Singapore Swing (3 page)

Right. Before I proceed any further: this is first and last time I will allude to oriental rhotacism, that indistinction between the ‘r' and the ‘l' on which so many cheap jokes have been based and not just those that play with elections and erections. The liquid ‘r' sound is an odd one and spans a continuum – from the strangled uvular ‘r' of the French to the trilling ‘r' of the Italians, it glides into the wide, open-mouthed ‘l' of the Brazilians and the dry, lockjaw ‘l' pronunciation of the English. In fact, European languages do invert up their ‘l's and ‘r's. Did you know that our Elisabeth is the Hungarians' Erszébet? Ever compared Spanish with Portuguese where the colour white is not
blanco
but
branco
and silver is not
plata
but
prata?
Did you know that African languages invert the ‘r' to ‘l' too? In Zulu a ‘teacher' has been mutated into a
utishala
and the South African capital Pretoria into
iPitoli
. As for Malay, no prizes for guessing which nationality is meant by
ingris
. So we've had our fun, that's it – although if I come across a Chinese who has adopted a name like ‘Rory', I might be tempted to return to the subject.

T
ung Pin came from a clan of officials; his grandfather had been master of ceremonies at the Emperor's palace and his father district prefect. But, unlike them, the young man was torn between following the family tradition and the realm of religion and philosophy.

One night, Tung Pin arrived at an inn in the capital, where an old Taoist priest impressed him with his ability to compose poems without any effort.

‘Who are you, Master?' asked Tung Pin, certain in his belief that the priest was a
hsien
, a supernatural apparition.

‘I am the Master Yün Fang,' the Taoist revealed himself. ‘I live upon the Crane Ridge and hold the secret of Immortality.'

Tung Pin's blood raced in his veins.

‘Will you show me the Way, Master?' he asked.

‘Why would you want to know the Way?' asked Yün Fang.

‘So that I can help others,' Tung Pin replied without hesitation.

The priest smiled. ‘Follow me,' he said and beckoned with his finger. Tung Pin accompanied him to his room where the priest brought a pot of millet to the boil. Tired as he was, Tung Pin fell asleep on a cushion leaning on the wall.

When he woke up, it was next morning and Yün Fang had gone. Dispirited by the apparent rejection, Tung Pin decided to listen to his father's advice and follow in his footsteps. He studied for two years and passed the triennial Mandarins' examination, coming top of the list. He started his career as a junior civil servant but rapidly gained promotion to the Censorate and eventually reached the position of privy counsellor in a dizzying upward advancement. He married a wife born into a family of wealth and authority. She bore him two sons who became important scions of society themselves. Eventually, Tung Pin became prime minister and wielded unqualified power. Unfortunately, such power corrupted him and he began to ask – nay,
demand
– bribes and commissions from everyone and for everything. It was only a matter of time before he was accused and tried for corruption. The outcome was dire: his home and all his possessions were confiscated, he was separated from his wife and children and was banished beyond ten thousand
li
. As he was crossing a snowy mountain range to reach a desolate corner of the empire, his horse refused to gallop on, and he was left stranded, a sad, solitary outcast on an untrodden path.

Someone touched him.

Tung Pin opened his eyes. He was still in the inn next to the Taoist Master, leaning on the cushion against the wall.

‘One lifetime passes, and the millet simmers still uncooked,' laughed Yün Fang. ‘Do you still want to become Immortal?'

Tung Pin swallowed hard. ‘More than ever, Master,' he replied and looked at the pot. ‘Is that
it
?' he asked.

‘No my boy,' replied the Master. ‘There is no magic potion. You only become Immortal through your deeds.'

- 3 -

There are some cities in the world that are the creation of a single man with singular vision: Alexandria, Constantinople, St Petersburg. But Alexander, St Constantine and Peter the Great were powerful potentates whose word was law and whose will was limitless. That Singapore is the brainchild of a thirty-year-old company administrator named Raffles begs comparison; that it was established against the will and sometimes open hostility of the board of the East India Company, the British government and the Dutch Crown defies logic – or rather says a lot about Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles himself. I mean, the guy has been able to wipe out from posterity the memory of his other middle name – Bingley.

