The Exile
In the city of Johor Bahru, the rain is still falling. A man is sitting by the window of his hotel room—the glass thick, sealing the room from the world completely. He can see from his seat the Causeway that stretches between the tip of West Malaysia and the neighbouring country. What had years ago, decades and lifetimes ago, been his country. Thick smears of rain and blurs of light. He had seen the news that morning—Exiled Communist Party of Malaya leader Chin Peng’s ashes returned to Malaysia. A stain of ink on his fingers afterwards and the memory of the day of his own leaving. A comrade of his coming into his newspaper office, quietly saying—you have to leave now or you will never leave.
And he had left. Simply walked away from everyone and everything he had known. From his family—his mother, father, sister—his friends. His one explanation a note to his sister, left in the flat on that afternoon swollen with heat, the rooms all empty with everyone at work. I have to go. You know what to do. By midnight he had been across the Causeway in the Malaysian jungle. Falling asleep beneath the weight of his travel, the smell of the earth seeping into his dreams.
She remembers the night she had left him. She had not desired to leave him, but he would not follow her and what could she do? He was nostalgic, sentimental, desirous of nothing but memory. She accused him of being old-fashioned, of not having hunger. One dollar is three ringgit leh—that means nothing to you, is it? We can work there and stay here what—find somewhere in JB—I don’t want to stay here—how many times already I have to say—
It had been clear then that they would never agree on this. She wanted to leave and he wanted to stay. That night she returned to her childhood home and packed her bags. The patterned paper lining the raw concrete floor, curling at the edge. She had smoothed it with a foot and watched as it curled again. The next morning she was on a bus to Singapore, driving past the jungle, seeing in the distance the blue hills of the deep country. Miles and miles of plantation. The last of Johor.
He had shared a similar childhood. He was not the son of a wealthy man. And yet he wanted to remain in that country. Don’t like that lah—you stay here, you think got future meh, here got what work to do? So you think now I don’t work hard? The anger on his face a brittle thing. All of that drama between them and in the end she was only a bus ride away. But that is done now. There are larger tragedies to mourn.
When years and years later he is asked by his son in a clipped English accent if it was true that he had been a Communist fighter, he does not know what to say. In London he sells fruits. Crisp apples and pears that lack the preening showiness of the fruits he had known back home. The durian, the jackfruit, the rambutan. With their strange animal hides and deep sweetness and pungent perfumes, their odours.
How to describe for his son the press of the jungle around them? How to describe for him the weight of the air, as if the embrace of a woman? He sees himself in his mind’s eye as his son must be imagining him. Young and lithe and strong, skin gleaming with youth and humidity. Possibly a gun slung around his shoulder, hidden in the shadow of the jungle. He felt ashamed of himself then—how he looks older than his years, how the skin on his hands is spotted and veined. He is the seller of fruits in a cold country. It is not the occupation that bothers him but rather the sense that he is, and always will be, a stranger upon the earth on which he now walks. But he cannot mourn too deeply. This is the life he has chosen for himself, the journey he has made.
Every second weekend she returns to Johor. The crowd at Customs and the Causeway on Friday evenings. The snaking queues and the thin sliver of tarmac upon which the buses come through, choked with stale lights and fatigue. Most of the time she walks across the Causeway. Singapore fades behind her as the lights of Johor become brighter and larger. But she focuses instead on the road, hearing the sound of traffic around her, the hoot of a motorcyclist or the horn of a bus that goes jangling past. Bas Pekerja in that familiar blue. The workers’ transport. On her left is the water, into which the lights fall. That she loves. She pays attention to her feet to make sure that she does not take a wrong step, is not snared by traffic. The billboard above her that reads Home of the Southern Tigers. There is a bend in the road halfway through where they must run across a narrow corridor, veined by motorcycles rushing past. Once she was in a clot of strangers, waiting for a break in the traffic. And then the mercy of a single motorcyclist who stops, waves them past. Evening falling thick and fast on their shoulders.
But when she steps out of the Malaysian Kastam, when she leaves the building and walks out into the clean sweep of a night unencumbered by high-rise buildings and breathes deep, she cannot deny the fact that something relaxes in her, something loosens. She heads over to the nearest kedai runcit and picks up a 7-day crossaint or a Sunshine bun with vanilla filling. The fluoroscent light wan against her skin. And then she looks for a bus that will bring her home, hoping for a window seat so that she can look at the jungle running alongside her as they move deeper into the country, into the embrace of its black womb.
