Dada 161

He would sing in an old ring or fairground if they would let him. Some would laugh, most of them migrants from over the border; maybe that’s why the Malay hated him and called him traitor. The song came from more than forty years old. It was no matter of time for him. He sang it until he went up the river to the home. Try as I might I could not picture me hanging from a scaffold in some quiet room of the prison. When you come to think about it there was a distortion on what the judgement was based upon and the sequence of events that ran up to it before the verdict was delivered. I did not mean to kill anyone when we set out that day. What happened was that I found myself in the middle of something outside my own actions like a small wooden doll. History suddenly washed me along its broken path as if a bottle was suddenly dancing on the tide; fated more than premeditation; chance rather than deliberation. The fact that the verdict was read out so late in the afternoon when it might have been done just after lunch, when the sky was different, the clouds softer, the possibility of sun; all of this would have had a bearing in making it seem better, easier for a man like me. At some point of the day we are all naked. Why make such a fuss of this Malaysian federation stuff when everyone knows we hate each other. We just want to get on with our own lives. All of this cultural stuff surrounds us like clogging weeds. It deprives us of that certainty.

Dada 160

They don’t like to see the face of the condemned man but the executioners will see me. Surely there must be cases when the rope has slipped or the drop is blocked or that chance or luck has played a happy part. It was easier to think of the pirates. Just a slip in the normal processes of justice would have done me. My emotions would have taken care of the rest. The papers often talked of a debt to be paid to society and the debt that must be paid to the one offended. But that sort of talk does not fire the imagination. No, the one thing that counted for me was to make a dash for it and defeat their rules, a mad stampede to freedom along the docks and quays and into the water, shark filled or not; a gamblers last throw. Naturally when the pirates caught you it would be no fun and games but at least there was the chance, kill or be killed rather than this slow and brutal wheel of justice. They deprived you of sex and cigarettes but not of time. Time on the anchor was time on the nail, Dada used to say, a curious in between world of being neither here nor anywhere, not at sea nor port. When a ship’s engines stop beating it loses its soul. But they could not deprive me of his song. I remember him shouting from his balcony and the constant visits from the police. ‘Brothers and sisters’ he would sing, ‘our time grows short and those who own the ships own much. Those who have wives should live as though they had none. Those who mourn for our impending loss should live as if they had nothing to mourn; those full of abundance who are enjoying life should live as though there was nothing to laugh about. For truly now, we have only ourselves to offer this State but only when we have our freedom; a demand from neither Dayak, Malay nor Chinese but from the Borneo seamen ‘

Sixteen

I have just refused for the third time to see any of the Holy men. I have nothing to say to them. I don’t feel like talking. I shall see them soon anyhow. They will still be sniveling around after I’m gone since they don’t do executions in public any more. The only thing that interests me now is the problem of getting around the procedures to see if there is a loophole in all that tight moral armoury of their precious law. They have moved me to a different cell. It’s more comfortable in this one, lying on my back; I can see more than a portion of the sky. Maybe that is the reason they move you here. To give you those last looks at what you are going to lose. Seeing the soft underbelly of the clouds sending the City pink and black in the last of the sunset is worth a lot to a condemned man. There is nothing much else to see but I can construct a whole world from those clutches of nimbus cloud. All my time is spent in watching the slowly moving colours of the day and even of the night. It would surprise you if you gaze up and wait. I do not care when I sleep or wake. The problem of a loophole obsesses me. I am always wondering if there have been cases of condemned prisoners escaping from the implacable machinery of justice. At the last moment they break through the police cordon and vanish to the jungle in a nick of time just before the noose is coiled. There would have been more chance if they held the hangings in public like they used to. I blame myself for not paying attention to executions. I used to read about them in the history books or scattered papers and that would be that; of prisoners jumping the scaffold and then being shot if they ran. That would be something. When you are on the move there is always a chance. It is like a thief running away down the dockside with a basket of fish, running for his life, looking ahead but waiting for the shot to gouge open his back; all of his life contained in that one moment.. You should always take account of such matters. I let them go missing. I suppose that if something doesn’t concern you, you don’t bother. I’d read descriptions of hangings but they hadn’t stayed with me long, but now facing my own, it is surprising what the mind stores up. What it brings together between your own circumstances and history.. Technical books that deal with the placing of the knot must certainly exist but I had never felt interested enough to look them up. If they were dealing with pirates or hanging them on a ship, of huge lashings or keel hauling and walking by lanyard in chains , there was always the chance of jumping over and taking your chance. This appealed to me more. ‘Hanging is the white man’s way, the civilized way;’ Iskra once told me. ‘Even the hood they use puts you at a distance. They don’t want to see your eyes’.

Dada 159

‘Corrective Service like my Dada had to endure. This is what really killed him even after his friends got him away to sea again’. I said this to him. He nodded but said he did not know. I asked what were the chances of getting the sentence quashed as it only a seemed to be bad luck that my history rose before me just when the white boys were having their argument. I reminded him of the slap snaking towards my face. ‘It carried the history of all this island’ I said. ‘No chance’ he said. He had not raised any particular points of law as this might prejudice the jury one way or another. It was difficult to get a judgement quashed on anything but technical grounds and there was none of that here. I saw his point and in a way, I agreed. Looking at the matter dispassionately, I shared his view. ‘In any case,’ the lawyer said, ‘You can appeal in the ordinary way but I’m convinced the verdict will be favourable’ We waited for quite a while, about three quarters of an hour. The policemen offered me another cigarette but I refused. It was strange but I wanted to get back to my cell. I had missed my two breaths of freedom beneath the evening sky. I could feel the rain coming with the night. A bell rang and the lawyer took his leave. Over his shoulder he said, ‘the foreman of the jury will read out all of the answers. You will be called on after that to hear the judgment.’ Some doors banged. I heard people hurrying down flights of steps and certain coolness when I knew the rain must have come. The heat was diminished but still hung in the air like a damp towel that draped everywhere like that moment on the beach. I could not tell if voices were nearby or distant. When I heard them still droning away in the courtroom I knew something was up. Then the bell rang again. I stepped back into the dock. The silent court room wrapped itself around me. Even the lighting seemed somehow dimmed. With the silence came a strange sensation. I noted that even the young smartly dressed journalist with the angular features, the who had originally eyed me with such fascination, had now turned his head to one side. I did not look at Mo. I had no time , even if I wanted. The presiding judge started with his pronouncements. I noticed he was wearing his cap. In short I was to be hung by the neck until death overcame me in some secret a site of the prison; a place the state reserved for people like me. I felt like sitting down but pirates don’t sit. They stand and stare. My sentence was no different from the thousands of stateless ones born to the undocumented, men and women, who all have to hustle their lives from fishing boats. My life was no different. My father said he wanted to help me face up to the chaos . I was not the only lost soul within his acts of contrition. When they burn wood in Kalimantan it permeates through all the sad moments of this island. What a good citizen he is, my father. My death shall be his honour. I couldn’t interpret the looks on the faces of the people present. The mood seemed to be one of respectful sympathy. Sobs were coming from Mo’s direction but I did not look up. The policemen handled me very gently too. The lawyer placed his hand on my wrist. I had stopped thinking. I was merely being kept afloat through the water with the sky above me. I heard the judge ask me if I had anything to say. After considering for a moment my mouth started to open and I was about to recite a string of curses that any pirate would utter at the moment of containment. ‘The Sea Dayaks are my people ‘I wanted to shout.’ Instead I uttered a decisive ‘no’.

Dada 158

The day was ending and the heat not as intense. The evening rains would arrive before dark and soon be here. By the sounds that reached up from the street, I knew that the cool of the evening would not be slow in arriving. We waited. I expected the arrival of the Police van of for some signal. Everyone seemed to be waiting. I looked around the courtroom. It was exactly the same as the day that I had first arrived. I met the eyes of the journalist but he did not return my gaze. It reminded me that not once during the whole hearing had I tried to catch sight of Mo nor share a message through our eyes. It wasn’t as if I had forgotten him. I was just too pre occupied with other matters. I saw him now. He was not seated by Srino or Iskra or Shabela but by himself. Two policemen sat at each side of him. He gave me a little wave as if to say, ‘At last’ He was smiling but I could see he was anxious. My heart had turned to stone even without his damning testimony. I could accept him with a certain disregard now. I returned his smile but it was an empty one. The judges came back to their seats. Someone read out to the jury a string of questions. I caught a word here and there, malice or murderous forethought, provocation, extenuating circumstances. The jury went out and I was taken to a little room where I had already waited before. My lawyer came to see me and sat near. He was very talkative. I wished he would shut up. He showed me more cordiality and confidence than he had done before. He assured me that everything would go well and that I would get off with a few years. The following corrective service would rid me of the stain.’

