snatch up my cork helmet and spring into my cart, which Aboo Din had kept
waiting inside the stables for the moment when I should relent.
Since Baboo had become a hero and earned the appellation of the Harimau-
Anak, his vanity directed his footsteps toward Kampong Glam, the Malay
quarter of Singapore. Here he was generally to be found, seated on a richly hued
Indian rug, with his feet drawn up under him, amid a circle of admiring
shopkeepers, syces, kebuns, and fishermen, narrating for the hundredth time how
he had been caught at Changhi by a tiger, carried through the jungle on its back
until he came to a great banian tree, into which he had crawled while the tiger
slept, how a sladang (wild bull) came out of the lagoon and killed the tiger, and
how Tuan Consul and Aboo Din, the father, had found him and kissed him many
times.
Often he enlarged on the well-known story and repeated long conversations that
he had carried on with the tiger while they were journeying through the jungle.
A brass lamp hung above his head in which the cocoanut oil sputtered and
burned and cast a fitful half-light about the box-like stall.
Only the eager faces of the listeners stood out clear and distinct against the
shadowy background of tapestries from Madras and Bokhara, soft rich rugs from
Afghanistan and Persia, curiously wrought finger bowls of brass and copper
from Delhi and Siam, and piles of cunningly painted sarongs from Java.
Close against a naked fisherman sat the owner of the bazaar in tall, conical silk-
plaited hat and flowing robes, ministering to the wants of the little actor, as the
soft, monotonous voice paused for a brief instant for the tiny cups of black
coffee.
I never had the heart to interrupt him in the midst of one of these dramatic
recitals, but would stand respectfully without the circle of light until he had
finished the last sentence.
He was not frightened when I thrust the squatting natives right and left, and he
did not forget to arise and touch the back of his open palm to his forehead, with a
calm and reverent, “Tabek, Tuan” (Greeting, my lord).