The Black Isle (49 page)

Though we had slept together countless times before, this was the first night I can recall in any detail. Perhaps this had something to do with the elation of being in a hotel room with luxurious, orchid-scented sheets and ordering room service champagne without a care. It all felt very
adult
, being able to afford our own extravagances.

Or perhaps I remember it because deep in the night, with my ear pressed flat against his chest, listening to the weirdly slow beats of his uncertain heart, I told Kenneth Kee that I loved him.

BY 1957, FREEDOM WAS CLOSE AT HAND
. The British were set to leave by the end of 1959, and the Isle was poised to be its own place, an island republic in a sea of other orphaned lands.

But the British, unlike the French or the Dutch, wished the world to know that they’d tried to be reasonable with their little colony. Before letting go, they set forth a series of tests for the new leadership. If the Isle passed, they could leave with a clean conscience, their ward having proved its maturity. If it failed, they had the perfect alibi for their retreat: We tried to civilize these people, but in the end…goodness gracious!

Or at least, that’s how Kenneth saw our situation.

Since entering the civil service, he’d built a popular following on his uncanny ability to gauge the mood of his public. Though only a junior officer in the Ministry of Social Affairs, he was a rising star who had for three years distinguished himself as a kind of walking bellwether, spending his lunch hours in the crowded alleyways of Chinatown, Little India, and Kampung Klang, and emerging with a sense of what needed to be done to improve people’s lives. His superiors were stunned by the ease with which he moved from doorway to doorway, soothing the anxieties of everyone he met with the firmest handshake in the land.

The colonial big shots who’d hurried through these same neighborhoods on their walkabouts had never shown any interest in shaking any Islander’s hand, let alone the blackened, greasy palms of illiterate auto mechanics or pail carriers in the dwindling night-soil trade. Yet Kenneth sought out these filthy, working-man’s hands—the lowlier the trade, the more resolutely he would take their palm in his. And he always looked each person in the eye, as if collecting his or her face for the growing tapestry of humanity that was slowly and meticulously being woven in his mind. At the news of a Kenneth Kee visit, throngs would issue forth from the overcrowded tenements and shantytowns, their hands outstretched in wait. Even infants pulled away from their mothers’ arms to graze their tiny fingers against Uncle Kenneth’s sleeve.

I’d heard that in private gatherings, the remaining Brits called him the Chameleon—not kindly, of course—but this was an erroneous impression. As somebody who’d accompanied Kenneth on his rounds during my own lunch hour from Woodbridge, interpreting for him some of the more obscure Chinese dialects (between Cricket and me, we just about covered them all), I knew him to be less a chameleon than a ventriloquist. His attitude never changed; instead, he listened to workers and residents as they articulated their hopes and dreams, then repeated these back to them using his own words, quietly incorporating what
he
felt they should be aspiring to. He left people wishing for things that, as soon as they heard them, they felt they could no longer do without: hot water, street lighting, cheaper bus fares, safer streets. Precisely because he gave shape and voice to their unknown desires, they adored him as a kind of savant, though of course they’d never use that word.

What they never suspected was how, after each walkabout, he dashed to the nearest sink and scrubbed his hands. I carried his vial of Lysol; Issa carried his nail brush.

As independence loomed, Kenneth Kee, feared and admired by the old guard for his popularity, was asked to design the young nation’s flag. We knew from the beginning that this test was double-edged. The flag, if designed well, had the potential to unify the disparate groups of the Isle but if done poorly could turn the new state into an international laughingstock.

Late one night, mere hours before Kenneth was to unveil his work, the phone woke me.

“I need you,” Kenneth said, and hung up before I could reply.

I rushed over to his apartment, just a few blocks from mine on quiet, suburban Clemenceau Avenue. I had rented a walk-up flat in this placid neighborhood as an antidote to my hectic new post as the chief of Woodbridge’s nursing staff, and hearing how much I liked the area, Kenneth had done the same. One benefit of suburban life was that I never had to worry about being seen, even if I happened to be running around in my nightdress—as I was doing that night. I’d long ceased to care what the dead thought of my looks, and as for the ancient Sikh security guards along our road, they were all, predictably, asleep at their posts.

When the door was opened by Issa, I gasped. I hadn’t expected to find him in Kenneth’s cramped little one-bedroom apartment, nor had I expected Cricket, who stood in the middle of the smoke-filled sitting room, clutching a tumbler of Scotch. Both looked worn down, as if they’d been holed in for hours, smoking Dunhills and arguing.

Seeing me enter in my nightclothes, hair uncombed, they exchanged a glance, confirming their suspicions that Kenneth and I were more than mere colleagues.

Kenneth, who sat hunched over papers at his tiny dining table, had more pressing matters on his mind.

“Hurry up.” He waved at me. “We don’t have much time.”

Next to an ashtray brimming with stubs were about a hundred sketches of flags, finished in crayon. A few were plain, but most were crowded with eagles, lions, tigers, even unicorns—outmoded Anglophile symbols of heraldry that Kenneth must have found impressive. I suppressed a smile.

“I’m at a complete loss.” He shook his head and picked out the most promising ones for me. “I might have to start again from scratch.”

“Just include a crescent moon,” Issa said.

“Fuck your moon! I’ve had enough of your damned moon!” Kenneth reached for the glass in Cricket’s hand. He took a long draft and turned to me. “As you can see, it’s impossible to do anything by committee. Everybody and their dog wants their say.”

“But that’s democracy, no?” I said.