Dada 157

Only one incident stands out. Towards the end while my counsel rambled on, I heard the thin tunes of an ice cream cart in the street, a small jangling sound of bells and chimes that cut across his flow of words and empty paraphrase. A rush of memories went through my mind of the red sunsets in the dry season, memories of a life that was mine no longer but was dissolving in the actions of these puppets of the State. Memories that had once provided me with the surest, humblest pleasures, the warm smells of summer, my favourite streets, the space by the water where the sky hung low at evening, even the rain that brought a deeper green to the trees and a cooling balm like sandalwood to the air by the river; Mo’s clean clothes and his laughter bubbling up and singing through those bright teeth with his hair swept back. How beautiful it was. How beautiful he was. The futility of what was happening here seemed to take hold of me by the throat and slowly throttle me. I had only one thought, to get it over as soon as possible. To get out and be in the space between the court and the police van when I could take my two breaths of freedom under the unmoving sky. This was my aim before the return to my cell and to sleep, sleep, sleep. My lawyer was finished, only one verdict possible he declaimed, that of homicide with extenuating circumstances. His voice drained away. The court rose and he sat down and looked exhausted. Some of his colleagues came up to him and shook his hand. ‘A magnificent fight, well done’ one of them said. Another even called me to witness the performance. ‘Fine wasn’t he’ he indicated. I nodded my head but said nothing. I had nothing to say. I was far too tired to judge whether the performance had been good or otherwise. To my mind it was all the same.

Dada 156

‘’I am astounded’ my lawyer continued, ‘by the attitude taken up by my learned friend in referring to the heartless action of placing the old man in the home. Surely if proof were needed of the excellence of such places than we should look no further than on the policy of the government towards these institutions. They are part financed and promoted by Government departments. The seamen in particular upon whom this nation depends also contribute towards them with their pensions But for all his long-windedness, (he skipped the funeral nor did he mention the Dada’s bad blood); did he touch the apex of argument that the prosecutor had used for my communist ‘Chinese’ Dada and his Catholic practices which had led to the strike and traitorous acts that followed. How little he knew of the minimal affect this had had upon a loving grandson in his furious rage as he encountered two innocent white boys in a Chinese club. My brain was threaded. Its membranes felt as if they were left out to dry in the sun or washed away in rivulets by the rain. What with his long words, the endless days and hours, the stifling heat, that clamoured through door and window for entry I found that my mind had gone blurred and that everything was slowly dissolving into a grey watery mess inside. How well I now remembered the policeman’s words, ‘in the end it drains you’

Fifteen

When I was brought back the next day, the air conditioning in court was fully functioning. It needed to be. Even from the prison van I could feel the brightness of the sky and the heat that seemed to penetrate even the metal grilles. It did not matter. As if by rote, the members of the jury were fanning themselves in some sort of expectant rhythm. The speech for the defence seemed to me interminable. At one moment though, I picked up my ears. It was when I heard my lawyer say, ‘yes it is true I killed two men.’ He referred to me as if he was speaking of himself. It seemed so strange .I did not understand but bent to one of the policemen at my side. ‘What is he driving at?’ I raised my finger in the Brief’s direction. The policeman told me to shut up. After a moment he whispered. ’They all do that, it’s called transference. They take on the fact that the jury think it is you speaking, and they are looking at you but is him speaking. Did you used to see all that stuff they did on the fairgrounds years ago. These fellers are not a patch on those acts’ It seemed to me that it was to further exclude me from the case. I wanted to jump up and say, ‘this is me, the Sea Dayak’ but it didn’t seem to matter. I didn’t want to be slung down again like the termination of yesterday’s proceedings. He was a poor ventriloquist, an even poorer image maker and nobody seemed to believe what he was saying anyway; whoever he thought he was. I felt his words dribble away like water in the sand and wished I was at the beach. He hurried through his plea of provocation but without much commitment and with a lot less talent than the flowing phrases and dominant constructions of the prosecutor. ‘He also knew about ‘me’,’ he said. He had closely studied me he said. He turned. ‘Unlike my learned friend I have found something there. Indeed,’ he added. ‘I may say that I have read the prisoner’s mind like an open book’. What he had read there was an excellent young fellow, a steady conscientious worker who did his best by all around him, especially his employers at the fish market. If it had not been for an unfortunate set of circumstances at his parent’s home he would have continued with his studies. I was popular with everyone and sympathetic to anyone’s trouble. Accordingly, I was a dutiful grandson who had supported his Dada when all turned away from him, knowing his time in prison had weakened him and after anxious consideration when he could see him failing, undertook to research the home up the river where he passed his final days as a content old man. He knew that his Dada needed more comfort and security than he his grandson was able to provide.’ Even I was confused by now as to which voice, place or time my lawyer now resided in.

Dada 154

I stood again and tried to explain that it was a culmination because of the sun and water and food and drugs and why I’d woken feeling tired that morning and my mouth bitter, then the fighting and the car ride to the city beneath a wet moon. I pointed at the prosecutor, ‘What about the blood, this lawyer refers to, are we not all mixed on this island?’ I spoke quickly but my words rolled into one another and clashed together like stones. I was conscious that what I was saying sounded like nonsense even though it was true. I heard a gentle laugh come like a breeze across the courtroom and looked up and saw a jury member cover her mouth. She fluttered a handkerchief across her nervous fingers and I thought of Mo holding the silver paper like a grill. The woman in blue looked at me as if to say, ‘I told you so.’ My mother too shuddered again. What I didn’t sing to her nor anyone else was my father’s song. Nor did I point to his absence across the court nor accuse him with his singing lash and the doleful acts of ‘contrition’ .I did not confide in them my terror when I heard his soft footfall on the stairs. I would not demean myself. My lawyer shrugged his shoulders and tugged at his cuffs. He was directed to address the court. All he did was to point out the lateness of the hour. As he pointed to his watch again I was attracted to one of his cuff links that shone a wan gold.it could have been the gold of a European clipper ripe for picking or a Chinese junk waddling like a duck up the straits of Molucca. He asked for an adjournment until the following afternoon. The judge nodded agreement.

Dada 153

The air conditioning had faltered again and the jury were wiping the sweat from their brow in the late afternoon. Most crimes he told them paled into significance besides the loathing inspired by my callousness to say nothing of the damage done to the wider reputation of these islands.. ‘This man who is morally implicated in his grandfather’s death and complicit by his own traitorous activity is no less fit to have a place in the community than those other men he resides with on the dark edge of our society and indeed.’ He returned to the unbroken necklace theme, my Dada’s death, the fight on the beach where Iskra was slashed and full of rage the hunting down and killing those two poor white boys who did nothing more than to be exorbitant with their voices. The murderous silence of the prisoners intentions as he parachuted back to reality amid the paranoid gloom of the drug locally entitled…..’ Here he took a cursory look at his papers, ‘Ya Bang’. ‘Yes ladies and gentlemen I am convinced one siege led to another, just as one fishing boat follows another to the sea that brought those two poor boys to our island and that also led to their deaths by the hand of this murderous son of Sarawak. He raised his voice a tone, ‘you will not find I am exaggerating the case against the prisoner when I say that he is guilty of a series of murders, to be sentenced by this court. I look to you for a verdict accordingly’. The prosecutor paused to wipe the sweat off his face. He then explained that his duty was a painful one but he would do it without flinching. ‘This man has no place in the community whose basic principles of law he flouts with such compunction. Nor heartless as he is, has he any claims to mercy. I ask you to impose the extreme penalty of the law and I do so without qualm. In the course of a long career in which it has often been my duty to ask for a capital sentence, never have I have felt that painful duty to weigh so lightly on my mind as it does with this case. It demands a verdict of murder without extenuating circumstances. I am following not only the dictates of my conscience and sacred obligation but those also of natural and righteous indignation I feel at the sight of a criminal devoid of even the least of human feeling’. When the prosecutor sat down there was that silence. This time it seemed to contain a greater resonance, a meaning beyond shock. I was quite overcome by the heat and drone of his voice and amazement at what I had been hearing. That was not me he was talking about but a shadow, some lurid memory of myself and the Dada he had woven into the fabric of his imagination. The presiding judge gave a low cough and asked me in a short voice if I had anything to say. I rose and as I felt in the mood to speak, I said that I had no intention of killing those white boys. The judge replied that this statement would be taken into consideration by the court. Meanwhile he would be glad to hear before my counsel addressed the court, what were the motives of my crime. So far, he had to admit, he had not fully understood the grounds for my defence.

Dada 152

He said he had studied me closely and that he had found a blank towards those deep and inner feelings that normal people possess. There was no depth to me, no examined life, no feeling for my actions; none of those moral qualities that normal people possess that were demonstrated in my character. No doubt he added we should not blame him for this, he is a poor fish dock worker, who possesses a roof only because of the generosity of the grandfather. We cannot blame a man for lacking what was never in his power to acquire. But in this criminal court any passive aggression must be tested to a series of higher principle, of loftier ideals, to the rule of law and Justice. Gone was the fact that I was intelligent.Now I was just a poor worker down on the dock.. My mother stared impassively ahead. Once my hers eyes strayed in my direction but for the most part she sat erect besides the woman in blue and dabbed occasionally at her face. ‘This man before you is a menace to society because in his own eyes he has done nothing wrong. He has enjoyed himself and now stands before you for something he has done by ‘chance’ The prosecutor spoke again at the great length of my crime. He quoted Russian novelists in the way I had pursued my victims. ‘This man is a menace to our society ‘he repeated again.

