Burgess in Kuala Kangsar Tour

Thought you might like to see a pic of some of our delegation of members of the International Anthony Burgess Foundation and Badan Warisan Malaysia on our trip to Kuala Kangsar yesterday. You might recognise Dr. Rob Spence who came to talk to Malay College Old Boys Association about Burgess last year, and his wife Elaine (in blue at the front). We gave books by, and about, Burgess to the schools as a thankyou for their hospitality. We were really privileged to be allowed to see around the schools - the first MCKK where Burgess taught, and the second the girl's school housed in what used to be King's Pavilion (the old residency) where Anthony Burgess and his wife Lynne lived 1954-6. The two schools are rightfully proud of their traditions, and I hope we have added yet another layer to that by reminding them that a very famous author was connected with the buildings. The teacher at the front in the picture is holding a copy of The Long Day Wanes, the US edition of The Malayan Trilogy which I passed to her (... a bit of informal book-crossing!). The biggest thrill for me was being allowed to go up to the top of the tower of the old residency where there were panoramic views of the forested hills, Perak River, and sultan's palace. This is the very scene that inspired Burgess to start writing about Malaya (just read the opening of the second chapter of Time for a Tiger). And of course, our tour took in all the other famous sites in Kuala Kangsar ... mosque, palaces, oldest rubber tree, cemetaries, Idris club (aka Burgess' Iblis Club), riverside ... Our Badan Warsian members added to our enjoyment significantly, being able to explain about history and architecture and culture much more effectively than yours truly, and I must say a big thank you particularly to Najib Ariffin (who also happened to be a Malay College old boy) for his entertaining and informative commentary on the coach. Thanks too to my former student Hasnul Ariffin, who present a spectacular time-lapse photograph of Malay College Big School to the IABF taken to mark the centenary of the school. Thank you to everyone who helped to make our trip a big success. Next - (and I am quite serious here) going to work on a Perak literary tour taking in Ipoh and other places and focusing on more contemporary literature!

BiblioTour Guide

Apologies in advance for not blogging much over the next day or two. The International Anthony Burgess Sympozium starts tomorrow at the Istana Hotel. I am so excited that the event has come to Malaysia (as a result of the success of our Burgess evening last year).

I have the chance to play tour guide on Wednesday for a trip to Kuala Kangsar. The delegates have come from around the world and we will be joined by members of Badan Warisan Malaysia.

We'll be visiting both Malay College where Burgess taught (as Mr. J.B. Wilson) and SMK Raja Perumpuan Kalsom which is housed in the old Residency building, better known as King's Pavilion when it was Malay College's prep school. It was here that Burgess lived with his wife Lynn, and wrote Time for a Tiger, the first part of The Malayan Trilogy.

Besides the literary hagiography (!) we will also do the usual Kuala Kangsar sights - the Ubudiah Mosque and the plethora or palaces around Bukit Chandan. If you don't know the town, do go take a trip up there some time. It's probably the prettiest Malaysian town, with plenty of historical stuff to explore.

So if there's nothing much new on the blog for a while, panic not. There are sure to be adventures to be written up.

Our Burgess Pilgrimage

Thought I'd share with you some of the photos I took on the trip up north to Kuala Kangsar on the "Burgess pilgrimage" I made with Rob, Elaine and Abu. For those of you who've skipped a beat, this town was my home for three years. And Anthony Burgess ... or rather John Burgess Wilson also lived and taught and began his career as a novelist there in the fifties.

Even Burgessians (for such we are, said Dr. Rob) have to eat. First stop, breakfast at the Tapah service station. While globalisation leads to a distressing homogenization of the world, and fast food franchises looking the same the world over, at least the local branch of Dunkin' Donuts is bold enough to initiate a new variety.

The only place to eat if you want to connect with the real Kuala Kangsar is Yut Loy restaurant, famous for possibly the best pau (steamed buns with a range of fillings) in Malaysia, and also as a smokers' haven for the Malay College boys, allowed out to town on Saturdays. They congregate in the room upstairs as they have for decades. And no doubt the friendly proprietor tips them off when a prefect or teacher approaches. Ah, tradition!

And the only dish to eat in Yut Loy if you want to follow local traditions is "egg steak". (A culinery delight i don't think even Boolicious has discovered.)

