Dada 79

Then he told me he would not be coming to the funeral. He sat down behind his desk, and crossed his legs. He explained that the Doctor and I would be alone with the nurse on duty. Again his eyes briefly swept my face like a wind from across the peninsula.

In principle, the residents weren’t permitted to go to funerals. He only allowed them to attend the wake.

 “It`s easier for them that way” he said.

But there was certain strength in the vessels of his throat as he cleared it. He had given permission for an elderly friend of Dada’s to walk behind the cortege: “Kim Song”, then the director smiled. “You see: he told me, it`s rather childish, but he and your Dada were hardly ever apart. Here at home, they were teased about it; people would say to Kim: “Is he your special friend.” Then your Dada would laugh and say

‘You have to know about Saturday nights at sea to know that.’ Then they would  both laugh.

 It made them happy. They had been ship mates together and it`s true that Dada’s death has upset him a great deal. I didn’t see how I could refuse him permission. He attended the wake last night.’

 I remember it must have been him staring at me like an eagle when I awoke. As if he knew my whole story. We sat in silence for a long time. The doctor stood up and looked out of his office window. At one point, he remarked: “Here comes the holy man from the district. He`s early.”   

He explained to me that it would take at least three quarters of an hour to walk to the graveyard beyond the centre of the village. We went downstairs. The priest and the two assistants who followed him were standing in front of the building. One of them was holding some robes and the little priest bent down to adjust its silver folds. When he arrived, he called me “my son” and said a few words to me. He went inside; I followed him. I noticed right away that the screws on the coffin had been tightened and that there were four men in the room dressed also in blue. I was glad I had worn something black. 

Dada 78

I breathed in the scent of the cool earth and didn’t feel sleepy anymore. I thought about my colleagues at work. They`d be getting up to go to the market about now. This was always the most difficult time of the day (for me) with the boats arriving full of fish that had waited the night in the river. Iskra would be waiting as well but that would be somewhere else. I thought about Mo a little more, but then I was distracted by the sound of a bell ringing from somewhere inside the home just like you could hear on the quayside before the market was to open. You could hear the early hustle and bustle behind the windows and then everything quietened down.

I looked up. I suppose that’s when I started looking at the sky – face down on the bed. Neck craned  as if I could see the colours through the window and not feel the lash imprinting itself through my shirt. The beatings were not the worst. The footsteps on the stairs came later, always after the dark,  when the air of eternity would close around me and the light sucked into a kind of simple silence before the door would open gently and my father’s act of contrition begin again.

 The caretaker crossed the courtyard and told me that the director wanted to see me.

I went to his office. He had me sign several documents. I noticed the Chinese doctor was dressed in blue even down to his striped trousers which seemed lighter. The Director picked up the phone and called out to me:

“The undertakers have just arrived.  I will ask them to close the coffin. Do you want to see you Dada one last time before they do?”

I said no. He spoke quietly into the phone and gave the order: I heard him say,

 “Tell the men they can go ahead.”

Dada 77

The caretaker served everyone coffee. I don’t know what happened next. The night passed. I remember that I opened my eyes at one point and saw that some of the old people were asleep, huddled up against each other, except for one man who had his chin resting on his hands his elbows tucked into the side of his stomach just below his ribs. He had no need of a walking stick but looked frail. He was staring at me as if he were waiting for me to wake up. He looked Chinese. His glare was like an eagle’s. I went back to sleep. I woke up because my back was hurting more and the pain creeping up towards my shoulders. Dada used to say I should meditate more but no amount of freeing my mind that night could rid me of bad thoughts.

Grey crept gradually in through the glass roof as dawn came. A little while afterwards, one of the old people woke up and coughed a lot. He spat into a large chequered handkerchief and each time it sounded as if his cough was being wrenched from his body, like from behind a watertight door of a ship below the bow where the Thai landers keep the immigrant women. He woke the others and the caretaker said it was time for them to go. Everyone stood up. The night had turned all our faces ashen.

To my great astonishment, they each shook hands with me as they filed out – as if this time had sealed a bond of intimacy between us, even though we hadn’t exchanged a single word.

I was tired. The caretaker took me to his room and said I could freshen up a bit. I had another coffee; this time with milk. It was very good. By the time I went outside, day had fully dawned. Reddish streaks filled the sky high over the hills that separate Sarawak from Sabah. From the sea, the wind was blowing from that direction carried with it the scent of salty air. It was going to be a beautiful day before the rain. It had been a long time since I`d gone to the countryside and I thought how nice it would be to go for a long walk, if it hadn’t been for Dada. I stood waiting in the courtyard, beneath a tree. 

Dada 76

Soon afterwards, one of the women started to cry. She was sitting in the second row, hidden by one of her friends, and I couldn’t really see her. She cried softly, continually; I felt she would never stop. The others didn’t seem to hear her. They were huddled in their chairs, sad and silent. They looked at the coffin or at their canes or some other object in the room. They seemed to see nothing else as if their thoughts were already contained in jars.

The woman kept on crying. I was very surprised because I didn’t know who she was. I wanted her to stop. But I didn’t dare tell her. The caretaker leaned over and spoke to her but she just shook her head, mumbled something and carried on crying with the same regular rhythm. My Ma told me that many people had once cried for Dada, especially women. But she said it with such disgust through pursed lips as if she had eaten something sour.

‘They cried for him all their lives.’  She said.

