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 didn’t 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 didn’t cause any trouble, with all the new work we were getting, I’d 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 he’d done a lot of work that month, or if we’d had a particularly difficult time with the weather or supplies, and the boss only gave him a small tip, I’d give him some extra cash from my own pocket. He’d 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 didn’t notice all that – the physical work we did on the farm, or the men who did it. He’d 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 didn’t 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 who’d stick at the job and didn’t steal or cheat or gamble their earnings away – that was what the boss always said, and I think that’s why he could never remember their names. He didn’t want to know about their lives, didn’t want to think of them as real people – it was easier that way when one of them suddenly didn’t turn up for work. You lose a man like that, of course you wonder what’s happened to him. Maybe he’d been hit by a bus in the night while coming back from one of the brothels down near the port, or he’d 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. That’s 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 can’t say I’m surprised. I know it’s wrong, it’s 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 hadn’t 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 there’s 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 hadn’t seen my family for seven years, I wouldn’t 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 wouldn’t 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 wouldn’t be thinking about a portrait of myself dressed in a suit and tie. I’d think: it’s time to go. And I’d go. No messing about.
The boss wasn’t interested in all that. As long as the farm kept running well, and no one stole any money or machinery, he didn’t care who worked there, how long they stayed, whether they were happy. Ah Hock, that’s why I have you! He used to joke that I was half-foreign – that maybe my dad had been with a prostitute, and that’s why I got along with the workers so well, because I had Indon blood in me. ‘Don’t 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. I’d been working on the farm for nearly ten years, and I’d 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. I’d 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 doesn’t 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. I’d 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 customer’s 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 man’s 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 two–three 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 isn’t there any more. I’d got used to that way of living. A promise isn’t a promise. Still, I kept the card.
A few months later, when I had a problem with my employers – they accused me of stealing, which wasn’t true, not at that job, anyway – I just turned around and walked out. The boss-lady was sitting at the desk, the cash register open, scolding me, her voice as harsh as a drill into concrete.