The dish that was invented for British and Aussie servicemen stationed in the town after the war and during the emergency when they couldn't afford beef steak. It consists of two runny yolked fried eggs, dowsed in a gravy made of dilute Worcestershire sauce, enriched with tinned processed peas, and served with thick slices of toast. Of such stuff are gourmet dreams made.

It feels like a place where time has stood still. These pictures of Kuala Kangsar in the floods date from 1967.

On to the official tourist route, which took us on a winding drive around Bukit Chandan, the town's royal hill and one of the richest spots for architecture in the country. Above, of course, is the famous Ubudiah Mosque:

... bulbous as a clutch of onions ...

as Burgess said irreverently in Time for a Tiger. We also pointed out to Rob and Elaine the Sultan's Palace, Istana Iskandariah (left):

... designed by a Los Angeles architect ...

Sadly, the Istana Kenangan (built without the use of a single nail) was closed to the public.

An army of asplenium nidus bent on world domination in the branches of an ancient rain tree on Bukit Chandan.

An old house (right) I loved to cycle to when I lived in Kuala Kangsar had burned down and only the blackened frame remains. Really this breaks my heart. I remember exploring inside the house, being careful of the broken floorboards ... and finding two thrones in an otherwise empty upstairs room! The house became the hang-out of drug addicts and I guess that's how the fire started. Clearly, it was yet another palace on a hill of palaces and I guess that no-one really cared enough to try to preserve it.

The most important stop was to see King's Pavilion, built 1905, which served as the British resident's home and later as the prep school for Malay College. This is where Anthony Burgess/ JB Wilson lived (upstairs) when he was hostel master. My husband was one of the seven year olds he describes in his autobiography Little Wilson and Big God, crying themselves to sleep at night and pissing off the balcony (which Abu says isn't true, but as Rob says, if Burgess were given the choice between the truth and a better story, he'd go with the latter). This is also where Burgess' protagonist Victor Crabbe lived in the alternate universe's Kuala Hantu.

The building now houses the Sekolah Menegah Raja Perempuan Kalsom.

Next stop was the Idris Club, named after the fun-loving Sultan Idris. In Time for a Tiger, Burgess rechristened it the Iblis Club. Iblis, of course, means Devil. All these cheeky renamings of Malaysian towns and landmarks would have passed the books foreign readers by. My theory - Burgess wanted to share a joke with his Malay speaking readers (to whom the book is dedicated) and not let the others in on it. (He didn't even fully explain the joke in his autobiography).

I used to be a member of the club. (Actually this is where I brought Abu on our first date!) To quote Burgess in Earthly Powers:

It was in Kuala Kangsar, if you will forgive the novelettish circumlocution, that I met the love of my life.

But now the Idris Club seems a very sad, rundown place and the people running the place seemed more than a little suspicious of us.

I had to sneak this picture of the billiard table through an open window. Can't see Burgess being a snooker player but I'm sure his characters played a frame or two here.

Of course, our trip culminated in a visit to Malay College, where the author taught. The school features prominently in Time for a Tiger.

On our trip home, we stopped off in Ipoh and christened the trip with Tiger Beer and tea. The 101 year old FMS bar is faced with closure, and many of the old shophouses seemed to be boarded up. More heritage buildings about to be lost?

I did a sterling job of pointing out other landmarks that make their way into Tan Twan Eng's The Gift of Rain ("That's a cave temple over there") and Preeta Samarasan's forthcoming Evening is the Whole Day. Am thinking of taking up bibliotourism for a living.

If you'd like more on Burgess in Kuala Kangsar, I think you will find this extract from the first volume of his autobiography, quite fascinating ... particularly on the topic of Malay ghosts and the affair he carried on with a coffee-shop waitress called Rahimah.

Beloved Bald Boy Book

Noor took me down memory lane yesterday with her comment about a book in Bahasa Indonesia is called Sipitak she'd loved as a child in the sixties and then lost.

Strangely enough, it's a book I remember too, and I had also been wondering why I never see it in the bookshops anymore.

I was learning to read in Malay. Used to conquer an article or two in the Malay newspapers each day. But I wanted to move on to real books and where better to start than with good kids fiction which wouldn't be too difficult, but would entertain too? I'm not sure where I came across the book of stories about this little boy called Si Pitak, but it must have been in one of the shops in Kuala Kangsar.

