Singapore Dream and Other Adventures Page 11

  But he did not stop anywhere, not because he would have felt uncomfortable having all these people curiously staring at him, but because he felt inwardly ashamed of his own fascination with looking at them. Besides, the wild music continued to sound, now from quite nearby, and at the corner of the next street he found what he had been looking for. There stood an incredibly strange edifice of the most fantastic form and of a frightening height, with a huge gate at its center. As he gawked up at it, he saw that the structure’s entire immense surface was covered with stone figures of fabulous animals, humans, and gods or devils, crowded one upon another, teeming in their hundreds right up to the distant, narrow pinnacle at the top, a jungle of interwoven bodies, limbs, and heads. This frightening stone colossus, a great Hindu temple, glowed brightly in the horizontal rays of the late-evening sun, clearly proclaiming to the stunned interloper that these animal-like, gentle, half-naked people were by no means an Eden-dwelling nature folk but had been in possession of ideas, gods, imagery, and religion for thousands of years.

  The booming of the big drums had just ended, and from the temple streamed a multitude of pious Indians in white and colored robes, with at their head, separated from the others, a small solemn group of Brahmins, haughty in their millennial learning and dignity. They strode past the white man like proud noblemen walking by a craftsman’s apprentice, and neither they nor the humbler figures that followed them seemed likely to be in the least inclined to have themselves instructed on the divine and human aspects of the Law by a recently arrived foreigner.

  When the crowd had dispersed and the place had become quieter, Robert Aghion approached the temple and with awkward interest began to study the statuary of the facade. However, he soon turned away perplexed and frightened, for the grotesque allegorical language of these figures, many of which were horrifically ugly (though seemingly executed with a very high level of artistic skill), confused and frightened him no less than the sight of various scenes of shameless obscenity that were unabashedly placed right in the very midst of the host of divinities.

  As he turned away and began to look for his way back, the temple and the street suddenly went dark. A play of colors passed briefly over the sky, and abruptly the tropical night fell. The eerily swift onset of darkness, although he was long since familiar with it, sent a slight shiver through the young missionary. With the failing of the light, from the trees and bushes all around came the shrill song and clamor of a thousand great insects, and in the distance he heard the strange, wild call of some beast crying out in wrath or pain. Hurriedly Aghion searched for and, with luck, found his way home. He had not entirely covered the short stretch of road before the entire country around him lay in deep nocturnal darkness, and high above the black heaven was full of stars.

  Back at the house, as he, distraught and distracted, was approaching the first lit room, he was met by Mr. Bradley with the words, “So there you are. You know, to begin with, you shouldn’t stay out so late in the evening; it’s not without danger. By the way, do you know how to handle a gun?”

  “A gun? No, I’ve never learned to do that.”

  “Then learn soon….Where were you this evening?”

  Aghion enthusiastically told his story. He asked eagerly what religion this temple belonged to and what gods or idols were venerated there, what the many figures on the walls meant, what the unusual music was, whether the fine men in white robes were priests, and what their gods were called. But here he met his first disappointment. His mentor claimed to know nothing whatever about any of this. He declared that there was nobody who understood anything about the foul jumble and filth of this idolatrous scene, that the Brahmins were an unholy band of exploiters and idlers, that these Indians altogether were a swinish pack of beggars and fiends, and that a decent Englishman would be best off having nothing to do with them at all.

  “But,” said Aghion haltingly, “my work is precisely to lead these confused people onto the right path! In order to do that I will have to get acquainted with them and love them and learn everything about them.”

  “You will soon know more about them than you’d like. Of course you’ll have to learn Hindustani and later on maybe some of these other nigger languages. But with love you won’t get far.”

  “Oh, but the people looked so nice and kind!”

  “You think so? Well, you’ll see. I know nothing whatever about your plans for the Hindus and I make no judgment in that regard. Our job here is gradually to teach this godless bunch a little culture and at least give them some faint notion of decency. Perhaps we’ll never be able to do more than that.”

  “But our morality, or what you call decency, is the morality of Christ, sir!”

  “You mean love. Yes, well go ahead and tell a Hindu sometime that you love him. Do that and today he will beg from you, and tomorrow he will steal your shirt from your bedroom!”

  “That’s possible.”

  “That is in fact absolutely certain, my dear sir. What you are dealing with here is, as it were, uncivilized people who as yet haven’t the slightest inkling of honesty and right; not with sweet English schoolchildren but with a tribe of sly, brown rogues, for whom the vilest behavior is the height of pleasure. You’ll remember my words later on.”

  Aghion sadly abandoned further questioning and resolved to apply himself meekly and diligently for the time being to learning everything that was to be learned here, but then to go on and do whatever he thought was intelligent and proper. Still one thing was sure: regardless of whether the severe Mr. Bradley was right or not, from the moment he had laid eyes on the monstrous temple and the unapproachably proud Brahmins, his position and mission in this country appeared infinitely more difficult to him than it had ever occurred to him it could be.

