This short story was published on Monday, 2 March 2026 and is part of the Kakantiga Ultra or Cantos of the Beyond: a daily new short story or play dreamfishing and celebrating past, present, possible and future Kristang culture. This short story features the 8th Kabesa Charles Joseph Pemberton Paglar and is set via dreamfishing in Singapore after one of Charles’s visits to Bahau on Saturday, 25 March 1944 as reported in The Syonan Times.
“And what else did you think I was going to say?”
Dr. Charles Joseph Pemberton Paglar folded the Syonan Times once, precisely along its crease, and laid it on the teak table as though it were a surgical instrument. The headline still glared upward in thick black letters, obedient and theatrical:
Spirit Of Contentment Written On Settlers’ Faces.
Outside, the March heat pressed against the shutters of his house at Joo Chiat Place. Somewhere down the road, a bicycle bell rang, thin and defiant. War had a way of flattening sound into metal.
Ronald Minjoot stood near the window, hat tucked under his arm, his jacket slung over the back of a chair as if the humidity had personally offended him. He had already read the article. Everyone had. In Syonan, news travelled faster than quinine ran out.
“You said what you had to say,” Minjoot replied, the words careful but not timid.
Paglar’s mouth tilted. At forty-nine, he wore authority the way some men wore linen suits: lightly, but never accidentally. His hair, still thick, was combed back from a brow that had learned to conceal its arithmetic. Batu Gajah. Penang convent. St. Francis Institution. King Edward VII College. Edinburgh’s Triple Q. Johor’s hunting fields with the Sultan. The clinic at 32 Joo Chiat, financed by money that had long since grown complicated. The man contained multitudes, and not all of them polite.
“I said what they needed printed,” he said.
He tapped the page where his own name was inked again and again, as if repetition could convert a man into a slogan. Leader of the Syonan Eurasians. Inspection Party. Contentment. Cooperation.
He had described strong bodies, sun-browned and bare-backed under the Negeri Sembilan sky. Bridges built. Forests felled. A stage erected with a large Hinomaru hanging behind it like an unavoidable sun. He had said the men were in good health. That their spirit shone on their faces.
He had not said how many lay feverish at night.
He had not said the word malaria.
He had not said that he drove the road to Bahau with medicine packed tight in wooden crates, counting the bends where the jungle leaned too close. He had not said that on one such road the MPAJA had stepped from the trees, rifles raised, calling him collaborator, traitor, puppet. He had not said that a single officer, older and perhaps more tired, had lowered the barrel and spared him with a flick of the hand.
In print, he was a contented man admiring contented settlers.
In motion, he was something else entirely.
Minjoot crossed the room and rested his knuckles lightly on the newspaper. “Well...the Japanese will read it as loyalty.”
Paglar’s eyes did not leave the page.
“And the rest?” he asked.
Minjoot hesitated. Outside, a lorry groaned past, its engine coughing as if even machinery found the Occupation indigestible. A Japanese sentry’s voice carried faintly from the junction, sharp and efficient. Then quiet again.
“The rest will read it as protection,” Minjoot said. “Or as surrender. Depending on how hungry they are.”
Paglar gave a soft exhale that might have been a laugh. “Hunger simplifies morality.”
He rose from the chair and walked to the sideboard where a glass decanter waited. He poured two fingers of whisky into a tumbler, not offering any to his guest. The bottle caught the light like a small, private rebellion.
“Bahau is not a headline,” he said. “It is mud. And fever. And boys who thought farming meant romance.”
Minjoot shifted his weight. He was younger, narrower in the shoulders, a man whose respect for Paglar was threaded with unease. “You told them the settlers are healthy.”
“I told them they look healthy.”
“That is not the same thing.”
“No,” Paglar agreed. “It is not.”
He took a slow sip.
“The Inspection Party needed a success. Tokyo needs a success. Shinozaki needs a success. And the Eurasians,” he added, turning at last to face Minjoot, “need time.”
Time was the only currency left that could not be confiscated outright.
Minjoot’s gaze flicked again to the folded newspaper. “The MPAJA will not read between your lines.”
“They rarely do,” Paglar said. “They read blood.”
A silence settled between them, thick but not hostile. The house held the faint scent of carbolic soap and paper. On a shelf lay medical journals from Edinburgh, their spines still stiff with authority from another empire. On another wall, a photograph of a clinic opening, men in suits smiling as if the world were permanently arranged.
“You are walking a narrow bridge, Charles,” Minjoot said quietly.
“I am a doctor,” Paglar replied. “Bridges are preferable to graves.”
He moved back to the table and placed his palm flat over the headline, as if steadying a patient before incision.
“They wanted contentment,” he continued. “So I gave them contentment. It costs less ink than truth.”
“And the truth?”
Paglar’s eyes hardened, not with anger but with calculation.
“The truth,” he said, “is that half of them will not last another season if the quinine does not arrive.”
Minjoot did not look away. Paglar’s hand remained on the headline. For a moment it seemed he was measuring its pulse, as if newsprint might betray arrhythmia.
“They cleared too fast,” he continued. “The forest does not forgive haste. The ground there is damp, Ronald. It holds water the way a grudge holds memory. You cut it open and it answers with mosquitoes.”