I just loved the stories of this naughty bald-headed lad (the result of ring-worm, I seem to remember) who was always up to mischief in his village with his little gang of followers. As I wrote in the comments yesterday, I can still remember one of the stories about stealing shoes from outside the mosque on Friday. I seem to remember another about stealing fruit. The writing was both funny and charming, and the language simple enough to for me enjoy without resorting to the dictionary too often. (I never quite made the transition to reading adult novels in Malay!)

Noor says that she didn't know author or publisher so a little detective work was in order. I love a challenge, and the first place to start was abebooks.com, where there was just one copy of a book fitting the description. Once I had the author's name, I checked on Amazon. Apparently there were several books about Si Pitak written by Indonesian author Soekardi, and of these two were published by Fajar Bakti (the local publishing arm of Oxford University Press) and I think may have been translated into Bahasa Melayu*. All are now out of print.

A lot of really good books here just seem to disappear. Perhaps we could twist the arm of this publisher to bring back Si Pitak for the sake of today's kids?

And meanwhile, if anyone knows of a copy mouldering in a forgotten corner somewhere, maybe they could get in touch? (Noor - I think that this could be the Indonesian publisher, and maybe they would also be able to tell us something?)

The search is on for the bald boy and any information leading to his recovery is very much valued!

And as suggests:

Sharon, when you are out of topics to blog, perhaps you can write one about books we have loved. The comments wd be so interesting.

I kick this topic open to you. What books from your past have you loved and lost?

*The official languages of Indonesia and Malaysia are the same apart from vocabulary differences.

Burgess in the Independent

In August 1954 an eccentric, chippy English teacher named John Burgess Wilson made a rather miserable boat journey to Malaya. His first two novels had just been rejected by Heinemann. He and his wife, Lynne, had become addicted to gin on the long voyage; by the time they arrived at Singapore, Lynne was so paralytic that their journey north into the peninsula had to be postponed until she had dried out. Wilson hadn't even intended to apply for the teaching position in the Colonial Service. He thought, he said later, that he had written about a job in theChannel Islands, but had mixed the locations up when posting his letter drunk.

During the five years he spent in Malaya and Brunei as a Colonial Officer, Wilson was frequently in trouble with his superiors and the police, his marriage became hellish and he ended up being invalided home with a suspected cerebral tumour after he lay down on a classroom floor and refused to get up.

But it was the making of him. For, as his biographer Roger Lewis puts it: "John Wilson went to Malaya and came back as Anthony Burgess." The man who was to go on to write such celebrated novels as Earthly Powers and A Clockwork Orange - and to assume the persona of the pseudonym he wrote under - finally found his voice in a country where the white man's role was to prepare three races, the Malays, Chinese and Indians, for independence; and, while he was at it, to try to avoid being shot or garrotted by the Communist insurgents who lurked nearby in the omnipresent rainforests.

By the time he left the East, Burgess was the published author of the three novels known as the Malayan Trilogy and had begun, in his forties, one of the most prolific and successful literary careers of the late 20th century. He was happy to acknowledge his debt to the country. "The Malay language," he wrote, "changed not just my attitude to communication in general but the whole shape of my mind."

Fifty years after the declaration of independence - the focal point of all three novels - I stand outside Burgess's classroom at the Malay College in Kuala Kangsar, a boarding school set up in 1905 for the sons of the Malay upper classes and known as the "Eton of the East". Here it was that the trouble all began for Victor Crabbe, the trilogy's hero; here too it began for Burgess. It was to this classroom that Crabbe, and Burgess, walked from quarters in the King's Pavilion (the former British Residence) overlooking the Perak river, arriving drenched in sweat. It was around this town, thinly disguised as Kuala Hantu (estuary of ghosts), that Burgess/Crabbe earned odd looks from his fellow colonials for drinking in local dives rather than amongst white men.

For Time for a Tiger, the first of the trilogy, and set around the Malay College (renamed Mansor School), is no mere novel. It is so closely related to actual events that many identified themselves - often with displeasure - when it was published. (The second book provoked similar reactions, and even a libel case.) It was this authenticity that led Burgess to claim that he had captured Malaya and Borneo more accurately than either Somerset Maugham or Conrad. But it also led to ambivalence among those who knew him then. Should they be proud to have been im-mortalised by such a famous writer, or was he just using them?