Dada 151

That slap across my face was the slap of my own history. I had no regret in rising against it. It was like the raising my own black flag. But the hurt had gone now; now was the time for parlay and illusion. The prosecutor was overdoing it. I would have liked to have the chance of explaining that to him in a friendly sort of way. To say it really wasn’t my fault that the whites had ruled this territory, district and city for so many years over the Malay. Yes, the Chinese came and helped them and when the Indonesians burned our boats we had to act superior because this was still our place. But it did no good to ape any of them because we Dayaks didn’t feel that way about any of it ; especially when they roll out the red carpet of the Malay nation with its laws and state and parliament on the peninsula. Who really listens? It was what the dada hated. As for myself I just wanted to be off and sailing like him across the sea with the Blue Funnel line, but I couldn’t say that either. Not least have I told anyone that it didn’t matter? The Dada said that the sea absolved all beliefs and the only wave you should ever pray to was the God without name, one god and one soul, one love above or below the waves’s and no religion south of the belly. To no one else give mention but love your neighbour. I have never regretted anything in my whole life. Things happen and you react or you don’t react, that is all. You live your life under the sun and the rain and the moments of everyday that give you grace. They are all that matters, Wabu Sabi. I’ve always been too much absorbed in the present moment or the immediate future to look anywhere else. Of course after my outburst there was never any chance of me being allowed to clear that up or speak again? The prosecutor was now considering the inner life of my character, what he called my ‘alma’

Dada 150

‘I have described to you the series of events which led this man to kill his victims when he was fully aware of what he was doing. He has even admitted to you himself, the effect of drugs was wearing off and that it was mere irritation rather than threat that led him to this action. ‘This man was fully aware of what he was doing ‘he repeated. ‘We are not concerned here with an act of homicide committed on a sudden impulse and with one single and fatal stab which might serve as an extenuation of the circumstances but a sustained and prolonged assault along a path he had already chosen and which confirmed his intention.’ The prosecutor wiped his brow. ‘We know the prisoner is a criminal, but we also know he was educated at the High school, until he chose to leave. He is not without some education. You will have observed the way he answered my questions. He is intelligent enough and he knows the power of words. It is quite impossible to believe that he committed these crimes without being aware of what he was doing.’ The intelligence that i supposedly possessed was being used against me; any solidarity with my Dada a construction in the use of narrative to show the overwhelming manner of my guilt. I missed what he said next except that when I looked up I heard him exclaim in a manner of exaltation, the way tourists sometimes greet the sunsets over the river after the rain, a sort of hallelujah of righteous indignation yet it came with almost a whisper. ‘Gentlemen and Ladies, not once in these proceedings has this man once uttered the least act of contrition.’ Muddied blood, I thought. ‘We know what sort of man his Dada was, the prosecutor continued’. Turning towards the dock he pointed a finger at me and went on in the same strain. I really couldn’t understand why he harped on so much about this point, Of course he was right. I was so tired, I didn’t feel much regret for what I had done. What had happened , happened . But I own the prosecutor had tapped into a certain history. The court room was electric. Dada was no plaster saint. He had frequented his own time, his ships and his women. He was not a pirate but he could have been. I was being hauled up high before my history. Would I kill again? No I certainly would not but that was not the issue, what was missing was the situation, the place that chance had led me into.

Dada 149

‘Please instruct your client to be quiet. His comments are to be struck from the record’ the Judge said. My lawyer nodded in agreement.. The prosecutor said, ‘Here we have an example of this man’s heartlessness, was there a word of sympathy in any of his narrative, or that last soliloquy, for his victims, was there one moment of doubt given for their suffering families in the home of democracy. He does not even know the age of his grandfather, the visit to the bathing pool with his friend, the purpose of the visit to the pictures, the day at the beach house with Shabela and his good wife; all these were motives for his own gratification. His voice sank as he rehearsed again the laws of this land and the offences committed between men. He turned quickly as if to move away from those who had helped in this judicial proceeding to my friend Iskra. Here the lawyer showed a certain deftness, a card sharps speed, away from the ‘crimes’ Mo and I had committed in our time together and back to the perpetrator’s aquaintences. All he said had sounded quite plausible. It was true I had written the letter in collusion with Iskra so as to entice his Mistress to his room and so to let her be punished . But it was pushing the boat out to call him a ‘dark creature of the night, one who deals with drugs and with women and sordid café’s as if he has been born to them’ Full of drugs I had provoked a brawl with Iskra’s enemies in the course of which Iskra was wounded. I had then asked for his knife. With one sole intention I drove with Mo and Iskra to town in a night full of wind, stars and rain and purposely engineered a fight with the poor white boys. When they refused my advances and stepped back, I challenged them and hunted them like animals before stopping and mercilessly slaying one then the other. After the first knife wound where the victim lay prone beside me , I pursued his friend and then in frenzy stabbed and stabbed again until there was only stillness!!! ‘That is my case, ‘the prosecutor said.

Dada 148

The prosecutor’s speech was especially boring and I had looked away before he was half way through. The only things that really caught my attention were occasional leaden phrases then with a sudden switch of gear, his gestures towards some new and elaborate tirade but that was only because I was thinking of the trees that lined my Dad a’s new village or the colour of the beach before the rain that rose yellow and green at the outcrop of the rocks that Sunday morning. What the prosecutor was aiming to show was that my crime was pre meditated. An action ordained rather than the extenuating circumstances that my defence was putting forward. A sin of commission. No one spoke of pure chance. I remember him saying at one moment, ‘I can prove his culpability to you, ladies and gentlemen of the jury. The facts of the crime are as clear as daylight. We have the weapon, we have the prosecution witnesses, but more importantly, he leaned forward, we have the character of a man who possesses a criminal and traitorous mentality even before his use of the knife, who consorts with the dark side of the night and the people who are drawn to it, a violent dangerous place into which these poor white tourists stumbled and which thankfully as a nation we have denied ourselves the iniquitous dens the accused and his friends inhabit.’ He started to sum up the facts from the day of my Dada’s death but it was not me he was talking about. ‘What about my mother and father’ I shouted, ‘were they not also responsible; the way they banished Dada and said he was not Malay but a child of the comprador and white oppressor, that he led the strike through his own bitterness and the way he oppressed all our family.’. I said all this in a rare mood of defiance. The judge rebuked my counsel. My mother shuddered in the court house. She sat next to the woman in blue who nodded as if everything she said was coming to pass. My Father was absent.

Dada Fourteen

The finish of the case came like a song; the conclusion to a drama, the end of a rainbow being emptied into the sea, rubbed away by the sound of the wind and incessant rain. But I was wrong. The full stop did come with a certain stillness but it was accompanied by the mad bedlam of the labyrinth. It made me wonder who was really on trial. Was I as much of a traitor to Malaysia as my Dada or was I the bit player, the man holding a triangle in a great orchestra; only the State or eternity of these islands would know if I was allowed any say. It is always interesting for the prisoners in the dock to hear oneself being talked about. And certainly in the speeches of my lawyer and the prosecuting council a great deal was said about me, more about me personally than about my crime. In reality there wasn’t much difference between the two speeches. Counsel for the defence raised his arms to heaven, spoke about my ‘deprived’ associations and pleaded guilty with extenuating circumstances. The prosecutor made a similar gesture but asked for the guilty plea due to my ‘depraved’, sodomite and traitorous background. There was nothing ‘extenuating’ about my circumstances he said. One matter about this aspect of my trial was irritating, quite often when being spoken about so much I was tempted to put a quick word about myself. But my lawyers expressly forbid that. It would do me more danger than any good he said. ‘You won’t improve your case by talking’ he warned. In fact there seemed to be a conspiracy that was being waged against me to keep me from opening my mouth. Were they scared of what I had to say? My fate was going to be decided out of hand. They did not want to hear about this fucked up island and its history ; or that we Dayaks of the coastlines and rivers were not made for farming but running the waters in junks and sampans and gigs; or of robbing and coming back to our villages to lie in hammocks to feel the sun and watch the sky. Our time was not to be measured by the fields and the clock or the passage of the great lighted ball around the earth but of the moon and the night and the pull of the tides. We were as unusual as the Chinese but we lived here first and our primary love was of the moon and the sea and the blessed waves. It was quite an effort at times for me not to not cut them all short and say; ‘Shut your fucking traps. Who is on trial anyway. Does the prisoner have any say in what is going down here.’ It was me who was sitting in the dock on trial for murder, could I not speak? On second thoughts, I had nothing to say. It would make sense to them anyway. Hearing yourself being talked about for so often you start to lose interest very soon and could not be bothered to score the points. It was too tiring within that heat with everyone sweating until the conditioner was turned so high that the cold ran through the court like a knife and some of the jury started to sneeze. I thought of the nurse at Dada’s funeral with her bruised face and her notion of the shiver. The air cooler would then go back to its lumbering uncertainty and we would all sweat again. Under those circumstances it was no wonder my attention wandered.

Dada 147

After I left that house the evening hour would come when I generally felt so well and would look forward with contentment to sharing a bowl of rice noodles with my Dada and to listen to his stories. I would go to my bed with the sounds and smell of ships and what might have been in my dreams when my kinfolk the pirates paraded, long haired and laughing beneath the moon. This was the same hour but it was different now. Dada was dead and I was going back to a cell. What awaited me was a night full of foreboding of the coming day and of Mo and the manner in which he was led down the path by those questions to make my betrayal complete. I traced the main features of all these islands with my fingers across the cell wall then extended them upwards, north and west to the Philippines and down again through the territories of this land as far south as Java and the spice islands. Borneo, a paradise disguised as hell, a hell disguised as paradise whether it is driven like a sailor across the sea or to die on some rubber plantation with its poisonous fronds and white beaches. It is not only the northern hemisphere that reaches its soul to the stars but for prisoners like me to trace their fingers around their own freedoms and suffer their own confinements. These islands are as much a prison cell to the innocent as a carefree sleep to a tourist beneath the sky.

