Authors: Fiona Cheong
Shadow Theatre
THEATRE
The Scent of the Gods
FIONA CHEONG
THEATRE
a novel
To Danny and Leela Sofia
and in memory of my sister
OCCURRENCES ON THE FIRST AND SECOND FRIDAYS IN august 1994 fi)
1
ACCOUNTS OF THE FOLLOWING SATURDAY IN august 1994 iii
71
WHISPERS FROM A FRIDAY REVISITED iij
125
OCCURRENCES ON THE THIRD SUNDAY IN august 1994 s)
169
GLOSSARY u)
235
EOGRAPHICALLY LOCATED ONE degree and eight minutes
north of the Equator, the island of Singapore, once part of the land
mass of the Malay Peninsula, is separated from the tip of the peninsula by a
narrow strait and buffered by smaller islands from the full blast of seasonal
monsoon winds. Possessing a natural harbor and situated at a confluence of
the old trade routes between East and West, Singapore was colonized by the
British in f 8 f 9, taken over by the Japanese in 1942, and returned to the
British in 1945. Colonial rule ended in 1955, when Singapore became the
only predominantly Chinese state in the Federation of Malaya. Due to irrec-
onciliable differences in governmental philosophy between the Malays and the
Chinese in power, Singapore was expelled from the Federation in 1965 and forced to re-form itself as an independent nation.
Modern scholars cannot verify the origin of the Sanskrit name
°Singapura,„or "Lion City,„ knowing only that it came into use sometime at
the end of the fourteenth century because until then Chinese and Javanese seafarers referred to the island as Temasek. The Chinese trader Wang Ta-yuan,
in particular, reported a settlement of pirates on the savage Tan-ma-shi,
among whom were Chinese inhabitants who lived and dressed in native style.
The seventeenth-century Sejarah Melayu, or Malay Annals, on the
other hand, attribute the rise of civilization on the island to Raja Chulan, an
Indian warrior-king and descendant of Alexander the Great, who encamped
at Temasek on his way to conquer China. Raja Chulan married the daughter of the god of the sea, who gave birth to a son, Sang Utama, who later
became Prince of Palembang, the Sumatran city from which he then ruled the
Buddhist maritime kingdom of Srivijaya.
According to the Sejarah Melayu, Sang Utama was forced to take
refuge at Temasek one day during a storm. Sailing into the estuary of the present Singapore River, he encountered a strange beast with a red body, a black
head, and a white breast, which he took to be a lion. Thinking the encounter
a good omen, Sang Utama decided to build a trading city at its site. It was
he who renamed the island Singapura. His city blossomed, but by 1365,
under the rule of a successor, Singapura fell to the .Javanese and was claimed
as a vassal state of the empire of Majapahit.
It should be noted that neither the Sejarah Melayu nor the private
papers of descendants of the earlier seafaring settlers are to he found among the
official records stored in the various archives of the old British empire. The following pages, culled from such unofficial sources, tell of a race of women who
still speak the language of the dreamer, who write in a saltwater wind, and
breathe like the changing light over the sea.