The Malay College old boys of the class of '55 who had Burgess as their form master as well as English teacher are agreed on one thing: they'd never come across anyone like him before. "He was the first Bohemian we had met," recalls Ariff Babu, now a businessman in nearby Ipoh. He wore bell-bottomed trousers, and rarely a tie. He sweated profusely - "wiping out the drips from his forehead and neck to no end, while his armpits were never dry," remembers another pupil, Suleiman Manan - and constantly ran his hands through a stubbornly errant forelock. Mr Wilson was certainly no smooth Oxonian. "He was not elegant in speech," says Suleiman, "munching his words to a mumble as though he had had too much whisky the night before."

But Burgess impressed by not speaking down to his charges - he addressed them as "gentlemen", a term Suleiman says had never been used to them before - and also by his command of Malay, written in Jawi, the Arabic script common at that time. "I can never forget his first day in class," says Ariff. "He strode to the blackboard and in a firm hand wrote, ' Nama saya [my name is] John Wilson' in Jawi. He bowled me over. We thought then of the British as being the supreme power. They wouldn't want to mix with us. But here was this orang puteh [white man] who was able to relate to us."

Burgess was more liberal than J D Howell, the headmaster whose stern but amiable features still stare down from the gallery of portraits in the college's Hargreaves Hall. It was with Howell that Burgess clashed over the expulsion of a pupil who had been caught in a compromising position with a girl. The monitor of his form, Abdul Rahim Ismail, headed a group who went to complain to Burgess. "We told him that we thought it was unjustified," says Rahim. "He seemed receptive." The incident is recorded in Time for a Tiger, and Crabbe, just like Burgess, ends up being transferred to a different establishment on the east coast of Malaya for challenging the headmaster's authority. But it doesn't seem likely that Burgess could have stayed at the Malay College for long in any case. Crabbe spurns the Iblis Club, full of planters and colonial officers, in favour of local kedais (roadside shops), but Burgess went further.

Ariff drives me to the location of the local toddy shop. Now a patch of wasteland, it is just across the road from the Idris Club (for Iblis, read Idris, named after a former sultan of the state), so his presence there could hardly have been discreet. Burgess makes it sound like a local drinking spot, but Ariff corrects me. "The government used to create areas to control the consumption of toddy [a low-grade, noxious coconut beer]. It was not a place a normal Malayan would go - it was for Indian coolies. He must have been really desperate to go there."

Lynne's behaviour was also the subject of talk. "We hardly ever saw her, but we suspected she was drunk most of the time," says Ariff. In Little Wilson and Big God, the first instalment of his memoirs, Burgess makes much of their mutual infidelity. I ask Ariff about this. "There was a rumour that a Malay teacher was carrying on with her," he says. "We thought he must be blind - she was terrible!" As for Burgess himself: "I don't think that women were ever his weakness. In fact we worried about his sexual preference sometimes."

Burgess returned to Malaysia (the country was renamed in 1963 after the Federation of Malaya joined with the Borneo states of Sarawak and Sabah, and, briefly, Singapore) to film a segment for the BBC series Writers and Places in 1980. "We met up at the Royal Ipoh Club," remembers Ariff, "where my wife and I entertained him for dinner. We saw quite a bit of each other during the few days he was in Ipoh, and he was even kind enough to appraise a short play my wife had written for the radio.

"I was all set to reinstall him on my pedestal. That is, until I witnessed his live BBC interview, in which he proceeded to paint a very disparaging picture of Malaysia since independence." A furious Burgess is seen unable to make himself understood when speaking Malay to a waitress. "The country and I," he says finally to camera, "have nothing to say to each other."

Burgess always had a reactionary streak, and he disliked the way that Malaysia had embraced modernity and consumerism, just as he had been unimpressed with the changes he found in Britain on his return from the East in 1959. But he did forge a connection with his class at the Malay College. "I liked the senior boys whom I taught, and felt that a rapport was growing," he said of the class of '55, describing them as "delicate of perception".

"When my father read the trilogy," remembers Rahim, "he said, 'this man understands us and our surroundings. Unlike all the other English writers.' And he specifically mentioned Somerset Maugham. I think the same." For Anthony Burgess, the strange, prickly, egomaniacal man who saw "the tropics as normality and the temperate zones as the locale for suicidal dementia", there could be no greater compliment. For it was in Malaya, as he "sweated and was happy to sweat", that Little Wilson became Big Burgess.

