intimate connection between artistic and religious impulses—to make a true pilgrimage.
One summer day, not long after I had turned in the manuscript for my book about O’Keeffe, I was digging up a new garden, when to my consternation I found that I had to stop every few minutes to get a drink of water—which, curiously, did not slake my thirst. I wondered if I was getting sick—did this signal the onset of diabetes, which runs in my family?—or if living in the desert had somehow changed my metabolism. Through the afternoon and evening I worked, and drank water from the well, and only grew thirstier. The next day, though, I felt fine, and because I never experienced such a thirst again it came to stand in my imagination for the unquenchable thirst of the spiritual life.
This all came rushing back to me in Eh Chom’s living room, when he rose to his feet, citing another obligation. During the proscription, he worked as a traditional healer, a bomoh, counseling couples with marital problems (his specialty, Eddin whispered with a grin). He was thus a busy man, and there was only time for him to take us on a quick tour of the temples by his house, a small dilapidated Thai structure and a larger, sturdier one, combining Thai and Chinese elements. He made a dismissive remark about the Chinese merchants whose donations were critical to the temples’ upkeep, then led us along a path lined with garish statues of the Buddha and across the road to the largest sitting Buddha in Southeast Asia—a brown, golden-lipped figure ten stories tall surrounded by Chinese figures, pillars, and carvings. Eh Chom’s second wife arrived on a motor scooter to take him to his appointment, and as they drove off Eddin said that while the Islamists despised this giant statue of the Buddha, which was ten years in the making, they had not forbidden its inauguration, in September 2001. The week-long celebration commenced with hundreds of Chinese Buddhists burning joss sticks and pinning pieces of gold foil to a teardrop-shaped heart displayed on a stage, and then they inserted into the heart a pair of gold and silver needles to signify their release from worldly attachments and rejection of hatred and greed—a symbolic act far removed from that of the al-Qaeda operatives who two days later crashed their planes into the Twin Towers. Like millions of people on 9/11, I had stared in disbelief at the carnage broadcast on television, wondering if, as the commentators kept saying, profound change was upon us. This Buddhist ceremony had continued, though, concluding with Thai monks installing the heart in the statue: a sign of the realm of pure light in which the enlightened dwell beyond change. And if I had thought that my travels in Malaysia would be undertaken in the light of a new dispensation now it occurred to me that from a Buddhist perspective perhaps nothing had changed at all. Back at my hotel, I sat down to make some notes on what I had seen since arriving in Kuala Lumpur the week before.
There was a crude swastika painted on the shrine to Ganesha, the elephant god, and as we started down the dirt path the sweet scent of a jasmine tree gave way to the smell of curry and then the stench of sewage. A dog barked, two chickens pecked at grain by a small house, and a baby crawled toward the door. We entered the Kali temple in which Eddin performed his monthly ritual bath, a shed the size of a walk-in closet lined with shelves on which were laid offerings for the goddess: silver canisters filled with red or yellow dye, jars of honey and spirits, bowls of jasmine blossoms and dried flowers, a coconut, three bottles of milk, lemons stuck to the prongs of a trident. Eddin said that during one ceremony a king cobra had slithered into the temple and right back out again.
He had become a devotee of Kali during the troubles in 1997. The Asian financial crisis, Anwar Ibrahim’s arrest, a clampdown on the media—these were connected in his mind to the mysterious rash he developed at that time. Repeated visits to the doctor over the course of seven months brought no relief, and just when he despaired of getting well something providential happened, or so it seemed to him. The newspaper he was working for sent him to the Brickfields neighborhood of Kuala Lumpur to do a feature on a Hindu temple saved from demolition by its priestess, an illiterate old woman who had returned from shopping one day to find a crew of men preparing to raze the shrine to make room for another apartment building to house the burgeoning Indian population. Eighty years before, an indentured Tamil railway worker, inspired by a dream to plant his trident here, had invited Kali, the mother goddess, the goddess of death and destruction, to enter this space, and now his spirited granddaughter told Eddin that in an age of incessant strife she had to preserve the temple; for Kali devours delusion, evil, and ignorance. Once she had answered his questions, she demanded to ask one of her own.
“You know why you really came here, don’t you?” she said. His suffering, she explained, was caused by Kali, Shiva’s consort, who was inside him: Kali, the dark goddess of time and change, customarily adorned with a necklace of severed heads, earrings of children’s corpses, and bracelets of serpents, her long hair in a wild tangle, blood smeared on her lips. The priestess advised Eddin to devote himself to the goddess, who danced on the battlefield after slaying the demon king—and within three months his rash was gone.
It was around this time that the paper put him in cold storage. Every day he would write a story, and then he would be summoned to the editor’s office to watch him spike it. How the editor relished pushing the delete button, and reprimanding him for the tie he wore, his worsening attitude, anything at all. The final straw for Eddin was the order to attend the Basic English classes convened for Malay speakers.
“Fuck that,” he said, and quit.
Providence entered the picture again, now through the British Council, which sent him to London to do his MA, and on his return he threw himself into his work at Pusaka, the origin of which he traced to a shadow puppet performance that he had attended in 1992, when he was studying politics at the University of Malaya. The spectacle of one man conducting an orchestra, improvising dialogue for scores of characters, and playing seven puppets at a time convinced him to apprentice himself to this master. So he took a bus to Kelantan, ignoring his mother’s warnings that he might fall victim to black magic, and asked a taxi driver in Kota Bharu if he knew where the puppeteer lived. The taxi drove him straight to his house—which Eddin interpreted as a sign that this was the right thing for him to do. Then the puppeteer accepted him as a student, though for the first eighteen months of his apprenticeship he was not allowed to touch a puppet.
“It was all banter,” he said, which is an essential part of instruction in traditional theater. But the puppet master was always observing him—how he held a cigarette, a cup of coffee—in order to discern his individual style.
“He told me from the beginning that I would never perform like him,” said Eddin, “but in my own way. After ten years of studying, I still haven’t performed.”
For acquiring the technical skills of puppetry was only part of his apprenticeship. More important was his immersion in Kelantan’s culture, which led to the founding of Pusaka. Eddin’s ambitions for his organization went beyond documenting and saving the traditional ceremonies: he wanted to expand their purview to engage urban communities and offer to the disaffected creative outlets rooted in the indigenous art forms of the land—admittedly a controversial idea.
“The government’s strategy is to create a climate of fear,” he said, “but Pusaka is here to ruffle the leaves, in the Malay phrase.”
And ruffle them he did. His organization took its name from his childhood home (putra pusaka, “princely heritage”), and if he would not say whether he was the prince of the house he did recall with love the nurse who had taught him to speak Malay. (He had more complicated feelings about the gardener who had taught him to catch the king cobras nesting under the staircase and to smoke.) In the mixed heritage of the Malay Peninsula, with its varieties of religious experience and cultural practice, he looked for solutions to social problems, which neither the single-minded Islamists nor the inertia-bound ruling party knew how to address. Amok was a Malay word, he liked to tell me, insisting that in such a constricted society it was only natural for some to run amok, to go mad with rage, taking a dagger or a machete to anyone they met. The papers carried stories of men going on killing sprees for no apparent reason, but Eddin suspected that their suicidal frenzies were linked
