The Garden of Evening Mists. Tan Twan Eng

first time I’ve seen dead bodies.’ I studied his reflection in the glass. ‘The smell. . . I thought I had forgotten the smell. But one never does.’

      He reached out a hand to adjust the tilt of the frame. ‘Your home?’

      ‘My grandfather built it.’

      The house had stood at the eastern end of Northam Road, a long stretch shaded by angsana trees and lined with the mansions of high-ranking colonial officials and wealthy Chinese. ‘Old Mr Ong was our neighbour,’ I said, no longer seeing the house in the painting but in my memory. ‘He had started out as a bicycle repairman before becoming one of the wealthiest men in Asia. And it all happened because he fell in love with a girl.’ I smiled, remembering what my mother had once told Yun Hong and me. ‘Old Mr Ong wanted to marry the girl, but her father refused to allow it. His was an old, wealthy family, and he looked down on the illiterate bicycle repairman. He told him to leave his home and never bother them again.’

      Aritomo crossed his arms over his chest. ‘Did he?’

      ‘It took only four years for Ong to become a very rich man. He built his house directly across the road from the girl’s family home. It was the biggest house on Northam Road. And the ugliest as well, my mother always said.’ I looked at myself in the glass. My eyes were shadowed, sunken into my face. ‘Ong didn’t let anyone know he owned it. The afternoon after he moved in, he had his chauffeur drive him across the road in his silver Daimler. He spoke to the girl’s father again and asked for her hand in marriage once more. Her father, naturally, gave his permission. The wedding took place a month later. It was the most lavish the island had ever witnessed, so the old people used to say.’

      ‘One of the things I like about Malaya,’ Aritomo said, ‘it is full of stories like this.’

      ‘I often saw Old Mr Ong in his garden, dressed like a coolie in a tatty white vest and loose blue cotton shorts, carrying his songbird in a cage. He always spoke to the bird with more tenderness than I had ever seen him show any of his wives.’

      Aritomo pointed to the pediment. ‘Athelstane. That was Swettenham’s middle name.’

      I glanced at him in surprise, then remembered the first Resident General’s books on his shelf. ‘That’s what my grandfather called it. A silly, pretentious name for a house,’ I said. ‘I’m sure the neighbours laughed at my grandfather, and us.’

      ‘I will look for it, next time I am in Penang.’

      ‘It was destroyed when Jap planes bombed the island.’ Aritomo’s face showed no reaction. ‘We had moved out only a few days earlier. We left everything behind – all our photographs. All of Yun Hong’s paintings too.’

      It unsettled me that I should see one of her paintings here; I felt she was still alive, about to appear at the door of my bedroom to tell me some gossip she had heard from her friends. I reached out my hand and touched the painting. The smudge of condensation I made on the glass disappeared a second later, as though it had found a way to enter the watercolour painting.