Then some of the kids started getting a rash on their hands red and tender, like the raw flaking patches that follow a burn, except more itchy than painful. I was the only one who guessed that it was from the mud some of the villagers had the same problem on their feet, from wading in the shallows during the harvest. People started visiting the Monkey God temple to make offerings and prayers. We burnt paper-money we thought it was our fault, that we hadnt done enough to appease the heavens. Everyone said, If we were richer, we could make more donations to the temple, wed have better catches. They didnt realise that there was nothing they could do about all the pollution flushing down the river that went right through the cities and emptied into the sea in front of our houses. Or from the offshore prawn farms that had started further up the coast where the water was deeper you could smell the chemicals sometimes, late in the afternoon when the wind was blowing in the right direction. A sour stink, like old catpiss. Even though I wasnt good at school, I understood that all those big industries further inland which were making cars and air-conditioners and washing machines and American sneakers they lay close to the same river that washed over our cockle beds, forty, fifty miles away, and they would just carry on emptying their waste into the river, more and more as the years went by. I didnt even feel sad, or angry why get mad over something you cant change? That was just the way things were.
The only thing that infuriated me was that no one wanted to listen to me when I told them what I thought was happening. Pollution? My grandmother repeated the word as if it was some bizarre other-worldly phenomenon, like an interplanetary collision in another solar system. She turned her back on me and went to the temple. Dont know what they teach you in school these days.
Whenever anyone came back from the temple, theyd talk about destiny. To live like this is our destiny. I never thought about the meaning of fate and chance until I was in prison, and ideas just came to me during those long hours when I was lying on my bed doing nothing. What would have happened if my grandparents had landed further up the coast, or drifted south? If the winds or tides had been stronger or weaker and had carried them to Perak or Johor, or to Port Klang itself? Would I have been a dock worker or a sailor, or maybe a ships captain? That would have been fun. If theyd landed somewhere else on the coast, where they werent trapped between river and sea, maybe theyd have travelled inland and gone straight to a city. Maybe then, I would have become you.
Im just kidding. Of course I couldnt have become you. I know its not that simple. And I dont mean that I want to become you, or someone like you. Its just that sometimes I cant help thinking about whether I was really destined to be me.
October 10th
The dispute was about money, as it always is. Thats why the man died. It wasnt because of a woman, as some of the papers suggested. People like us dont fight over love, we fight over houses, land, sometimes cars, mostly money things that make a difference to the way we live.
About five, six weeks before the night in question, I got a call at work. Hendro, one of the Indonesians whod been working for us for some time, came running up to the edge of the water, shouting, Boss, boss, telephone. His head was wrapped in his usual blue-and-white bandana, his hands blackened with grease as he signalled for me to go to the office. From a distance, he looked like a superhero cartoon toy, stout and smiling, even though hed been working since daybreak, tarring the dirt yard in front of the small office building with a few of the other guys, transforming it into a proper car park with a tarmac surface so the cars and scooters wouldnt churn up the mud in the rainy season. We were getting more and more visitors then, people coming up from KL and as far as Alor Setar to inspect the farm and witness for themselves the quality of our produce, our new filtration systems, the freshness of the water, the hygiene levels. They needed to be sure of these things before they signed supply contracts with us, so we had to impress them. We couldnt have their cars sinking into the red mud or arriving back in town looking as if theyd driven to the Sahara and back. My boss had money then, business was good.
I started to make my way across the walkways, back towards the shore. Id been supervising the release of the newest batch of hatchlings. Sea bass, thats what we were concentrating on that year, we knew the price of it would be high. Thered always been demand from Chinese restaurants, but then the upscale Western places started serving it too. A couple of our customers, who ran a neighbourhood restaurant somewhere in Petaling Jaya, showed us their menu our fish might be selling at the same price as fancy imported produce like salmon and cod. You kidding me? I said. Local people really paying these kinds of prices for sea bass you sure its not Westerners? They assured my boss it was easy. Their clients preferred fresh local produce, they didnt want stuff that was frozen and flown all the way from Australia or Alaska. Their restaurant was just a café, it didnt look anything special, but it was selling sea bass fillets at fifty, sixty ringgit a serving. I thought of that money as I watched the tiny fish swim slowly out of the plastic bags, shimmering against the dark water like a bright silver cloud. A hundred bucks each on someones plate in the city.