Thanks Ted for e-mailing me this link from the Independent. Sholto Byrnes writes about Burgess in Malaya and interviews several of the folks who knew him.

This is a very important piece which echoes my own article on the Kakiseni website and in my blog entries regarding the importance of Burgess and the neglect of him in Malaysia. And Byrnes also notes the lack of a commemorative plaque on the walls of Malay College. Great minds, hey?

*The article can now be found here.

My Malaysias

I was tagged by KG who was tagged by Sharanya as the next blogger to contribute to the 50 Posts to Independence Project started by Nizam Bashir. The idea is to write about anything that makes Malaysia special to that person. The project culminates on the nation's 50th birthday next year.

Here's a free-flow thing I've just knocked up, barely ahead of the deadline. More of a collection of notes than anything else (certainly not a poem ... or not yet). I enjoyed writing this and the memories it brought back and I'm nudged towards fleshing the whole thing out. (Great things about blogs is that they can be places to post stuff that's in-progressy!)

And in turn, I tag Eliza whose intelligent writing I enjoy ... both in my class and on her blog.

My Malaysias

My first Malaysia

Raub

goldmining town until the veins were flooded
when the Japanese came.
one street of Chinese shophouses,
one cinema, one supermarket
a school where I taught Form Three students
resisitant in their way to the invasion of English.

a memory of curfew,
imprinted itself on the town.
the last of the communists hung out
in the steaming forest.informers staked out the coffee shops
and army officers
drank whisky with discreet napkins around the glass
at the tenth hole of the golf club,
built by an Irish doctor
who never found his way home -
as i might not.

orang asli felled small game
with blowpipes along FELDA roads
distracting me from driving lessons.
the best Chinese restaurant was a zinc hut
behind the bus station
(the towkay's fortune gambled away),
kari ayam in Sempalit
the red tables cloths
of that place in Sungai Lui
that sold mee.

my second malaysia

Kuala Kangsar

"it was in Kuala Kangsar
if you will forgive the novelettish circumlocation
that i met the love of my life"

said Burgess (and hey, that works for me)

his writing drew my dislocated self
to his "estuary of ghosts"
with its sluggish river and footferry,
golden domed mosque, kampongs,
and scatter of palaces
(one a secret place with rotting floorboards
and birds nesting in the throne room).

i came to teach the elite
those white uniformed boys
who came wet to class rainy afternoons
(because umbrellas were not macho)
for Steinbeck.

in the Chinese restaurant
(how did i become an honorary man?)
we yang singed, and not with Chinese tea,
spun the chicken head on the empty platter
to see who would drink the next forfeit
or sing
and Bobby who slaughtered pigs by day
giving us Santa Lucia in the the richest
sweetest baritone.
and then him
back for a school reunion
asking "where can one get a beer in this place?"
his romantic chat-up line.the rest as they say is history
my history
and his.
my third malaysia is the malaysia of now
and here

a city of jams and flashfloods and too large malls
which leave me breathless with agrophobia
a skyline changing from one day to the next
but an excitement at being at the centre of things
and a feeling of the possibility of change.

corporate training
in golden triangle boardrooms
how to write the perfect business report.then a teachers training college
and mid-morning breakfast escapes for pan mee or utthapam
with the best colleagues of my life.
poetry classes under casuarinas -
teaching necessarily subversion
through poetry.

observing teaching practice on hot afternoons
in parts of the city i'd lost my way trying to find
proud of my students growth into teachers
and watching at the back of the classroom
the reactions of my hypothetical child
(the only one i'd ever have).

inheriting a family and customs
finding places to adapt and common ground.
carrying hantaran at weddings,
folding my too large self on the floor at kenduris
but never never neatly enough.
relatives scrambling through the bin for the
plastic wrapping of my Christmas turkey
to make sure it really was halal.the agak-agak versions of family recipes
scribbled on slips of paper
and consumed with fingers.

mat salleh I am ... but these are my stories to tell.
my credentials.
see how line by line,
Malaysia has written me.
so that these are the stamps in my passport
in lieu of the official one that says

i belong.