Dada 146

The prosecutor’s words and the thought that all would testify against me ran like the beat of a drum through my insides. I suppose when you look at it though what else could they have done. Shabela knew they were watching him for drugs. Iskra they had down for pimping and distributing. Even Jalima, they could tap into anything with her for association or waltzing the tax. I was glad the woman had been declined. Sometimes a defence is worse than a prosecution. This guy was tricky. And Mo, poor Mo, they would have him for the most heinous act on this island, a sodomite, an infidel. They would throw him to the wolves if he spent a day in prison or his buttocks were lovingly exposed to await the singing lash in the manner of which they like to administer here. None of them were to blame for their ‘confession’s’. It was what they did here, turn everyone against each other. The pirates in their brutality were the only ones with honour; little wonder the Rajahs had to kill them all to establish power. Before I went to live at Dada’s, my father was working in the up country on an estate where they process the palm oil. He brought a young man to the house one day, a Kalimantan whose eyes alone could tell you of the distress he had suffered. I could hear him sobbing in the spare room like Old Srino wept in his kitchen before the birds started to sing. My father had been missing for some time since we had eaten our dinner. My mother turned her face away when I asked where Da was. ‘ I’m sure he’ll be somewhere’ she said. ‘I expect the Indonesian has been misbehaving again’. ‘Your father has been very kind to those who come to work on that estate’ she said. I laughed.

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'Each one of them would turn their evidence if offered the chance or if they were on trial here today' he said. He jeered at Shabela and Iskra. ‘ Only one has had the decency to come forward and stand before you with an honest heart.’ he said. You could still hear a rack of sobbing from the court but I could not look at the place where it was coming from. It was like the weeping noise of the stream behind the hut that fateful Sunday; the gurgling sound of the woman who gushed out her truth to me like broken waters around a rock. She could be my auntie, my mother’s sister, my Dada’s daughter, my mother? The prosecutor’s words seemed to make much effect on the jury and the public. My lawyer merely shrugged his shoulders and wiped the sweat from his forehead but you could see he was rattled. Mo’s words had not been good. Then the court rose like a flapping of wings. As I was being taken from the courthouse to the prison van, I was conscious for a few brief moments of the once familiar feel of a Spring evening out of doors, the cool and the rain were there of course, we would never escape that, but there was a lightening sky west of the river that sprang from the south China Sea and momentarily set everywhere pink. Sitting in the darkness of the prison van, with the rain drumming on the steel grilles like some form of corrugated chorus, I recognised that after this light there would be a sunset. With all that came the characteristic sounds of the place I loved, the buzz and thrum of the docks, the gangs swarming to the ships and those in from the country for the early markets walking through the dusk. This certain hour of the day I had always enjoyed and walked home in the thought of food and the television and the rain, and of the sun spreading across the island from the rivers in the west to the forests of the south. The shouts of newspaper boys, dressed all in plastic above their shorts, their papers protected, the call of the gulls on the wharf or starlings in the city gardens, the cries of the hot noodle stalls and squeal of the trolley buses that ran between the water and the central districts, the sounds that came down from the upper town of my prison and how they met with the sounds rising up from the suddenly still harbour come to form a sort of whispering chorus that became quieter and quieter until the real darkness hammered itself down upon me.

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After making this pronouncement he asked Mo to give a full account of our doings on the day when I had forced myself upon him and we had intercourse. Mo would not answer at first but the prosecutor insisted. He then he told Mo that only by agreeing to the proceedings before the Magistrate could he be helped. Mo said that we had met the second time at the public baths, gone together to the pictures and then back to my Dada’s house. The prosecutor then informed the court that as a result of certain statements made by Mo before the magistrate, he had then taken this opportunity of acting as a witness for the prosecution. Turning to Mo, he asked slowly and carefully, how many times did the prisoner use the knife on the tourists. ‘Once, twice and three times sir’ Mo whispered. ‘Once and twice for the first man and three times for the second;’ Mo nodded. The prosecutor then took the jury through the events that had unfolded that night at the waterfront. ‘Was it then, you realised things had gone too far and that you must give evidence against this man’ the prosecutor asked Mo nodded Looking very grave the prosecutor drew his small frame up to his full height as if standing on a stone and with his robes around him stated. ’ Gentle souls of the jury I would have you know that this man who stands before you in the dock is a criminal of the highest order and sentence of the highest order should be placed against him. That is all I wish to say’ When he finished, the courtroom was so still you could have heard a pin drop He sat down to the same dead silence. Then all of a sudden Mo burst into tears. He’d got it all wrong he said. It wasn’t like that really. The law had bullied him into saying what the opposite of want he meant to say was. He knew me well and he knew in my heart I was a gentle character. At a sign from the presiding judge, one of the court ushers led him away. The hearing continued. The prosecutor was not finished. He jumped to his feet and again draped his gown around him and said he was amazed at the disingenuous way the defence had been taken in by these so called friends of the defendants.

Thirteen

It was Mo’s turn next. He wore a hat but quickly whipped it off under the unrelenting glare of the prosecutor’s eye as he entered the witness box. His head was shorn. Where was the lovely weave of his hair as it floated on the green water that Sunday. I wanted him with his hair returned. From where I was sitting I had a glimpse of his firm chest and the little undulations of skin above his hips. He appeared very nervous and fiddled with his hat but in a different way that Shabel held his cap as he bent to look at me. Mo did not look. The first question was how long he had known me. Since the time when I walked from my office to the fish dock, he replied. Then the judge asked him what the relations between us were. He cleared his throat and whispered, ‘intimate’ Answering another question, he nodded when it was put to him that this was against the laws of the land. The prosecutor who had been studying a document in his hand, asked him rather sharply, when our ‘liaison ‘had begun. Mo gave the date. The prosecutor then observed in a rather casual air, that this would be around the time of the Dada’s funeral. After letting this sink in he remarked in a slightly ironic tone, that given the laws of the land and as this was a ‘’delicate’ topic he could sympathise with this young man’s feelings but, here, his voice grew deeper in his chest, his duty obliged him to waive considerations of delicacy. ‘We are a stern but fair nation’ he said

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There were some titters in court as a handkerchief fell out of his sleeve onto his desk but then the prosecutor sprang to his feet. He was amazed he said at the ingenuousness of his learned friend. Could he not see that there hung between these two elements of the case a vital link a that hung together between the funeral, the pimps letter and the prisoner’s final action.’ ‘In short’ he concluded and speaking with great vehemence said, ‘I accuse the prisoner in his behaviour at all the above events that he showed he was already by his very nature, by his conversations and by his preferences to be, a murderer at heart.’ He drew himself as high as Kim Song had done and concluded ‘ a murderer of the ideals of these great islands and peninsulas.’ ‘What is more’ his voice came as little more than a whisper now. ‘ I shall demonstrate before you in the habitus of a common clerk all that is wrong in this court room today and all that is wrong with this man and all that was wrong with stain left on his poor family who only by the actions of their senior members, prevented more acute harm being done to the strong federal structure that we enjoy in Malaysia today. He continued with this narrative of betrayal and subterfuge since my Dada a communist sympathiser had led out the seaman of nearly fifty years ago and my familial links with him. This , far more important than the accusatory knife that lay before him on the table became entwined with my father’s rattan lash to encourage my acts of contrition. Blood was at the heart of it. ‘Exhibit A’ he gestured and held out the knife in its plastic folder before him, ‘is the murder weapon and ‘he pointed to me.’ There stands before you, the murderer. ’ ‘A baby taken away’

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He was about to finish but muttered something of ‘bad blood’ as if passing a covert message around the court room. ‘We cannot be too careful’ he said. Iskra began to splutter and I could see his hairy arms bunch tight. My lawyer also expostulated. They were told that the prosecutor must be allowed to finish his remarks. ‘I have nearly done’ the prosecutor said in a tone of mock weariness. He then turned again to Iskra. ‘Was the prisoner your friend?’ ‘Certainly, we were the best of pals as they say. ‘ The prosecutor then put the same question to me. I looked hard at Iskra and he did not turn away but looked me direct in the eye. ‘Yes’ I said. The prosecutor turned with a glance to the bench but with his full face to the jury. ‘Not only did the man before you in the dock indulge in the most shameful of acts , of which we shall hear later, but on the days following his grandfather’s funeral, he killed two men in a furious cold blooded act. This no doubt, in pursuance of some sad vendetta that he had built in his head concerning the history of this island and his unhappy family in the formation of this land we now call the nation. His voice rose. ‘He conducted these acts in the underworld hell of iniquity of drugs and clubs and pimps and prostitutes. A life that is foreign to 99% of Malaysians. That my learned friend is the type of man that this court is set to try before you today.’ ‘ That, gentle people of the jury is the type of man who stands before you today. You shall know him by the category of his friends.’ No sooner had he sat down than my lawyer out of all patience and frustrated, raised his arms so high that the sleeves of his gown fell back to reveal the full length of his shirt cuffs and gold cufflinks. ‘Is my client on trial for having buried his grandfather or for killing two men’

