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inwardly wise and powerful, figure. He first suits Kwan’s purposes of mastery over the human
theatre he has created, and then becomes one of the principle vehicles for Kwan’s relinquishing
of those self-deceiving intentions and his unification with Guy Hamilton.
11.3.2.2.1. The Disfigured, Noble ‘Other’
Koch first introduces his dwarf figure in Across the Sea Wall in the person of a beggar
who among all the beggars who ‘rose from under their feet’ like the ‘dust that rose everywhere;
the mustard-coloured dust which was the floor of India’, terrifies Ilsa:
‘Annas master, annas master! Annas mastair!’ Disease blotted the faces;
hunger made them frown and grimace. And here was a legless dwarf, three
feet high, in a white turban, with a large, dignified, almost intellectual face
with serious straight eyebrows, who circled among the feet of the four,
swinging himself, with horrid expertness, on his hands. This was the first time
O’Brien had seen Ilsa frightened.
‘Ah! He is horrible! Like a spider! Make him go away!’
This dwarf-beggar has no legs, but the spider image makes him both a soulless insect and a
many-armed god. His dual description—at once grotesque and dignified—is found in
d’Alpuget’s Monkeys in the Dark when Alex and Maruli are eating at an indigenous restaurant:
Another beggar was now standing at the entrance to the tent, a tall man
in faded khaki. One of his arms was missing. As Alex squinted at his
silhouette in the doorway she saw that his left leg also was gone—his trousers
on that side were pinned up and hanging hollow. He held a rough crutch in his
left armpit, while jerking forward, the stump of his right arm as if it still had a
hand attached to it. Strangely, he made no wail for money as beggars normally
did.
As she continued to look at him she realised that his face was beautifully
structured: a long, noble nose and full, chiselled mouth. Flesh had wasted
from him and his pointed cheekbones seemed about to break through the skin.
(MD, 48)
The character reappears in The Year of Living Dangerously, where the symbol of
brutalisation is similarly developed. In one instance he is a cripple much like the one out of
d’Alpuget, ‘a man with no legs, who propelled himself across the floor to us with wooden
blocks tied to his hands, blocks which hissed and shuffled slyly on the tiles at our feet, as we
fumbled for our money’ (YLD, 89-90). Another appearance has a true dwarf, but one who is
again dehumanised—taking Kwan with him—and presented as a gift to Guy Hamilton as a
joke on Kwan:
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