Sulphur

Mornings coming down the stairs it was always difficult to catch the denominations on the coins for the newspaper. Gold twenties and fifties were much of a muchness here, the former unreliably thinner and the embossing likewise. One needed to flip each coin a number of times even to get the right side up for the numeral, on the steps aiming at the shaft of light from the vents in the outer wall. Merchants, even of the street-stall kind and 30sen involved, didn’t need donations as much as beggars and cripples. One afternoon earlier in the week with what was an overcast sky, sitting against the wall in the usual position opposite Hiap Joo, the light had played another kind of trick on another poor, hapless victim. Two lasses in fact, one almost directly after the other, both having exited Hiap loaded with bags of its locally famous banana cake. The yellowing of Asian skin that the British had noted during the time of their Concessions in China, that the Americans had found in Vietnam, Cambodia & Laos, and other Europeans elsewhere in the region, was ordinarily exceedingly difficult to discern, even for sharp observers and long-time residents. This revelation outside the bakery needed a particular cast of light, filtered somehow by cloud perhaps, or by some other means, and possibly more prominent in the monsoon season. On this pavement the girls’ fine, shapely legs had taken a noticeable cast of sulphur; a prominent pale daubing that seemed to run below the skin like water over a pane of glass. At the wrong time of day in the whorehouses and on the streets of the cities hereabout the old cruising foreign devils had lost sense of erotic pleasure and delight in the twinkling of an eye. Shocking still in the present day was all the reference among the Indians to skin colour, its various gradations of blackness in the range up to the desired fairness. In the case of the Malays, where the variance could be almost as pronounced, the matter was much less remarked upon by those people; their use of the whitening products less common, certainly among the older generation pre- the new media. The presence of the foreigners, the kind of regime imposed and the extraction from the forests and jungles was of a different order across the Malay Archipelago. One young traveler recently returned from a long trip to Tuscany reported olive being a much celebrated tone just now through Europe, and elsewhere among the fashionistas. Here on the Equator none had a snowflake’s chance in hell making that discrimination.