At that time, in 1948, the aeroplane man seemed ancient to me. It is true that all adults can appear uniformly ancient to a child of eight, but that was not the case with me. I was aware of the fine distinctions my mind made, though not always of the reasons behind them: I knew that Miss Parimala, my teacher just after the Japanese occupation, was young, fresh, her world within arm’s reach of my own, but that Miss Hunt, the Eurasian lady who rented the house next to ours, was a grown-up in the full sense of the word, a person who frowned as she read the newspapers and looked up to address me only with an Oh my, Achudhan, growing so tall already! before turning to the other adults to discuss the price of rice and flour.

But neither age nor household responsibilities were the essence of the distinction: though I could not and did not want to articulate this in words, a part of me sensed that my own mother was not fully an adult. She was not a woman-child like Miss Parimala, but there was something in her, a need, and not an innocence — which people so often mistakenly ascribe to children — but that far more characteristic combination of innocence and guile that I associated with those of my own age. She loved pretty things: fine fabrics, frills on blouses, embroidery. She lingered over photographs of film stars in magazines and listened to love songs on the radio. She was quick to laugh and to cry. And when she insisted that I join her in an activity or on an outing, I understood that she did so not out of a sense of duty, but because she was lonely, and even, at times, afraid to face the world on her own. “You come,” she would say, “Achudhan come with Amma,” and though she was a tall woman and I scarcely came up to her hip, I felt, when she held her red-nailed hand out to me, that she was the child and I the adult. I saw the beseeching in her eyes; I felt the tremble in her hand, the thin layer of sweat under her talcum. I always went.

It was my mother who took me to the house where the aeroplane man lived. We went to accompany her friend Gurinder, whose husband was being held in that house along with the aeroplane man and eight or ten others. The British were keeping these men prisoner, my mother said, because they were suspected of having collaborated with the Japanese during the war, but it wasn’t true of Gurinder’s husband. It was a nasty rumor; someone who didn’t like him, someone who owed him money, had framed him. Gurinder had five children at home and no parents or relatives nearby to help her. Poor thing, my mother said whenever we were about to leave for that house and again right after we returned, poor thing, everyone is against her. She needs all the help she can get. Why, then, did it feel — more and more over the course of that year — like Gurinder was helping us? Perhaps it was just her manner: Gurinder was a stout Sikh woman, even taller than my mother, brisk, deep-voiced, smelling of turmeric and asafetida and ghee. As we walked she sometimes put her hand on my mother’s shoulder, and when we crossed the street she led the way. Yes, it might have been just that, but to this day I cannot be sure how much Gurinder knew.

The first time I saw the aeroplane man in the compound of that house, my fingertips tingled. I felt I’d seen a creature not fully human, a shapeshifter straight out of Malay ghost stories. Bony, mottled grey, he might have been a rock or a tree; only when I looked closely did I realize that he had eyes, and that his lips were moving slowly. I couldn’t tell if he was looking back at me or past me. I couldn’t tell what he was saying, or if he was addressing one of us. I remember so well that sensation of being completely overwhelmed. The sky hummed like a warplane, all the colors of the world turned brighter before my eyes, everything smelled heavy and bold. Even now, sixty years later, I can almost summon that strange assault upon my senses at will, turn myself into a little boy again, bladder jumping, bowels churning, though what I am feeling is not exactly fear, no, nor a simple wonder, but a rising, an opening, a certainty that the world will never be the same again because I have seen this man.

On the one hand I longed for immediate relief, to be taken indoors with my mother and her friend, to be spirited back into the safe world of people I knew, but on the other hand there was nothing I wanted more than to stay outside and stare at the man. My mother remained, as always, oblivious to my inner turmoil. “Achudhan,” she said on that first day, “you play outside for a little while, okay? Amma will just go inside with Gurinder Aunty and come. Ten minutes.”