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He was then asked how did he come to know why the dead boys were murdered and what were his relations with the perpetrator? Iskra took this opportunity of explaining it was he, not I, that had asked the European men to first sit down and be quiet in the club. ‘This was not what I meant’ The prosecutor’s eyes narrowed again ‘So what of this letter that led to this train of events?’ He waved some papers over his head. ‘That was nothing’ Iskra said. Some Indonesians had a grudge for me because I beat up the guy’s sister.’ ‘How is it then that this letter led directly to the tragedy and was the work of the accused’ The prosecutor asked. ‘By pure chance,’ Iskra said. ‘He did me a favour. I took him and his friend to the beach. There was a bit of a scuffle and I got stabbed. We only took the drugs as a diversion because it had been a fidgety, troublesome sort of day, the rains came after the sun and we all came back to the city by car. The music was good. We were good. It was only by chance that we ended up at that part of the city and then at the club and then at the waterfront bar. We meant to stay at the beach. We didn’t know where we would be or who we would argue with. T hose who shouted and slapped us took us away from our party. It was only a chance thing.’ He shrugged his wide shoulders. The prosecuting Barrister said ‘ Chance or mere coincidence plays an awfully remarkable large part in this farrago of lies .Was it by chance that the prisoner had not intervened when Iskra assaulted the girl who was his mistress. Did this convenient term ‘chance’ account for the prisoner’s actions at the police station when he was summoned? Did chance make statements extravagantly favourable to him and now we find that ‘chance’ again led to the night club and to the knife and the killing of these two poor white boys..’ ‘What do you do for a living ‘ the prosecutor asked. On describing himself as a warehouseman who was temporarily out of work, the prosecutor informed the jury that it was common knowledge that the witness lived off the immoral earnings of young illegal Indonesian girls and that he supplied drugs around the district which he procured from the Thai fishing boats, eighty per cent of which were equally illegal. ‘The accused prisoner’ he said as if throwing a card down on the table. ’ Was this man’s close friend and confidant. In fact the whole background to this crime was of the most squalid form of disreputable association, demeaned illegal women bought and sold for sex, drugs, liquor, parties and finally the extinguishing of two bright European lives who came from the land of the Queen; lives which had soared like stars and were cruelly terminated by a fish dock worker with a knife used by a pimp.’ He wiped a bead of sweat away from his clammy forehead and continued. ‘ What has made this crime more malicious and odious was the personality of the prisoner, an inhuman monster in that small frame, who exists solely without any sense of morals. What chance was there for repentance in that’.

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Shabela turned and gazed at me. There were tears in his eyes. He really did care about me even if we had met just the once. His lips trembled as he looked as if to say, well I gave it a try my friend, I’ve done my best and if it hasn’t helped much I’m truly sorry. I didn’t say anything or make any movement but apart from Mo, I wanted to step down and kiss him in front of all the court. The judge repeated his order to stand down and Shabela returned to his place among the crowd like an actor going to sit amongst the audience in a cinema. He was only half fixed upon himself, the witness box, the dock or the bench where the judges always sat. During the rest of the hearing he remained there, leaning forward, eyes turned down, elbows on knees and his cap twisted in his hands across his huge girth. Hardly anyone seemed to listen to Rana, the next witness, he stated that I was reasonable and younger than him and even when we were together on a night out I was responsible and a good man to have together with you. Then even less to old Srino who said I’d always looked after him at the fish dock and had been very good to him at the house about his missing bird and the time when he was sick. When he told them about my kindness, or when in answer to a question about me and Dada, he said that I was Dada’s real son and that he treated me like one and that his own daughter and son in law were the real criminals and punished him for what he was, by never going to see him. ‘You’ve got to understand’ he said. ‘You’ve got to understand.’ He repeated himself again. What is the crime before the crime ?.’ The prosecutor nodded as if he was thinking about his dinner or something else that was demanding his attention. They told Srino to stand down. Iskra was the next witness. He gave me a little wave of his hand and led off by saying I was completely innocent .The judge rebuked him ‘You are here to give evidence, not your views on the case.’ ‘You must confine yourself to answering questions to those put to you,’ the judge said.

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The prosecutor who had been making dabs of pencil marks on his file like he was joining the dots of a drawing, suddenly looked up. He made no comment but his eyes narrowed like a peregrine falcon’s and he seemed to nod to himself at this traitorous turn of events. There was a short break of five minutes during which my lawyer said that the case was going very well. Then Shabela was called. He was introduced as a witness for the defence. Now and then he threw me a glance. He kept squeezing his cap in his big hands. He was in his best suit, the one he sometimes wore on Sundays at the beach house he said. His stomach popped through his shirt buttons. I became fascinated by this when he breathed. I could remember the last time, I saw him walking into the sea. Asked if I was one of his friends, he said, ‘Yes, a good friend.’ Asked to state what he thought of me, he said I was ‘okay’ and when asked to explain what he meant by this, he replied that everyone knew what ‘ok’ meant. Was I a secretive sort of man he was asked, ‘no he answered I wouldn’t call him that and he told them what I’d said when I saw the Thai fishing boat coming into the river. He thought me patriotic. The prosecutor asked him if I always paid my bills on time. Shabela laughed and said, No. ‘But you’d have to ask Jalima that, she is the one that runs the restaurant. With me he said, he always paid on the nail all right’. The prosecutor, slightly flustered, then asked him what he thought of the alleged crime that had been committed by the defendant. Shabela placed his hands on the bar and I could tell he had speech already to go with. ‘To my mind it was just an accident or a stroke of bad luck, or if you think about places and times. A thing like that can throw you off your guard if you are in the wrong place.’ He was about to continue but the judge cut him short, ‘That’s all thank you’ he said from the bench. The head’s of all the jury swung around towards him. Shabela seemed flummoxed. H drew himself up to his full height and said he hadn’t finished what he had come here to say. The Judge told him to continue but to make it brief. He could only repeat that it had been an accident and that I was a good buddy’ ‘That is as maybe,’ the judge observed, ‘but we are here to try such accidents according to law, which in Malaysia runs like a silver thread throughout our history.’

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At this some people in the court let out a little laugh and my lawyer, pushing back one sleeve of his gown, said sternly, ‘this is typical of the way this case is being conducted. No attempts are being made to elicit the true facts here.’ Kim Song raised his head to make himself look taller. He appeared to shout although in truth his voice came out as a loud, hoarse, whisper that filled the room. ‘He used to talk with his Dada about what a shit heap this place is, ‘ He suddenly laughed and showed his gums, ‘About how we’re all fucked up here because of all the Kalimantan, and Chinese and all those Thai fishing boats and the Burmese slaves and the way the Malays run the place after the White Rajahs used it to wipe their arse on them for over a hundred years and how we’re all messed with because everyone sits on everyone else here and even the government has to decide who is up their bum or down the plughole.’ The court room gasped at these profanities but Kim Song only grinned. ‘I was just reporting what they said’ he said.

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The caretaker went back to his seat. When Dada’s old friend was called, a court officer had to help him to the box. Kim Song stated that although he had been a great friend of my Dada, he had met me only once on the day of his funeral. He was asked how I behaved on that day. ‘Well I was more upset, I can tell you that’ he said,’ far too upset to notice everything and I was tired by the heat. My grief sort of blinded me. I think it had been a great shock, my good friend’s death.In fact I fainted, so I hardly noticed the young fellow’ The prosecutor asked him to tell the court if he’d seen me weep. When Kim Song answered that his Dada only wept when he lost money, a murmur went up through the court. ‘It is probably the same with him.’ He looked at me, ‘ but ‘No’ he added emphatically, ‘I trust the jury will take note of this reply’ the prosecutor said. My lawyer rose a once and asked Mr Song in a tone that seemed overly aggressive, ‘Now think well old man, Could you not see the defendant was trying his best to keep calm because of all the other things in his life – including the death of his grandfather.’ He alluded to my new and close relationship. I saw the prosecutor make a quick mark with his pen onto paper. ‘ Can you swear he did not share a tear.’ Kim song answered again ‘No’

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They got the caretaker to repeat what he had said about coffee and the amount of cigarettes I smoked. The prosecutor turned to me again with a gloating look in his eyes. He smoothed down his robe like a surgeon about to operate. My counsel then asked the caretaker if he had not enjoyed a cigarette with me but the prosecutor drew himself high with indignation. His face twisted in a sneer, ‘I’d like to know who is on trial in this court. Or does my friend think that by some form of propinquity a witness for the prosecution might be coerced into speaking for the defence, that he will shake the evidence, the abundant and cogent evidence that is against his client ?’ None the less the judge told him to answer the question. The old feller fidgeted a bit then said, ‘Well I know I oughtn't to have done it’ he mumbled, but I did take a ciggie off him just to share a moment of companionship like’ The judge asked me to comment, ‘ Yes your honour’ I said, ‘ I did offer a cigarette, it seemed right to share at that time.’ The caretaker looked at me with a sort of gratitude, than after humming and hawing for a bit suggested that it was he and his wife who had offered me a coffee. My lawyer was exultant, ‘The jury will appreciate, he said’ the importance of this admission’ The prosecutor was on his feet again, ‘Quite so ‘he boomed, ‘but why didn’t the accused keep his cigarettes in his pockets and refuse a café’ out of his own sense of decency for the dead. Any person of common decency should have refused it. This prisoner ,as I will demonstrate, does not respect the decencies of life nor the laws of this nation.’ I thought he looked ridiculous.

