sweet scent of a jasmine tree gave way to the smell of curry and then the stench of sewage. A dog barked, two chickens pecked at grain by a small house, and a baby crawled toward the door. We entered the Kali temple in which Eddin performed his monthly ritual bath, a shed the size of a walk-in closet lined with shelves on which were laid offerings for the goddess: silver canisters filled with red or yellow dye, jars of honey and spirits, bowls of jasmine blossoms and dried flowers, a coconut, three bottles of milk, lemons stuck to the prongs of a trident. Eddin said that during one ceremony a king cobra had slithered into the temple and right back out again.
He had become a devotee of Kali during the troubles in 1997. The Asian financial crisis, Anwar Ibrahim’s arrest, a clampdown on the media—these were connected in his mind to the mysterious rash he developed at that time. Repeated visits to the doctor over the course of seven months brought no relief, and just when he despaired of getting well something providential happened, or so it seemed to him. The newspaper he was working for sent him to the Brickfields neighborhood of Kuala Lumpur to do a feature on a Hindu temple saved from demolition by its priestess, an illiterate old woman who had returned from shopping one day to find a crew of men preparing to raze the shrine to make room for another apartment building to house the burgeoning Indian population. Eighty years before, an indentured Tamil railway worker, inspired by a dream to plant his trident here, had invited Kali, the mother goddess, the goddess of death and destruction, to enter this space, and now his spirited granddaughter told Eddin that in an age of incessant strife she had to preserve the temple; for Kali devours delusion, evil, and ignorance. Once she had answered his questions, she demanded to ask one of her own.
“You know why you really came here, don’t you?” she said. His suffering, she explained, was caused by Kali, Shiva’s consort, who was inside him: Kali, the dark goddess of time and change, customarily adorned with a necklace of severed heads, earrings of children’s corpses, and bracelets of serpents, her long hair in a wild tangle, blood smeared on her lips. The priestess advised Eddin to devote himself to the goddess, who danced on the battlefield after slaying the demon king—and within three months his rash was gone.
It was around this time that the paper put him in cold storage. Every day he would write a story, and then he would be summoned to the editor’s office to watch him spike it. How the editor relished pushing the delete button, and reprimanding him for the tie he wore, his worsening attitude, anything at all. The final straw for Eddin was the order to attend the Basic English classes convened for Malay speakers.
“Fuck that,” he said, and quit.
Providence entered the picture again, now through the British Council, which sent him to London to do his MA, and on his return he threw himself into his work at Pusaka, the origin of which he traced to a shadow puppet performance that he had attended in 1992, when he was studying politics at the University of Malaya. The spectacle of one man conducting an orchestra, improvising dialogue for scores of characters, and playing seven puppets at a time convinced him to apprentice himself to this master. So he took a bus to Kelantan, ignoring his mother’s warnings that he might fall victim to black magic, and asked a taxi driver in Kota Bharu if he knew where the puppeteer lived. The taxi drove him straight to his house—which Eddin interpreted as a sign that this was the right thing for him to do. Then the puppeteer accepted him as a student, though for the first eighteen months of his apprenticeship he was not allowed to touch a puppet.
“It was all banter,” he said, which is an essential part of instruction in traditional theater. But the puppet master was always observing him—how he held a cigarette, a cup of coffee—in order to discern his individual style.
“He told me from the beginning that I would never perform like him,” said Eddin, “but in my own way. After ten years of studying, I still haven’t performed.”
For acquiring the technical skills of puppetry was only part of his apprenticeship. More important was his immersion in Kelantan’s culture, which led to the founding of Pusaka. Eddin’s ambitions for his organization went beyond documenting and saving the traditional ceremonies: he wanted to expand their purview to engage urban communities and offer to the disaffected creative outlets rooted in the indigenous art forms of the land—admittedly a controversial idea.
“The government’s strategy is to create a climate of fear,” he said, “but Pusaka is here to ruffle the leaves, in the Malay phrase.”
And ruffle them he did. His organization took its name from his childhood home (putra pusaka, “princely heritage”), and if he would not say whether he was the prince of the house he did recall with love the nurse who had taught him to speak Malay. (He had more complicated feelings about the gardener who had taught him to catch the king cobras nesting under the staircase and to smoke.) In the mixed heritage of the Malay Peninsula, with its varieties of religious experience and cultural practice, he looked for solutions to social problems, which neither the single-minded Islamists nor the inertia-bound ruling party knew how to address. Amok was a Malay word, he liked to tell me, insisting that in such a constricted society it was only natural for some to run amok, to go mad with rage, taking a dagger or a machete to anyone they met. The papers carried stories of men going on killing sprees for no apparent reason, but Eddin suspected that their suicidal frenzies were linked to a lack of creative means by which to express their disillusionment, their fundamental powerlessness. Take the bored young men of Kelantan, who had nothing better to do than visit prostitutes in Thailand and return infected with HIV or sign up with Jemaah Islamiyah: the traditional ceremonies offered imaginative spaces in which to work out one’s anxiety or despair. Eddin’s devotion to Kali (who was, not coincidentally, the patron goddess of Kelantan) served a similar purpose.
In the temple, Pauline Fan, his helpmate and partner (another providential figure in his life, he said), took the flowers that he had bought from a street vendor and suggested he change into his ceremonial attire. She is a delicate Eurasian woman, a translator of Paul Celan and the manager of Pusaka, the calm eye in the storm that is Eddin Khoo. She laid the flowers on the altar, while he put on a white wrap, cinching it below the tattoo of a king cobra on his chest. The assistant to the priestess tolled the bell twice—the signal for Eddin to pour a canister of dye over the statues of Kali, Ganesha, and the snake goddess—and then the priestess held a candle made of camphor before him and Pauline. This ritual was repeated several times until the floor was covered with dye, and when Eddin went outside to wash off the priestess cleared the altar, wiped the tiles with a rag, mopped up the dye. Then she stopped to look at me, and after a moment she asked Pauline to translate for her. She said that although I was inclined to be a priest I need not worry about the external trappings of religion since I carried the spirit of faith in my heart; that I had two daughters; that there were tensions in my marriage; that I should resolve differences in my life quietly; that I should devote myself to my writing, having lost precious time in the last years because of other obligations; that my back and chest hurt; that I should not trust others too much; that whatever I put my mind to in the next five years would likely be successful, though for my own happiness I should spend my time writing; that I should drink more water. The priestess said that Kali was speaking through her, and that she had no choice but to tell me what Amma, the Mother, was reading in my soul.
She went into her house and returned with wedges of watermelon, which we ate at a table outside the temple, and then it was time for us to drive through heavy traffic to the weekly night market near Pauline’s apartment, where hordes of shoppers looked over the goods on display in the stalls—fruits and vegetables and spices, clothes and utensils, balloons, toys. One man offered back scratchers for sale. A leper begged for money. A man in a white skullcap asked for donations for the construction of a mosque. We drifted along in the crowd, eating pancakes made of flour, sugar, and crushed peanuts, and washed them down with coconut milk. Eddin recalled his visit to an astrologer in India.
“You’re three million years old,” she told him, “and sometimes you feel it, don’t you?”
“This will take fifty years for the United States to live down,” said the Western official.
We were having drinks by the pool at the Hotel Intercontinental, in Kuala Lumpur, and as the sun sank through the haze of fires set by farmers clearing jungles in Sumatra the diplomat was considering