but it didn’t matter. Now we could spend more time at sea. Now we could start farming cockles in the mudflats that stretched out for hundreds of yards right from our front doors. Auntie Hong found a new recipe for prawn crackers that became so famous that day-trippers came up from the city at weekends to buy them, and one day an article appeared in the national newspapers under the title ‘Forgotten Seaside Charms’. I can still remember the photo of her, dressed up nicely in a red blouse, with matching lipstick and blue eyeshadow that made her look like a completely different person – who even knew that she had make-up? But there she was, proudly holding a bag of crackers in one hand, and a raw prawn in the palm of the other.
For about ten years, right up until I left the village, we got used to the excitement of the harvests of cockles – the distant sound of the shells as they were emptied from the boats into huge blue plastic tubs for cleaning. A bright sharp drumming noise that you could hear from hundreds of yards away. It was easier than going out to sea for long stretches, men and women could work together, they didn’t have to be separated from their families for so long, could see the storms coming and take refuge. The children helped sort through the harvest. We picked out all the empty shells or those already half-open and dead. By the time I left the village, I knew that I would be one of the last of the children to be doing that job. Each year the harvests grew smaller, and we started to find more plastic bags in the mud that got dredged up with the catch, wrapping around the shells and suffocating them. One year I found dozens of condoms too. Maybe a factory had dumped them there, or they were carried downstream in the river – who knows. The younger kids had no idea what they were – they blew them up as though they were balloons, wore them on their fingers and clawed the air pretending to be a Pontianak or some other evil ghost. We laughed a lot that year.
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 hadn’t done enough to appease the heavens. Everyone said, If we were richer, we could make more donations to the temple, we’d have better catches. They didn’t 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 wasn’t 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 didn’t even feel sad, or angry – why get mad over something you can’t 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. ‘Don’t know what they teach you in school these days.’
Whenever anyone came back from the temple, they’d 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 ship’s captain? That would have been fun. If they’d landed somewhere else on the coast, where they weren’t trapped between river and sea, maybe they’d have travelled inland and gone straight to a city. Maybe then, I would have become you.
I’m just kidding. Of course I couldn’t have become you. I know it’s not that simple. And I don’t mean that I want to become you, or someone like you. It’s just that sometimes I can’t help thinking about whether I was really destined to be me.
October 10th
The dispute was about money, as it always is. That’s why the man died. It wasn’t because of a woman, as some of the papers suggested. People like us don’t 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 who’d 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 he’d 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 wouldn’t 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 couldn’t have their cars sinking into the red mud or arriving back in town looking as if they’d 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. I’d been supervising the release of the newest batch of hatchlings. Sea bass, that’s what we were concentrating on that year, we knew the price of it would be high. There’d 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 it’s not Westerners?’ They assured my boss it was easy. Their clients preferred fresh local produce, they didn’t want stuff that was frozen and flown all the way from Australia or Alaska. Their restaurant was just a café, it didn’t 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 someone’s plate in the city.
I couldn’t 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 farm’s 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. I’d 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 I’d 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. I’d 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
