One of Jason’s three Gurkhas was making a recording of the talk without the Temiar realising it. It was later edited and a copy sent to Special Branch in KL. The report on that meeting Jason submitted was seen as a hallmark of how the Temiar mind worked: Mr Too and the Director of Intelligence circulated it to all concerned: ‘I had earlier been told by one of the Temiar that tapioca in a nearby plot was being stolen. I wanted to find out if it could be Ah Soo Chye who was digging the stuff up or was it a rumoured man – but from whose ladang? After I had persuaded the senior men of the ladang I wanted to have a talk with them and hear their views, they came to where I had a temporary base. They sat in a semicircle on the ground in front of me and my three Gurkhas. Once they had settled down I felt it time to ask them to let me know, one way or another, where Ah Soo Chye was, dead or alive? If alive, what was he feeding on?
‘I did not bother to mention his two lieutenants as I thought it would be too much for them but if they did I could talk about them. By then I was known as “Tata”, literally Old Man, but used to a person as a mark of “one of high standing”. By then I knew that any straightforward question to start with was unproductive so I had to begin carefully. We started talking at 4 o’clock and went on for two and a half hours. The talk went round and round and round, frustrating in its elusiveness. My head swam by the end of it and I did not know what to think. After welcoming them, I started off as a normal Temiar conversation and the report’s conclusion was that it was still uncertain whether Ah Soo Chye was dead or alive and, if the latter, where he would be:
‘With what news?’
‘With no news.’
‘I hear, I hear strong, I hear wind, tapioca it steals.’
‘How you hear?’
‘I hear wind. True or not?’
‘Hear women talk. Talk tapioca it steals.’
‘I hear,’ I continued after that part of the conversation had been repeated many times and had taken five minutes, ‘I hear mad Temiar he from that side of the river, he steals tapioca, true or not?’
‘Tata, I say, and if I say good luck, good, and if I say bad luck, bad, if you are angry, what am I to do? But I say, yes.’
‘Yes, what?’
Came the devastating answer, ‘Yes, no.’
So I started again: ‘Is there a mad man?’
‘Yes.’
‘Tell me about him.’
‘He lives in the jungle. Sometimes he comes. He has long hair and we are afraid. He has no knife. He has no fire. He cannot eat.’
‘Where is he now?’ I asked.
‘Dead.’
‘When did he die?’
‘One day in the past.’
‘So he does not steal tapioca?’
‘No.’
‘Who does?’
‘The mad man.’
‘But you say he is dead.’
‘No, he is not dead.’
This point, try hard though I might, was never satisfactorily resolved, despite twenty minutes solid cross examination. So I switched tack.
‘If the dead man does not eat, does not steal tapioca, then inland man steals?’
‘No.’
‘But tapioca it steals, mad dead man not, inland man not, who?’
‘It steals.’
‘The bad man China, that Ah Soo steal?’
‘He is in the high hills. What am I to do?’
‘What does he eat?’
‘Food.’
‘If no food?’
‘No food.’
‘If no food he dies?’
‘He dies.’
‘How long they no food he dies?’
‘Long.’
‘Dead now?’
‘Yes.’
‘Dead now?’
‘No.’
I gradually brought them around to thinking the guerrillas might be living off the land, lying up, stealing tapioca and here having to use the word ‘river’ (even to the extent even when there was no actual river but where it would have been had there been one!) as an integral part of any location as otherwise the Temiar could not visualise where I was talking about:
‘Ah Soo is near?’ I asked.
‘No.’
‘Ah Soo is far?’
‘No.’
