A few days ago, when the storms were at their worst and the rains fell in heavy silken sheets, my father came home very late in the evening. His scooter snaked its way across the yard, carving patterns in the mud until it came to a halt outside the front door. He kicked off his sodden Batas and shuffled into the house, padding softly across the floorboards. Over the rich sour odour of his damp clothes I could smell the perfume of liquor, and I knew he had been drinking at the samsu stall again. He placed a parcel on the kitchen table, gently, as though the slightest impact would shatter it. The object was wrapped in a dirty rag and bound loosely with string. I looked at it coolly, and only for a moment. "What miraculous discovery have you made this time, ayah?" I said, returning to my book.
"This is the most beautiful thing you will ever see," he said. Out of the corner of my eye I saw him holding the string between thumb and forefinger, pausing theatrically. "Behold," he stage-whispered, as if to an audience.
I said, "It's just another brick." He sat down beside me, his gaze held by the lump of hardened clay that lay before us. His eyes looked soft and watery and sad; he cupped one hand over his mouth, as if stifling a cough. In a muffled voice he said, "goddam those Americans." With the rain drumming on the zinc roof I could hardly hear him.
"Don't worry," I said, pretending to read. "Your bricks are much better." I was lying, of course. I knew that this new specimen was special. Its edges were sharp and straight, as if someone had cut them with a blade and a ruler; its colour, too, was different: honeyed and flecked with brown, like some perfect, spiced confection.
He lowered his head, resting his chin on the table so that his eyes were level with his new-found treasure. Moths fluttered around the naked bulb above us and cast uncertain shadows over his face. "Those Americans," he said again, his voice thin and tired but shot through with excitement.
"I think it's time you went to bed," I said. I didn't tell my father what I knew: that the brick was a Super-Cream Wire-Cut, maximum four per cent iron content. Nor did I tell him how I came to know this.
A few weeks before this episode, an American visited my school. We knew someone important had come because, parked on the bitumen school yard, under the spreading acacia tree, was a sleek brown car; its rolled-up windows betrayed a fully functioning air-con system. We examined it as we filed past on our way to class. On its broad gleaming nose we could make out its name. Oldsmobile. "What the hell is that?" someone said. "Sounds like make-believe shit."
There was a pot of coffee and a neatly sliced Swiss roll laid out on a table in front of the classroom. Mr Kumar was in a state of high excitement. Our geography lesson was cancelled, he informed us, due to this impromptu visit. "Sadly," he said, "we will not be discussing the workings of vineyards in Bordeaux." A small cheer rippled across the back of the room. "Instead, we are honoured to have a very distinguished guest with us today. Allow me to introduce…"
A white man stepped into the room, taking huge quick strides towards Mr Kumar, who backed away like a nervous pet. He grasped Mr Kumar's hesitantly outstretched hands with both of his thick freckled fists, thanking him profusely. He spoke with lively twanging vowels and an earnestly inclined head that nodded to emphasise every other word. He sounded like a character from Dallas.
The man went to the blackboard and wrote: HAL ROGERS JR. He underlined it twice, ending with a sharp stab which broke the piece of chalk. "That's my name," he said, approaching the rows of desks with his hands on his hips. He wore a shirt with a button-down collar and a tie covered in red Scottish checks. "I'm a manager at the new factory down the road. You might have seen us already. AMQ—that's what we're called. It stands for American-Malaysian Quarries, and we're what's known as a 'joint venture.' We're a diversified industry—minerals, cement, bricks, you name it. One thing we've always been proud of is our commitment to the local community, wherever we are. We want to make sure that folk in rural areas like this don't have to go to the big cities to earn a living. How old are you guys now—sixteen, seventeen? Pretty soon you'll be looking for jobs. And I guess this is where I come in." He paused and put a hand on his chest as if to swear an oath.
It was then that I put up my hand and said, "Urbanisation is not peculiar to this part of the country. It is a phenomenon experienced in all parts of Malaysia—indeed the world over."
"Well," he said, cocking his head and nodding. His toothy smile remained emblazoned across his face.
"Shut your fat mouth!" Mr Kumar yelled at me.
Afterwards, I was summoned to the headmaster's office. I had my defence ready: we had learnt about "shifts in social topography" in the previous week's lesson and I was merely keen to share my new-found knowledge. When the door opened I found not only Mr Kumar and the headmaster, but Hal Rogers Jr too.
