The Consul's File

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It was a late recessional, one of the last in Asia. The consulate in that little town had been necessary to the American rubber estates, but the rubber trees were being replaced by oil palms, and most of the Americans had left. It was my job to phase out the consulate. In other places the consular task was, in the State Department phrase, bridge-building; in Ayer Hitam I was dismantling a bridge — not a difficult job: we had never been very popular with the Malays.

I was unmarried; I had time on my hands. Because I had been told that everything I needed to know was in the files that were kept in the 'box-room' of the Residence, for a long time I avoided looking through them. I had other ideas, and whether it was the annoyance of being known in that place as just another white man or the pointless pressure of the bureaucracy I served, I felt a need to stake a claim, so I might carry a bit of that town away undis-torted. In a different age I might have taken a Malay mistress, but in my restless mood — excited by what I saw and yet feeling a little like a souvenir-hunter — I decided to write.

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