On the Tiger's trail in Anthony Burgess' Kuala Kangsar

Forgive me, I'm tipsy, but that's only to be expected when one's trying to summon the phantasms I'm chasing.

I am walking along the river bank in Kuala Kangsar, in northern Malaysia's Perak state, looking for hints of Kuala Hantu, the fictitious "ghost town" that served as the backdrop to Anthony Burgess' first novel. Time for a Tiger (1956) is an account of life and alcohol-fuelled multi-ethnic bonding at the tail end of the British occupation of Malaya, and it could be Burgess' less-than-flattering depiction that has saved this pretty colonial town from the ravages of mass tourism.

I start with the obvious: at the gates of the Malay College, a red-roofed, two-storey white building that emerges like a neo-classical molar from a sprawling expanse of cleanly mown English grass. A boarding school for the sons of the Malay elite since 1905, this is where Burgess taught English in the mid-1950s.

The students are all ensconced in their classes, heads bent over textbooks, humming rote-learning mantras. I stroll the campus' empty boulevards, stalking history teacher Victor Crabbe, Time for a Tiger's doubtful protagonist and Burgess' literary alter-ego, to the multi-ethnic Mansor School. Crabbe tries to curb the threat posed by a communist student who runs clandestine night-time indoctrination sessions in the college. Considering the pair of timid boys who pass through the pillars of the building known as Big School and start jumping with a rope on the rugby pitch, it's clear the "red threat" here is now no more than a fictional one.

Burgess described Kuala Kangsar as a spooky and corrupt town, a place where "the dark shrouded the bungalow of the District Officer, the two gaudy cinemas, the drinking shops where the towkays [business owners] snored on their pallets".