This short story was published on Saturday, 28 February 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 6th Kabesa Hugh Ransom Stanley Zehnder and is set via dreamfishing at Telok Paku Camp on Saturday, 26 June 1937 as it was documented in The Malaya Tribune two days later.
By day Telok Paku had been all whistle and bark, the metallic cough of the Lewis gun, boots combing the grass into obedience. The Tribune had come and gone that afternoon, its photographer arranging men into geometry: platoon in line, section in advance, officers on the flank with binoculars raised as if they could see into the next war and choose its manners.
Now the camp lay under a wet, thinking dark.
Major Hugh Ransom Stanley Zehnder stood just beyond the verandah of the wooden hutments, cap tucked beneath his arm. Fifty-eight, though the number did not sit on him heavily. The years had thinned his hair and salted his moustache, but his back remained straight in the way of men who had once been told they would never be gentlemen and decided to practise the posture anyway.
From the parade ground came the low murmur of D Company settling into itself. Eurasian voices, clipped and easy with one another, the vowels of Singapore and Malacca braided together. He could tell them apart even without looking. Aeria’s laugh carried; young De Souza’s orders were brisk, still testing the shape of command in his mouth. Herman Marie de Souza Jr. had taken Malacca’s D Company only months ago. The tide was turning; younger men were finally stepping forward.
Hugh remembered when there had been no tide at all.
In 1918, four months before the Armistice, D Company had been drawn up almost as an afterthought, as if the war had suddenly discovered the Straits and required its Eurasians. Founder members: Noel Clarke, LeCain, Angus, Aeria. Hugh among them. They had stood in borrowed khaki with the peculiar awareness of being permitted. Not equal, not yet, but permitted.
Before that, colour bars and decrees. European descent on both sides. A Class carriages for men who were told they were not quite white, not quite anything. Hugh had learned early that the Empire liked its categories clean. It did not know what to do with children born in between.
He had married Edith in December 1915, in the thick of that in-between. Edith Louis Daly, precise and warm, sister to Alice, which made him Noel Clarke’s brother-in-law and tied the lines tighter than any regimental cord. The Clarke house had been full of argument and tea and a kind of determined civility. Noel had written to governors; Edwin before him had pressed for an Eurasian company when it seemed a foolish dream. Men who refused to accept that inefficiency was a racial trait and not an administrative convenience.
A match flared somewhere behind him.
“Evening, sir.”
Hugh did not turn at once. He knew the voice. William Athelstan Aeria had succeeded him the year before as company commander, and Hugh had stepped up to second-in-command of the battalion. It was a promotion that tasted less like ascent and more like stewardship.
“Evening, Will.”
They stood side by side, watching the last glow leave the sky above the palms. Beyond the camp, the island went about its business. Rubber and tin and dinners under slow fans. The Governor had no appetite for visible defences; to build was to alarm. Better to keep morale intact, as if morale were a seawall.
Yet here at Telok Paku, the men had demonstrated platoon attacks, gas respirators, steel helmets that sat awkwardly on Eurasian brows that had once been told they could not command Europeans. The Intelligence section in HQ Wing had filed its notes. Signals sections had laid their wires like veins across the grass.
Hugh felt the old ache in his left knee, a souvenir of drills on harder ground. He wondered, not for the first time, what would come of all this careful preparation. No plans for civil defence had yet been introduced at the Legislative Council. Shenton Thomas trusted in commerce and calm. The island trusted in its distance from Europe’s tempers.
But distance was a theory.
He could hear the men of D Company settling, rifles stacked, boots unlaced. Eurasians were the first non-Europeans to join the Corps, they liked to say. It was true. It had taken decades and petitions and indignities.
It had taken being told that one could never be a gentleman and deciding to behave as one anyway.