I couldnt stop thinking about the value of those fragile little fish as I walked along the wooden planks lashed to the floating oil drums. The farm had grown in recent times, and each year we added another few pens to the existing ones floating cages framed by timber squares on the surface that served as walkways, the nets suspended in the water below. That year, the twelfth of the farms existence, we had grown to twenty enclosures, five of them added in the last few months alone. I liked the neatness of the grid, knew my way around it, was quick on my feet, never losing my balance even if I had to run along the narrow decks in bad weather, when the water was choppy and the wind was up. Id stand and look down at the fish thrashing at the surface of the water as the men threw in the feed, feeling the platform bob gently under my feet as the fish disturbed the water. And Id be happy that I no longer had to jump in to repair the netting or retrieve plastic bags and bottles and other debris that got blown in by the storms. Id grown up by the sea, but it remained unpredictable to me, always capable of change and destruction.
It took me a while to get back to the jetty, and I thought that the caller would have hung up by then. People get fed up of waiting, especially young people everyone is in a hurry all the time. Hendro walked to the office with me, complaining about all the work they had to do. It was just him and two other Indonesians resurfacing the car park Budi and Joyo, who were newer, who didnt know how to operate the machinery. They were slow, he had to show them how to do everything. Hendro had to deal with one of the generators too, which had blown up the previous night and needed to be fixed by the end of the day. A cage had been ripped and needed to be mended. One of the jetties had to be repaired. Then there was the maintenance of the pens, checking the water filters, doing the feeding rounds he was having to do it all. They stupid, boss, they stupid. I laughed. When I started out here at the farm, I did all that work myself. And I never complained, I just did what needed to be done. Aiya, people these days, I told him, they just like to complain about everything. Damn migrant worker also complain, how can? We laughed. Get the tarmac done first, the other jobs can wait until later.
He knew that if he did everything well and didnt cause any trouble, with all the new work we were getting, Id make sure Mr Lai gave him some extra cash at the end of the month to send back to his wife and daughter in Java nothing much, fifty, a hundred ringgit maybe, two hundred at Hari Raya. Sometimes, if I felt that hed done a lot of work that month, or if wed had a particularly difficult time with the weather or supplies, and the boss only gave him a small tip, Id give him some extra cash from my own pocket. Hed been with us for four years, and I thought he deserved something good it was unusual for a worker to stay that long.
The boss didnt notice all that the physical work we did on the farm, or the men who did it. Hed started spending more and more time on the road, searching for bigger clients farther afield his latest obsession back then was the big supermarket chains in the Klang Valley, Tesco and Carrefour and suchlike. Some weeks he didnt even show up at the farm one single day. Most days it was just me keeping an eye on the place, supervising twelve workers. It was always difficult to find good Indonesians, men whod stick at the job and didnt steal or cheat or gamble their earnings away that was what the boss always said, and I think thats why he could never remember their names. He didnt want to know about their lives, didnt want to think of them as real people it was easier that way when one of them suddenly didnt turn up for work. You lose a man like that, of course you wonder whats happened to him. Maybe hed been hit by a bus in the night while coming back from one of the brothels down near the port, or hed died in a fight or got picked up by the police, or just decided enough was enough and headed back to Kalimantan without bothering to collect his wages.