"I apologise wholeheartedly and unreservedly," I said pre-emptively, hoping for mitigation.
Hal Rogers Jr laughed. "No need for that, sonny. Your teachers tell me you're a smart guy."
I shrugged.
"And I've heard about your old man. His problems." He said the word slowly, dropping his voice.
I shrugged again.
"Tell me about what he does."
"He makes bricks."
My earliest memories of my father are steeped in the red mud of this valley. If I close my eyes, I see him swathed in a skin of scarlet dirt, scrambling nimbly between carpets of moulded clay in the drying-yard. Behind him the kiln belches thick smoke and the smell of burning mangrove wood drifts across the yard and into the house, where I sit, watching. We are in the middle of the dry season—always the dry season, for the unroofed kiln cannot work properly during the monsoons. Across the shallow valley the air is rich with fine dust, which hangs like a veil over the limestone hills in the distance. The light is hazy, the countryside stained with this shade of red. And in the middle of this landscape is my father, alone in the afternoon heat.
My mother is less easy to picture. No colours attach to her, not the red of the earth nor even the yellow of the chrysanthemums that we laid at her grave every month. There was no sadness at this ritual, only a gentle chattiness on father's part, and impatience on mine. For me, the most important part of these cemetery days was the pilgrimage into Slim River afterwards. We would always begin with a bowl of mutton soup, slurped rapidly under the trees by the riverbank, where at dusk the food stalls would begin to set up. The clatter of folding chairs on the tarmac formed a strange percussion together with the hum of portable electricity generators, and at seven o'clock the neon lights would be switched on, illuminating the little promenade with their kaleidoscopic colours. We would then watch a movie, always an old P Ramlee film, flickering on the uneven canvas screen of the open-air cinema. We sat on the dirt floor at the edge of the clearing, far away from the proper seats in the middle, where nice families sat, their children wearing good jeans and American sneakers. The movies were filled with songs and pretty girls dressed in tight kebayas which no one seems to wear any more. Once, and only once, I wondered if my mother had resembled any of these women, and so, on the way home on the back of my father's scooter, I said, "Was mother pretty like those girls, ayah?" He lifted his chin, shouting into the rushing wind. "My God no," he sang. "She was a dog."
When I was old enough—and before I discovered books—I began to help my father in the brickyard. When he arrived home with the clay balanced precariously in baskets on the back of his motorbike, we would set about shaping them. For a time, I remember him shaping each brick by hand, occasionally writing his name into their wet surfaces with his finger. LAN b YUNUS, the shaky letters read, their edges bleeding into the softness of the clay. Sometimes the inscription of his name seemed more important than the production of the bricks themselves, and he would rush to touch his finger to each brick before it became too dry to bear his mark. They went into the kiln in small batches, like delicate cakes rather than lumps of building blocks. The building merchant who came to us once a week with his lorry from Tanjung Malim sighed when he saw the meagre supply. When my father wasn't looking, he raised his little finger to his temple, twirling it in quick circles and mouthing the word, "Crazy!"
Then, on a cross-country trip to visit relatives in Terengganu, my father discovered sturdy wooden moulds capable of producing bricks of uniform size and shape. He was uncertain at first, leaving me to fill them with wet clay.
"I can't touch my bricks," he said, watching me at work. "I can't feel them any more."
"Don't be stupid," I laughed, and dipped a finger deep into a section of the mould. "Look, you can still write your name."
The results quickly changed his mind. Row after perfect row of brick emerged from the kiln. Not one was broken or chipped, none had collapsed in the firing. Their edges were smooth, not bobbled as before, and my father, Lan Yunus, saw his name repeated over and over again on these immaculate red surfaces.
Soon, more moulds were acquired, financed by the sale of his motorbike (replaced by a moped) and the last of my mother's jewellery.
"No point being sentimental," he chirped. "Anyway, since I don't have daughters to pass them on to, what's the point of hanging on to them?"