To be a dead man even though he is still living. That was the price he had paid. To have his former life stripped away from him so cleanly, to have severed even the rumour of return so completely—to become an enemy of the state, to never again see the country of his childhood. That was the price he had paid. But he knew what he was fighting against; that had fuelled him. The massacre at Batang Kali. The Operations against them—Cold Store and Lalang. The resettlement of half-a-million Malayans taken from their homes. And further north and south—what the Americans were doing in Vietnam, what was happening in Indonesia. And across the sea, half a world away: the leftwards surge of the lower Americas. All over the earth a rising red tide. He could not have sat idly by as it unfurled.
But he would be lying if he said there were no moments of regret. Lying if he said that he was not kept up at nights by desire for what he had left behind, for what he had confined his future to. These strictures. On certain nights he felt that the jungle would drive him mad. The way it closed upon him, the trees and the air, its secrecy. In joining the larger struggle his life had been narrowed to this single point. That was the price had had paid.
At home on the weekends she does her laundry by hand. It is tedious yet calming work. She squats in the outside kitchen over a tub of dirty clothes and soapsuds glinting with moonlight. Plunged up to her elbows in cold water. The whispering of the ferns and leathery, large leaves that border their house. The earth so close to her. The sky above them so free. Tangled telephone wires above the streets. Once she had heard a crackle of electricity pass through.
Her sleep on those nights is always clean and deep.
Once she had seen him in town. They had both turned away from each other.
Still even with that she cannot deny that she looks forward to this regular release. This homecoming. The nights sweet with a contained wilderness. The taste of familiar cooking. Her mother’s familiar gestures. The curl of the paper on her floor. The sound of the rain on their tin roof, as loud as a thousand armies. In leaving her country she has made it a place to return to. She has made it an object of desire. That was something she had not forseen.
But it had come to an end. 1989 and the peace agreement signed in Thailand. The communists had surrendered. Relegated to the fringes again, old men and women fighting old, revolving battles in small, hot rooms. That was the end of his fight. All those years in the jungle, consuming itself and living and dying and living again, had left him unaccustomed to an ending as sharp as this. Even when his comrades had been buried in the earth there was always a strange sense that this was not their final goodbye. The nature of the tropics that had played on his mind like music, that he read like language.
He walked the streets of Kuala Lumpur a free man. The city streets with all their thousand lights.
But he could not return to Singapore; that road was forever closed to him. His name had been listed; he had chosen to run. His crime against the state was an eternal thing.
Yet there were small mercies. A former comrade who had immigrated to London put out a call that he would be willing to sponsor a handful of them to move there. What else could he do? His war was finished; he could not return. He elected to go.
Before he left he made his way down the peninsula. He traveled on a bus through the deep country, through miles of gnarled jungle and disciplined plantation. Starlight a kingdom above him. He made his way to the southernmost point of the country, the city of Johor Bahru. He saw his country beyond the water. Saw its new lights and new buildings. Then something shifted in him and he knew—in a way he had not known before—that what he had done was irrevocable.
His family came over the Causeway that evening. They spoke little of what he had done, what he had chosen to do. They ate noodles out of melamine bowls at a streetside stall. It does taste better in Malaysia, his father had said. Each mouthful a blessing. His mother’s hand on his cheek just before they parted saying all that she could not. A language more deeper and primal than speech.
After they had left he went to the shores of Stulang Laut, from which he could see his old country. Families lined the beach, eating and laughing. Fathers and sons standing waist deep in the water, waiting for catch. He breathed in the clarity of sea air. He bought himself some nuggets on a stick. Above him the fronds of coconut trees swayed with the wind and a carful of youth and music drove by. He listened to his inner desire and stood only when he was ready to stand. Left only when he was ready to leave. The sound of the sea on his back as he walked away.
It is six in the morning and the sky is still dark. She is walking across the Causeway, back to Singapore this time. A silent line of walkers. And then, passing them on a bicycle, goes an old man with two young children on the seat behind him. In uniforms—heading over to Singapore for school. Holding on to each other’s waists tightly so that they will not fall.