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His tone and his look of triumph as he glanced at me were so marked that I felt what I had not felt in ages. It was the same when my father had not shouted at me but took me quietly upstairs and beat me. My mother passed the room and caught my eye and said ‘there you are’ though she remained silent downstairs. I did not like to think about these things. I felt a foolish desire to burst into tears. For the first time I realised how these people loathed me as much as they did. After asking the jury and my lawyer if they had any questions, the judge heard the caretaker’s evidence from the home. On stepping into the witness box, the man threw a glance at me, and then looked away. Replying to the prosecutor’s questions he said that I’d declined to get them to open the coffin or see Dada’s body and that I had smoked and slept and drank black coffee and water. ‘He looked like he was out of it’ the caretaker said, ‘as if he had been to a party and come up here without any sleep.’ I felt a sort of wave of indignation spreading through the court room and for the first time I realised the fact that I might be guilty. ‘Am I to die because of the progeny of this island, ‘my dada used to say?

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That didn’t mean much, all older people have grievances and anyway, the Dada probably meant my father, his wretched son in law. Was anyone going to ask him that ? The judge asked him to be more specific. Did he reproach me with sending him to a home up the country, an old man and far from his district and city of Kuching. The Director nodded his head and said ‘ yes’ and this time no one asked him to qualify his answer. To another question, he said he was surprised by my calmness on the day of the funeral and asked what he meant by my calmness, the director lowered his eyes and stared at his shoes. I remembered him looking at me as if unsure of my identity. Then he said that I did not want to see my Dada’s body but instead sat around drinking coffee and left immediately after the funeral in the village. ‘All his tears had been shed, that’s what he told me,’ the director said. Another matter had perplexed him. One of the undertakers had told him that I did not even know Dada’s age. There was a short silence and the judge asked him if he was referring to the prisoner in the dock. The director seemed puzzled by this and the judge explained, it is a formal question and I am bound to ask it. Why you don’t ask him about all those ships of the Blue Funnell line, I thought. The prosecutor was then asked if he had any questions to put and he answered loudly, ‘Certainly not, I have all I need here’

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I couldn’t quite follow what came next. After some more long and boring discussion between the lawyers and the bench, the prosecutor, and my counsel, the presiding judge now said the court would rise. There was an adjournment until the afternoon when further evidence would be taken. Almost before I knew what was happening. I was rushed out to the prison van which drove me back and I was given my midday meal. After a short time just enough to realise how tired I was , they came back for me again . I was back in the same room, confronting the same faces and the whole dance and fandango started again. Even with the sky overcast and waiting for the rain the heat of the day had increased and with the air conditioning on its last legs, some further fans had been procured and people were waving their faces towards them like fronds from a coral reef. They writhed like translucent leaves like those from beneath the sea, orange, yellow and blue, the colour of the women’s scarves. The jury, my lawyer and even my friends all seemed a long way away. I was getting an idea of what the prison guard meant. The young man and an older woman were still staring intently at me. I wiped away the sweat from my face but I was barely conscious of where or who they were, when they brought the Director from the home where Dada died to the witness box. When he was asked if Dada had often moaned about me, the chief answered ‘yes’.

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He then told me he had to ask some questions which might seem unconnected to my case but which could perhaps have a significant bearing on the whole structure of the matter. I realised he was going to talk about Dada again and I immediately felt very uncomfortable especially with my Ma and Da sitting rigid, erect and scared in the courtroom. I tried to do what my lawyer had first counselled me; to tell them my emotions were aroused and I could not control them. I tried to forget my rage but it kept getting in the way like a filter before a camera. The judge asked me why Dada was in a home and when I said I was working all the time and didn’t have much money. He looked at me as if that was a crime. He asked me if Dada’s death had affected me personally and I replied that Dada and I had expected nothing of each other, but he told good stories and he made me laugh and it was a shame when he got sick. We had both got used to our new lives. Mo would never have been able to stay if Dada had still been living there but I didn’t say that. My lawyer had told me not to bring that up. The presiding judge said he didn’t want to dwell on these affairs and asked the prosecuting lawyer if he had any questions for me. The prosecutor half turned his back on me and without looking at me, stated that with the permission of the presiding judge, he would like to know why I had carried on with my vendetta when the first white boy had dropped to the floor and I had gone on calmly to kill his friend. I said, ‘no, it was not a vendetta, it was pure chance.’ ‘In that case why I had taken a knife with me, and why follow the other man with such determination when his friend had fallen. Was this a matter of pure chance he asked? I nodded my head and said yes, very clearly; pure chance, because it was all part of the same moment. The prosecutor then said in a short and terse voice, ‘very good that will be all for the present.’

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‘Yes, your honour’ I said. One time I forgot with all the heat and confusion and called him your worship, then I slipped again and called him ‘your holiness’ and everyone laughed. It took a very long time because the presiding judge included the minutest detail, from the beach house to the car journey, the club, the music, the lights, and the time before the final incident. He dwelled a lot on those moments. The case was strung out like pearls upon a necklace and the details seemed to take for ever. He looked over his glasses at me. The whole time he was speaking, the journalists took notes. I could feel the little woman like a sparrow watching me with an intensity as sharp as Kim Song at my Dada’s wake. Shabela’s wife also looked me over as I answered each detail. And just like the necklace string of islands that danced their whole disparate frame of our identity, that nameless sea of faces, the jury each looked at me with their own separate sense of being. Then they turned one by one like a line of optical dancers back to the presiding judge, who coughed and leafed through his file and peered towards me after every phase of questioning whilst all the time fanning himself and occasionally sipping from his water.

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‘I could have been her step mother , so many times did I share your Dada’s bed.’ ‘They took away my baby’ she whispered. I remember looking at her. The sea was combing in little buttered waves behind the hut. ‘Many bad things have happened in both our houses,’ she said. The presiding judge began to utter his words and ordered that the official proceedings begin. He knew that he did not have to remind the members no matter how many emotions might be aroused, they must discount these in favour of the evidence. He felt that his role was to preside over the trial with impartiality and to consider the case objectively. The jury’s sentence would be made in the spirit of justice and, in any case, he would clear the court room if good order did not prevail among the public if given the slightest reason to do so. People from Europe would be following this trial!!!! Even with air conditioning grumbling away it was getting hotter and I could see members of the jury fanning themselves with bits of paper or those who were judicious enough to have brought fans used them in uniform purpose. There was a constant rustling of paper. The presiding judge gestured to the clerk who immediately brought in bottles of water for the top bench. My interrogation began at once, the presiding judge questioned me calmly and even it seemed with a touch of cordiality. Once again I was asked to confirm my identity and in spite of my irritation, my profession. On the other hand I relaxed, because I thought this was only natural because it would be a serious mistake to pass judgement on someone with a different identity especially on this island. The presiding judge then began explaining what crime had been committed and what I had done, turning to me every three sentences and asking me if that was correct. Each time I replied correct as I had done in the detective’s office.

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She wore a jacket and her hair was back and she carried earrings in the same silver that studded her suit. She levelled her eyes and same precise manner as she had when she told me I would come to a bad end. I remember Shabela who just laughed as though he fancied her. I realised with a start, all the times I had seen her before my arrest and that each time she had given me a warning, at the hut, the restaurant, then the street. She was staring at me with a purposeful look that brought back all those things that I don’t like to talk about. She was very intent with her gaze; maybe she was missing her TV programmes. I could imagine an open magazine alongside her at the café’, a pencil in her mouth; a gatherer of stories from the labyrinth she said controlled us; stories and spiteful whispers, a bit like my Ma with her pursed lips and everything that went before me, severe, unforgiving, and silent except when she spat her barbed comments. ‘I am your mother’s older sister ’ she said

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It was perhaps because of this framing and also because I did not understand the court procedures that I didn’t really take in everything that happened next; the way the jurors were selected, the questions the presiding judge asked my lawyer, the prosecutor and the jury when all the their heads would turn towards the judge at the same time. A quick reading out of the official charges which contained the names and places I recognised and some additional questions for my lawyer that he seemed to brush off when he looked over at me and smiled. Then the presiding judge said we should move on to a call of the witnesses. The clerk read out several names that caught my attention. From amid the crowd of spectators I witnessed only as a shapeless mass. I now watched as each person stood up, one by one, and went out by a side door; my boss and the guy who cleaned, Iskra, Shabela , Jalima, Mo. He gave me a nervous little wave. I was surprised I hadn’t noticed them earlier but then the final defence witness, the friend of Shabela’s wife stood up when her name was called. I recognised her. She was declined Thank God,, I thought ; a life story told without her gushings.

