Respect

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Odd the way the Chinese Johor beggar has desisted these many months after being told there was little coming in from the scratching of pen and paper. Once spoken was enough for the chap to accept the matter. For the first year or so this man was the single, fixed regular. One dollar a time for a full twelvemonth. Sometime afterward that had been revised to seventy and fifty cents dropped into his cup. Sometimes the cup was entirely empty and the man would have easily been able to judge the size of the alms. A practiced beggar such as himself could no doubt tell by weight and sound without looking. Some of the local Malays had a set against the chap. Unlike one or two of the other Chinese beggars, seemed he was not a convert. Word was he was far from destitute. In earlier time the chap had helped at his father’s food-stall up at the Haig Road market. Once or twice the man must have noticed the big eyes at his generous treating of lunches for the Batam girls. Cigarettes were also handed around the Labu Labi tables to the Indon and Malay workers awaiting a call from their contractors. Once, rather shamefully when the man had pulled up a chair at the author’s table, which he has done on three or four occasions, the remark was passed that he was earning more than his chief benefactor. No challenge had been returned.

         Now the beggar skirts around the author’s table on his rounds like most of the other beggars seeing a white-man, as he did a couple of nights ago at Labu Labi. From behind he had come up unnoticed and gave a light touch in passing, no words and without stopping. The chap is indeed a man of few words, almost like the deaf-mutes at Labu Labi who are capable of only a range of inarticulate sounds and exclamations. (With highly evocative sign and gesture, whistles and snorts, one of these chaps in particular is a great showman, regularly entertaining a dozen at table.) Somewhere in his forties, over the two year period the Chinese Johor beggar has thinned, his pace slowed and more stops become necessary along the vacant stretch before the Converts’ building. It is not lack of breath or weariness that overtakes the beggar. On these stops in the middle of the path the beggar’s heavily blotched face and eyes need vigorous rubbing. But for the raised skin, psoriasis it appears on one side of the face, the forehead and especially the flaccid cheek. On the man’s back a similar kind of welt stretches from his shoulder-blade down to his tail-bone. During one of the sits at table beside his chief benefactor—almost certainly chief mat salleh, white-man benefactor—a brief account of his woe was accompanied by a show of the evidence. A motor-cycle accident had caused the man to come to grief, common in this region for this class and age cohort. The man’s father, the former food-stall operator at Haig Road, has retired to Johor, over the Causeway, where the son visits every month or two, paying his own way clearly.