the ages, he went into a trance. It turned out that the seductive approach had not gone far enough. For the spirits inhabiting the second shaman were harder, his dancing more robust, calling to mind the gestures of a martial-arts master. Evidently a firmer hand was needed to bring out the conflicting elements in the soul of the patient, the pesakit.
“In traditional Malay society,” Eddin told me, “there’s very little room for the individual. But the stage is a place of liberty, where you can move out of your customary ways of relating to others and acknowledge individuality.”
This was the moment when the shaman asked for, and received, permission from the pesakit’s husband to touch her, and now he told her that she could go into a trance, if she liked, or jump into the air. Her body went limp, her facial features softening, and her first words from the depths of trance brought forth laughter from the crowd.
“She said she hasn’t been felt up in a long time,” Eddin explained. “This can be very embarrassing for the husband!”
The shaman pretended to hump her feet for a minute or two before resuming his banter with the minduk. He danced in an exalted state, he brushed off the pesakit’s request to caress her, he rubbed up against the other shaman. Eddin laughed.
“Whoa,” he said, translating the first shaman’s words. “He said he wants to fuck her, but he needs some lubricants.”
The pesakit sat before the minduk, and the shaman took up a position behind her, gazing at her long hair. Then he said something that drew a gasp from the crowd.
Eddin turned to me. “This is becoming very interesting,” he said.
“It’s already very interesting,” I replied.
He shook his head. “He just asked her if she’s a man.”
“What?” I said, incredulous.
“What a crazy country this is,” he said.
“Is that common?” I said.
“There are lots of transvestites in the villages,” he said.
“No wonder the Islamists disapprove,” I said.
The pesakit rose uncertainly to her feet, and the shaman began to spin her like a top under the mobile, slowly at first then faster and faster, spurred on by the drums and gongs and cymbals. Nothing that I had witnessed during my travels could have prepared me for the shock that I experienced when the pesakit dramatically tore off her scarf and said that she was indeed a man. He leaned toward us, head down, panting.
All your life, the shaman sang in a soothing voice, you haven’t known what to do, where to go, how to dress. He turned solicitous, almost tender, as if to calm a child in the throes of nightmare, and what he sang went to the heart of the matter. You’re still hungry after you eat, you don’t really sleep, and when you bathe you don’t get wet.
With a loud sigh the pesakit suddenly collapsed, as though stricken, falling heavily to the floor, and lay his head down in the minduk’s lap, and closed his eyes. Eddin took note of his gold earrings and bracelets, which glittered in the soft light.
“Gold is haraam for Muslim men,” he whispered. “Forbidden.” Now the shaman tapped the floor with his fingers, marking time in what became an entrancing rhythm, and sang a lament that seemed to echo from the beginning of time, and now the pesakit rose up on his knees to dance, twisting and turning, rolling his head from side to side, shoulders swaying, transported into an exalted state.
For he had crossed the threshold between waking and dreaming, leaving the rest of us on that strange border between daily life and enchantment. What was ordinary had become extraordinary, or vice versa, and the sight of a man in a sarong rocking on his knees like a supplicant, a man who had spent his life pretending to be a woman, was, to say the least, unnerving. Trance is integral to religious practice; also ecstasy. And the knowledge gained by spiritual adventurers in altered states of mind had certainly shaped my life, alerting me, for example, to the poetic possibilities of things glimpsed at the edge of vision—the mineral quality of sunlight after rain, the hieroglyphs that birds inscribe in the sky. But I had never witnessed such complete surrender, such visible evidence of out-of-thebody travel, and the pesakit’s gyrations made me wonder if he would return whole. Eddin assured me that the medicine men would not lose control of what happened onstage, but even he seemed astonished by this revelation.
Tonight in this place you are the queen, the shaman sang, wiping sweat from his eyes, and the pesakit stared at him. Don’t be afraid.
There was good reason to be afraid. Homosexuality is forbidden in much of the Islamic world, punishable by death in countries like Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen, and elsewhere by flogging, fines, and prison terms. Indeed the former deputy prime minister of Malaysia, Anwar Ibrahim, was serving a prison sentence for sodomy and corruption, charges that Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International regarded as politically motivated; this week a panel of three judges on the highest court would hear his appeal to have his convictions overturned. This night in the jungle a banned ceremony had elicited a stunning confession, and I suspected that I was not alone in fearing what would become of the pesakit now that he had disclosed the secret of his sexuality.
The shaman rendered his diagnosis: the pesakit suffered from the thwarting of the wind associated with a young demigod, dewa muda, which makes the afflicted want to be the center of attention, to enjoy all the finery, flattery, and privileges of royalty. You want to feel grand, the shaman sang—a recurring problem in Kelantan, Eddin added. And since it is difficult to convince most sufferers to give up their delusions of grandeur dewa muda is the most common blockage of the inner winds treated in main puteri. But would this ceremony release the malevolent spirit from this tormented man?
A woman in a pink veil left the circle of the pesakit’s attendants to rinse his hair in a bowl of ablution water, and when she had patted it dry with a towel the shaman asked them to dance with him—the first movement of a communal dance that lasted for close to an hour, the minduk and the other shaman joining in, men dancing with men, women with women, the pesakit spinning from one partner to another or whirling alone, flinging his hair around and around, still in a trance. A man from the crowd entered from the side of the stage, the drums beat faster, the serunai sounded deep in the night. Lightning flashed, people danced in the trees, and in the frenzy the pesakit fell to his knees, and rose to dance with the shaman who had caught out the malevolent spirit tormenting him, and fell, and rose again, up and down, up and down, and then crawled toward the minduk, the shaman looming at his back, swinging his hips, leering, as if to take him from behind.
It was after midnight when the minduk brought the music to an end. He bantered for a while with the shaman, who coaxed the pesakit out of his trance and instructed him to stay calm when he went home: he needed all his energy for the next performance. The shaman sang a benediction, the minduk crept away on his knees, tossing jasmine over his shoulder to close the stage, and from a nearby house women brought out cups of coffee layered with condensed milk. How to remain calm after this?
“Politicians are a terrible people,” Anthony Burgess declares in his autobiography, Little Wilson and Big God, recalling his service as an education officer during the Malayan Emergency (1948–60), which included a stint in Kota Bharu. He wrote his first novels in Malaya and Brunei, and upon his return to England, his tour cut short by the diagnosis of an inoperable brain tumor, he set out to write enough books to provide for his wife after he was gone. In the year that doctors gave him to live he finished nine novels—and then discovered that he was perfectly healthy, by which time he had learned how to live by his pen. Had an incorrect diagnosis spurred the development of a great novelist? Perhaps. A shaman might have divined that he suffered from a blockage of his angin, but Burgess was in all likelihood never treated by a shaman. And no one ever would be again, if the PAS leader tipped to become Kelantan’s next deputy prime minister had his way. Husam bin Musa was the sort of politician that Burgess despised.
Eddin