The annotated budak

Mosquito coast

A fortnight of short, sharp showers that gave way to lurid dusks has replenished the ponds, creeks and wells of Pulau Semakau's secondary forest. The storms also threaten to unleash their bile on the trail that leads to the western shore, having broken a number of trees and turned the understorey of ferns and sprawling rotan tikus into a brackish swamp. And just before the end of the path, an arbour of sea hibiscus sags so they force passing visitors to ape the stoop of their wild mancesators.

Large bodies, probably resident varanids, crash through the vegetation, their foraging disturbed by the lurching of another frame. For a months-long reprieve from the island's dominant predators has ended with the emergence of culicids in numbers that overwhelm the capabilities of birds, lizards, frogs, spiders, dragonflies and asilids. The insects stir long before their heartland is breached; a cloud of amazons buzzed around my head as I stepped off the bund towards the trail, prompting the flimsy defence of a tea towel. A maddening din and short, sharp pricks through skin and sweat plagued the walk to the beach and stumble back to the seawall, where salinity dampened the attack just enough to permit a restive survey of the mangrove fringe.

A second, brief attempt at probing the forest for nocturnal herpivores failed to go deep. But the assault had become a wee fitful and this respite fuelled a shortlived sense of mind to look a little closer. Banded bullfrogs bellowed and four-lined treefrogs quacked from the grassy banks, and it had become dark enough for hunting spiders to risk life and limbs in arboreal pursuits. Geckos prowled the huntsmen's territories, bearing lost digits and ill-fitting tails that betray encounters with wolf snakes. A changeable lizard clung to a climber, while a migrant flycatcher roosted at the tip of a high tendril.

And just before the swarms mounted a resurgence that proved irresistible, two tiny moths settled on a vine. Barely half-an-inch long, these lovers probably hatched on the island as the rains fell and sowed a fresh season of growth and sexual urgency. Drawn to the scent of nubile molecules, the male had eluded the swoops of tomb bats and charted a parlous course to a mate-in-waiting. Like many others in their order, the pair might have but a single appetite to satisfy in their adulthood, having consumed their last meal shortly before a recombinant slumber. Coupling in the fashion of their tribe, the moths locked gametes and engaged in the ancient game of genetic roulette, a chance to live on by half for the male and the prelude to a quest for hosts with the fare to nurse a new generation of powdered wings.

Meshsacre

Two centuries ago, the heirs of a long-fallen empire commanded the passages of the Singapore Straits, exacting a bloody toll on junks, dhows, schooners and other merchantmen laden with the fruit of the region's forests. The marauders and their swift, stern perahu are long gone, seduced by the rewards of inland grabs and the royal legitimacy conferred by mercantile overlords. Thus transformed from buccaneers into allies of the British, a prince of pirates and his entourage secured the rights to a vast hinterland and a new dynasty fuelled by jungle sap and the sweat of riverine farms.

Since then, the backbone of a maritime army has lost its purpose, retreating to the swamps, coves and muddy inlets that had nursed them for centuries. Many surrendered their nomadic spirits for orthodox identities and the sons of the seas around Singapore, hemmed in and ruled out by the growth of civilised shores, had no choice but to give in to life on solid ground. But even their outposts on isles a world away from the lion city gave way in living memory to the hunger of a leviathan who devours the past and hoards the future with no inkling of loss or that one day there might be no more room to grow. 

Today, a people at home on the sea and at heart alive only when bound to the rhythms of the tide still survive in high flats, where they dream of village life and the void of urban existence. Their former haunts, reclaimed and ravaged or reserved for grander developments, no longer suffer the craft of men who sailed to feed their families or face the market power of mainland fishmongers. Then, children, or the poorest of bachelors with no means to acquire a boat or bubu, resorted to hook, line and sinker. Others built traps of mangrove poles and wire mesh to pen schools seeking to escape the tide. Larger nets were placed by tidal creeks and flats, and their owners planned their hunts according to the moon, currents and weather, for they pursued a living reliant on optimal yields and could scarcely afford the loss of fresh catches.

A different class of seafarers now dog the remains of reefs that once sustained a minor industry. They still heed the call of the tide, but there is no longer any sense of urgency or drive to make the most out of a line at the very end of providence. The nets are made to last, but their wielders have attention spans that crumble at a wave and, more often than knot, foresake their harvests long after the mesh has embraced a body of fins, legs and flippers who endure a slow, smothering death. Some victims thrash about until they succumb to exhaustion or cuts from the net or surrounding rubble. Others squirm and swim their way to a greater mess, dying as a bundle of flesh in still wool. 