As befits someone with such an international reputation, Raffles was born a few days out of Jamaica on board a four-gunner ship escorting a convoy bound for England. It was 1781: the year of the British army surrender in Yorktown that sealed the fate of the American colonies in their War of Independence; the symbolic year when Britain turned her gaze away from the west and started focusing east.

Raffles entered the offices of the East India Company in Leadenhall Street at the age of 14 as a general dogsbody. For the next ten years he worked assiduously and educated himself at home. An admiring biographer compared his time as a clerk with that of the legendary Chinese sage Che Yuan who worked hard all day and studied at night under the glint of the fireflies. A more apt comparison would be with a moth attracted by the torch of success: Raffles networked like a bee, latching on to his boss through whom he met people well above his station in life. It was not long before Raffles attracted the amorous attentions of a surgeon's widow, Mrs Olivia Fancourt, ten years older than him, but well-connected. After gaining so much social capital, it was hardly surprising that Raffles was chosen in 1805 to accompany the governor of the new settlement of Penang as his assistant. He married Olivia a month before they embarked on the trip that kick-started his dizzying career. He was just 24 years old.

In Penang, Raffles was both diligent and lucky: he learned Malay and made a very important friend, Dr John Leyden, a medic and orientalist who fell for the charms of Olivia. There is little doubt that Raffles cultivated Leyden's passion: there exist numerous romantic letters between Leyden and Olivia that can not have escaped the attention of such a clever operator like young Raffles. The reason for such encouragement is clear. Leyden was a close friend of the most powerful man outside the British Isles: Governor General of India, Lord Minto. If there is a moral there, I fail to find it.

Leyden had translated the
Malay Annals
, a compendium of the legendary history of the Malay people. One of the earliest such fables involved Sang Nila Utama, the young Raja of Palembang. He was sailing from the island of Bintan to hunt on the forested outcrops that dot the archipelago when he landed on the island of Temasek. There, he came momentarily face to face with a majestic, wild animal he hadn't seen before in his maritime kingdom and guessed that it must be that famed lion of the songs and the myths and the epic poems. Believing the encounter to have supernatural significance, he founded a city which he called Lion (
Singa
) City (
Pura
) and built a palace up on a hill by the river. His harem used to bathe by the spring at the bottom which is why he prohibited access to the area; the locals called it the Forbidden Hill. This taboo was entrenched further when Nila Utama himself died and was buried at the top.

While Raffles was learning Malay and, no doubt, entertaining himself with the
Annals
, Lord Minto in Calcutta was agonising with a specific brief. The Low Countries had just been annexed by Napoleon: the French could not be allowed to outflank India through the colonies of Holland. Britain captured the Dutch colony of Cape Town, an important shelter-and-provisions point on the way to the subcontinent. Malacca in Malaya capitulated not long afterwards. By 1810, the only threat to the subcontinent's trade were the Dutch outposts in Java. But before Minto could act, he needed intelligence: how would Holland's colonial subjects react? What would the independent sultanates do? It was there that Leyden's friendship proved crucial: on a trip to Calcutta he told Minto of that man Raffles, who had learned Malay and was on personal terms with various Malay sultans. Minto sent for the ambitious under-secretary, and Raffles grabbed the opportunity with both hands. He arrived in Calcutta in June 1810 – wisely leaving his wife behind.

Minto and Raffles got on like a
kampong
on fire and planned the invasion of Java together. The naval convoy was assembled in the summer of 1811. On the way to Java, the fleet passed by an island bemired by swamps, populated by fishermen and belonging to Mahmud Shah III, Sultan of Johore-Riau.

Raffles knew it from Leyden's legends: it was called Singapura.

