We’re now in the last month of our time in Singapore, just that time when I start thinking with some longing for that other place in my life: Vancouver, and the space, the scenery, and the exposure to the natural world. I’ve written before about that sense of self-regulation in retirement. How you want to have time to live in the moment, but also push yourself, too, in new directions, and to make new discoveries. In the last few months, with the first part of my research on S. Rajaratnam now done, I’ve paused. There seem to be various possibilities in the seam of history that I’ve opened up. The first would be another article on Rajaratnam’s journalism in the late 1940s and 1950s, something that hasn’t been looked at closely. A second might be a reflective piece on methodology: how I’ve used marginalia, journals, but also public records, photographs, and affective filiations in the present. But for the moment I’ve just let things grow organically. I have a large virtual scrapbook of documents, conversations, and reflections that I add to and review periodically, and at some point I hope to come back to it and to begin to sort through, and find the line of a theme or an essay.

One of the focuses of my research that’s intrigued me is a house in London, just off Haverstock Hill on the way up to Hampstead, where Rajaratnam and a changing cast of other boarders lived from 1935 onwards, continuing after Raja and his wife-to-be, Piroska Feher, left the house in the very early 1940s. What interests me about the house is how a researcher can trace, through various public records, who lived in the house, and through further exploration, begin to add flesh to bone; to gain a sense of the affective community in the house, and its connection to larger affective communities of anticolonial and progressive activists in London at the time. I began with the 1939 Register, a “snapshot” of all households in England and Wales on 29 September 1939 that was used to produce identity cards. From there, using online databases such as  Ancestry.co.uk, it’s possible to trace more: dates of entry to and exit from the UK on shipping records, and the presence of people in records of births, marriages, and deaths, and in registers of voters and phone directories. What you find is mostly the skeleton of a life: brief mentions of someone who at some time was registered and classified by the state or by a commercial organisation. And from this you can often find further contacts: children who are still living, for instance.

How do you begin to put the flesh on the bones? First of all, by presence. When I was in London two years ago, I visited the house, met the current owners, and took photographs. Second, through contacts with the children of the boarders in the house, who have provided me memories, and photographs. Third, through Rajaratnam’s own photographs, and private fragmentary reminiscences. And finally, the most productive seam I’ve followed has been in memoirs, in the published writings of Xiao Qian, the Chinese journalist who stayed in the house in 1940. It took me some time to find these, because I read Chinese slowly, but they’re curiously evocative, describing the house and its various inhabitants from India, Malaya, China, Hungary, (and Somerset!), as a “little league of nations.” Xiao Qian often wanders outside the house, but there are moments at the beginning and end of his travels when he settles there. There’s something intriguing about the house as a lived reality of multiculturalism, of living together and understanding each other across cultural background and language. This shouldn’t be idealised – Xiao Qian doesn’t distinguish between the two “Indians” who live in the house, and at one time has Raja telling stories about the Ganges, which seems unlikely given his birth in Ceylon and his childhood in Malaya. But I thought I’d end with a passage that triangulates with my visit to the house itself, and with photographs. There’s a tabby cat here, and of course Raja will write about a tiger, only two years later, in a different house. And you can still see the spire of St Saviour’s Church from Eton Road today; there’s a photograph in one of the collections I’ve seen of someone standing, with  Fedora pulled down over his face, very near it. I don’t know about the pear tree:

倫敦的冬霧眞的提前保衛這古城了嗎？早晨起來，把被氈勒成個大包 袱 連同草墊抱到堆房裏。上樓時覺得很冷。用木根撥開窗上的黑簾，外面是一片淒迷的灰霧不但沒有了後街依吞路教堂的尖楼，竟運後園的梨樹也依稀只剩條黑彩。正在出神時，一聲咪噢，一個蹟動，我們的狸花貓坐在沙發背上了。她用羞怯 的眼瞭了我一下，就把四腿花瓶般抱在一道，對者灰霧出神起來。霧澱刷刷響 者交通声音，悠長的汽笛，短促的汽笛。樓下的即度小姐已開始了她那不換調 子的提琴練習。

Had London’s winter fog really rolled in early to protect the ancient city? I woke up in the morning and rolled the quilt into a big bundle and brought it with the straw mattress to the storage room. When I went upstairs, I felt very cold. I parted the blackout curtains with the wooden rod, and outside was a gloomy expanse of grey fog. Not only was the spire of the church on Eton Road, behind our street, missing, but even the pear tree in the back garden only remained as a faint black shadow. It this trance-like time, the sound of a meow, and a movement, showed our tabby cat up on the back of the sofa. She glanced at me coyly for a moment, and made her four legs into the shape of a vase, also mesmerised by the grey fog. The layers of fog were brushed though with the sounds of traffic, of horns both long and short. Downstairs, the Indian girl had already begun the ceaseless scales of her violin practice.

It’s from these moments that you begin to assemble the affective life of the house. With Xiao Qian’s writing I look at a small paragraph of text, checking my own translation against DeepSeek, which I find scarily good at translating Chinese into English, and even explaining why it made certain decisions. But the process of my own translating’s still good, somehow: it seems of a piece with what is happening in this house, eighty years ago, in which the inhabitants also move, in slow gestures, into other translated worlds.