Bottom dwellers, with their stiff forms and instinct to dash for the deep, are particularly apt to perish in drift nets. Cephalic spines, bony ridges and stiff dorsals are suckers for punishment and useless against a polyester foe with no plan or purpose other than the entanglement of every pelagic marine creature. Similarly, flatfish with venomous stings find little room for manouervre once they have blundered into a suspended mesh, and soon die with their pectorals upturned and cartilage frayed.

Instead of men happy to waste their hoard, the throes of the trapped and their chemical distress signals draw the reef's clean-up crew, who welcome the chance to sample meat on the bone and still pulsing with blood. Long pincers allow portunids to reach in and pluck out their pound of flesh. But the crabs' serrated claws, lateral spines and half-score of jointed legs are also exaptations for entrapment and not a few make a false move that turns opportunity into calamity. Menippids and xanthids, too, have no defence against a device that get their knockers in a twist and offer no gain to boot, for their captors would find an animal that has shed its legs in vain, and in the case of egg and mosaic crabs, a meal with warning colours. 

The nets also snare other creatures with little to offer hungry men but pretty shades and odd shapes. Copperbanded butterflyfish, yellowtail angelfish, feathery filefish, rare rabbitfish and tusked wrasses with the intelligence to use the tools of primitive men were among the collateral damage of a half-hearted effort to reap an aquatic harvest that resulted in two deadly phantoms at Big Sister's Island. Laid out by the gaps that flank the central seawall of the island's larger lagoon and anchored to chunks of living coral, the drift nets formed walls of doom with no sign that their owners cared that these nooses would catch, kill and consume a host of reef dwellers, the surplus to requirements of a labour of loaf and malignant neglect.

A few were fortunate enough to undergo the discomfort of an unravelling and the snips of closely held cutters. The rest remained on the mesh in varying degrees of decay. The ends of the nets were located and unwound from their living footholds, and the grand schemes of itinerant fishermen reduced to luggable bits and dragged to bins by the pier. It was a minor tragedy of not uncommon circumstances in these southern shores where the baseline will continue to shift as long as memories falter and faith sustains the notion that the sea will never run dry and the earth will never run short.

Bussed

There are times when it pays not to listen to one’s parents. Even the skewed sense of risk endemic to high school years can yield fitful rewards that fall dormant after the heady thrill of explorations beyond the reach of a shout and long before the rise of wireless tethers. The lure of an old flame and nights of chaste nubility once drew my duck from his nest in the western floodplains of the peninsula to dryer parts about 30 miles northeast and an hour by bus, or more on a busy day when the driver would grind the jalopy to a jerky halt every other minute or so to pick up a schoolchild or give an old makcik time to unload her bags and body onto the largely straight and once narrow road.

At a forgettable settlement named after peaty waters that thrives by the sole virtue of its status as a regional crossroad, the bus would detour into a gravel park and idle for a while. The high road comes thereafter, as the terrain sinks, swells and skirts the ridges of undulating foothills that mark the last of a continental chain. The service terminates at a filthy lot at the edge of a town in the middle of a state of loss. Buttered roasts and brown buns beckon from a canteen by the railway station, but for bodies of a less discerning age, the comforts of a suburban house with creaky boards and roofs that thunder in the rain trumped the flavours of worldlier appetites.     

Such escapades took place under the cloak of loftier pursuits, for even, nay especially, then, attempts to cast caution to the wing and probe the outer reaches of a cloistered district ill-befitted a fowl of domestic prospects. Homework be damned, the shorter hours of the day would roll through rubber estates, coastal lanes and country roads, in buses, on pedals or by the touch of a throttle, and run afoul of paternal instincts, for these journeys with neither maps nor meaning often ended long after dinner was cold and the skies had turned red with waiting. 

I never bothered to reveal where exactly I had been or explain why I sought out these peripheries of imagined hazard. For why should one give in to the grounds for a grilling and forfeit the soul of sights and spills that taunt the mind and scrape knees of adolescent skin? As luck would have it, I survived harmless madmen and many angry dogs but failed to dodge the orthodoxy of old school paths and so abandoned, for far too long, the superior doctrine of infinite passabilities. 

Little has changed. The barest hint of bland adventure evokes a murmur of fear that discourages further comment and cues a dip into the bliss of questions unasked but never forgotten. "Why do you do these things?" "Why on earth do you have to go to such places?" I could have told them it was all for the better, for the sake of tougher journeys or the salvaging of a wit on edge. But it's never certain that revelation will bring relief rather than a descent into remission and I leave the box unopened. 

Repetition may be farce, but one recent trip to a nest half-empty bordered on atrocity. The coach kicked off nearly two hours behind schedule and turned out to be a double-bill, offering passage to two unsung destinations. But the driver later learnt that one town pitched a solo act and decided, in a stroke of economic genius, to skip the bypass for the benefit of a sleeping majority. He was at once politely insistent and earnestly apologetic at dumping a hapless duck by a crossroad 20 miles from home and sped off with the air of a wronged dame. I had earlier declined the driver's offer of compensation, prefering to save my senses for the task of picking up from where he had left me off, a not-unfamiliar borderland that thrives by the sole virtue of its proximity to a national highway. 

