good timeâ sounded good enough. He nodded to one of them and was taken to a shophouse on Sago Street. Its main room was broken up with endless gauzy curtains, useless against the working noises within. His girlâs had a slatted window and a brick wall that was mossy and damp to touch. There were slick little flowers growing in the cracks, dripping life. She was smoking on a narrow bed with a headboard whose paintwork still showed. A pastoral scene: fat sheep grazing upon a wide green, a blue sky above them full of sheepy white clouds.
She had skin like milky tea and spoke well enough to get a good price for the rest of her cigarettes and made the right noises to keep him talking telling asking long enough to charge him twice and he never so much as sat down. Instead, Sam offered her more money to meet the woman she called her Pocket Ma, who was sitting on a crate at the back of the shophouse, fanning herself with a thatched fan, chatting with another woman with a sweaty heavy chest and ragged dress, only she was standing at a table, cutting up durian. To look at them, they cooked cabbage for sailors and scared off cheap johns. But the girl had told him enough that he wanted to impress this fat old widow. Considering Samâs story as she fanned herself, the old woman began to speak English, far better than the girlâs. She said she believed nothing that heâd just said about his shadow work for a great man in Sydney harbour but would let him try to prove it. She gave him a figure for every fresh brown boy he brought her way instead of their going to the Hindu operation on Orchard Road, and she gave him a far better figure than head money for every white man with a shipping contract he could bring from Commercial Square.
Three years later, Sam Kandy might have been the richest virgin in Singapore. But one day he told the old woman that he was tired of fighting the Hindus on Orchard Road for every fresh brown boy on the wharf. Besides, he knew of a crowded little island close by, where brown boys could be had with ease, boys with village-strong backs searching for ships to take them anywhere but home. And he told her that by then he also knew the right white men in Commercial Square to secure the necessary passages. The old woman spat and shrugged. She would see what, if anything, heâd send back, and was meanwhile disappointed to lose a good earner but also relieved to be rid of him, this suited monk who always slept alone in a side room, who never took payment in anything but money.
He returned to Colombo and came to know its dockworkers very well during a strike at the harbour. He sold some of them into Singapore, making money as a sub-agent for Pocket Ma, working harder and faster and cheaper and more silver-tongued than the established shipping agents around the harbour in telling dockworkers and middle sons from the villages that for a fee if they shipped out as he suggested and then went to Sago Street they would make money too. And if they paid him a little more, he would tell them where they would find not only work but rare love behind a green curtain, fair-skinned girls who could have almost been daughters in Cinnamon Garden. When the strike ended, those who were not tempted to go to Singapore would still hold back a sack of rice for a cut, or be hungry for it at a cut price, would anyway and always need something more from the near world than blood and birth hour predicted, than jetty sweat and Pettah stalls afforded, and Sam Kandy made that, all of it, his business. Because he knew them, these young men, their every want and wish, the daily plans, the long-ago promises. He made of them what he could. But after a year of working Colombo harbour he had to go to the village. From this much trafficking in it, Sam Kandy knew the great world was not enough. He needed warrant from the village: he needed the village itself. And when he arrived, his back would not shine with biscuit tins and city
She had skin like milky tea and spoke well enough to get a good price for the rest of her cigarettes and made the right noises to keep him talking telling asking long enough to charge him twice and he never so much as sat down. Instead, Sam offered her more money to meet the woman she called her Pocket Ma, who was sitting on a crate at the back of the shophouse, fanning herself with a thatched fan, chatting with another woman with a sweaty heavy chest and ragged dress, only she was standing at a table, cutting up durian. To look at them, they cooked cabbage for sailors and scared off cheap johns. But the girl had told him enough that he wanted to impress this fat old widow. Considering Samâs story as she fanned herself, the old woman began to speak English, far better than the girlâs. She said she believed nothing that heâd just said about his shadow work for a great man in Sydney harbour but would let him try to prove it. She gave him a figure for every fresh brown boy he brought her way instead of their going to the Hindu operation on Orchard Road, and she gave him a far better figure than head money for every white man with a shipping contract he could bring from Commercial Square.
Three years later, Sam Kandy might have been the richest virgin in Singapore. But one day he told the old woman that he was tired of fighting the Hindus on Orchard Road for every fresh brown boy on the wharf. Besides, he knew of a crowded little island close by, where brown boys could be had with ease, boys with village-strong backs searching for ships to take them anywhere but home. And he told her that by then he also knew the right white men in Commercial Square to secure the necessary passages. The old woman spat and shrugged. She would see what, if anything, heâd send back, and was meanwhile disappointed to lose a good earner but also relieved to be rid of him, this suited monk who always slept alone in a side room, who never took payment in anything but money.
He returned to Colombo and came to know its dockworkers very well during a strike at the harbour. He sold some of them into Singapore, making money as a sub-agent for Pocket Ma, working harder and faster and cheaper and more silver-tongued than the established shipping agents around the harbour in telling dockworkers and middle sons from the villages that for a fee if they shipped out as he suggested and then went to Sago Street they would make money too. And if they paid him a little more, he would tell them where they would find not only work but rare love behind a green curtain, fair-skinned girls who could have almost been daughters in Cinnamon Garden. When the strike ended, those who were not tempted to go to Singapore would still hold back a sack of rice for a cut, or be hungry for it at a cut price, would anyway and always need something more from the near world than blood and birth hour predicted, than jetty sweat and Pettah stalls afforded, and Sam Kandy made that, all of it, his business. Because he knew them, these young men, their every want and wish, the daily plans, the long-ago promises. He made of them what he could. But after a year of working Colombo harbour he had to go to the village. From this much trafficking in it, Sam Kandy knew the great world was not enough. He needed warrant from the village: he needed the village itself. And when he arrived, his back would not shine with biscuit tins and city
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