A breeze moved across the parade ground, lifting the canvas edges of the tents so that they breathed like sleeping animals. Somewhere a kettle clinked; somewhere else a man coughed and was answered with a muttered joke. The night stitched them together more honestly than the day did. In daylight there were ranks and distinctions: A Company European, C Company Scottish, D Company Eurasian, F Company Malay. By lantern light there were only silhouettes and the shared grammar of fatigue.
Will struck the spent match against his boot and let it fall.
“They performed well,” he said. “The Lewis section especially.”
“They did,” Hugh replied. He could still see the demonstration as it had unfolded that afternoon. The prone gunner, cheek against wood and steel. The loader poised, hand steady. Section commanders under Lieutenant Travis moving forward to inspect positions before the simulated attack. The choreography had been clean. The photographer had crouched low to make it heroic.
“The Tribune will like it,” Will added.
Hugh did not answer at once. He listened instead to the camp. To the faint metallic tick as a rifle cooled. To the insects sawing at the dark. To the low hum of a generator from the Signals section near HQ Wing, where wires lay coiled like patient snakes.
“The Tribune likes a photograph,” he said, finally. “It does not like a warning.”
It was as close as he would come to prophecy.
He thought of Edith at home, the house quiet now that the heat had broken. She would be reading by the lamp, perhaps, or writing a letter. Edith had a way of writing that made events line up as if they had been inevitable. She had stood beside him in 1915 when he wore his uniform as both privilege and argument. She had endured the sideways looks, the social arithmetic of who could sit where and speak to whom.
Alice would have been there too, and Noel, leaning back in his chair, hands folded over his stomach as if he were holding in a tide. Brother-in-law. Founder member. A man who had believed that D Company was not an indulgence but a correction.
Hugh turned his gaze back to the huts where D Company rested.
When he had first stood in khaki in 1918, he had felt the weight of scrutiny more than the weight of the rifle. Eurasians were efficient when needed, expendable when convenient. The Corps had been disbanded once before, in 1887, by proclamation. Efficiency was a word that could be arranged to mean whatever authority required.
And yet here they were in 1937, not as an experiment but as a fixture. One battalion, then two. Headquarters in Singapore. Signals sections. Intelligence officers. Support Company. Penang with its Malay and Chinese and Eurasian companies. Malacca with its own D Company now under De Souza’s command. A latticework of men who had learned to drill against history.
A sentry’s boots crunched over gravel as he approached the verandah.
“All secure, sir.”
Hugh nodded. “Very good.”
The young man hesitated, then added, “Fine display today, sir.”
It was not flattery. It was gratitude disguised as report.
“Get some rest,” Hugh said. “We’ll do it all again in the morning.”
The sentry saluted and moved off, silhouette dissolving into the dark.
Will shifted his weight. “You ever think?” he began, then stopped.
“Think what?”
“That it might come to something more than display?”
Hugh considered the question as one might consider a loaded weapon: not with fear, but with care.
“Yes,” he said. “I do.”
He stepped down from the verandah and onto the grass. The damp rose through the thin leather of his shoes. He walked a few paces toward the parade ground, Will following.
“How can one forget,” Hugh said quietly, “what our fathers were told?”
Will did not answer. He knew.
“That they were not quite fit. Not quite equal. Not quite white. Not quite anything. That they could not expect to go to Britain, could not hold certain offices, could not command certain men.”
He stopped and faced the dim outline of the huts.
“And yet we command.”
Not out of rebellion, not out of spectacle. Simply because they had learned to do the work.
In the darkness, D Company breathed. Men who travelled in A Class carriages because B Class would not have them. Men who had been told they could not be gentlemen and who now stood watch over an island that preferred not to imagine its own vulnerability.
Hugh felt the ache in his knee again and welcomed it. It reminded him that time was real, that bodies paid for the right to stand upright.
“Hugh,” Will said softly.
“Yes?”
“If it comes…”
“…we will meet it standing,” Hugh finished. “We prepare because we exist.”