I never spoke of the aeroplane man to my mother, and I don’t think I spoke of him to anyone else. In fact I don’t think — I’m almost certain I never even told anyone about that wooden house on stilts, in some out-of-the-way corner of Taiping whose name I never knew. It was not near anything else; we never passed that street on other errands, and after that time had passed I never went near it again. I began almost to think of it as a figment of my childhood imagination, and to this day I can sometimes convince myself that it was. But the fact is that I still have the little wooden aeroplane the man gave me on that first day, wrapped neatly in tissue paper, nestled among old photographs in a box I’ve moved across continents. I don’t need to take it out to know it’s there.

I must have been watching the man intently as he carved the aeroplane, fascinated, as most boys would be, by that sharp little knife and his skill with it. And though his eyes were fixed to his work, he must have been aware of my attention, because when he was done he did not look around and then casually decide to give me the aeroplane. No: he blew the wood shavings off it, looked straight up at me with great purpose, and held it out to me on the flat of his palm.

I froze. I had been taught not to take things from strangers. Remember that all this was happening just after the war, just after a time when Japanese soldiers had marched through the streets of Malaya in their black boots, eviscerating men for suspected treason, beheading boys for forgetting to bow. I was an only grandchild, immeasurably precious to my parents, my uncles, and my grandmother. They had protected me fiercely, like a whole pride of lions with only one cub. It was that preciousness I felt now on my skin as I looked at the man; I don’t know how else to describe it. That is what it was: I was keenly aware of my worth, my delicate bones, my clean shirt and combed hair. The gold pendant my mother allowed me to wear on our outings lay cold against my chest. In an instant, without needing to fan precise images out before my eyes, I felt what my parents and uncles and grandmother would feel if I were stolen from them; I felt the magnitude of their loss.

And yet I stepped forward and plucked the aeroplane from the man’s palm. I did not say thank you. I clutched it in my fist and ran to the mango tree in the compound, touching the bark with my other hand as if this were all a game and I had reached a safe base. From there I looked at the man, and he looked at me. There were two guards at the gate, and other prisoners wandered about the compound, exercising, gardening, or doing nothing at all, but all these men were only ghosts. In that moment, in that dimension, only the aeroplane man and I existed.

I scarcely need to tell you, I’m sure, that the aeroplane man filled my dreams and all my waking hours after that day. I wondered what he would have said if I had spoken to him; I wondered if he could speak at all, or only move his lips. I had seen a deaf-mute once, at the Double Happiness coffeeshop, and my mother had had to pull me aside and explain his handicap to stop me staring. But the aeroplane man, I felt, must have a voice; he had only hidden it from me. And so in my recurring fantasies I made him speak, in Malay: “Adik,” he said “Adik,” he said, little brother, “adik budak baik, ya?” You’re a good boy, aren’t you? Or: Have you eaten, little brother? Did you eat rice and curry for lunch? Or: Do you work hard at school? Work hard and you’ll get a good job one day. None of these convinced me. The aeroplane man had remained silent precisely because he didn’t say the things that other adults did. He didn’t want to or know how to; if and when he chose to speak, he said things I couldn’t even imagine.

It was not until our fourth visit that he finally spoke to me. He had not made any overtures to friendship since the aeroplane. He must have known that I stood and stared at him every time I came, but he had ignored me. That day was no different from our first three visits: my mother went inside the house with Gurinder, and I took up my sentry post under the mango tree. After a minute or so, the aeroplane man put what he’d been carving into the pocket of his shorts and, keeping both hands in his pockets, stood up and walked over to me. He walked slowly, deliberately, perhaps a little stiff in the joints: he seemed, as I have said, ancient, though the hair on his head was full, and not white but a steely grey.