It is then she feels anger. Rising from the earth, wedging her into place. This is what they have done. Those men and women in their boardrooms, at their chandeliered dinners. Reducing her countrymen to this. She feels hot tears in her eyes and then she is angry at herself also, because she understands then that she will never leave—never truly leave. Cannot truly leave. That she has not left. She is more sentimental than she has realised, more tethered to history, to memory—
Woi, kantoi—
A man behind her curses. She has stopped so abruptly, almost unsettling him. She apologises and blinks the tears out of her eyes. Continues on her way.
He has returned for his mother. The wake itself had been held in Singapore, the body cremated there. But she had wanted her ashes interred in Malaysia, near the kampung where she and his father had grown up in. And so he is here, in Johor Bahru, as close as he can be to his country without being in it. Tomorrow his family will come. They will make the drive up north with his mother’s ashes in a jar. He has missed the rituals and the incense, the chanting and the fresh grief. He has made this journey alone. The long fight across the English channel, then the breadth of Asia. For many years he has not returned to Southeast Asia. Travel had not been feasible. All those old promises, that old glory. When he touched down in Kuala Lumpur, departed from the airport and felt his body wrapped in that old embrace of humidity, he had felt so young he could not believe it. Then he saw his reflection in the glass of some old teksi.
He rode in night-time silence on a bus down to Johor. Somewhere along the road the driver had made the requisite stop at an R&R for the passengers to relieve themselves, to stock up on snacks. He had ambled over to a snack shop, picked up a packet of dried squid strips. He buys that packet with his hands trembling, and sits in the clammy air on the stoop in front of the bus as the driver waits for everyone else to return. Beyond them on this silent road is the jungle. He eats and watches it, is watched by it. A strange pulse of light within it, and he feels again the old music, hears the old songs—
Her last weekend back she had spoken to him. It could not be avoided—she had been picking up a few things from the kedai runcit and it was only when she reached the counter that she saw the back of his head. He had turned around and said hi before he could stop himself. Behind him the pages of a rice-paper calendar fluttering in the wind of a standing fan.
For some reason they had walked back together. They had spoken about their lives. He was a teacher now in a local school. They had both taken the long way home—the way they had taken when they had been together. They spoke only about small things. Later, before they parted, they hugged. She did not want to let go but she did, and she did not look back as they walked away from each other. That night she did the laundry and saw the moon clear in the water. She put her finger into its reflection so that it rippled, moonlight spread in waves across the tub. There is a buckle in the air—she knows that a storm will be coming. Tomorrow she must cross the Causeway again but she does not want to. Still there is nothing she can do for now. The moon has reappeared in the water, staring back at her through the liquid dark.
He is waiting for them on a platform. Beneath him the rumbling of trains. In front of him a Starbucks. Lines of people outside a series of moneychangers, waiting to turn dollar into ringgit. He smells baking eggs from a kuih bahulu stall. A young woman walks past him with a Sunshine roll in her hand, making her way to the automatic doors with the rest of the crowd heading to Singapore. These Malaysians. He had become a honourary one in those years in the jungle, and it is here after all that he can be closest to home. Then he sees the girl again—she has not gone through the doors, she is walking in the opposite direction now, her face hard and set. He watches her pass and soon forgets about her. The young are always caught up in the fury of their lives. It will pass. His phone pings and he fumbles for it. His sister has sent a message—they are waiting to clear their passports now. It will take them longer than usual to explain the ashes. He thinks of Chin Peng then, the old hero. Of his homecoming after his own years of exhile. Further north they will be scattering him into the earth of his childhood. The rain will pummel his remains into the soil.
He himself has made his own plans for death. Burn my body, he has told his son, and throw my ashes into the sea. It has been so long since he has seen his sister. He will be seeing his nieces and nephews, and they will be the new youth of his old country. One day he will bring his son. Perhaps the boy can go on his own over the border, while he waits for him in Malaysia. After they bid goodbye at Immigrations he might go back to that old beach and look at the lights across the water, as he had done all those years ago. And then, when he is ready, when he wishes to, he will turn around and head back into the night.
Sharmini Aphrodite
Sharmini Aphrodite was born in Kota Kinabalu and raised between the cities of Johor Bahru and Singapore. Her short fiction has been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and placed on the Australian Book Review Jolley Prize. Her essays on art, literature and history can be found online. She is the Submissions Editor for Smokelong Quarterly and the Fiction Editor for the literary journal SUSPECT.