A lantern flared briefly in one of the huts. A figure shifted behind canvas. The men of D Company were not ornamental. They were clerks and mechanics, teachers and shopkeepers by day. By night they were riflemen. Not permitted, not experimental. Necessary.
Hugh felt the weight of that word settle on his shoulders.
Necessary.
A distant rumble drifted across the water. Not thunder. A ship, perhaps, or the long breath of some engine beyond the horizon. The sound was faint, but it carried.
Hugh looked toward the dark line where sea met sky.
Islands were never as alone as they believed.
Behind him, a voice called softly from one of the huts. Laughter followed, quick and contained. The camp did not sleep heavily. It never had. Eurasians had learned generations ago that safety was conditional.
He placed his cap back on his head and adjusted it with care.
“Go turn in, Will,” he said. “We begin early.”
“And you?”
Hugh allowed himself the smallest smile.
“I’ll walk the perimeter.”
Will saluted him gently and withdrew, boots fading into the grass.
Hugh began to walk.
He moved along the edge of the parade ground, boots quiet on the damp soil, the camp thinning into shadow around him.
Beyond the last hut, the land sloped gently toward scrub and water. The perimeter was not dramatic. No barbed wire glittered in the moonlight, no searchlights swept the sky. It was marked instead by habit, by memory of where one stopped and where one began again. A boundary maintained more by discipline than by fence.
He passed the stacked crates of the Support Company, neatly tarpaulined. Ammunition accounted for. Stores logged. Somewhere inside HQ Wing, papers lay in orderly piles. Reports drafted. Names listed. Recommendations prepared.
Tomorrow or next week, he would sit again in the Legislative Council chamber, unofficial Eurasian member among men who wore their authority like tailored cloth. Edwin had sat there first from 1923 until his passing in 1926, careful and insistent. Noel after him, from 1926 to 1936, steady as a tide against rock. Hugh had taken the seat not as ornament, not as novelty, but because someone had to speak without apology.
He had learned the cadence of that room. The way proposals were framed as prudence when they meant delay. The way concerns about cost could eclipse concerns about vulnerability. Civil defence had been mentioned, yes. Debated in passing. Deferred in practice. Visible fortifications, some argued, would unsettle the population. Better to protect morale than to disturb it.
He wondered what morale would look like under bombardment.
A sentry at the far post straightened as Hugh approached.
“All quiet, sir.”
“Good.”
The young man’s rifle caught a thread of moonlight. His features were soft still, not yet carved by long years of compromise. A Eurasian boy, perhaps twenty. In another decade he might be arguing policy in a council chamber or drilling men on this same ground. Or he might be somewhere else entirely, the map rearranged around him.
Hugh nodded and moved on.
The night air carried salt from the sea and the faint sweetness of crushed grass. He thought of Edith again, of how she would ask about the demonstration with a practical interest that was never naive. She had listened to Edwin’s accounts, to Noel’s frustrations, to Hugh’s own measured reports. She understood that representation without preparedness was theatre. She understood that preparedness without representation was vulnerability.
He paused at the edge of the scrub and looked back.
The distant rumble came again, clearer this time. A vessel moving through the Straits, perhaps. Trade flowing as it always had. Ships were Singapore’s lifeblood and its vulnerability both.
He turned back toward the huts.
Edwin had not been loud. He had been relentless. The kind of man who could sit at a table of men who did not want him there and still make them listen, not through performance but through precision.
Noel had brought a different cadence: more forceful, less patient with the theatre of delay. Hugh had seen Noel exit the chamber after sessions with that particular kind of exhaustion that came from being asked to justify your own reality.
Now the seat was Hugh’s.
Hugh stopped near the edge of the field where the grass gave way to scrub. He could smell the sea. He could hear, faintly, the movement of water. He imagined the shipping lanes in the dark, the commerce and the confidence sliding past one another.
What would Edwin make of it, he wondered.
He would not be surprised.