Little has changed. The gravel lot is dry, dusty and driven over by buses of doubtful menace. Litter lined the fringes of the compound and what grasses grew were scorched or squalid from the emissions of diesel-fed combustions. Two coin-operated phone booths, living fossils of rural telecommunication, stood a little away from the derelict end of a terminus building which otherwise housed a sleepy vendor of snacks and penny rags. 

The wait was probably shorter than it seemed, but an old red and white bus arrived well before any thoughts of watering the dismal lawn. The service is unchanged in numeration and it appears that the firm has made little effort to upgrade its vehicles with unnecessary comforts. Raw panels line the cabin, seats of industrial textures and stiff sliding windows welcome passengers to a ride that laughs in the face of perfunctory danger. A Malay girl in jeans and tank top hopped on, but reckoned there was enough time to dash down and buy a bag of guava. Her only companion was a largish Spongebob Squarepants plushie, which she hugged during the journey with the indifference of female privilege. A literal handful, including the conductor, sat in the bus when the driver continued southwest pass shops of cheap pottery and plastic souvenirs. The 20-mile trip cost a little more than a buck and is divided into 35 invisible milestones known only to the conductor who probably takes his passengers' word for their eventual alighting point.

Over the years, oil palms have displaced the rubber trees that once fuelled the state's fortunes. But the old trunk road, though a little broader now to fit obese automobiles, still runs by houses guarded by fruit trees and gaudy shrubs. Rambutans, durians, mangos, guavas, gingers, draceanas, crotons, bananas and yams flank many a driveway that leads to a house on stilts and designed for village spaces. But not a few families have clearly downgraded to more elementary structures, trading cool vents for warm rooms of brick. Some quarters lease or lend their porch to purveyors of local patties, who assemble special treats for those who ride at night. 

On both sides of the road are ditches fed by streams, canals and small rivers that flow perpendicular to the track. Brooks that seep by food stalls, workshops and shanty towns bubble with the foam of municipal neglect, but those in less populated corners still gush with deep brown waters and the hearts of small water lilies. Aquatic sedges, marsh flowers and duckweed have invaded the ditches, though parts of these waterways have been ripped up and await the concrete of rural improvement. 

Primitive shelters of rods and plywood serve as bus-stops where children and collared men await the bus and take their time to choose their seats. Schools, manufactories and garages have emerged in creeping densities and face the road behind broad gateways and grand names. Only village mosques, willing prisoners to more pressing calls, break the grid and impose a moral compass on this series of parrallel constructs.

A lizard straddles a wire fence. Melastoma blooms over a drain of effluent. The trees give way to a wasteland of commerce and industry, a frontier of sprawling complexes to which the townsfolk ride and return each shift and clock their earnings. Bungalows and shops have inched their way towards a hill of graves and a playground lies torn and tired near the palace of a benignant ruler.

I arrive many hours later than what a reasonable day might expect. "The bus was late and exceedingly slow" appeared to satisfy the incessant distress of a shrinking unit. It seemed crass to add to the mental agony of unfulfilled expectations by recounting the details of a transport debacle that'd beg the question of why their words once, and still, fell on stubborn ears and failed to stick in those years when the future was in their hands and theirs for the shaping.

Neat freak

Snapping shrimps overwhelm the casual but aurally cognisant visitor to tropical shores, who reliably seeks the source of incessant clicks but betrays doubt when told of the elusive percussionists. Thousands of snaps, cracks and pops may accompany the darkening hours of the day, when the alpheids declare their presence and pursuit of partners from burrows under sand and rubble.

The din would probably be worse were it not for the shrimps' obsession with housekeeping. Consumed by the urge to redecorate their chambers and retrofit their porte-cochère, individuals such as this small male at Big Sisters' Island discard their customary wariness and indulge in a fit of domestic passion that beguiles and bewilders. Rude ornaments are grasped and expelled, followed by an explosive whirr of swimmerets for good measure. The animals have unhelpful eyes, so a tactile sense of shape, size and aquatic scenery must guide this drive to pick and push away pebbles of objectionable character. There is no end to this labour, it seems, for the tides offer fresh decor at every turn, compelling the shrimp to reconsider daily its interior selections and choose between a life that's neat or nearly on the rocks.

Unfluttered

There are no paddy fields on this island to feed the young of swift fliers. But pockets of grasses and unruly herbs, more often closely cropped but at times tall and tender, still survive between grander erections. Barren plots, spaces formerly occupied by shophouses and mansions too lofty for conservation, nurse the seeds and spores of vascular pioneers who sprout from the cracks that form between ground and wall or erupt to colonise land left fallow until the next best bid. 