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A clerk announced that the court was in session and it seemed at that very moment, the air conditioning cranked and slowly lumbered into action, filling the chambers with its groan. The judges, two of them in purple besides the one in red came into the courtroom with their files and very quickly took their places on the high platform. A small man in the black robe sat very rigid on the chair in the middle and placed his cap on the bench in front of him. He wiped his small head with a pale blue handkerchief and declared the proceedings officially open. The journalists already had their pens in their hands and all wore the same slightly mocking looks on their faces. This was particularly true of the foreign correspondents. I noticed that the man from Kuala Lumpur was trying to affect the same facial, slightly bored expression. The exception amongst them was one who looked much younger than the others and wore a blue silk suit and floral tie. He had left his pen in front of him on the table and had turned his neck and was staring at me. On his angular face with its shadows and no trace of fat around his collar, I could see his very bright eyes examining me carefully, yet without expressing anything that I could put my finger on. I had the bizarre impression of looking at myself like looking through the lens of a movie camera, as if I was in a film

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The journalist had a kindly face, not like the prosecuting judge who terrified me with his cap beneath his arm almost like a hood and his large book. He shook the policeman’s hand very warmly and again, I noticed that everyone was talking in little groups, calling out to each other and chatting like in a club where everyone is happy to meet other people that they have something in common with. It was like one of those bars that only serve coffee after the football because no one would dare to talk or drink anything else in between.

I could not explain the circumstances that I felt totally alone, that everyone knew someone except me, that they all had something together that I was the intruder. Nevertheless the journalist spoke to me and smiled. He said it he hoped it would go well for me. I thanked him and he added,

‘you know we’ve written about your case, it has exercised the imagination and duress of the nation’

I didn’t understand what he meant. He said the trial would not last long. The turn of the seasons after May is the only time when the judges can get away. They never fail to have a rest after the major trials and then come back refreshed for the slow season and the winter monsoon.

‘I wouldn’t worry ‘ the journalist said. Then he pointed out another  small Malayan man who was standing with the group that he had just left. He was wearing enormous glasses that looked like those artificial ones with wobbly eyes you can buy at the fairground; one of the  places  where old Srino took his old parrot. He looked like he had not missed many meals.

The policeman told me that the man was a special correspondent from Kuala Lumpur and had come especially for my case. It was important that Malaysian justice was seen as incorruptible to the rest of the world.

‘They have asked him to send in your story in double quick time.’ He said.

 I was about to thank him but that seemed ridiculous. If Dada had been here, he would know just what to do. The journalist gave me a friendly little wave and walked away. We waited for a few more minutes in the stifling heat.

He was a little like my father who messed away those years of my growing in his own way. My studies were good; my citizenship was flowering .I was a bright young fellow, my father’s friends, teachers and other managers all said it but the issue was the boy’s grandfather. To even discuss him was enough to give countenance to the traitorous manner in which the lawless treated our island.

My lawyer arrived, flowing in his robes and surrounded by several of his colleagues. Straight away he went over to the journalists and started to shake their hands, even those of the foreign correspondents who previously, if they had noticed me at all, had only glared. They exchanged pleasantries and were laughing together, completely at ease. Then the bell rang in the court room and everyone took his place.

My lawyer came over, shook my hand and advised me to reply to any questions as briefly as possible. He asked me not to offer any additional information and to count on him to do the rest.

To my left I heard the sound of a chair being scraped across the floor a and I saw a tall fat man, dressed all in red and with steel rimmed spectacles, which he constantly removed and replaced from his nose with a hand bearing a heavy gold ring on its final finger. Swag for the pirates I thought or my turn on the boats of a Dayak imagination.

Below and to the right side of the presiding judge, the chief prosecuting lawyer sat down carefully folding his robes beneath him as if he was sitting on a cushion.  I struggled to remember any of the previous conversations with the detective. He definitely would not wear that sort of ring for show. He was far too courteous. He would not mock you with his power.

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He told me that it was because of the newspapers and pointed to a sea of faces sat at a table below the jury box.

‘There they are’ he said. I asked who? And he replied,’ the journalists.’

‘They are here from England, the Daily Express, the Mirror, the Telegraph besides the Sarawak Weekly the Malay recorder and the Borneo Express.

‘What about the London Times’ I asked. He laughed,

‘The British papers are all saying you are a psychopath’ he added.

‘They say you were high on drugs.’

‘That is not exactly true, I was coming down after being high’ I said.

‘Is that going to be your defence ?’  he asked

‘No,’ I said, ‘the slap of history is my defence. Mine was just a chance reaction. If I had not been carrying the knife for a friend, this would not have happened.’

He looked at me and then away. Suddenly one of the journalists was coming over towards us. The policeman knew him. He was Malay. He was middle aged and grimaced slightly and more when he put his foot down on his right leg as though one leg favoured another. It reminded me of the night of Dada’s wake when all the residents of the home trooped and limped sucking on their lips into the room that held the coffin. The journalist had a kindly face.

Twelve

I can honestly say that one season quickly followed the next. No seasons change as many lives as they do here with the days warmer or cooler, rainier or less rain. The monsoon of November is very different from the one of May. As the warmer days approached I sensed that something new was awaiting me. My case was due in the last session of the crown Court which finished in the last days of the month. The proceedings opened with the sun blazing outside the courtroom. My lawyer had assured me that it wouldn’t last for more than two or three days, and besides he said the judges would be in a hurry because it’s the start of the holiday season just after my turn.

I knew what he meant. We were over the worst of the rain and our dry monsoon would soon be upon us. I loved the beaches between April and September. We call them here the light yellow wine. There is more of sunlight even though you always have rain; the sun splits the days and brings us our evenings, like the light that fell that one fateful Sunday with all the huts along the beach glistening and groaning  with an activity and abundance  you can only imagine in November.

At seven in the morning, someone came to get me and the police van took me to the court room. The two policemen showed me into a small room that smelled a bit stale as if the windows had not been opened to the air. On the other side of the door were the sound of voices, names being called out, the scraping of chairs, voices of authority, the kind of commotion that made me think of certain festivals we used to have in our district when the furniture in the room is pulled to one side and re arranged for dancing or when the bride first looks out of the window and flings out her shift of flowers. The policeman told me we had to wait to be called into the courtroom and one of them offered me a cigarette. I said no and showed him the tiny piece of wood stuck between my teeth.

‘I use these now ‘I said. A little while later he asked me if I was nervous. Again, I shook my head and said that in a way I was quite interested in seeing a trial. I had never been in court before. He laughed and said that wasn’t true and laughed again but I just shook my head and said no not serious like this one. Those other times were minor matters, this was the real thing.

‘Yes said the second policeman, ‘ A trial wears you out. I’ve seen innocent guys fly away in their heads because they can’t take it anymore. In the end they accept what they give you just to be rid of it’

After a while a little bell rang in the room. They took off my handcuffs and opened the door and led me into the dock. The room was jam packed. In spite of the blinds, the sun filtered through in spaces and it was stifling hot. They’d left the windows closed for the air conditioning but something wasn’t working properly and everyone seemed to be sweating.

I sat down and the policemen stood on each side of me. It was then that I noticed a row of faces in front of me. They were all watching me. I realised that they were the jury. They all looked the same to me but I could see a scarf here and there, it was only later that I would be able to tell the faces line by line and what they seemed to be thinking. It was like getting on a bus or crowded train to go back to the villages, at first there is just a sea of faces in front of you but after a while you realise each and every definitive trace and feature of every single one. They were all looking to see who the last passenger was as if it was me; like they were craning over to see what was contemptible in the face of a killer. Did I really look like one? They called me baby face at school and on the fish dock but maybe there was something in me that looked like a monster. I did not really know.

I was confused by all the people crammed into this tiny space, everyone seemed to be talking and to know one another, I looked around again and again I could not recognise a single person. It had not occurred to me that most of the people here, all sweating, had come to get a good look at me. No one normally took any notice of me, especially on the markets when everyone was babbling and smoking before the rain. It took some effort on my part to recognise that I was the source of all this commotion.

 ‘There are so many people ‘I said to the policeman.

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She looked away and told him her book was going to draw a line where Islam ran from the peninsula down to Papua New Guinea and no island of our many thousands had remained untouched by the great wind blown out from across the desert. Her book would capture the role of encirclement and plantation and the myth of the woman who brings shame to her family by flying free of the labyrinth. But too close to the sun or too near to the sea’

‘Islam is a beautiful religion,’ I heard my Dada say, ’but it is not mine’

He then told her of his history. Or what he told me he did. She did not shudder nor flinch and denounce him as his own daughter and son in law had had done but a distance grew up between them. We did not see her around much anymore which was a shame. I liked her.

I was back in my cell. There was no way out unless you breathed and wondered at the interminable silence and the long nights of prison with a voice deep and strong within you. Just hearing it sound through all the shapes and patterns within me brings a reminder of not only what you have lost but also what you have been given as the greatest gift, the gift of life itself. 

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When the guard had gone, I looked at myself in my metal dish. It seemed as if my reflection appeared grave even when I tried to smile. They say it’s always like this when people think a lot. Even if you’re happy, you don’t look it because you’re wondering why you’re happy. I remember my Saturdays with Mo. I stretched my face about a bit in front of me and tried to smile but my features still had the same, harsh, sad frown. The day was ending and the hour was approaching that I don’t like to talk about, that nameless time when the sounds of the night rise up throughout the entire prison and you can hear groans and sighs and other sounds where placation or repentance are deemed necessary to express themselves in other machinations of the soul. Then the footsteps away, slow and rhythmic and the cortege of silence died towards the small hours. An occasional cry reminded me of my father’s footsteps on the stairs of the family home.

I walked over to the little window and tried to study my reflection once again but the light was gone. Instead I could see among the dark patterns, the same small serious face that gleamed back at me from the dark. Why should it not be when I was serious as well as my situation? It was all serious. My face could not lie. At the same time though for the first time in months, I could clearly hear the sound of my own voice within me.