Minjoot let out a breath through his nose. “You make it sound like a patient.”
“It is,” Paglar said. “A patient misdiagnosed as a solution.”
Outside, a child’s laugh rang out and was quickly hushed. Even laughter had acquired edges.
Minjoot stepped away from the window and took the chair opposite the doctor. “Some say you should have refused from the beginning.”
“Some say many things from comfortable verandahs.”
Paglar moved back to his seat. He did not sit fully; he hovered, restless.
“If I refuse,” he said evenly, “another man accepts. Perhaps one eager for proximity to power. Perhaps one who believes Tokyo’s promises. Perhaps one who does not drive north with crates of medicine because he is too busy perfecting his speeches.”
“And so you speak instead.”
“I speak,” Paglar corrected, “and I drive.”
The room seemed to tilt slightly toward the north, toward Bahau, toward the muddy grid of plots and the long barracks of bamboo and zinc.
“And you will keep driving?” Minjoot asked.
Paglar’s expression did not change. “Until they forbid it.”
“And if they do?”
“Then I find another road.”
Minjoot studied him, as if attempting to determine where resolve ended and recklessness began. “You realise,” he said slowly, “that you are becoming the face of this.”
Paglar’s hand drifted from the newspaper to the edge of the table. His fingers were steady, surgeon-steady.
“I am already the face,” he replied. “Better mine than someone who mistakes obedience for virtue.”
A gust of wind pressed briefly against the shutters, rattling them in their frame. The sound was small but abrupt, like knuckles against a coffin lid.
Minjoot lowered his voice. “There are rumours.”
“There are always rumours.”
“They say lists are being kept. Names of those who speak on air. Those who recruit. Those who organise.”
Paglar’s gaze flickered toward the shelf where the medical journals stood in tidy ranks. The Royal Colleges. The Triple Q. The kind of credentials that once seemed permanent.
“Let them keep their lists,” he said.
“You are not afraid?”
Paglar considered the question without vanity.
“I am afraid of incompetence,” he said. “I am afraid of preventable deaths. I am afraid of a mother burying her child because the shipment was delayed or because a man with a title preferred applause to logistics.”
“And prison?”
Paglar’s mouth curved faintly. “I have seen wards more crowded.”
Minjoot let out a short breath that was not quite a laugh. “You treat treason like influenza.”
“I treat it like fever,” Paglar corrected. “High, dramatic, and often survivable if one does not panic.”
A pause.
“You understand,” Minjoot said carefully, “that when the British return, they may not care for nuance.”
“Nuance is rarely popular with returning empires.”
Paglar reached for the decanter again, then stopped himself. The whisky remained untouched in the glass, amber and patient.
“When they return,” he continued, “they will want clarity. Heroes. Villains. Clean lines. But war does not leave clean lines. It leaves residue.”
“And you?”
“I will stand where I stood,” he said simply. “Between.”
Minjoot looked at him for a long moment. “Between what?”
“Between collapse and compromise. Between pride and extinction. Between the jungle and the city.”
His voice had lost its edge. It was quieter now, almost reflective.
“You think that makes you righteous?” Minjoot asked.
“No,” Paglar said. “It makes me necessary.”
The words hung there, unadorned.
Outside, the bicycle bell rang yet again, as if the street itself were insisting on continuity.
Minjoot rose at last. “You are gambling your name.”
“My name,” Paglar replied, “is a smaller thing than their lives.”
He walked his friend to the door once more, the latch cool beneath his hand.
On the threshold, Minjoot hesitated. “Charles.”
“Yes.”
“If history turns against you…”
Paglar’s gaze held steady.
“Then let it,” he said. “History has the luxury of hindsight. I have only the present.”
Minjoot stepped into the light. The sun caught briefly on his hat before he disappeared down Joo Chiat Place.
Paglar closed the door and leaned against it for a moment, allowing the stillness to settle around him. The house seemed to exhale.
He returned to the table and unfolded the paper again.
Spirit Of Contentment Written On Settlers’ Faces.
He imagined the faces in Bahau. The boys who had once worn office collars now bare-backed under a punishing sky. The women stirring tapioca in makeshift kitchens. The fevered lying under mosquito nets that sagged like tired lungs.
He imagined the stage with its large Hinomaru hanging behind it, bright and absolute.
He imagined the jungle waiting.
Then, for a brief moment, dreamfishing moved through him, not as spectacle but as memory ahead of time. He saw another courtroom, bright and British, his name spoken in measured tones. He saw prison bars that smelled faintly of disinfectant and accusation. He saw, beyond that, a cemetery where thousands would one day stand as his cortege passed, faces lifted not in contentment but in complicated gratitude.
He did not smile.
He folded the paper once more.
“If I must be remembered,” he murmured into the quiet, “let it be for keeping the door open.”
He stepped to the window and pushed one shutter slightly ajar. Heat rushed in, thick and immediate.
From somewhere down the road came the sound of ordinary life continuing: a vendor calling, a cartwheel turning, a child insisting on being heard.
Charles stood there in the half-light, neither hero nor coward, neither pure nor damned, but a man counting breaths across distance.
North, the jungle held its fever.
South, the city held its judgement.
Between them, Charles Joseph Pemberton Paglar prepared to drive again.