Take away the medicine. Give me rice curry and chicken and fish cooked with green bamboo tips and sourish-sweet pilou of river mussels. And then a whiff of bhang or black Malay tobacco that the gypsies of the sea smuggle in....
My name? Paul Brandon will do. My father was a Stepney coster. Mother? Oh, a half-caste Mandalay woman. Yes, they were married at the mission. He took her home. I was born in London. But I ran away; came East....
Don’t mind if I babble, ma’am. And forgive me if I pull at the sheets. Or if the sight of a white woman, old, patient, trying to be kind to me, makes me shy. When my head clears, I’m white; when the fever mist comes over my brain, I see things through my brown mother’s eyes.
Thanks for fixing the ice pack on my head. No, that mark on my forehead is not from an old bruise. A Karen-Laos woman put it there with her tattoo needles. It has a meaning. It is the Third Eye of Siva.
Thanks for pulling-to the shade. Those bamboo things the yellow and brown folk use are not shades. They are full of holes where the weaving is that holds them together. Why, you can see through them—see the most unbelievable things....
Oh, yes, the mark on my forehead. A girl put it there with her needles. Now that you touch it, it is sore. Well, so would your head be sore if a giant python had smashed his wedge-shaped head in death stroke against your wrinkled brow, executing the Curse of Siva.
How long have I been in Maulmain?... A week? Well, I won’t be here another. But it’s queer how a man will drift—to his own people.
Thanks for the little morphine pills. Yes, I know what they are. Give me a dozen, and they may take hold. A man who has smoked bhang, black Malay tobacco and opium, and who has drunk bino isn’t going to be hurt by sugar pills. They only wake me up, steady me.
Why didn’t I know Pra Oom Bwaht was a liar?...