When I was very young, we lived in an old white bungalow surrounded by jungle, one of the remnants of British rule in Malaya. The bungalow was “C” class and belonged to the government; one that civil servants like my father could rent at a subsidized rate. It was so infested with termites that my parents feared it would collapse while we were living in it. Monkeys ran over the roof, snatching food left unattended. A toad lived in the back outhouse, and wild chickens scratched across the front lawn. Once someone came by on a bicycle and stole my dad’s shirts off the washing line.
It was a housekeeping nightmare for my poor mother, but we children loved it.
I was too little to go to school at the time, so I spent most of my time playing alone and waiting for my sister to return. For me, it was an unpredictable world. The jungle pressed in on all sides, growing overnight into bamboo thickets and green vines through which our dog sometimes vanished for days at a time in the company of his feral friends. I always had the sensation of being very small in a world that was humming with life and filled with mysteries.
There were other bungalows left behind by the British. Larger ones classified as “A” and “B” for senior officers, and private residences. Some were very grand indeed, with detached servants’ quarters. With their high ceilings and gracious windows, they spoke of a life that has vanished – a sort of Downton Abbey of the tropics with its shadowed interplay between servants and masters. My mother said that in the old days, there were colonial houses like this all over Malaysia, or Malaya as it was then called before independence in 1957.
“I always had the sensation of being very small in a world that was humming with life and filled with mysteries.”
“They were very well-kept, with beautiful flower gardens,” she said. “The British lived in them, and they had dinner parties and many servants.”
In fact, when my mother was eight-years-old, she had a friend who was a few years older than her, perhaps thirteen or so, who worked as a maid in one of these big houses. One day, my mum went to visit her in the kitchen and her friend proudly served her a treat: a glass of ice water. Malaysia is a tropical country, and it was the first ice that my mother had ever had in her life. She said she’d never experienced anything so cold before. Listening to her, I thought how wondrously strange it must have seemed. And also how in those great houses, the masters probably had no idea what the local servants were up to.
This idea of parallel or mirror worlds—servants and masters, locals and foreigners, the living jungle and the civilized houses—filled me with curiosity. A sunlit world of hot silent afternoons, where ghosts and lucky numbers were just as believable as stories on the radio, and a houseboy could literally be a boy of eleven.
“The Night Tiger” came out of the secrets I imagined hidden in those houses together with many of my favorite obsessions: Chinese dancehall girls; twins; tigers who turn into men; a train that takes you to the world of the dead. And of course, a good old-fashioned murder mystery!
I hope that you enjoy the adventure too.
