at its contents one more time. My drawings for the garden, folded and laid flat at the bottom of the box. On top of that a notebook whose crinkled, yellowed pages I have read a thousand times before, the words repeating nightly in my head. I opened it one last time and looked at the even, rounded handwriting. And then I returned it to the box, along with the final item — a torn fragment of a photograph. In it I am standing alone. My right hand is missing from the picture; the jagged tear runs through my forearm, leaving me marooned and disabled in the jungle. I fill in the image of Snow, composing her from nothingness as I have done countless times before, and the picture becomes whole again. I can see her sitting next to me. My hand rests on her shoulder; she does not shrink from me, but moves her neck to receive my tentative touch. It is my birthday. Though we do not yet realise it, we are already somewhat in love. I am frowning but impossibly youthful; she is placid and half-smiling, her cheeks flushed, hot. In the distance a ravaged building rises from the trees. My gorgeous ruin, fading, as I am, on the sepia-tinted paper.

I hesitated for a moment after I wrapped the box in its silken cloak. I wanted to fling it from my window, out onto the soggy lawn, and myself with it. But I breathed deeply, and the murmur of doubt soon passed. And I am resolute: I shall take these things with me to Kampar and present them at the funeral to the son whom the newspapers say survives his father; they say his name is Jasper. I have no other gift for him, only this little box. So many lives have I changed, destroyed. It makes little difference now, Wormwood.

Forty years have passed since I last saw Jasper. My body has begun to dissolve into the dank air of forty long monsoons and the desiccating heat of forty dry seasons, and yet, strangely, I know I will recognise him. How little he will have changed since the last time, when I stumbled across a group of children at play by a riverbank. He will be older now, his hair will be streaked with grey and his face scarred by the passage of time, but he will be as blithe and carefree as the day he spoke to me, the day when my meanderings led me innocently to him.