My sling has been attracting looks making me nervous, sheepish, diffident. It's been two days already and I haven't yet ventured far; I've been reading a Raffles biography in bed. I have discovered some licensed brothels at the other end of Keong Saik Road, but I've not been accosted. Prostitutes in Singapore are subject to continuous health tests – I wouldn't be surprised if they had their vaginas barcoded – and are forbidden to walk the streets. On top of that, the ladies of the night are, let's say,
mature
and their clients visibly of the Viagra generation, so any activity stops around 10 p.m. Out of curiosity, I peek into one of the open doors; from a poster the sitting, smiling, silent women are holding, I deduce that oral sex is on offer with a condom only. This is highly risqué; Singapore's puritan penal code criminalises ‘carnal intercourse against the order of nature' – which includes oral and anal sex even between husband and wife.

True to type there is an Indian corner shop nearby, where I make friends with several members of the Tamil family who own it (and keep it open long after the sex action in the area has dwindled). I get slowly addicted to aloe vera juice with pulp bits; conceived in Japan and manufactured in Malaysia, this is like nothing I've drunk before as the aloe chunks seem to retain the coolness of the fridge long after I have opened the can. During my forays there, Rita, one of the owners, conveys to me her knowledge of the neighbourhood, some of which I've already passed on to you.

At her recommendation, I sit down for lunch at the seafood restaurant opposite and ask for king prawns. ‘Are they shelled?' I ask repeatedly, as I don't want to wipe my hands in heaps of wafer-thin napkins. ‘O' course, shell,' comes the reply, but I should know better for in Singapore the final ‘d' has long been swallowed out of existence; as the poster above my head reminds me, the Japanese miracle drink Amachazuru offers a ‘Balance Blood Pressure'. Even when that tricky ‘d' is used, it's used incorrectly: signs inform me that shops are ‘opened' or ‘close'. So my giant king prawns come in their shells and, since I am a messy eater, my T-shirt gets speckled with blackbean sauce. But all is forgiven, because the waitress provides me with a bowl with lemons to wash my hands in; it is so large I could use it for my laundry. For that thoughtful gesture, I forget any missing, ingested consonants and tuck in.

The furthest I've been so far has been to the Pearl Centre, a working-class shopping mall on the way to Outram Park metro station (or MRT as they call it here). Half of the shops sell mobile phones or accessories and the other half are a mixed bunch. There are food stalls outside offering dim sum or curry puffs, barbecued pork slices or exotic fruit. There is a Western-style bakery where every individual sandwich is wrapped and rewrapped in cellophane. If you follow the sign, ‘More Shop Inside', you can find an Internet Café where everyone is playing
Doom
, a ‘New Million Years Hairdressing Salon' (a mistranslation of ‘millennium' if ever I've seen one) and an ‘Erotica Adult Toys Store'.
Huh?
This is a country where even
Playboy
is banned. I come closer and read the warning: ‘We do not sell medications, porno VCD, DVD or magazines'. Phew! My world is the right way up again.

Too many people are staring at my arm. Ill at ease, I start making my way back to my hotel. At Duxton Park, I sit on a bench and chase away a flock of mynah birds. South East Asia is colonised by those feathered punks with chocolatey bodies, white underwings, distinctive orange beaks and a lot of attitude. Mynahs are one of the great survivors of our planet: they are intelligent enough to walk on the edge of the tarmac waiting for insect roadkill, sufficiently ferocious to drive away kingfishers and small animals from their nests, and so massively hungry that they can devastate miles of vineyards and acres of fruit orchards. I bet they'd be proud to learn that they have been assigned to the Extreme Threat Category for exotic species in Australia and thrilled that they've been nominated among the World's Top 100 invaders by the World Conservation Union. Frankly, if we left it all to Darwin, there would only be three animal species left in the long run to keep us company: cats, rats and mynah birds. Thankfully, they prefer hot climates, like British lager louts. Unsurprisingly, they are a nuisance in Singapore, nesting as they do in their hundreds on houses and high-rise flats.