He enlarged the kiln, doubling its capacity. Inside, he built sturdy racks to accommodate the sharp increase in the number of moulds. His days started earlier in the morning, long before I woke, in the purple half-light before dawn; he did not stop until twilight returned. Over the months the stacks of bricks grew taller and fatter, and the building merchant from Tanjung Malim began to visit us twice a week. My help no longer seemed necessary. Lan Yunus, one-man production line, forbade me to join him in the brickyard. "You're older now, son, just go concentrate on your books." He spoke with a gleam in his eye, his face covered in the crimson powder of his work. "Do your algebra and Charles Dickens and all that other stuff and let me work so that you can go to uni in KL. This job is only fit for people like your old ayah who can't read proper books."
Once the temperamental new kiln was mastered and all variations in quality were brought under control, experimentation began in earnest. The relentless increase in volume calmed for a while as my father chose to concentrate on formulating suitable coatings for his bricks; afternoons suddenly became silent and smokeless as father set up a makeshift laboratory in the kiln. Over dinner each evening, he would run through his theories, posing questions and then answering them himself. I took to reading a book during meals, frowning with the effort of concentrating on two simultaneous lines of thought.
"What are you reading?" he said once, stopping in mid-flow as if he had only just noticed what I had in fact been doing for months. Without looking up from the book, I lifted it to show him its cover.
"Very good," he said, unable to pronounce "Salinger."
"He's American," I said, continuing to read.
"Very good." And then he was away again, telling me—or rather, himself—about his breakthrough idea. I remember only fragments of detail; words came to me in isolation from their sentences. Iron, salt glaze, manganese, sky's the limit, extract, Penang, shopping complex. And then, as he left the room, he said, "Don't stop reading those books!"
He was out of the door before I could reply, heading into Slim River to celebrate these new theories with his friends. "Of course I'll keep studying, ayah," I said when he was gone, "what else can I do?"
Now greatly enlarged, the once-tiny kiln required—so my father said—an uninterrupted and durable heat source. All sorts of wood were experimented with, to determine which would burn the longest. Eventually mangrove wood was settled upon. For many years, its sweetly scented smoke drifted from the brickyard, insisting its way into our home, where it cast itself on every object: bedlinen, clothes, even the timber walls. The kiln burned all morning and afternoon, and now two building merchants came three times a week, their little Tata lorries shuddering under the haul of multi-hued bricks. There was enough money now to send me to a better school further away, one where the boys wore long olive-coloured trousers, nicely pressed and creased down the front. The older boys had mopeds and Donnay sports bags—and soon, so did I. There were school trips to the tea plantations at Cameron Highlands and the hundred-year-old Hevea brasiliensis in Kuala Kangsar. Father was thrilled. "KK? You went to KK? Did you see the Royal Malay College?"
"No, ayah, we went to see the rubber trees. Part of our national culture class."
"I wish I had the money to send you to the RMC."
"I don't mind where I am now."
"Know what the answer is?" he laughed. "More bricks!"
It was around this time, not long after my thirteenth birthday, that my father made his most significant discovery. He did not know it would also be his last.
I woke one morning to an unfamiliar smell: bitter, pungent, choking. As I rushed out of the house towards the brickyard, I could see angry clouds of smoke, coal-black in colour, engulfing the kiln. "Ayah!" I screamed.
My father came running out of the kiln, his face and clothes blackened like the Welsh miners I read about in geography lessons. "It's all right, everything's A-OK, no problems here," he shouted, waving his hands.
"What the hell is that smell?" I said, careful not to venture closer. The fumes made my eyes water and I lifted my T-shirt to cover my mouth and nose.
"It's my new fuel," he said, his words punctuated by coughs. "Look, I'll show you." He ran to the back of the yard and returned carrying two enormous tyres. "It was something you told me way back, about how the economy of this country was built on rubber. All that stuff about the world wars and the need for rubber this and that, and how we became number one exporters in the whole world. Remember?" He spoke quickly and breathlessly—whether it was the suffocating fumes or sheer excitement I couldn't tell. "So I got thinking: wood is so goddam difficult to collect these days. It gets wet, it can't burn, we don't eat. So. Last week I went past a junkyard. They were burning a huge pile of old tyres. I saw this big fire, like a small red and black mountain. I didn't pay a single cent for these tyres—I just picked them up from the junkyard. Move with the times, that's what we have to do. I'll be the best brick manufacturer in the state, and it's all thanks to you, my clever son."
Acrid black smoke continued to billow from the kiln. "You're welcome," I said from behind my T-shirt.
