The wind was blowing away from them: sand flew, and in amongst the gusts of it he could see figures swirling in purple and black and burned orange, green and indigo.
He was so short he had to stand on the thwart to jump down out of the boat. He landed, squinting despite the shade of his straw hat, in hard wet sand. This grew lighter in colour, and dried, as they walked inland. But it was still sand, hot, and slippery underfoot. So this was Paradise.
There was nothing built on it, only a few fragile open-sided sheds, straw roofed with skinny crooked poles at the sides to hold them up. And hundreds of tents, which flapped in the wind and hissed with the onslaught of sand that came on the gusts. Papa explained that the fleet had gone out with the land breeze at the firing of the guns at ten o’clock the evening before. It would have reached the banks at daybreak and the divers would set to work. At noon they would stop as the air began to stir to warn them to come back. They were due back, on the sea breeze, in a few hours.
James could see, emerging out of the sand clouds, people. People of every kind he could imagine, hundreds and hundreds of them. He and his Papa had arrived at a giant, seething fair which was all the more astonishing for having appeared on a sand spit, out of nowhere. There were black men, yellow and brown men too, men in long robes, men with pigtails and satin hats, nearly naked and squatting in loincloths, long-haired, turbaned, wrapped in shawls and crowned with fez. There were Malay soldiers with their curved blades called kreese; his father said to watch out. Once drawn, a kreese was bound to draw blood.
It was all impermanent, an encampment, and better than a circus. They passed men with rings through their lips, and women so freighted with jewellery and hardware they had to be supported as they walked. Others were shrouded so that they appeared as only a pair of large wary eyes, in a black triangle. The sun-burned laughing girls who flipped their tambourines at him were sea-gypsies. And there were dancing boys with hips as narrow as a dog’s, who insinuated themselves between the soldiers as they walked.
It was hot, huge and festive. Pigs squealed, donkeys brayed and people shouted in tongues. James stopped before a shy graceful animal like a small deer, in a cage. A gazelle, his Papa said, waiting to be sold. A worldly-looking monkey with a white beard made its way without touching ground, by climbing over the shoulders and heads of whole rows of people.
Papa kept him by the hand. Maybe he thought he’d be stolen. Maybe he would have been. He dragged behind, caught up by a snake charmer playing on a flageolet who coaxed his cobra halfway up out of the basket only to let him drop again. A scribe sat cross-legged on a straw mat on the sand with a little crowd waiting for him to put some message on paper. He crooked his finger at James, but Papa pulled him past. They ducked under the flaps of a tent draped with coloured carpets. An Arab with a long white headdress and a massive black beard greeted his father with open arms; he looked on James kindly and the boy shrank behind his father’s leg. Papa prised James off and showed him the scales, and the tongs, with which the trader handled the pearls, and weighed them. There were big brass sieves for sizing, a whole set of them, each with a different sized hole for the pearls to slip through, and the corn tongs he knew well because his Papa used them himself.
The men in line had pearls to sell. As for buyers, the richest of the rich were there, his father said. James was very impressed by how many of these exotic individuals his father knew by name. This one bought for the Sultan of Sarawak and that one represented the rulers of an Indian province. This man bought for the markets of Paris and London, for opera singers, and famous French courtesans. All this Papa told James. He waited while his father spoke to them and watched a man at a spindle, making holes in pearls. He had a half coconut sitting beside him, full of water, in which he dipped each pearl before he set to work on it. The pearls gleamed in the dim tent.
When they went out again, Papa took the boy to where, under the open sheds, rows of half-naked men were prising open the scabrous shells of oysters. They had white cloth wrapped around their heads and sat cross-legged. Only their hands moved, and if one moved too quickly or too far, one of the Malay soldiers came down on him with knife drawn. In front of them were little trays. A man circled briskly around the openers, and as soon as a few pearls appeared in the tray, he carried it off.
‘There’s the second best job you can have in the pearling game,’ said Papa. ‘If you’ve got nimble fingers and luck you might get away with a pearl or two.’
‘What is the best?’ James asked. He was anxious to impress him, the Papa newly in his life.
‘You’ll see.’
As the afternoon grew hot the breeze died. Papa pointed at a group of naked men behind a fence. ‘Those are divers who were caught swallowing pearls. They’ve been given a herb, and they’ll sit there until they’ve emptied themselves out. Some lucky fellow will have the job of looking for the stolen merchandise.’
The boy stared at the men. They were sullen and defiant as if determined to hold the contents of their stomachs in for ever. He half hoped they would succeed. The place stank of shit.
‘Who thinks of it?’ Papa said. ‘A pearl in a princess’s tiara may have been regurgitated–or worse–’ he said, rolling his eyes significantly ‘–under extreme pressure from that lot–’
James thought about that. It was ugly to contemplate, but not for Papa. He went on. ‘Isn’t it odd, isn’t it marvellous? A pearl may go from sinking in the most foul-smelling mass of dead matter you can imagine, straight to the most beautiful neck in the world. It will wash clean and look as innocent as a newborn babe. That is the beauty of pearls. They come up fresh again and again.’
His father was educating him, you see, as they strode in that sand, and hard work it was. He was a feeble boy and he whined, a mother’s boy, he had been until then. But Papa kept on, determined that the boy should know, and follow him in his way of life. James ate some roasted meat–goat, judging from the upset displayed by the goat’s relatives who were tied up outside. He thought he might be sick. Sweet-smelling smoke came from certain tents along the side of the crowd; this was where the men were smoking ‘bang’, his father said.
The air was alive with hailing and haggling, and Papa was joyous. He pointed out a weird solitary figure at the fringe of the water, facing out in the direction of the pearl banks. They called him the shark binder. Pullul Karras. His job was to keep the sharks from eating the divers. He did this by casting spells. Papa said that the man was a charlatan, but the divers would not go near the sea if he were not there.
‘His is the best job in pearling,’ Papa grinned.
‘Why?’
‘Why don’t you see? He has fantastic opportunities for snitching.’
Apparently everyone snitched.
The conjuror kept up a tranced dancing, his voice rising into a wail, and dropping to a polite appeasing manner, and his body curling and snapping up, arms flung high, repeatedly, like a whip. His eyes were glassy and his lips were black. Papa said that he was supposed to abstain from both food and drink. But, as they watched, he regularly hailed a young boy in a filmy fabric skirt, who had a brass tray with drinks on it. This was ‘toddy’ from the palm wine tree. The shark binder drank one and ordered another. Then another. Now his song came and went without its former conviction, and his arms lost their former height.
‘Papa,’ James said, ‘I don’t think he’s saying the chant right.’
‘Never mind,’ he said, ‘I’m sure the sharks will get the point.’
There were fortune tellers and charm setters and religious fanatics. He watched an Indian with matted hair put hooks into the flesh
