He bought a packet of joss sticks from a monk and placed them in the large bronze urn after whispering a prayer. Plates of eggs had been left on the tables as offerings for the snakes. I stood around, uncertain. Religion had never played a large part in my life. My mother had been a lapsed Buddhist, but I attended the weekly service at St. George’s Church with my family. This temple, with its intricate writings and large wooden plaques—their lacquer chipped and faded—felt strange to me. The various gods and goddesses housed in different altars stared at me from beneath half-closed eyes as I walked past.
A bell tolled, and through the smoke I heard the chanting of monks. A cobra uncurled itself from a pillar and slithered across the uneven tiles, swaying to the drone. Its tongue stabbed out to taste the air, its scales shining like a thousand trapped souls. A passing monk picked it up and slung it over the back of a chair. He asked me to touch it. I stroked its dry, cool skin. Like the snakes, I felt myself being slowly drugged by the smoke and the chanting, which vibrated through my body to be absorbed by my blood and bones.
“A fortune-teller,” Endo-san said, pointing to a massive old woman cooling herself with a rattan fan. “Let us see what she can tell us.”
I sat before her as she examined my hand. Her skin had the same texture as the cobra’s. She studied my face and looked as though she were trying very hard to recall where she had seen me. “You have been here before?” she asked.
I shook my head.
She stroked the writings on my palm and asked for my date and precise time of birth. She spoke in Hokkien: “You were born with the gift of rain. Your life will be abundant with wealth and success. But life will test you greatly. Remember—the rain also brings the flood.”
Her vague pronouncements made me pull my hands away from her, but she was not offended. She looked at Endo-san and her eyes became dreamy, as though trying to remember a person she had once known. She returned her gaze to me, her eyes coming back into sharp focus, and said, “You and your friend have a past together, in a different time. And you have a greater journey to make. After this life.”
Puzzled, I translated her words for Endo-san, who could only speak a few phrases of the local dialect. He looked momentarily sad, and said softly, “So the words never change, wherever I go.”
I waited for him to tell me what he meant, but he remained silent and thoughtful.
“What does my friend’s palm show?” I asked the fortune-teller. She crossed her arms over her chest and refused to touch Endo-san. “He’s a
Jipunakui
—a Japanese ghost. I do not read their futures. Beware of him.”
I was embarrassed at the way she had dismissed Endo-san and wanted to soften her harsh words before I conveyed them to him. “She isn’t feeling well, she says can’t do any more readings today,”
I said. But he saw the struggle in my expression and shook his head, touching me on the arm to let me know nothing had escaped him.
I paid her and we walked out of the dim, timeless space of the temple into the sun, leaving the reverberations of the place behind, our bodies slowly tightening, coming to stillness again. Everything seemed to move faster outside, even the shadows cast by the sun.
“What did you mean, when you said the words never change?” I asked, as he bought me a glass of cold coconut juice from a roadside hawker.
“I have seen many fortune-tellers, of all sorts. Some have read my face, some my palms. Others went into a trance and asked the spirits for guidance. And always they came back with similar words. That old one back there did not even have to touch me to do the same,” he said, starting to walk back to where his chauffeur was waiting for us.
“What did they tell you?” I asked, catching up with him.
He stopped, and turned to face me. I felt compelled to look at him directly. “They told me that we had known each other a long, long time ago. That we will know each other in the times to come.”
I found what he was saying, coupled with the fortune-teller’s strange pronouncements, quite incomprehensible, and told him so.
“You are a follower of Christ,” he said. “You would not be aware of the Wheel of Becoming in which the Buddhists believe.”
I shook my head. Seeing my ignorance, he went on, “What happens after you die?”
I answered that easily. “You go to heaven—if you’re good.”
“But what happened before you lived? Where were you then?”
That simple question caused me to stop walking and think. It could not have been heaven. Otherwise, what was the point of leaving it and going back there again? Finally, I said, “I don’t know.”
“You had another life. After the end of that life you were reborn to this life. And so it will go on and on until you have redressed all your weaknesses, all your mistakes.”
“And what will happen then?”
“Perhaps after a thousand lifetimes, you will reach Nirvana.”
“Where is that?”
“Not where, but what. It is a state of enlightenment. Free from pain and suffering and desires, free from time.” “Like heaven,” I said.
He turned to look at me and twitched his eyebrows. “Perhaps.” “So the Christian way is shorter. You only have to die once.” He laughed. “Oh, definitely.”
* * *
I thought no more of the fortune-teller’s words. Endo-san’s explanations made no sense to me and so I did not dwell on them. My training intensified. Apart from the hand-to-hand combat, he now made me practice with a wooden staff. The weapon came up to my shoulders when it was planted on the ground and he wielded it with great dexterity. In his hands the stiffness of the wood seemed to transform into fluid flexibility.
“Once you have mastered the rudimentary movements of the staff, you will learn how to use a sword. In some instances the staff will be more deadly than the sword,” he said. “A sword has only one cutting edge but a staff—
jo
—has two ends to strike. And the entire
jo
is a cutting edge.”
He swung the staff, his hands moving up and down the shaft smoothly. “As with all the principles of
aikijutsu,
you do not meet the force of the strike head-on. You parry, you step to the side to avoid the blow, you redirect the force and unbalance your opponent. It is the same with the
ken,
the sword.”