When my father discovered he had cancer, he took up smoking. "Makes no difference now," he said with a grin before taking a deep drag of his kretek, the sugary aroma of clove smoke bringing relief from the stale smell of burnt rubber that hung everywhere around our house. He puffed his way through two packs a day, his chest heaving with cough spasms. When we ventured into Slim River for a meal and a film, he would curse and spit every time he had a coughing fit, proclaiming loudly so that passers-by would notice. "Cis! Dammit! I've got to kick the habit." He wanted people to think that it was the cigarettes, not the tyre-smoke, that made the tumour grow on his lungs.
At first we thought it was asthma. I'd read the health leaflets at school and thought I knew the symptoms: persistent shortness of breath, wracking cough accompanied by night sweats. The traditional doctor prescribed squirrel soup and recommended that he drink his own urine once a day. "I prefer asthma," my father said. After a particularly sharp episode of breathlessness and stabbing pains in his chest, I finally persuaded him to go to the hospital in Ipoh—just to get an inhaler, two hours max, I said. After three hours they said they needed him overnight. Preliminary tests were done. Another day passed. On our return visit there were more tests, more charts and graphs and X-rays and pictures of brilliant colourful shapes that looked as if they had been taken by satellites from outer space. I got tested too, nothing rigorous: a doctor tapped my chest, looked under my eyelids, tweaked my limbs and had me blow into a tube. A panel of three doctors sat us down and served us cups of Milo and curry puffs. They asked all sorts of questions about "lifestyle" and "living environment." "It's a miracle you're so healthy," one of them said, looking at me.
My father did not seem perturbed by the discovery of his illness. On the contrary, his enthusiasm for the brickyard was rejuvenated. Lan b Yunus, he insisted, was still strong. New moulds were ordered and special glazes devised. All the time, tyres continued to burn in the kiln. "I told you," he laughed when I remonstrated with him, "it's the cigarettes that are harming me, not the smoke. The smoke is what keeps me going."
One cloudy afternoon, I returned from school to find my father speaking to a man wearing a short-sleeved shirt and tie. The man was making notes on a clipboard and my father was pointing at the kiln.
"Here, speak to my son," father said when he saw me, "he'll tell you that there's not one single goddam thing wrong with this place."
The man glanced at me over his half-moon glasses and returned to his notes.
"Take a good look at this boy," my father said, seizing me by my shoulders, "he is a healthy boy, isn't he? All the doctors said so."
"Sorry," the man shrugged, "but I've told you: health regulations. It is prohibited to burn tyres anywhere, even in the countryside. It pollutes the atmosphere with poisonous substances."
"But no one lives here except us. Who's going to get polluted?" My father was shouting now. "There's no one for miles around."
"Pollution is pollution."
"Don't be a stupid fool. There's only the two of us here. He's OK and I've got cancer. Who cares about a bit of pollution."
"It's the law," the man said as he climbed into the car. Through his open window he waved a piece of paper at my father. Lan b Yunus, brick manufacturer, took the letter and tore it into shreds as the car pulled away.
By the time the inspectors confiscated his bricks, my father was very weak. Three times they visited us to make sure tyres were no longer being used, three times he told them to mind their own goddam business. The fourth time, they came with a convoy of trucks and took everything away—the bricks, the moulds, the stash of tyres. They went into the kiln and dismantled the racks and took those away too. By this stage he was already too weak to argue. He merely stood aside as they drove off in a cloud of red dust. "This is not the end of Lan Yunus," he said, smiling in the dizzying sunlight.
He busied himself by collecting small quantities of mud and silt from the riverbank a mile away; he shaped the bricks by hand and fired up the kiln with a little firewood which he scavenged from the scrubby jungle around the house. The flames were meagre, the bricks powdery, brittle. He began to take rests in the middle of the day, falling asleep with his mouth open, a dry crust of spittle forming on his lips. When I came home each day I would sometimes find him just as I left him, sitting up in bed smoking a cigarette. I offered to collect good timber for fuel; I could help him make the bricks as I had when I was very young, or even take over entirely—but no, he insisted that I go to school instead. In the brickyard I found half-moulded bricks and small piles of ash, barely warm to the touch.
Sparrows had built a nest in a pile of old bricks; their droppings littered the earth with chalky star-shaped splashes.
