The Tree of the Doves. Christopher Merrill

       PART I

      CEREMONY

      Her symptoms were vague: aches and pains, a general feeling of despair. Yet the figure she cut in the circle of women seated on one side of the stage was regal. This was not her first main puteri (literally, “playing the princess”), a healing ritual performed in the northeastern Malaysian state of Kelantan despite the proscription, dating from a 1991 decree by Islamic authorities, against traditional ceremonies. And she betrayed nothing in her demeanor of the drama about to unfold on this hot, humid night in the jungle.

      After evening prayers, the entire village or kampong assembled by the stage, an open-sided tin-roofed shed cleared of its tools, machinery, and motorcycles. The size of the gathering was the first surprise: hundreds of people of all ages sat on fallen palm trees or stood in the fringe of forest thickening the darkness. I had traveled here with Eddin Khoo, the director of Pusaka, a small organization dedicated to preserving Malaysia’s traditional art forms; and while his passion for indigenous ways of apprehending reality had spurred my journey it also raised questions in my mind about their true place in this society. Dislocation, a recurring theme of our conversation on the long drive from Kuala Lumpur, through lowland plains and rubber-tree plantations, then jungles and forests and craggy mountains, to the coastal city of Kota Bharu, the royal seat of Kelantan, explained some of the appeal of the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party (PAS), which ruled this conservative state: it offered a belief system to counter the uncertainties and encroachments of modern life. If I had assumed that PAS’s strictures would keep the villagers away, their numbers seemed to vindicate Eddin’s efforts to save the banned ceremonies. He had studied, documented, and promoted them for over a decade, defying the Islamists in an inventive fashion—apprenticing himself to a shadow puppeteer; sponsoring main puteri shamans and musicians; and training young people in indigenous dance forms. It was not hard to imagine him losing perspective in his enthusiasm for what remained of Malaysia’s old ways. He thought himself fortunate thus far to have avoided arrest.

      “What we’re doing is basically illegal,” he said with feeling.

      He was a short, fidgety man, half-Chinese, half-Tamil, with a lilting British accent (courtesy of Newcastle University in Newcastle upon Tyne); his pugnacious bearing did not issue from his black belt in kung fu as much as from a lifelong feud with his countrymen. Born during the Sino-Malay race riots of 1969, which left hundreds dead and part of Kuala Lumpur’s Chinese population homeless, he decided early on that there was no place for him in his society, and so he became a thoroughgoing Anglophile. He read David Copperfield at the age of seven; his parents would trot him out at parties to say the word “conflagration” ; asked to name the most important Malaysian writers, he said, “Joseph Conrad, Somerset Maugham, and Anthony Burgess.” English on Eddin’s tongue had a marvelous ring, all flattened vowels and trilled r’s and cackles of delight punctuating his speech as he drove himself to exhaustion in a bid to change his culture through the word. He slept no more than four hours a night—his soporific was watching World Wrestling Federation TV shows—and in his insomnia he had devised an ambitious literary agenda. He was tinkering with his first collection of poems; writing books on the Muslim predicament and his shadow puppeteer master; translating literary works from English into Malay. His version of Moby-Dick was proceeding by fits and starts; he intended to do all of Shakespeare’s plays and publish them under his own imprint.

      That was not the end of it. He planned to run in the Kuala Lumpur Marathon—a foolish risk, I thought, for a smoker with high blood pressure. Equally disturbing was his claim to be adept at catching king cobras—a skill acquired in childhood from the family gardener, which might be put to use during the main puteri: a swarm of king cobras had invaded the kampong earlier in the day; if they returned, the headman planned to spray them with ammonia. It is taboo to kill a king cobra, which for Hindus like Eddin is the incarnation of Shiva, and also unwise, since the scent of the dead snake could attract other snakes. Likewise the sound of the serunai (a reed instrument similar to an oboe), Eddin added as we took our seats behind the musicians, on a plank of wood laid on the sand. Not to worry, he said. Rubber tappers had discovered that spitting on a wad of tobacco made a poultice that, if applied to a king cobra bite, might keep you alive until antivenin serum—always in short supply—could be located.

      “We have a Malaysian saying,” he said. “Fight poison with poison.”

      The saying has a political dimension. This healing ritual, for example, was taking place against the backdrop of a Muslim insurgency in southern Thailand. Two weeks earlier, on April 28, 2004, rebels had coordinated attacks on ten police stations just over the border from Kelantan. Armed with machetes, the rebels were no match for the Thai military, which killed more than a hundred, many of whom had sought refuge in a mosque. The Thai government accused Malaysia of supporting the insurgency, which some believed was connected to al-Qaeda and Jemaah Islamiyah (the militant organization responsible for the Bali car bombings in October 2002); and while the border was closely monitored (preventing, among other things, a group of traditional Thai dancers from traveling to Eddin’s next festival, in Kuala Lumpur), no one thought that the bloodshed was over.

      Meanwhile a story had just broken on the television news magazine 60 Minutes and in a New Yorker article by Seymour Hersh of a scandal at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, where under the rule of Saddam Hussein thousands of dissidents had been tortured and executed. After the Iraqi strongman was deposed in the US-led invasion, the prison was used to inter suspected insurgents, and now photographs were circulating on the Internet of American military police torturing and abusing the prisoners—images of naked men stacked in a pyramid, punched by a soldier, and cowering before a German shepherd; of a woman with a cigarette dangling from her mouth giving the thumbs-up sign to a hooded prisoner’s penis; of corpses laid out on cement floors. The occupation of Iraq had taken a sadistic turn, the revelation of which was met with particular revulsion in the Islamic world; the photograph of a hooded figure standing on a box, with electrodes attached to his arms and genitals, was a fixture in political cartoons and graffiti from Egypt to Malaysia; Iraqis nicknamed the image The Statue of Liberty.

      Eddin was scrutinizing the patient, as if to place her in his memory. She towered over the women attending to her—her sisters-in-law, Eddin guessed—and her features were as angular as theirs were round; her plaid sarong offset their bright yellows, blues, and greens; when she wrapped an orange scarf around her neck—the only colorful note in her attire—Eddin wondered aloud if her problems stemmed from barrenness. The success of the main puteri, he explained, depended upon the shaman discovering the source of her illness; part divination, part theater, this spirit-raising ceremony, usually undertaken as a last resort, would require her to surrender to his ministrations for two nights running, and the resignation etched into her face suggested that she was willing to try almost anything, if it would bring relief. She radiated a kind of fatalism familiar to Eddin.

      “The Kelantan sensibility,” he said, laying his hand over his heart, “is located entirely in lament, in loss.” Tonight we would learn what was missing from this patient’s life, in a performance combining animist, Hindu, and Islamic elements. The magical spell woven by the main puteri, drawing on the oldest customs of the Malay Peninsula, was precisely what the purifying Islamists campaigned against.