Dada 43

He knew I’d loved Dada a lot. I replied – I still don’t know why – that I hadn’t been aware people had criticized me about that, but letting Dada go back to that village was the best choice of send off  I could have given him. It was his chance to make peace and it seemed the natural thing to do. I had looked after him long enough, I said. I didn’t earn enough to pay   to take care of him for years longer and the home had been part of his entitlement to his seaman’s pension.

“And besides”; I added, “For a long time he didn’t have anything to talk to me about, and then he couldn’t stop, once the secret was out. And especially when I started going about changing everything in my life. He got bored by himself after that”.

“Yes; he said, “and at least back in the village he knew people.”.

Then Srino said he`d be going.

He wanted to go to his bed. His life had changed now and he didn’t quite know what he was going to do. For the first time since I’d known him, he shyly offered me his hand, and when I shook it, I could feel the scales of his skin. He gave me a little smile; as he was leaving, he said “I hope the birds don`t sing too early in the morning. I always think that one of them is mine even if he can only hop about and mouth obscenities. I should never have given him his freedom. What will he do, what will he do’ he wailed.

Iskra shook his head. Dada would have laughed. He was always talking of freedom. I couldn’t be sure of all what he said was true – but it helped me imagine, helps me now to think of the way they called these places the spice islands and rotten jungles and pirate boats ploughing these waters. How we bear a tropical identity with our old pirate ways and locked between Islam and Catholicism and Buddhism like a golden triangle that sways between our hearts and our minds to palm trees, coconuts and the blue grey China Sea the source of our drugs and a sea not only occasionally stained by blood in search of its own traditions.