Edwin had been too good a reader of systems to believe in Singapore’s immunity. He had known that the colony’s comfort was borrowed, that the calm depended on everyone agreeing not to name the storm. He would have looked at the absence of civil defence planning and heard, beneath the polite language, the same old instruction: do not disturb the Europeans. Do not distress the population. Do not threaten rubber and tin.
Edwin would have hated the word morale being used like a charm, as if it could ward off aircraft.
He would have said, quietly, that morale was not the same as readiness. That confidence was not the same as defence. That a society could be calm all the way into catastrophe.
Hugh pictured Edwin in the Council chamber, fingers steepled, eyes steady.
Gentlemen, Edwin would have begun, and the word would have cut because they had once insisted he could never be one.
Then he would have spoken of practicalities. Of shelters. Of drills. Of warning systems. Of a civilian population that would need more than reassurance when the first bombs fell. He would have asked why an island so proud of its commerce had so little appetite for the cost of protecting the people who made that commerce possible.
He would have pointed out, with cruel simplicity, that refusing to build visible defences did not make Singapore safer. It only made the shock larger when reality arrived.
Hugh resumed walking.
The camp’s orderliness comforted him and angered him at the same time. Here there were inventories and schedules, signal lines tested and section commanders trained to inspect positions before an attack. Here there was at least the acknowledgement that threat existed, even if it was framed as demonstration for a newspaper.
But beyond Telok Paku, beyond the parade ground and the stacked crates, the island still insisted on its own exception.
Hugh could almost hear Edwin’s voice again, not accusing, not pleading. Simply naming.
You cannot bargain with the future by refusing to see it.
A hut door creaked softly. A man stepped out, bare-armed, and stood for a moment looking up at the sky, then went back in. Life went on. Even vigilance had its ordinary rhythm.
Hugh turned toward HQ Wing.
In the Council chamber, his words were weighed for tone, for tact, for whether they inconvenienced the wrong people. Here, under the palms, the truth did not need to be polite.
War was coming.
Singapore was not prepared.
He felt the weight of that fact settle in his chest like a stone you could not swallow.
He thought again of Edwin, and of Noel, and of the long chain of men who had been asked to speak gently so that others could remain comfortable. He thought of the young Eurasian sentry at the far post, twenty and uncarved by compromise. He thought of Edith, reading by lamplight, and of the kind of fear a woman carries when she knows her husband can see what others refuse to name.
Hugh climbed the steps of the verandah and stood still, letting the night settle.
Tomorrow he would drill men again.
Soon he would sit in that chamber again and speak the words that would be minuted, debated, softened, deferred.
But here, at Telok Paku, with the sea muttering beyond the scrub and the camp breathing in disciplined sleep, he allowed himself one private, unminuted vow:
He would speak as Edwin had spoken. Not for permission. Not for applause.
For preparation.
For the people who would pay for everyone else’s refusal to look.
A twig snapped softly somewhere behind him.
Hugh turned, hand rising by instinct to the place where his sidearm would sit on a different kind of night. It was only Will, moving carefully so as not to wake the men, his cap in his hand as if he had come out to borrow a sentence and return it intact.
“Couldn’t sleep?” Hugh asked.
Will gave a small shrug. “Too much…in the air.”
Yes, Hugh thought. Not the humidity. The other thing. The pressure you feel before a storm that has not yet been announced.
Will stepped onto the verandah and leaned lightly against a post, looking out at the dark field as if it were a ledger that refused to balance.
“You were thinking of Edwin,” he said.
It was not a question. Will had known Edwin too. Not as long, perhaps, but enough. Everyone who had watched Edwin sit in that chamber carried some imprint of him, the way men carry the memory of a drill sergeant’s voice even years later.
Hugh’s gaze stayed on the parade ground. “Was I so obvious?”
Will’s mouth flickered. “Only to people who’ve had to learn to read what’s not written down.”
