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He was a hunch-backed Indonesian dwarf: a genuine midget, with closecropped
hair like a black cat’s fur, and wide-set eyes. He had a tin cup around
his neck for money, and was dressed in a brown shirt and a sarong, from
beneath which peeped his fantastically abbreviated brown legs and stubby bare
feet. He couldn’t have been more than three feet high: his extended arms were
like flippers - ending, I noticed, in tiny infant hands whose fingers were
strangely splayed. Compared to him, Billy Kwan (at whom I dared not look),
was a normal man. (YLD, 91)
The juxtaposition of the desperation and nobility of beggars in these books comes out of
both Eastern and Western traditions. Billy Kwan explains many of the Western sources and
cites others in his files, including Gervase of Tilbury’s Otia Imperialia about the ‘high-
minded’ dwarf-king of the Antipodes, Bilis, who became Beli, who Kwan calls the ‘prototype
of nearly all mythological dwarfs, and of Pelles, in the Grail Legend’ (YLD, 108). Kwan sees
Bilis/Beli as his model, and Koch clearly invokes this name in creating Billy. As the short
form of ‘William’, being ‘will + helmet’ (Morris, 1466), the name also fits Billy well. William
is the heroic figure out of English children’s literature whom Billy tells Hamilton he had
wanted to be but could not because of his Chinese face (YLD, 84), and this is just one of many
reasons that the adult Billy protects his self-image with a helmet of pure desire. The close
association of Billy Kwan and Guy Hamilton has similar Western antecedents, specifically in
the story found in Kwan’s files about the Pelles of Arthurian legend, who was split into a
knight and his dwarf servant. Billy calls Hamilton his ‘giant brother’ (YLD, 116), and this is
echoed by the journalists of the Wayang Bar who call them ‘Sir Guy’ and the ‘squire’. Eastern
traditions include many stories of gods who come to earth disguised in the form of dwarfs,
beggars, servants, or other lower-caste humans. These characters, especially those with
physical disabilities, seem to have the special ability, directly related to their ‘otherness’, to
interact in the world otherwise divided between those men who are kasar, or coarse, and alus,
or refined, since they themselves share character aspects of each and benefit from seeing the
world through dual perspectives. Kwan, with all of his inexplicable contacts in Indonesian
politics and society, is certainly one of these, yet needs Hamilton to complete his self. Still, as
in the relationship between Arjuna and Krishna, it is Hamilton the knight who must attend to
the teachings of Kwan the servant, for Kwan’s favourite dwarf is, like Krishna, really a god.
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