Stay in the business long enough, you hear all kinds of stories about what happens to these foreign workers. Just that week, three workers from the sheet metal factory down the road went missing and were found two days later, in a shack on the edge of a plantation, their eyes bulging and bloody, their mouths gone no more lips or tongue, just a mess of bone and blood, dissolved by acid. Thats what happens with paraquat poisoning, it burns a hole in your throat this bit here [touches throat, makes gurgling noise] and all the blood and whatnot comes bubbling up. One of them was a woman, a girl really, not even twenty-five years old. Who knows why they decided to commit suicide together. Workers kill themselves all the time here, and I cant say Im surprised. I know its wrong, its a sin. Everyone knows that. When I started going to church that was one of the first things people told me I guess they were concerned about my mental state, afraid I might try something stupid once I started to repent and realised what I had done, as if I hadnt realised before. God will punish you if you commit suicide! Churchgoers told me that all the time. But sometimes, when you see the way these Indons and Bangladeshis live, it makes sense. [Pause.] What I mean is, if theres no ceremony or leisure in your life, why would there be in death? If I worked eighteen hours a day and only had two rest days a month, and hadnt seen my family for seven years, I wouldnt be thinking of a luxury funeral with all my friends and huge bouquets of flowers and black cars the way you sometimes see in town, when some big boss dies. I wouldnt be thinking about whether my family will take out a full-page ad in the papers to announce my passing, like those Chinese tycoons do. I wouldnt be thinking about a portrait of myself dressed in a suit and tie. Id think: its time to go. And Id go. No messing about.
The boss wasnt interested in all that. As long as the farm kept running well, and no one stole any money or machinery, he didnt care who worked there, how long they stayed, whether they were happy. Ah Hock, thats why I have you! He used to joke that I was half-foreign that maybe my dad had been with a prostitute, and thats why I got along with the workers so well, because I had Indon blood in me. Dont know how, but you actually understand these guys, he used to say. Sometimes, when clients came to visit and remarked on how smoothly things ran, the boss would tell them that it was down to me. My foreman does everything, makes sure the boys work well village boy, easier for him to communicate with them, hor.
I was proud that he boasted about me like that. Although I grumbled from time to time about his absences, it secretly felt good to be trusted like that. Id been working on the farm for nearly ten years, and Id got to that point in time when one year began to resemble the next, changing in ways I could anticipate, in ways that I wished for. My salary was going up only slightly, but it was increasing all the same. Id got used to small surprises a nice angpow at Chinese New Year from clients or machinery suppliers, sometimes a present when the boss came back from holiday, like that box of special Hokkaido wafers when he went to Japan one time.
When life evolves like that, one small gift coming on top of another, you start to feel strong. Your salary, which surprises you at the beginning because its regularity is astonishing, because it keeps coming to you even when you think it might stop abruptly at any moment starts to feel as if it has always been there. An unshakeable part of the universe, like atoms or the cells in your body. You receive it month after month, one year, two years, four, eight it can never end. You start to feel complacent, though it doesnt strike you as complacency, but a sensation of solidity that surrounds you, so thick that sometimes you wake up in the night and believe that you can reach out and touch it.
Put it another way: I was thankful. Id left home a few years before that moved away from the village and drifted through a number of jobs in KL before returning to the area. I worked in a hardware store in Klang for a couple of months, then a shop that sold small agricultural tools and equipment just opposite the train station. I was loading some bags of fertiliser onto a customers truck one day when I saw he had a big watch, a Rolex. This was the kind of thing that my time in KL had taught me to notice shiny, expensive objects worn by their owners as a sort of challenge. Look at me, resist me. Covet me, reject me. I kept loading the bags, flipping each one up onto my shoulder and carrying it from the shop to the truck, fifty pounds a time, and all I could see out of the corner of my eye was the watch on the mans wrist as he stood there, hands on his hips. He checked the time. It was noon. It was hot.
When I finished he reached into his pocket and I thought he was going to give me a tip, maybe twothree ringgit, something like that, but instead he gave me his business card. Ever need a job, just ring me, he said. He was called Mr Lai, and he owned a few vegetable farms near Sekinchan, some orchards, a goat farm. Plus, he was the middleman, the one who employed the groups of migrant workers to harvest the rice for the Malays who owned the biggest ricefields in the area. He arranged everything for them, got the groups of Bangladeshis and Indonesians in for the season, paid them their wages in cash, then sold the rice for the land-owners. Of course he took a cut from everything not much, a bit here, a bit there, enough to end up a wealthy man. People make job offers all the time, but when you call them, the work isnt there any more. Id got used to that way of living. A promise isnt a promise. Still, I kept the card.