He snorted. “First the flag, then we can talk democracy. But we have nothing if we don’t first have the flag.” He waved Cricket and Issa away. “Go. We’ve exhausted one another. Any more arguing and my fangs may begin to sprout.”

Cricket offered a final bit of encouragement. “Keep it simple.”

“Simple?” Kenneth didn’t even look up from his sketching. “Don’t tell me what to do, you Chinaman. What do you know about my country?”

Issa and Cricket took the abuse astoundingly well; like family, they absorbed the bad with the good. At the door, they looked thankful I was there to pick up the load.

“Whatever you do,” Cricket whispered, “don’t let him drink anymore.”

I didn’t. Kenneth and I talked and sketched flags the rest of the night. He never apologized for waking me and I didn’t expect him to. Nor did he seem annoyed that I’d shown up in my nightclothes, thereby exposing our intimacy to his friends. Maybe he was relieved, as I was, that our longtime secret was finally being let out.

My chief contribution that night was to suggest that the flag contain the color red, since, on a visceral level, it symbolized the life force that coursed through every Islander’s veins, no matter his or her background. Secondly, I persuaded him to include a crescent moon, despite his fierce personal resistance. I understood Issa’s point. Muslims made up a good third of the population.

“You do want their votes, don’t you?”

He did. To be fair, the rest of the design was cooked up by Kenneth, with me by his side, making him coffee and kissing his furrowed brow. In the end, the flag proved democratic after all. He even heeded Cricket’s words by keeping it clean and simple.

“For the sake of schoolchildren, flag-printers, and the not-so-bright, I shall exile my galloping unicorn,” he sighed, half jokingly. “So long, too, snake and scepter.”

At daybreak, the flag of the Black Isle was born, a minuet in red, white, and blue.

The Isle’s first national day was declared on August 31, 1959, and the weather turned out to be drizzly, a perfect morning for sleeping in. But thousands poured onto the Padang to watch the new flag being raised for the first time. When it peaked, I reached for Kenneth’s hand.

We held on tight, the proud, discreet parents of a shared secret. The flag’s creator would never be named. It had been decided by the ex-governor that it should spring to life in a miraculous birth, unencumbered by history or memory. But when it came time for everyone to sing the new national anthem, played by a marching band in bright yellow raincoats, Kenneth and I were at a loss for words. We weren’t alone; only a learned handful could even follow the lyrics printed tightly on the programs. In a belated sop to the indigenous population, the British had commissioned it to be in Malay, and not the market Malay that many of us used, but the archaic, courtly Malay that nobody spoke.

We had to have faith that the tune, neither British nor Asian, would eventually grow on us, maturing as our nation matured. Luckily, this faith had already taken root. I saw tears in every eye, even Kenneth’s.

The doddering governor Lord Pickering had just begun his speech when the drizzle seemed to explode, becoming a full-fledged storm. His words were rendered incoherent. Was this a eulogy or a christening? When sudden flashes of lightning lit up the sky, squawking bullhorns called the ceremony to a premature close. All but the most ardent dashed for shelter, holding soggy programs over their heads.

Kenneth and I were the only ones to remain on the steps of city hall, drenched in our expensive new tailored clothes. In addition to my silk dress and leather pumps, I’d bought myself a permanent wave in the best salon on High Street. Now I could only touch my flattened curls and laugh. Unable to get any wetter, we sat down on the watery steps and watched the rain cover the grass of the Padang like multiple sheets of vibrating glass. Kenneth was laughing, too, but in a different spirit. He stared at the flag high above us, too sodden with rain to even shudder in the breeze.

“If I’d known the anthem was going to be in Malay, I wouldn’t have put that crescent moon on the flag. Now it’s a permanent stain.”

“It’s not a stain. Besides, the governor liked it.”

“
Ex
-governor, overcompensating out of guilt. Now the whole world will think we’re another volatile splinter nation. Another Pakistan.”

“They won’t.” I took his hand. “Anyway, the flag’s quite handsome.”

“That it is not. The moon’s a mouth, laughing at us.”

“Nobody will see it that way but you.”

“But I will
always
see it.” He grimaced. “I suppose our national outlook has always tended Anglo-Chinese. We have both British indirection and Chinese cunning in our veins. It’s a potent formula, if we can keep it this way—and there’s no reason why we shouldn’t keep it this way. I’ll just have to tell myself the moon’s a decoy.”

We watched the rain for a while longer. As the mud rose from the grass, the Padang turned into a lake of chocolate milk. Frogs began croaking a raucous symphony normally reserved for night.

“God, I hate the tropics,” Kenneth finally said. “I wish the Isle could just pull up its anchors and sail off to a better neighborhood. We deserve better than this.”

For all his reassuring handshakes, there was one fear Kenneth Kee could not subdue. After the Burning Trees and the mysterious incidents leading up to independence, our citizens had become obsessed with the dead.

“This is a time when our minds should be fixed on the future, not the past,” he said to me. “You’re the one who sees them all the time, yet you’re not half as obsessed as they are.”

“It’s probably
because
I see them that I don’t find them half as interesting.”

Newsstands were now filled with supernatural novels, and for those who couldn’t read, there were horror stories in various languages on the radio. Even if one never consumed any of these fictions, the taint of superstition was impossible to avoid. Self-proclaimed psychics sprang up along respectable shopping streets, promising, in gaudy signage, to ferry news to and from the beyond. Even the stodgy
Tribune
had begun carrying articles on ghosts, propagating a rumor that the ladies’ toilet of the Rex was haunted by a weeping woman—no matter that this was true.