The Day My Toilet Caught Fire

Today, in a picturesque small town called Rye on the South coast of England, my friend Barry is celebrating his 80th birthday. And he'll have with him most of his far-flung children, their spouses (from Australia, Canada, Hawaii and Britain), and his grandchildren with him to make this a very special day.

Barry has always called me his "adopted daughter", which brings a lump to my throat everytime he says it.

I've know Jean and Barry for over twenty years now. Jean came to teach here with CfBT (Centre for British Teachers) and was posted to Kluang. Barry came with her as a non-working husband, though within a year had taken over the running of the 'A' Level programme when the previous Project director died suddenly of a heart attack, and thus became not only friend but boss for a while.

We stayed friends after Jean and Barry moved back to Britain, and I used visit them in Plymouth. Later they came out to live in Malaysia again when Jean was involved in resourcing our college library for the B.Ed programme.

Anyway, cue the burning toilet story which Barry teases me about to this day. He says it could only happen to me. But it really wasn't my fault ...

At the time (mid 80's) I was teaching at the famous (or should that be infamous?) Malay college, and one day Barry (as big boss) came up on an official visit to check on our progress. I agreed to host a gathering of all the British teachers on the programme at my place. (I rented the upper floor of a semi-d from the Hokkien family who lived below.)

I cooked all day, and around seven in the evening my colleagues began to arrive. Irene and Alan who taught Economics, John who taught Business Studies, Lorri who taught Geography, and then Chris and Neil, who both taught English with me, turned up with wives and kids in tow.

Of course there's that little period of chaos whenever you hold a gathering - folks all arrive at the same time and you're letting them in, and greeting them, and saying thank you for the flowers, and opening the wine, and getting them a drink and so on.

So I had my hands full when, amid this chaos Chris pointed out that the lightbulb in my loo had gone and asked if I had a candle because his kids wanted to use it. I found one, gave to to him and thought nothing more of it.

The evening went very well, we talked shop for a while, then ate and chatted. The only thing that surprises me, looking back, was that in all that time no-one went to the loo.

Alan was helping me to wash plates in the kitchen while the rest continued to party, when we heard a strange sound like oil frying in a pan. Oddly enough, it was coming from the toilet!

Alan and I looked at each other and, mystified, crept up to the door to listen. What on earth was happening inside? I yanked the toilet door open and a huge cloud of black smoke whoofed out into the flat causing my guests (boss included) to run screaming to the balcony. Soot blacked every inch of my lounge and highlighted most embarrassingly all the cobwebs I had failed to clean in my slatternly housekeeping.

Alan and I meanwhile hurled buckets of water at the flames, which fortunately were easily extinguished. But the plastic cistern of my squat loo was now a molten puddle on the floor, the tiles were blackened and cracked, and the window broken. It was a scene of utter devastation.

We were all totally mystified as to the cause of the fire. It was only next day that that idiot Chris (who ironically been the first guest to go home and had missed the excitement) said that it was just possible perhaps that it had been caused by the candle he'd left burning, stuck to cistern without anything underneath it.

I got workmen in and managed to get the damage repaired without my cantankerous landlord suspecting anything.

But the damage to my reputation has never been repaired, and Barry loves to remind me of that.

Happy Birthday, anyway Barry. I'm thinking of you today and sending my love from across the world.

Stories about Syed

I first met Syed in January 1985. I was due to take up a teaching post at the prestigious boy’s school described since colonial times as “the Eton of the East”. I had arrived in the small town of Kuala Kangsar on an overnight bus from the capital. I was supposed to be staying at the Rest House. (Every small town in Malaysia had its government Rest House – they were places for officials to stay when they travelled to more out of the way places.) But at three a.m. on a Sunday morning in a strange town, I decided that the most sensible course of action was to rattle on the grills of a nearby small Chinese hotel, until the owner, sleeping on a palette bed in the hallway, grudgingly let me in and gave me a room.

A few hours later saw me trudging in the heat to the ‘Rest House’ situated some way from the centre of the town along the road to the Sultan’s palace, a heavy bag slung over my shoulder. An ancient, very battered car suddenly stopped for me. A man leaned out of the window and asked if I wanted a lift. His heavily pregnant wife was beside him, so I got into the car. His name was Syed, he explained, and this was his wife, Asmah. They were going to the Rest House for lunch.