Hugh let out a quiet breath, almost a laugh.
“He’d have hated this,” Hugh said at last, not meaning the camp, but the wider island beyond it. “The way they keep saying morale as if it’s a sandbag. The way they keep choosing calm over preparation.”
Will’s fingers tightened on his cap brim. “You think it’s that bad?”
Hugh looked at him then. In the lamplight Will’s face was lined by responsibility in the same way Hugh’s was, though differently. Will had the burden of men under him. Hugh had that, and something else besides: the burden of sentences spoken into a room that could turn them into mist.
“It’s worse than bad,” Hugh said. “It’s tidy.”
Will frowned.
“Tidy,” Hugh repeated. “A neat story. Singapore is prosperous. Singapore is distant from Europe’s tempers. Singapore shouldn’t alarm the population with trenches and shelters. Therefore Singapore will be safe.” He tapped two fingers against the verandah rail. “That kind of reasoning survives any evidence you put in front of it. It’s made to.”
Will stared out at the dark, as if he could see the Council chamber through the palms.
“Edwin would’ve…” Will began.
“…forced them to name it,” Hugh finished. His voice stayed low, but it sharpened. “He would’ve said: you can’t defend morale with silence. You can’t protect people with reassurance. You can’t pretend a colony’s value won’t attract attention.”
Will swallowed. “And Noel?”
“Noel would’ve made it personal.” Hugh’s expression softened slightly at the thought. “He’d have talked about families. About women and children in shophouses. About the docks. About what happens when warning comes too late.”
Will nodded slowly, absorbing it like an order.
“And you?” Will asked.
Hugh felt the weight of that simple question. Not theatrical. Not rhetorical. The question of a man who would have to stand beside him when the day arrived that words became insufficient.
“I’ll do what they did,” Hugh said. “Only in my voice. I’ll push where I can push. I’ll make it hard for them to keep pretending.” He paused. “And I’ll keep this place ready.”
Will’s shoulders eased a fraction, as if a line had been tied off.
A pause settled between them. In it, the camp breathed. Somewhere a man shifted in his bunk. Somewhere the faint buzz of an insect found the lamp and danced around it like a small, stubborn idea.
Will cleared his throat. “Do you ever get tired of it?”
Hugh didn’t pretend not to understand.
“Tired,” he repeated. “Of being the one who has to say the obvious out loud.”
Will nodded once.
Hugh considered the night, the sea, the unseen shipping lanes, and the unseen future moving toward them with the patience of something inevitable.
“Yes,” he said. “I get tired.”
Then, after a beat: “But I don’t get unsure.”
Will’s eyes held his.
“Edwin used to say something,” Will murmured, as if testing memory. “Not exactly those words, but…” He searched for it, then gave up and let it come out plain. “He used to say you don’t wait for permission to be responsible.”
Hugh felt something in his chest loosen at that. Not comfort. Recognition.
“That’s right,” he said quietly.
For a moment neither of them spoke. Two men on a verandah in a humid dark, listening to the world’s silence and refusing to mistake it for safety.
At last Hugh adjusted his cap again, not because it needed it, but because the gesture gave his hands somewhere to put the feeling.
“Go back in, Will,” he said. “You’ll need your head tomorrow.”
Will hesitated. Then he nodded, once, firmly. He took one step, then paused again, glancing back.
“If it comes,” Will said, voice low, almost conversational, echoing Hugh, “D Company will meet it standing.”
Hugh’s mouth curved, small and sharp. Will’s smile answered his, brief as a struck match, then he turned and disappeared into the dark between the huts.
Hugh remained on the verandah a moment longer, the lamp’s weak halo on his hands, the sea’s distant mutter in his ears.
Then he turned in as well, carrying Edwin’s relentlessness and Noel’s steadiness like twin weights in his pocket, not burdens exactly, but tools.
Outside, Telok Paku kept breathing.
Lightly.
Ready.