  The next morning the trunks in which the missionary had packed his possessions from home were brought to the house. Carefully he unpacked, put the shirts with the shirts and the books with the books, and he found himself cast into a pensive state by many of the objects that passed through his hands. There was the small copper engraving in a black frame, whose glass had been broken during the voyage, that portrayed Daniel Defoe, the author of Robinson Crusoe; and his mother’s old prayer book that he had been given as a young child; and, as a guide to the future, a map of India given him by his uncle; and two steel hoop nets for catching butterflies that he had had made for himself in London. One of these he immediately put aside to be used in the next days.

  By evening his possessions were divided up and stowed, the little copper engraving hung over his bed, and the whole room was tidy and in good order. As had been recommended to him, he had set the legs of his table and his bed in little earthen bowls filled with water to keep the ants away. Mr. Bradley was gone the whole day on business, and the young man found it strange to be invited by the respectful servant to come to meals using signs, and to be served by him at the meals without being able to speak a word to him.

  Early the next morning Aghion’s work began. A handsome, dark-eyed youth named Vyardenya appeared and was introduced to him by Bradley. He was to be his Hindustani language teacher. The smiling young Indian spoke not bad English and had the best manners. However, he shrank fearfully back when the guileless Englishman reached out in a friendly manner to shake hands with him, and from then on the Indian avoided all bodily contact with the white man, which since he belonged to a high caste, would have rendered him impure. He also definitely never wanted to sit in a chair that a foreigner had used before him. Instead each day he brought his own fine bast mat neatly rolled up under his arm. This he spread on the tile floor and sat cross-legged on it, noble and erect. His pupil, whose enthusiasm he must have been well pleased with, tried to learn this art from him as well, and during his lessons the Englishman always sat on a similar mat on the floor, even though at the beginning all his limbs were in pain. At last he became accustomed to it. With diligence and patience he learned everything the you
th tirelessly and smilingly pronounced for him word by word, beginning with the everyday formula of greeting. He threw himself afresh every day into the struggle with the Indian guttural and palatal sounds, which at the beginning sounded to him like inarticulate gurgling but which little by little he learned to distinguish and imitate.

  Hindustani being as interesting as it was, the lessons in the morning hours with the courteous language teacher, who always behaved like a prince obliged by need to give lessons in a middle-class house, went by quite fast, but the afternoons and evenings were long enough for the hardworking Mr. Aghion to experience the loneliness in which he lived. His host, with whom his relationship was ambivalent, who related to him half as a patron and half as a kind of supervisor, was not often at home. Most of the time he came back from the city, either on foot or horseback, around noon, and presided as the master of the house over meals, to which he occasionally brought an English clerk. Then he lay down for two or three hours to smoke and sleep on the veranda, and toward evening he went for another few hours to his office or warehouse. From time to time he had to go away on a trip for several days to do buying, and his housemate had little against this, for with the best will in the world he was unable to make friends with this rough and word-stingy businessman. Also there was a fair amount in the way Mr. Bradley lived his life that the missionary did not like. Among other things, from time to time in the evening Bradley and the clerk sat around and drank a mixture of water, rum, and lime juice until they got drunk. They had invited the young clergyman to join them at this in the beginning, but he had always gently declined.

  Under these circumstances, Aghion’s daily life was not particularly amusing. He had tried to make use of his feeble beginner’s language ability by going, during the long vacant afternoons when the wooden house was beset on every side by stifling heat, to visit the staff in the kitchen and trying to converse with them. Though the Mohammedan cook gave him no reply and was so stuck up that he pretended not even to see him, the water carrier and the houseboy, who squatted idly on their mats for hours and chewed betel, had nothing against having some fun with the young master’s labored linguistic efforts.

  But one day Bradley showed up at the kitchen door just as the two rascals were slapping their skinny thighs with delight over some errors and word mix-ups on the part of the missionary. Bradley beheld the merrymaking and bit his lip. With lightning speed, he delivered a slap to the boy, a kick to the water carrier, and yanked the terrified, dumbstruck Aghion out of there. Back in his room he said somewhat angrily, “How many times do I have to tell you not to have anything to do with these people! You are spoiling the boys for me, of course with the best intentions, but nevertheless it is simply not acceptable to have an Englishman making a fool out of himself in front of these brown rascals.”

  Then he walked out, before the insulted Aghion could justify himself.

  The lonely missionary got to be with people only on Sundays, when he regularly went to church. Once he even had to give the sermon in place of the less-than-industrious English minister. But he who had preached with love to the farmers and weavers of his district found himself out of place and alien in front of this emotionally distant congregation of businesspeople, tired, sickly ladies, and young employees out for fun. The cold-blooded commercial or exploitative bent of these people, who were bleeding this rich land for whatever they could get but had not a single kind word for the natives, was painful to him. Gradually this created a bias in his way of looking at things, and he always took the side of the Hindus and spoke of the obligations of the Europeans toward the native peoples, thus making himself both unpopular and ridiculous. Or else he was simply looked down upon as an idealistic and naive young man.

