Domenica returned his greeting.
Ling turned to Domenica. “He says he is happy,” he announced.
“So I heard,” said Domenica. “And I am happy too.”
These niceties over, Domenica went up the steps that led to the veranda. Behind her, Ling took the suitcase from the boy who had carried it from the village at the end of the track. The boy was sweating profusely; it had been a long walk and the suitcase was heavy. Ling rested the suitcase on a step and fished into his pocket for a few coins. These he tossed at the boy, who caught them in the palm of his hand, looked at them, and then stared imploringly at Ling.
Domenica watched this, uncertain as to whether she should interfere. It was obvious to her that Ling had underpaid the boy.
Of course, this is the East, she thought, and people work for very little, but it distressed her that she should be part of the process of exploitation. She looked at the boy; she had not paid much attention to his clothes, but now she saw them, as if for the first time. His shirt had been repaired several times, and his trousers were frayed about the pockets. He was obviously poor, and she, whose suitcase he carried, was by his standards, impossibly rich.
It would have been a simple matter for her to intervene. She had a pocketful of ringgits, and many more stashed away in her suitcase. It would have been easy for her to press a few notes into the boy’s hand to make up for Ling’s meanness, and she was on the point of doing this when she checked herself. One of the rules of anthropological fieldwork was: do not interfere.
A well-meaning interference in the community which one was studying could change relationships and distort results. The anthropologist should be invisible, as far as possible; an observer.
Of course, there were limits to this unobtrusiveness. One could Domenica Settles In 173
not stand by in the face of an egregious crime if one could do something to help; this, though, was hardly that. The real bar to her intervention lay in the fact that if she now gave money to the boy, Ling would lose face. Her act would imply that he had acted meanly (which he had) and reveal her as the one who was really in charge (which she was), and that could amount to an unforgivable loss of face.
Domenica looked at the boy. He was still staring at Ling and it seemed to her that he was on the brink of tears.
She turned to Ling. “Such a helpful boy,” she said. “And he has such a charming smile.”
Ling glanced at the boy. “He is just riff-raff,” he said. “The son of an assistant pirate.”
“But such appealing riff-raff,” persisted Domenica. “In fact, I really must photograph him – for my records.”
She had been carrying a small camera in her rucksack, and she now rummaged in the bag to retrieve it.
“I do not think you should photograph him,” said Ling, shooing the boy away with a gesture of his hand. “He must go away now.”
“But I must!” exclaimed Domenica. “I must have a complete record.”
Ignoring Ling, she moved towards the boy and led him gently away from the side of the veranda. At first he was perplexed, but when he realised what was happening his face broke into a grin and he stood co-operatively in front of a tree while Domenica took the photograph.
The picture taken, Domenica reached into her pocket and thrust a few banknotes into the boy’s hand.
“Why are you giving him money?” Ling called out. “I have paid him. Take the money back.”
“I’m not paying him for carrying the case,” Domenica said lightly, indicating to the now delighted boy that he should leave.
“That was for his photograph.” She glanced at Ling and smiled.
She felt pleased with herself. She had repaired the injustice without causing a loss of face to her guide. The natural order of things had not been disturbed, and the amount of happiness 174 By the Light of the Tilley Lamp in the world had been discreetly augmented. It was a solution of which Mr Jeremy Bentham himself could only have approved.
The young man who was to be Domenica’s house-servant now picked up her suitcase and walked into the house. He moved, Domenica noticed, with that fluidity of motion that Malaysians seemed to manage so effortlessly. We walk so clumsily, she thought; they glide.
She followed him into the living room of the house. It was cool inside, and dark. Such light as there was filtered through a window which was largely screened by a broad-leafed plant of some sort. She suddenly thought of the Belgian anthropologist.
Had he lived here? She looked about her. On one wall, secured by a couple of drawing pins, was a faded picture of le petit Julien, le Manneken Pis, symbol of everything that Brussels stood for, culturally and politically, or so the Belgians themselves claimed.
I detect, she thought, a Belgian hand.
56. By the Light of the Tilley Lamp There was no electricity in the village, of course, and when night descended – suddenly, as it does in the tropics – Domenica found herself fumbling with a small Tilley lamp which the house servant had set out on the kitchen table. It was a long time since she had used such a lamp, but the knack of adjusting it came back to her quickly – an old skill, deeply-ingrained, like riding a bicycle or doing an eightsome reel, the skills of childhood which never left one. As she pumped up the pressure and applied a match to the mantle, Domenica found herself wondering what scraps of the old knowledge would be known to the modern child. Would that curious little boy downstairs, Bertie, know how to operate an old-fashioned dial telephone? Or how to make a fire? Probably not. And there were people, and not just children, who did not know how to add or do long division, because they relied on calculators; all those people in shops who needed the till to tell them how much change to give because nobody By the Light of the Tilley Lamp 175
had ever taught them how to do calculations like that in school.
There were so many things that were just not being taught any more. Poetry, for example. Children were no longer made to learn poetry by heart. And so the deep rhythms of the language, its inner music, was lost to them, because they had never had it embedded in their minds. And geography had been abandoned too – the basic knowledge of how the world looked, simply never instilled; all in the name of educational theory and of the goal of teaching children how to think. But what, she wondered, was the point of teaching them how to think if they had nothing to think about? We were held together by our common culture, by our shared experience of literature and the arts, by scraps of song that we all knew, by bits of history half-remembered and half-understood but still making up what it was that we thought we were. If that was taken away, we were diminished, cut off from one another because we had nothing to share.
The light thrown out by the Tilley lamp was soft and forgiving, a light that did not fight with the darkness but nudged it aside gently, just for a few feet, and then allowed it back.
Looking out through her open door, she saw that here and there in the village other lights had been lit. In one of the houses a kitchen was illuminated and she could make out the figures within: a woman standing, holding a child on her hip; a man in the act of drinking something from a cup or beaker; the moving shadow of fan-blades. She had yet to adjust to where she was, and it seemed to her to be strange that the people she was looking at through the window were outlaws – contemporary pirates. How peculiar it was that ordinary life should take place in spite of this sense of being beyond the law. She would get used to that, of course; anthropologists in New Guinea came to accept even head-hunting after a while.
The house servant, who had gone off to his hut shortly before dusk fell, had left a meal for her in the kitchen: a bowl of noodles, a plate of stewed vegetables and a pot containing pieces of grilled chicken. Domenica was not particularly hungry; she always lost her appetite in the heat, but now she tackled the meal almost for want of anything else to do. It was, she found, tastier than 176 By the Light of the Tilley Lamp she had expected, and she ate virtually everything prepared for her. Then, sitting in an old planter’s chair, she read for two hours by the light of her Tilley lamp.