He had taken to drinking, too—just a little at first, a shot of whisky twice a day ("to clean the germs from my throat"), then a whole tumblerful, then a half-bottle, then a whole one. Sometimes there would be no evidence, but I knew all the same that he had been drinking at one of the samsu stalls in Slim River. The harsh reek of alcohol was only partially disguised by the sweetness of Juicy Fruit chewing gum.
"Don't be angry," he said, "it makes me feel better." His eyes were sleepy and bloodshot, his cheeks beginning to sink into his skull. "I'll be working again soon, I know it."
And then my father suddenly did feel better. "I told you," he said, "it's the smoke that keeps me going. As long as I keep working I'll be OK."
"No, ayah," I said, "it's called remission."
The kiln began to work again, a modest spire of smoke rising each day into the rich afternoon sky. "You wait and see," my father said, his forearms coated with red clay, "I'm going to make the perfect goddam brick!"
I cannot remember how long this lasted, this heady time of promise. It filled the canvas of my memory for some time, staining it richly with red. The cancer came back, of course, and I can recall only the whiteness of hospitals, erasing everything.
On the day of the school trip to the American factory, we sat waiting in the classroom. Hal Rogers's name had been left on the blackboard as if it were a valuable proverb, standing erect amid a mass of mathematical calculations and random words. Someone had added graffiti at the end of it so that it read HAL ROGERS JR EWING.
"I'll slap the feller who did that!" Mr Kumar shouted as we filed on to the minibus.
Hal Rogers himself was there to meet us. He led us to an air-conditioned conference room where we were presented with little lunch parcels containing savoury buns and cheese Twisties, neatly wrapped in cellophane. There were small bottles of 7-Up and Pepsi, which Hal Rogers distributed himself as the slide projector flickered pictures of factories all over the world on to a white screen: Broken Hill, Australia; Manaus, Brazil; Colorado, USA; colossal silver buildings with pure white smoke drifting gently from towering spires. He showed us spidery graphs and colourful charts marked with confusing captions. "AMQ Market Share Output Ratio Per Country By Volume," "1985 Diversified Industries Indonesia," "Minerals List FOB to Pasir Gudang."
"This is just to show you that our employees aren't just part of one factory in one country," Hal Rogers said. "They are a part of one big… well, family. Guys in this operation are the same as guys in Kazakhstan or Hungary or Canada. We all get the great working conditions, the same friendliness, the same benefits."
A nicely dressed woman stood in front of the room and told us about salaries, performance-related bonuses, discretionary bonuses, sick leave, paternity leave and pensions. She also told us about the company's healthcare insurance.
Throughout the tour, we were waved at by smiling workers who wore hard hats and neckties. We were shown offices full of computers and cavernous warehouses full of sheet metal; we had to cover our ears with mufflers when we were shown the production lines. Halfway through the tour, Hal Rogers put his hand on my shoulder and led me away from the rest of the group. "I want to show you something that may be of special interest to you," he said, leading me through a labyrinth of doors and staircases. When we emerged into a large room—more a laboratory than a factory—all the people in the room stopped work. I saw their distorted images through the swell of glass tubes, and reflected in the gleam of aluminium surfaces. Stacked neatly against the walls were perfect specimens of bricks.
"Our new brick production plant is about to start operating very soon," Hal Rogers said. "We're just fine-tuning the last technical details."
I don't know why I couldn't tell my father I had decided to leave school and take a job at the factory. I should have told him on that rain-drenched evening, when the drink had made him dizzy and quiet.
"Where did you find that brick, ayah?" I said, putting my book aside.
"In Slim River town," he said, continuing to stare at the brick with his chin on the kitchen table. "Some Americans have built a factory down the road. A guy I know is going to work there. He brought this to show me. He says the bricks come out on a conveyor belt. A million of them every month. One million. Isn't it the most beautiful thing you have ever seen?"
"I think yours are prettier."
He looked at me with watery red eyes and laughed. "You're crazy. This is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen."
The rain continued to drum its monotone on the roof. Outside, the trees nodded and bowed in the storm, their silhouettes shivering against the night sky. As I lay in my bed I thought I could smell the faint scent of woodsmoke on my mattress. I called out to my father, Lan Yunus, brick manufacturer, but he did not answer.