  At times when he was troubled over his situation and feeling sorry for himself, there was one consolation that never entirely failed him. He would equip himself for an outing, hang his botanical specimen boxes over his shoulder, and take up his butterfly net, which he had fitted out with a long, thin bamboo pole. The very thing about which most other Englishmen were wont to complain bitterly, the searing heat and the Indian climate in general, was just what filled him with delight and wonder. For he kept himself fresh in body and mind and never let himself cave in to it. This country was in every way an inexhaustible trove for his passionate interest in nature. Every step of the way unknown trees, flowers, birds, and insects drew his attention, and he resolved that with time he would come to know them all by name. Strange lizards and scorpions, huge, fat millipedes, and other goblin-like creatures scarcely frightened him anymore, and since the time he had beaten a fat snake to death in the bathroom with a wooden bucket, his fear of unexpected dangers from animals had more or less disappeared.

  The first time he used his net he caught a big, gorgeous butterfly. He picked up the proud, radiant creature in cautious fingers and saw its broad strong wings glowing in alabaster hues dusted with colorful down. His heart beat with a boundless joy he had not felt since as a boy, after a long breathless chase, he had caught his first swallowtail. Gladly he accustomed himself to the discomforts of the jungle and did not lose heart when deep in its wilds he got stuck in a mud pit, was mocked by herds of monkeys, or was attacked by angry ant tribes. Only once he found himself cowering on his knees, shaking and pleading, behind an immense rubber tree as nearby, like a combined storm and earthquake, a troop of elephants crashed through the dense thicket. He got used to being awakened in his open-air bedroom in the early morning by the cries of irate apes in the nearby forest and by night to hearing the howling of jackals. His eyes would shine bright and wakeful in his lean, brown, and now manly face.

  He became increasingly familiar with the city as well, particularly the peaceful, garden-like outer districts. The more he saw of the Hindu people, the better he liked them. The one thing he found quite awkward was the custom of the lower class of allowing their women to walk around the street naked from the waist up. Seeing the naked necks and arms and breasts of the women on the street was something the missionary could not get used to, although it was quite often a very appealing sight, and the women’s nakedness gained in naturalness through the deep bronze hue of their sun-hardened skin and the open, uninhibited manner with which they carried themselves.

  Next to this indecency, nothing bothered him and stayed so much on his mind as the riddle that the spiritual life of these people represented for him. Religion was everywhere, wherever he looked. In London on the highest church holiday there was surely not as much piety on display as could be seen here on every workday in every street. Everywhere were temples and sacred images, prayer and sacrifice, processions and ceremonies, penitents and priests. But how could it ever be possible to make sense of this jumble of religions? There were Brahmins, Mohammedans, fire worshipers, and Buddhists, devotees of Shiva and Krishna, turban wearers and believers with smoothly shaven heads, snake worshipers, and servants of sacred tortoises. Who was the God whom all these errant believers served? What did he look like and which of the many cults was the oldest, holiest, and purest? This was a question nobody knew the answer to and to which the Indians themselves were entirely indifferent. Whoever was not satisfied with the faith of his fathers moved on to a different one or set forth into the world as a penitent to find a new religion or even create one. Food in small bowls was offered to gods and spirits whose names no one knew, and all these many divine cults, temples, and priesthoods existed happily side by side without it ever occurring to the followers of one faith to hate the others or much less kill them, as is the custom with us at home in the Christian countries. Much of what he saw he found lovely and charming—flute music, sweet flower offerings; and in many faces there was a peace and a lighthearted serenity that one might seek in vain in the faces of Englishmen. Another beautiful and sacred thing, as he saw it, was the Hindus’ strictly observed commandment not to kill any animal, and from time to time he felt ashamed of, and tried to justify, his own practice of mercilessly killing be
autiful butterflies and beetles and impaling them on pins. On the other hand, among these same people, for whom every worm was a holy creature of God and who showed heartfelt devotion in their prayers and temple rites, thievery and lies, false witness and breaches of trust were very much everyday things, over which not a soul lost his temper or was even surprised. The more the well-meaning religious envoy pondered these matters, the more this people became for him an impenetrable riddle beyond all theory and logic. He soon again began to engage in conversation with the servant Bradley had forbidden him to speak to. At one point, they had even seemed to reach a state of deep heart-to-heart understanding, but an hour later the servant stole a wool shirt from him. And when, sternly but not unkindly, he confronted the fellow with the matter, at first the servant denied the deed under oath and then with a smile admitted everything. He showed the missionary the shirt and trustingly explained that since the shirt already had a small hole in it, he had felt sure that the master would never want to wear it again.

  Another time it was the water carrier who provided amazement. This man received his salary and his board for providing the kitchen and the two bathrooms every day with water from the nearby cistern. He always did this work in the early morning and in the evening. The entire remainder of the day he either sat in the kitchen or in the servants’ hut and either chewed betel nuts or a piece of sugarcane. Once, since the other servant had gone out, Aghion gave him a pair of trousers to brush out that he had gotten full of grass seed on a walk. The man just laughed and put his hands behind his back, and when the missionary lost his patience and strictly ordered him to do the small task at once, finally he went along and did the job amid grumbling and tears, then sat himself down inconsolably in the kitchen and raved for an hour like a person in utter despair. Through a great deal of effort and after working through a great number of misunderstandings, Aghion finally brought to light that he had seriously offended the man by ordering him to carry out a task that was not part of his duties.