It was chiming like a bell and rang, saying, hang on, hang on. Do not deny yourself  anything.It was saying, you are full of richness and spirit.  This experience could serve me as a pirate; a voice strong and resonant, a manner to which I was not accustomed. I recognised it as the voice that had resonated deep and strong within in me throughout my days of remembrance. It was like I had been talking to myself. I realise now what the Dada was saying to me on one of the visits to his nursing home.

He had suddenly sat upright on his bead. He had been lying there as part of his afternoon rest. His eyes were bright but far away,

‘Take comfort, take comfort my people’ he said, ‘your hardship will not last, and neither will you waste away in sadness. Do not let sorrow seize you nor fear that you will not be saved’

He looked straight at me and caught my eye. ‘These are the prayers of every leader ‘he said.

‘They put me in jail after these words. Don’t they know we are all strangers to each other even though we may sing the same song? 

I remember he once had an Indian lover of Arabic descent. She was very beautiful, an older women like him but beautiful; more beautiful than the woman in blue. She was writing a history of caste and practice and the love of Islam in Malaysia. She was saying that Islam runs like a jewel through our history in these islands.

‘Not as pronounced in Sarawak’ my Dada said, ‘We are all in the mix here that is why we wear the colour blue, those high with the fundamentals hate it. It is the colour of muddied blood; the blood of the virgin mother.’ 

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Ships articles ran for two years then and for the Chinese crews they used every hour before they allowed them to sign off. Maybe he was teaching me with his long silences when I moved into his house as though secrets could safely exist in a place of their own company. What he was instructing me was really his own experiences when he crossed rivers and bays and sounds and tended watch below in days of unceasing change that he could never see nor spend time with except for brief spasmodic moments on deck, his cap jauntily set upon his head between the watch bell and the stars.

The woman in blue might have been the daughter in the story from France, the one who threw herself down the well. It would have fitted with her own sense of things never really belonging unless they were about something or someone else.

‘Not a month after the pirates were captured, some hung, others put in camps, then the Rajah took your great grandmother. Oh he was a terror, his wife, the Lady was asleep in their bed, of  silken  sheets when he had her. So it continued even after he ‘put’ her with his Chinese manager. He still came for her. Wives came and went but he always came back to her, well after the boy was born. He came back to her, always insisting.

‘How do you know all this’ I asked her. She pointed a manicured finger to her head.

‘With us Sea Dayaks, the memory never dies. I have known of you since your Dada swore his revenge’

‘Were you one of his girlfriends’ I asked.

‘’He is 25 years older than me’ she said. ’It left him hating all authority’ she said.

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They thought their good son Rama would disown him as well as the rest of the family, the politicians and the State. I was on a journey. Between the hours spent sleeping, remembering things in all their blonde, red and green patterns sometimes shot with gold, reading the French story and watching the light fade in my cell and grow light again with the grey fingers of dawn, I seemed to travel great distances. A distance as real to me as any life I had lived on the outside. I’d read somewhere that people ended up ended up losing a notion of time in prison. That was nonsense. I was realising every moment of my life as time passed through me.

The clarity was like the ice of a cold fish knife held between my thighs and not at all like Iskra the pimp’s little blade used i used on those two poor lost souls. It seemed so long ago. After you had been through one memory after another on a form of trip always tinged by guilt it was made easier by the way the body adapts and encourages you to get around this problem or align your shoulders to stack one upon the other the way they do at yoga. These were my days. Easy breathing days. They became so extended that they ran into each other. My siesta could be my night’s sleep or one day separate me from another by a snooze in the afternoon. The names of the week became lost but not my sense of time. Only Yesterday and Tomorrow became important to me.

One day when the guard told me that I’d been there for over five months I believed him but couldn’t quite understand it, to me it was either five minutes or five years. The same day had played itself out endlessly in my cell and I had set my goals each time by the stars. Maybe Dada knew this and was secretly teaching me from all of his time on the sea with those chartered voyages on tramp ships that ran between these islands and crossed the oceans for years on years. He would have done his own counting. 

Dada 120

Then there was sleep. In the beginning, I slept badly at night and not at all during the day. Little by little my nights got better and I could also sleep during the day, particularly after I had completed a memory test with all its associated thoughts and feelings and the life of people passing in and out and through me like dancers waltzing across the dance floor or the way we danced in the clubs.

These acute reminders would be tire me and would sleep but I would wake refreshed and start again. It was a case of staging my time after meals and the night winds or the rain to send me dozing off. In the finish I was sleeping between sixteen and eighteen hours a day in preparation for the next bout of memory search for which I needed to be fresh. Apart from visits to the prison yard, I had not time for exercise. Sometimes even visits to the policeman interrogator or my lawyer checking up on me came as a rude interruption. Six hours to spend with my meals, my basic needs and the story of the man from France was more than enough to entertain me.

Between my mattress and the wooden bed I had found  a worn scrap of paper, yellow with age. It was almost completely stuck to the back of the mattress and they must have thought it was a label or description of  the make of the material. It was taken from the Sarawak Times but the date was missing as was the beginning of the article. It was a story that must have happened somewhere in France between the mountains and the sea and no doubt taken place some years before because, as I say, the paper was yellow and cross with brown markings at the creases.

A man left his village in the country north of Marseilles to go down to the sea. He sailed away to make his fortune. Twenty five years later when he returned from America, he was rich and came back to the village with his wife and young child. His mother now ran a Pension there, near to where he was born and brought up on their small farm. He left his wife and son in another hotel and went to his mother’s place to surprise them.

His mother didn’t recognise him when he came in. As a joke he had the idea of asking for a room. He let them see the money and cards he carried in his wallet. During the night, his mother and sister entered the bedroom to rob him and murder him. They beat him to death with a hammer and threw his body in the river which would carry it away to the sea in the same way that he had set off to carry him on his journey and brought him back home again like some maritime romance. When his wife arrived in the morning, holding her little boy by the hand and not knowing what had happened; she informed the mother and sister the real identity of the traveller.

The mother hanged herself and the sister threw herself down a well. I read this story a thousand times and tried to make sense of it. On the one hand it seemed entirely improbable. Who would play a trick on their family like that. And then I thought it was possible. Duplication takes place every day. It all comes about by chance, the same chance as with my actions that fateful Sunday. In any case I thought that the traveller sort of got what he deserved. You should never mess around with things like that. When Ma and Da told Dada out of spite that I had become aware of his real identity and his shame, they said it was when he started getting sick. That was another lie.

‘Sick’ the DaDa said and grunted, ‘Sick that I did not tell you more myself’ but he seemed worried.

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I became such an expert at this that by the end of a few weeks I became a specialist  in every part of the house of my Dada. I could spend hours simply listing everything in my bedroom and putting them in category of order. The more things I thought about, the more they came back to me and not only the things themselves but the thoughts and feeling attached to them. When Mo first came over and we lay on the rug, listening with the night, I wasn’t thinking about his body now but how the rug fitted the manifest of my room, what thoughts I’d had on the bed when I had to leave my Ma’s and Do’s place and my Dada took me in, it was the beginning that became part of the inventory.

Stuff  I hadn’t noticed before or had forgotten now became part of a wider pattern. I realised then that a man could live for a hundred years in prison and still not get past the front door of his own house if he put his mind to it.. If he was an older man, he could spend a thousand years. He would have enough memories to keep from getting bored and how the days stacked together in what the Japanese call Wabu Sabi or joy of everyday life. In one respect this was an advantage. I could think clearer now about why I left my studies and those other silent whispers in that crazed household and those other matters of which I don’t like to speak.

Why does everyone have to speak two languages here? We are not allowed to choose, we have to learn the language of our ethnic group and this is determined by your father but that’s not something I like to talk about either. In my case it was useless.  We are so integrated with the Malays we have forgotten our Chinese and the sea Dayaks are dirt with their feckless ways and Christian culture but this is not how my mother and father viewed the picture. They needed me near.

‘Forty years at sea can absolve you of anything,’ the DaDa said.

 Chinese, Malay or Dayak, nobody was going to teach him to sing. It brought him pain but it was also what made the Kalimantan’s laugh and call him ‘Uncle Sam’ 

Dada 118

Apart from those problems I wasn’t too unhappy. Time was the big master but once I understood that I was fine. When I saw I could do nothing about the way it was passing through me rather than me journeying through time, then things then became a lot easier. I stopped being bored all together when I  learned how to remember. Sometimes I would start thinking about my room and I would imagine starting at one end of it and walking around in a circle while listing mentally all the things I passed. In the beginning it took no time at all but each time I started to do it again it would take a little longer. And over time walking around my cell as if it was my room and then sitting down on my bed each time I had completed the survey it took a little longer and then a little longer because I would remember all the different pieces of furniture, their colour and texture, soft, hard and any marks, scratches or chips. I concentrated so hard I would have a complete inventory.

And the clock, the clock my Dada used and what he gave me when he had to go up country to the home, the clock he had with him on every ship. He never used the shake man he said. His alarm would always go off in good time. He had that clock since The Brooke’s family had ruled the island and raped his mother. He had it through his marriage and my mother’s early years. The woman in blue told me she could remember every finger of its face and which part of the numerals she scratched. I could see him down below on the Blue Funnell boats, going to the harbour ports of China and Australia and Liverpool and time ringing through every part of him as a marker to his life and what he had done.