Something about his gait made me glance instinctively at the guards. I had wanted the aeroplane man to speak to me, had even pictured the moment for myself, but now, as he put foot before foot, all I could think of was his hard, sure hands, and the knife in his pocket. Neither guard was looking at us. One leaned against the fence, bored or sleepy or both; the other was smoking a cigarette, leaning his head far back to blow each puff of smoke into the blue sky. There were so many places to run, of course, towards the guards and the gate, or into the house, or into the vast backyard, and yet I felt cornered, and thought: If the aeroplane man slips that knife out of his pocket and cuts my throat, no one will even notice until it’s too late, no one will be — I can still make it into the house if I run now, without warning — or I can scream, and surely before he can silence me —

Before he spoke, the aeroplane man grinned widely, and his teeth were just as they had been in my dreams: long as the teeth of a horse, yellow, protruding from pale gums. “Adik,” he said at last, “adik selalu datang sini, ya?” Little brother, you always come here, don’t you?

I stared. My head swam. A deafening silence throbbed and swirled around us.

How come you don’t go in? he went on. Don’t you want to go in with your mother?

He waited, smiling again. And then he said: “Bapak adik kat dalam, kan?” Isn’t your father inside?

I must’ve shaken my head then, wanting him to go away and leave me alone, wanting to nip the misunderstanding in the bud, because he frowned at me in confusion for a long moment, before he turned and made his way, still stiff and slow, into the house.

I didn’t tell my mother about our conversation, but on the way home I decided I wouldn’t accompany her to that house again. The aeroplane man had proven that he — what? When I marshaled my thoughts, trying to put together an argument that would convince my mother just in case she needed it, I couldn’t think of the right words. In the end he hadn’t behaved dangerously, no, not exactly, although he did have that knife in his pocket. He’d been rude, perhaps, because a man like him, a prisoner, grubby and shirtless, was not supposed to talk to a boy like me for nothing — but rude simply didn’t seem strong enough. I knew what I felt: he was evil and dirty, dirty in the way pictures of naked ladies were dirty, dirty and disgusting and shameful like the noises and hand-gestures the big boys at school made behind the backs of the girls. He was the kind of bad company my grandmother was always warning me against; I should not be mixing with such types. But I didn’t know how to say all this to my mother, of all people, my sweet, doll-painted mother who had to be protected from the world’s crudeness. She didn’t know about that kind of filth. I would just have to find another way to get out of returning to that house.

Overnight, in the incubator of my sleep, my disgust turned into fear. I could not explain this to myself. I had gone to bed disdainful of that dirty, stupid man, and woken up terrified. Terrified and haunted: what else is there to say about great childhood fears? I saw the aeroplane man’s face lurking in the shadows of our garden at home, looming at my dark bedtime window. His tobacco-stained fingers, his narrow, sunken eyes. In the days after that visit, every beggar outside the market began to look like him, and even the blind and the crippled, the ones whose legs ended in stumps at the knee and the ones whose hands sprouted out of their elbows, seemed ready to snatch my ankles as I passed. I was all right at school as long as there were distractions — Miss Parimala’s lessons, our loud recess-time games — but during quiet moments, when we were meant to be studying by ourselves, I thought of nothing but the aeroplane man. In this way I made myself violently sick one afternoon, and Miss Parimala sent one of the older boys to my house to tell my mother to bring a trishaw and take me home.

I never wanted to be alone again, not even for my bath in the afternoon; I left the bathroom door open a crack and forced my eyes to stay open when I poured water on my head. I could not reason my terror away. Of course there were guards at the gate of that house; of course it would be impossible for any of the prisoners to slip past the guards and their guns unnoticed. But was the aeroplane man thinking of me, just as I was of him? That thought alone — that he held the memory of my face in an iron grip, that when he sat down to his prisoner-food and took his prisoner-baths he saw me at windows and doors — made me shiver. Once, I took out the aeroplane from the drawer where I had stashed it. I thought I would bring it outside and smash it with a rock. Maybe that act of destruction would set me free. But as soon as I held the thing in my hand I knew I could not do it. It was so small, so perfect, the wood of its wings so smooth under my fingertips. I put it back in the drawer and ran outside into the sunlight.

