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their drugs discreetly well into the sixties.
    I look as if I have just emerged from such a den, as I try to approach a European-looking gentleman in a three-piece suit and a laptop case. To my consternation, he doesn’t slow down but shrugs his shoulders gallically and ignores me in his rush: out of all refusals his hurt more. I feel as if I have to relearn to walk in public, for, as befits the Central Business District, it’s busy, busy, busy. Everyone is in a hurry and if you turn unexpectedly, somebody’s bound to charge into you. My sling seem to attract knocks: passers-by stare at it in Darwinian critique, perplexed by the ang moh who should have known better than to go travelling since he’s so demonstrably a cripple. They miss no opportunity to underline the message by colliding against my arm as hard as they can. Only by trial and error and doubling up on my own trail a couple of times do I end up outside the Fullerton, one of the most distinctive city hotels, next to a life-size street sculpture of a huddle of men in formal Western suits and ties holding umbrellas. They are identical to the business clientele which has been frequenting the Fullerton since 1999 when it was converted into a hotel. During my first visit so many years ago, this neoclassical building with its tall Doric columns standing on a thick, rusticated base housed the Central Post Office. I have to admit that hotelhood becomes it.
    It is here, on the other side of Cavenagh Bridge that lies in front of the Fullerton that the Chinese bumboats used to anchor, side by side with the double-ended Indian tongkangs and the squat, flat-bottomed twakow vessels easily distinguished by the red and green eyes which were superstitiously painted on their bows. The town was truly an entrepôt, an Emporio Rafflesi : goods were brought in, exchanged and then resold. I try to imagine the worn, musty smell of foodstuffs like beef, flour, wheat and wine; the cold inorganic odours of iron, lead and copper; the pungency of spices such as pepper, mace and nutmeg; the blunt aroma of camphor; the stench of hides and gutta-percha; the disorienting fragrance of coffee, tea and opium. I take a big breath, but only petrol fumes scorch my nostrils.
    My eyes focus horizontally in the distance. I can make out the clocktower of the Victoria Theatre.
    There, the Padang…

    The self-anointed ‘Grandest Society of Merchants in the Universe’ didn’t know what to do with Raffles. Punching above his weight in terms of breeding, he was consorting with royalty. Still in his thirties, he was over-promoted and in the directors’ eyes hugely overrated: although his administration in Java had been popular locally, he had cost the company good money.
    In the end, Raffles was promoted downwards. He was sent as lieutenant governor to Bencoolen, by far the least fashionable and most pestilential of the Asian settlements – even its position at the rear end of Sumatra lends itself be dubbed as the ‘arsehole of the archipelago’. Before Raffles left, he handed a memorandum to the chairman of the board, George Canning, the later Foreign Secretary and future prime minister. In its pages Raffles was advocating a new colony on one of those islands he had passed on the way to invading Java at the tip of the Malay peninsula. Canning agreed and authorised him to check the Dutch influence in the region. What exactly the unwritten terms were is still a matter of contention, yet Raffles was clear: ‘ I left England under the full impression that I was not only Lieutenant-Governor of Bencoolen but in fact Political Agent for the Malay States .’ But then, he would say that, wouldn’t he?
    Before he left, Raffles married again and took his second wife, Sophia – descended from good, landed Irish stock – to Sumatra where he made his other big discovery after Borobudur. During one of his expeditions to the interior, he came across the