We had a most enjoyable lunch. The food was simple but tasty (I later became good friends with the Rest House manager Kamal, and his beautiful wife, Mona, who did the cooking). The view from the Rest House dining room was spectacular: it looked out over the Perak River, and we watched the small ferry ply between the town and the village of Sayong on the opposite bank, laden with people and bicycles.

Syed was fascinating. I thought he was of Arab descent at first, given his name and the overlarge nose which dominates his face. But I learned later that his father was Indian and his mother Thai. He speaks with a cut glass English accent. He was the first person I’d ever met in Malaysia who had actually read Burgess' The Malayan Trilogy, the first part of which (Time for a Tiger) was actually set in this town. (Burgess called it Kuala Hantu: Estuary of Ghosts.) Syed had known Burgess (real name John Wilson) very well indeed: Burgess was his lecturer when he was training to be a teacher, the first intellectual he’d met and someone who had shaped the course of his life. The two had become drinking companions. Syed knew the characters who became immortalized in the fiction of the trilogy: knew the stories behind the story. And when A Clockwork Orange, Burgess’ cult novel came out, he sent several autographed first-edition copies to Syed (though unfortunately, they got stolen later on.)

I couldn’t believe my luck, meeting folks this friendly and this interesting within hours of landing up in a new town. Syed said that he would come and collect me at dinnertime and we would go and explore the town.

Dinnertime came and went and he and Asmah did not appear. I felt sad that my first friends had so apparently abandoned me.

But life moved on. I met up with my new colleagues, the other British teachers who had been at the school for a year already and was soon caught up in looking for a place to stay and getting settled in the school.

I saw Syed a few weeks later. Again the battered car skidded to a halt beside me. He apologized for standing me up the night I’d arrived: Asmah had gone into labour that very night and delivered their thirteenth baby.

I visited Asmah several times, riding across town on my Flying Pigeon bicycle. Asmah was a dental nurse at the government clinic and lived in quarters behind it: a tiny, single storey building. Like the old lady who lived in a shoe, there were children everywhere, scarcely a year between them in age. Asmah, not surprisingly, always seemed exhausted. Syed was always away in Kuala Lumpur. He worked for the examinations board.

And more or less that was it: someone who might have been a friend who slipped from my life.

Years later, I discovered to my great surprise that Syed was someone that Abu and I had in common. He had been a teacher at my husband’s school – taught him art. Unconventional, humorous, he had been a great favourite of the boys, more of a friend than a teacher. There’s a photo in my husband’s album of himself and Syed standing on the roof of the school, their arms around each other’s shoulders. There are so many stories about him – really he is the stuff of legends, and I’m not sure which of them are fact and which are fiction.

Syed loves to tell the story about how, as a young teacher, he had gone into a staff meeting where other, more senior members of the local teaching staff had upbraided him for not having a tie on. He immediately went upstairs to the headmaster’s office and cut off a piece of the rug in his office, and wore it round his neck as a tie. Fortunately, the headmaster, a very easygoing chap (and a friend of Syed’s to this day), saw the funny side of it.

I learned that Asmah was his second wife. Someone said that he had a first wife – a marriage that his parents arranged for him in Taiping, another small town about a half hour drive from Kuala Kangsar.

When he first started teaching, his first school was in a very small place, halfway between Kuala Kangsar and Taiping. Legend has it that every afternoon after school, he would walk down to the bus stop and wait for the bus. If the bus to Taiping arrived first, he would take it. If the bus came from the other direction, he would go home to Asmah. I don’t know how many children he had from this first marriage, but someone old me that he had another dozen or so.

The Old Man says that after working with the examinations syndicate, he got a good job with Bank Negara who commissioned art from him. (He paints wild abstracts full of swirling colours and textures.) He lived in the back of a van in the bank’s carpark: everything he earned had to be sent back to support his two families.

Then there was the day we met him in the Bangsar night market, buying vegetables with a very beautiful young woman who he introduced as “my wife”. We never met her again.

We met him again a couple of years ago with Nino, at the Rugby Sevens in Kelana Jaya. Now in his late 60's he looked well, younger than many of the boys he’s taught who are stumbling into overweight middle age. White hair tied back in a ponytail, fashionable silk shirt – always impeccably dressed.

Am I in love with him? Infuriating irresponsible rascal though he is, it would be impossible not to be. And everyone else who knows him feels the same way. There are so many gaps in the story of his life I’d like to fill.