Green is the Colour by Lloyd Fernando

Author:Lloyd Fernando
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789810736026
Publisher: Epigram Books
Published: 2017-05-31T00:00:00+00:00

8

SEATED AMONG THE women and garbed like them in a long loose garment with a cowl, Sara shifted uneasily. Her unfamiliarity at being covered completely except for her face was only a minor discomfort. But was she a betrayer of her faith? True, she couldn’t accept that it was necessary to flaunt her belief.

“Look at Papua New Guinea,” Panglima once said to her when she tried to say that everyone should be left to practise their own beliefs. “The Christians didn’t leave them alone. And what about Sarawak. They were doing the same thing on our orang asli. We have to stop them.”

He had discovered the power that came from standing up for religious belief during his early life in south Thailand, a period few knew much about. After a quarrel over a creamy-complexioned girl brought down from Chiengmai whom he seduced before the brothel owner could initiate her, he had come to Songkhla by the sea near the border with Malaya where he met and married a Thai girl who was Muslim and he converted to the faith with the name of Saiful.

The Buddhist governor of the province at the time refused his village permission to build a mosque. Saiful was a natural leader in the demonstration which followed. A grenade exploded under a bridge near the police station in Narathiwat.

After ascertaining that it sent a passing patrol jeep out of control into a rubber tree on the side of the road, Saiful went with a following of over one hundred people to the police chief to discuss ways of maintaining peace. Permission for building the mosque followed. He became a member of the Liberation Front which demanded from Thailand independence for the southern province of Patrani and brought his skills in intrigue and quiet menace to a fine pitch.

Sara considered Panglima obtuse because he did not perceive the contradiction between his stopping other people spreading their faith and spreading his own. The colonialists had gone, was the whole business repeating itself? Different groups were scrambling to put their own brands on people. Just like the colonialists, she told Gita later.

The ceramah had begun promptly at nine and had been going on for more than half an hour. The speaker inside the crowded mosque was not visible. His voice over the loudspeakers was crystal clear, switching from Arabic quotation to Malay commentary, the words bathing listeners, inside the mosque and seated in groups outside on the wide, sandy ground, like a medicinal oil, refreshing them, making them tremble with slight spasms. Quiet and soothing at first, the voice rose to a declamatory pitch that excited a few women to involuntary cries. Then the voice sank again to commence a new rhythmic cycle.

Everywhere the people were seated in quiet groups on the sandy ground. Except that the atmosphere was subdued, it might have been a country fair or a picnic. A few large angsana trees spread their leafy branches over the entire halaman. The men dressed in baju and checked sarongs, wearing skull caps, sat under the shadiest one, their knees drawn up.

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