Two weeks went by, and then three; I began to believe that Gurinder was visiting her husband on her own now, and that we would no longer have to go with her. But then one afternoon my mother said: “Put on your shoes, Achudhan. Long time already we haven’t been with Gurinder Aunty.” I must have been uncharacteristically unable to hide my worries from my mother, for after a pause she began: “Actually you wouldn’t have to come. But — Paati is taking her afternoon nap, and the thing is, I — if I don’t –” She sighed and seemed suddenly to buckle. She pulled out the chair next to mine, set her handbag down, and sat.

It was true: we always left the house at about three o’clock in the afternoon, after I’d had my lunch and taken my bath. At that hour, my father and my uncles were all at work, and my grandmother was resting. It made sense that my mother could not leave me alone in the house. Even if I could have managed without adult supervision for a couple of hours — weren’t these dangerous times? Weren’t there roving bands of communists about? The newspapers were full of — But I knew very well that these were not the reasons I had risen abruptly from my book and was already putting on my shoes on the front steps, and I despised my own weakness. I didn’t want to hear my mother’s explanation, whatever it was. As terrifying as it would be to go back to that house, it was the easier option.

And so, although the nightmares continued, and I fell asleep at school because I lay awake all night in my bed, and I heard noises — the aeroplane man coughing, breathing, clearing his throat — around every corner of our home, I went back to that house with my mother, again and again. I wanted to go, I didn’t want to go, want, don’t want, want, don’t want, each time my mother asked me along my heart raced to the rhythm of the words in my head and my hands fumbled with my shoelaces. It was almost as if I needed to go in order to calm my fears: as soon as I saw the aeroplane man, there he was, just the same as before, squatting under the jacaranda tree carving something, or just looking out at the world beyond the fence. It seemed to me that I could hold him in place with my stare, that as long as I stood there looking at him, he could not get up to anything behind my back. He was a known entity, though frightening. He never spoke to me again, and as long as I was there, looking at him, I knew he never would. But on the days I did not see him, he ballooned in my mind, grinning sinisterly at me, grabbing my wrist as he handed me another aeroplane, holding his little knife to my neck as he asked me strange, senseless questions.

***

Six months after we first went to the prisoners’ house, my father came to find me in the garden one evening. My father almost never spoke to me: he was the opposite of my mother, every inch an adult, a man who fed and clothed me, sent me to school, and saw that I had had shoes to wear even during the war, but he had never tried to be my friend. He needed nothing from me or from anyone else; his bearing alone made this clear. When he came to me that evening, though, he seemed different, even from a distance: he had his hands in his pockets, like a grown man pretending to be a schoolboy, and he looked not straight ahead, head held high, but at the ground until he had caught up with me.

“There you are, Achudhan,” he said, and then, as if to himself, “you’re out here in the garden.”

It did not seem to be the sort of statement that required a Yes Appa, and so I said nothing.

“Are you studying hard at school? Doing well at games also?”

“Yes Appa,” I said.

“Good, good. Doing all your homework properly?”

“Yes Appa.”

“You do your homework every afternoon?”

“Every afternoon Appa.”

“And sometimes you go out with Amma?”

I started to nod, and then I saw, far behind my father, a curtain stir at the dining room window. I don’t know why this stopped me — after all, anything I could tell my father, I could certainly tell anyone else in the house — but at that moment I had the distinct sensation of having walked into a trap. My heart shriveled inside my chest. I blinked at my father and slapped at a mosquito that had landed on my neck.

“In the afternoons,” he said, “do you go out with Amma?”

“Sometimes,” I said quietly.

“To the shops and all that she goes on Saturdays, isn’t it?”

“I think so,” I said.

“No, Achudhan, you don’t think so, you know very well that she takes you to the shops on Saturdays when you have no school. Isn’t it?”

“Yes Appa.”

“Then where do you go on schooldays?”

“We don’t –”

“Achudhan, I think you have been taught not to tell lies, yes?”

With the nail of my index finger, I put an X in the mosquito bite on my neck.

“I think you have,” my father said. “So just tell me, where do you go on schooldays?”

“Not every schoolday,” I said dumbly, not consciously stalling for time, and yet at this my father smiled grimly.