I heard the seriousness in his voice as he continued, “These principles apply to your daily life as well. Never meet a person’s anger directly. Deflect, distract him, even agree with him. Unbalance his mind, and you can lead him anywhere you want.”
The
jo
shot out from his hand and I stepped neatly aside without thought. Putting an
atemi
punch into his ribs I got him tilted off his feet. Merging my subsequent movement into his tilt I threw him to the ground, disarming him of the staff. He landed gracefully and curled his body into an
ukemi
forward roll, to come up again on his feet. When he turned around I was pointing the tip of the
jo
at the softest part of his neck.
We stood there, facing each other, our breaths barely discernible. Only the whisper of gentle waves and the rustle of leaves could be heard.
* * *
From that moment on we went all out. He still held back, but not by much. As for me, I gave it my all, and in return I received punches, kicks, and bruises from him. I was thankful my family was not around to see me hobbling up from the beach, rubbing my body, putting camphor balm on my bruises. He had warned me that in all fights one had to expect to get hit. The point was to minimize such occurrences.
I trained on my own too, making the effort to get into the daily habit of waking up earlier than my usual time. Long before it was fashionable to go running purely for health reasons I was already doing it, running along the beach, sometimes ten miles a day. I lost whatever fat I had, replacing it with a strange combination of a runner’s body and the muscular frame of an
aikijutsu-ka.
I also worked on my swordsmanship, doing hundreds of cuts daily, increasing my speed until my sword came slashing down in a blur. All these activities made me eat voraciously and Ah Jin, our cook, started complaining that I was losing weight in spite of her good cooking.
These were the foundations of a regimen that would go on until I was old—the foundations that made me one of the most respected teachers in the world after the war. The only respite I had was when Endo-san had to attend to his own business. And what that was I never asked. It would not have been polite.
Chapter Five
The most rewarding way to see the place one lives in is to show it to a friend. I had taken the beauty of Penang Island for granted for a long while now and it was only through acting as Endo-san’s guide that I learned to love my home again with an intensity that surprised and pleased me.
After the experience with the fortune-teller in the snake temple I made an extra effort to ensure that we avoided the temples whenever we explored the streets of Georgetown. There was never a shortage of places to show him and, in order to impress him with anecdotes and little known facts, I learned more about my home by asking the servants at Istana and reading the books in my father’s library.
One evening we stopped outside St. George’s Church, drawn by the voices of the choir in practice. We stepped inside and sat at the last pew. When I was younger, I whispered to him, I used to sing with the choir.
He silenced me and closed his eyes as the voices surrounded us, and I sat and listened again to the traditional English hymns that had formed the music of my boyhood. I had given up singing when my voice changed, four years ago, but it comforted me that the tunes and the order of service remained the same.
Afterward, when we were walking within the church grounds, Endo-san said, “That was a very stirring selection.”
“Maybe now you can begin to understand why the English feel they have to colonize half the world.”
He saw I was only half serious. “What were those last few lines?” he asked. “I heard mention of a sword.”
I could still remember the verses I had sung so often: “I
will not cease from mental fight; Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
...”
He nodded and repeated those lines. “I cannot agree. The sword must always remain the last option.”
“It’s just a song,” I said.
“But a song, as you have noted, powerful enough to drive a nation.”
“We use swords in training,” I pointed out.
“What am I teaching you?”
“To fight,” I said.
“No. That is the last thing I am teaching you. What I wish to show you is how
not
to fight. You must never, ever use what has been taught to you, unless your life is in danger. And even then, if you can avoid it, so much the better.”
He made me promise him that I would always remember that.
* * *
It rained heavily for the next few days and I could not show him around the town. But when the skies cleared again I took him exploring through the quay and the godowns on the waterfront. We walked out to the end of the wooden jetty and stood looking out to the Malayan mainland.
“What is that place?” He pointed to a collection of buildings on the Butterworth shore where two ships were in drydock, lifted high out of the water, their rusted hulls looking as if they had been smeared with galangal powder.
“The second largest shipyard in the country after Singapore,” I said. “The navy uses it for their repairs as well.”
Endo-san studied the shipyard for a while. Then he turned back to look at the range of hills behind us. “I wanted to ask you what that hill is called, that one with the houses on it.”
I knew even without looking what he was referring to. “Penang Hill. The highest point on the island. Those houses you see are government houses and holiday homes. We have a house up there too.”
“Will you take me there?” he asked.
“I was planning to,” I replied.
* * *
We hiked up Penang Hill in the early dawn at the end of the week. His chauffeur dropped us at the foot of The Hill, two miles out of Georgetown, near the Botanical Gardens, and we walked for ten minutes into the forest. It had rained the night before and the path was slippery, the dead leaves turning to mulch beneath our boots. The branches soaked us as we pushed them away. “It’s here somewhere,” I said, using my walking stick to lever myself up a muddy slope.
“Well, I have never heard of it,” Endo-san replied.
“That’s because you’ve never traveled with the locals.” I slipped, and his hand held me firmly, pulling me to a standing position.
“Careful.”
“There it is,” I said. “Moon Gate.”
Once it must have been as bone-white as the full moon on a cloudless night. Now the wall with the empty circle in it was stained with moss and fungi. Bird droppings, smeared by the strokes of the rain and dried by the heat, streaked its sides. It stood alone at the edge of the jungle, just a square slab of plastered bricks painted white, three steps leading to the round gateway set in the center.