In these slits of bland soil, doomed by the imperative of urban renewal, grow the soft blades and stiff shoots that nourish the plainest of wanderers. Drably clad, with thickset, hairy bodies, but nominally butterflies by virtue of their clubbed antennae and diurnal habits, swifts are a tribe of skippers with varying shades of brown and hyaline wing markings that range from indistinct spots to polygonal patches. A few species rely on bamboo to complete their life-cycle. But others, such as the small branded swift, have catholic tastes, so long as the host is of poaceous extract. Rice, lallang, sugar cane, citronella and the coarse cowgrass used to create instant lawns are all game for this tough little thing, who must endure the opprobium of residents averse to flying pests and whose grubs eclose from fibrous tubes to haunt the terraces of an estate that once prospered by the coast and now strains to hold back the tide of properties built to beggar the neighbours and burnish its past.

Boxed in

The sand stirs with life even when the spring tide drains the bars of Cyrene Reef on a dawn fuelled by frail winds and flavoured salts. There is always the danger that rubber soles, stumbling from dinghy to damp bank, might meet spiny ends or crush the life out of soft creatures in brittle exoskeletons. Sea stars, sand dollars and the snails who hunt them in the dark occupy the shifting towers of a mound that at times probes deep into the seagrass meadow, cleaving the flat into a field of raised puddles. 

Nearly every patch of bare grains between the seagrass is apt to harbour a menagerie of shells, soft bodies and squirming forms with little love for the shadows of low waters. For these magical hours also beckon terns, egrets and herons who seem to know the moon and its moments of opportunity. In the mid-year months, families of little terns arrive to dive after trapped fish, their recently fledged members in tow and testy at having to fend for themselves after a spell on drier dunes. On the fringes of the reef stalk reef egrets, white or slate-grey specialists of Indo-Pacific coasts who must vie with the region's human population for the fruit of the tropical sea. 

Many fish unfortunate enough to enter submerged traps of steel wire laid by itinerant sampan men avail themselves to neither bird nor man. For soon after, or even long before their final spasms, their bodies would be nibbled at, ripped apart and shredded by the claws of a clean-up crew with a nose for trouble and the dexterity to reach through the mesh for (still) fresh pickings. Thalamita and Charybdis, two genera of portunid crabs, are among this gang of underwatertakers who'd scarcely refuse a break from their bland regime of corticated filaments.

The swimmers are not the only ones who feed off others' misfortunes. Moon crabs share the habitats and appetites of the portunids but lack the will, if not the wherewhital, to stage a feint with brandished arms before paddling off to safer grounds. They appear to realise that their comparative advantage lies in 'flee' not 'fight, and make full use of all eight flippers (the portunids have only two) to propel their roughly rounded carapaces away from scenes of questionable content. After this aquatic sprint, the crabs plough themselves into fine silt until little more than a pair of short-stalked eyes remain on the sand line.

Three species of matutids have been recorded locally. The two most commonly encountered ones have pale bodies with black spots and are reliably distinguished by the angle of a ridge on the outer side of their palm, which is parallel to the ventral margin in Ashtoret and oblique in Matuta. Like portunids, these genera borrow their names from Mediterranean deities and exhibit a certain convergence in two lateral spines that probably make them just a little harder to swallow. The third species, the strikingly patterned Matuta planipes, is a little less frequently seen, which may be the result of relative scarcity or a preference for deeper shoals. But all three favour sandy bottoms in the vicinity of seagrass beds, which provide in turn refuges and repositories of nourishment.

Matutids were once regarded as a subset of Calappidae, but these ties have been severed by carcinologists who saw enough apomorphies to raise the rank of moon crabs to a clade of their own. Though similarly fossorial, box crabs possess tapered ambulatory legs that are hidden under a broadly ovate or clypeiform carapace. The deep body, an aid to respiration when the animal is buried, is protected by an anterior shield of two robust chelae: one with a 'can-opener' tooth built for cutting and penetrating and the other with daintier fingers for gripping and picking. Gastropods with stubborn opercula or narrow apertures are the primary victims of this toolkit, but hermit crabs in secondhand shells also fall prey to calappids with a taste for anomura.

Like their erstwhile kin which dig into sand rather than snails, calappids have three local representatives. But the crabs' favoured substrate of littoral seabeds within reach of productive reefs, a habitat dismissed by both coastal planners and coral rescuers, has rendered them vulnerable to local extirpation. Their food items, likewise, have suffered from the ravages of floating dredgers as well as developers who crave the tranquility of an equatorial seafront. There is too much at stake, it seems, and too little time, after the labours of a life of leisure, to lose face and succumb to the shame of boxing in a pod of bottles and betting the future on present grains.