“Very clever,” he said. “Okay, only some schooldays. Once every fifth schoolday. Once every eighth, tenth, twelfth schoolday. Sometimes it is important to be precise and sometimes it is not. I’m only asking where you go, that’s all.”

“We go with Gurinder Aunty,” I murmured.

“Where?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know? Why, does Amma blindfold you to take you there?”

In the kitchen someone dropped a heavy pot. It spun on an axis against the hard tiles, the sound of it ringing out into the silence.

“Do you go to K.L.? To Singapore? To England?”

“No,” I whispered. My eyes smarted from the smoke of a neighbor’s burning rubbish pile, and I longed to rub them.

“Then what?”

“Just… But I don’t know the name of the place, Appa. I don’t know it.”

Again my father smiled without showing his teeth. Then he took a deep breath. “Fine,” he said. “You’re a very clever boy. Your teachers have taught you well. Good job.” He turned and strode back to the house, his head held high again, his shoulders back.

I was taken ill again after that, though this time I suffered not just a brief spell of vomiting at school, but a long fever. Malaria, my grandmother said, the boy shouldn’t be allowed to play outside at dusk. But the doctor ruled out malaria, and typhoid, and all the other diseases that had plagued us during the war. Just one of those inexplicable childhood fevers, he said. Keep him cool and it will pass.

Through the haze of heat that shimmered around my body I saw people come and go: Miss Parimala, Gurinder Aunty, my uncles. But I also saw Japanese soldiers, and skinny-armed communists, and the aeroplane man, all these apparitions, and so I cannot be sure what really happened during those weeks, who came and said what. I thought my father sat on the edge of my sickbed one afternoon, his hand on my forehead, but of course that would not have been like him; he was the type to pay for the doctor and leave the nursing to the women. And my mother, did she come to me and weep? Did she say, “There was something I meant to tell you, Achudhan, something I needed to show you,” and then:

“When you get better, you and Amma will go away from here, okay? Okay?”

Okay, I think I said. Okay, Amma, don’t cry.

I would like to think she asked me that, that she needed me until the end and had the intention, at least, of taking me along. At the last moment she must have changed her mind: one afternoon, weeks after my fever had passed, I came home from school and only my grandmother was there, waiting for me at a table laid out with rice and the usual four curries, as though nothing had happened. One look at her face and I knew not to ask her questions. I would learn what I needed in the usual way, by watching the adults and listening to them.

But all my distinctions between real and pretend adults crumbled under the weight of what had happened. My father locked himself in his room for days, refusing food. At school, Miss Parimala shepherded me away from the other boys at recess time, made me sit and eat with her in the staff room. And it was Miss Hunt next door who called out to me over the fence and, after remarking upon how tall I’d grown, whispered secrets like a schoolgirl: The man your mother ran away with, Achudhan, he was actually her first love. Before your father. We old folks, we remember all that, you know? Your mother was a good girl, never fooled around after marriage, she was not that type, but when she found out he was in that prison house — well, she just couldn’t bear it, I think.

Out of everything she told me, I seized upon the most trivial of details: how had my mother’s first love got past the guards? Had he bribed them? Had he waited for them to fall asleep, and then climbed over the back fence? Or had others helped him? There were ten prisoners, after all, and only two guards. But if there had been a mutiny at that house, no one ever spoke about it. And since I never again went back to that house, or even ventured close to it — after a few months, I even forgot the way there — I never knew what happened to the other prisoners. They, of course, knew about us; Taiping is even today a small town, and the news would have reached them. The very day my father came out of his sulk, drove to Siam in a relentless rage, found my mother and her first love, and shot them, the prisoners probably heard about what had happened to one of their own. The aeroplane man need no longer have puzzled over my mother’s presence in that house. But I could not lay him to rest quite as easily as he must have forgotten me: still, today, when I remember all the writhing terrors of those years — the Japanese, the communists, malaria, my father weeping in his room — it is the aeroplane man’s face that comes to me first and leaves me last, and I wonder sometimes how old he actually was.