Dada 44

I knew the little secret there was before I came to live with the Dada; his mother raped by a white Christian and ruler of this district; his surrogate father, an estate manager and Buddhist Chinese and his own wife and daughter, fierce in their desire for Islam. The joke of his son in law, my father a fanatic terminator of impure souls within the Malay hierarchy. Throw in communism and my abused great grandmother, a sea Dayak and catholic pirate and you would need little more to stir any pot on this island. I pondered on this history when I smelled the wind and saw the stars. They looked as if they were weeping  as if they thought I was not looking and  that Iskra not looking either.

It came to me with a sudden clarity that Dada could not know all the things he told me. Someone must have let him in on it. He could not have  imagined the times that brought him to this moment as he docked from one port to another in the ports of the Blue Funnel Line, his own mother a sea Dayak and his father a scion of the white rajahs who gained power in defeating them with the  women  as prizes ?  Was it his adopted father who told him in his bitterness or at his mother’s early death and the responsibility thrown on his shoulders for the boy ? Was it this revenge that brought the Dada to treason against the state at the very moment of its foundation, when it saw spies around every corner or maybe the strike of all Borneo seamen came at the wrong time. It was difficult to know these things.

I said goodnight to Iskra.  ‘Goodnight my friend ‘he said.