Then the caretaker came over and sat down beside me. After a long time and without looking at me, he explained: “She was very close to your Dada. She says that he was her only friend here and that now she has no one.” We sat like this for a long time. The woman`s sighs and sobs grew fainter and fainter. She sniffed a lot.

Finally, she fell silent. I wasn’t sleepy any more but I was tired and my back ached. At that moment, it was the silence of all those people that was hard to bear. Every now and then, I heard a strange sound, but I couldn’t make out what it was. In the end, I worked it out: some of the old people were sucking in their cheeks, making odd clicking noises. They were so engrossed in their thoughts that they didn’t realise they were doing it. I even had the impression that this dead man stretched out in front of them meant nothing to them only that they were rehearsing their own wake but I could have been wrong about that. 

Dada 75

My eyes had been closed and now the room seemed even more dazzling white. There wasn’t a single shadow and every object, every angle; every curve stood out so sharply that it hurt my eyes. At that very moment, Dade’s friends came in. There were about ten of them in all and they silently slipped into the room beneath the lights that were blinding me. They sat down and not a single chair creaked.

I looked at them as I had never looked at anyone before, taking in every detail of their faces and clothing. But I couldn’t hear them, so I found it difficult to believe they were real. Almost all the women wore silk sarongs tied tightly around their waists, which made their stomachs look even rounder. I had never noticed how old women could have such big stomachs. They seemed to carry them along as if all of their being resided there.

The men were almost all very thin and walked with the help of sticks or canes. The Chinese men walked low on their feet as if they too ,like Dada, had spent their lives in the engine rooms of the ships of the Blue Funnel Line.  What struck me most about their faces was that I couldn’t see their eyes, just a faint, dull light in a nest of wrinkles either Chinese or Malay or even another of the Sea Dayaks.

Once they had sat down their clothes became indistinguishable. Most of them looked at me and nodded as if they felt embarrassed by my youth. Their lips looked sucked in because they had no teeth; I couldn’t tell whether they were acknowledging me or if their mouths were just twitching. I think they were probably acknowledging me. It was just then that I noticed that they were all sitting opposite me, around the caretaker, nodding their heads. For a split second, I had the ridiculous feeling that they were a tribunal sent there to judge me. 

Dada 74

He then offered to bring me a cup of coffee. I like coffee, so I said yes, and a moment later he came back carrying some on a tray. I drank it. The taste was bitter and suited my mood. Then I wanted a cigarette.  But I hesitated because I didn’t know if I should smoke in front of Dada. I thought about it: it was of no importance whatsoever. Dada would have offered me a drink of brandy if the tables were turned. I could imagine him sitting up in the coffin while everyone around him screamed. I offered the caretaker a cigarette. He took one carefully and we both smoked.

“You know; he said to me after a moment, “your Dada`s friends are going to come to the wake as well. Even if it isn’t the custom for most of them, they still want to come here. I have to go and get some more chairs and coffee.”

I asked him if he could switch off one of the lights. It was still only the early evening but their harsh reflection off the white walls was making me nauseous. He told me it wasn’t possible. That`s how the lights worked:

‘ Like day and night, like life and death here, all or nothing.’ He said, echoing the Dada.

I didn’t pay much attention to him after that. I knew by his expressions that Dada had been talking to him. He went out, came back, set up the chairs. He put some cups of coffee around a coffee pot on one of them. Then he sat down opposite me, on the other side of Dada. The nurse was also at the back, but turned away from me so that I couldn’t see what she was doing. Judging by the way her arms were moving though, I could tell she was knitting; probably for her family in Kalimantan, they always have big families over the border. It was cooler now. The coffee had warmed me and the night air drifted in through the open door, bringing with it the sweet scent of flowers. I think I fell asleep for a while. I was awakened by something brushing against me.

Dada 73

The old man bowed his head and apologised. “It`s all right: I cut in, “it`s all right.” I agreed with what he said and found it interesting the difference between the different customs, what is there to hate in that? In the little mortuary, he told me he had no money at all when he first came to the home. The job paid for his coffee and cigarettes and some little trips he added

Dada made him laugh he said with his stories about being sewn up in a canvas bag and thrown into a lifeboat threatened to be lowered or beaten with hot shovels when the stokers were drunk on rice wine. He made him laugh every afternoon when he brought him his secret little drink.

‘ Here,’ he indicated. Since he considered himself healthy to be at the home, he had offered to take on the job of caretaker and that brought him a few coins and even a trip to Kuching now and then, when he and his wife could be bothered to take the bus. I pointed out to him that when all was said and done, he was still one of the residents but he said he wasn’t. I had already been struck by the way he said “they”, “the others” and, more rarely, “the old people” when he spoke about the home’s  occupants , some of whom were the same age as him and some even younger but he didn’t see himself as one of them. His wife originally came from this island and that is why they came back, ‘he said.

I thought, that’s why most people come back – because of some decision made outside of their daily lives. I remembered my father’s footstep on the stairs and knew what was coming. Gradually I realised what starts out as ordinary chance often becomes part of the normal

‘Naturally each case is different.’ he said. He was the caretaker and to a certain extent he had more privileges and some authority over them. Then the nurse came in. Night had come suddenly.  Very quickly, the sky had grown heavy and dark above the glass roof. The caretaker switched on the lights and I was blinded by the sudden burst of brightness. He invited me to come to the dining hall to eat, but I wasn’t hungry. 

Dada 72

The tops of the trees were wired through with lightning conductors, a reminder of the ferocity of the thunderstorms, you can get out here. When any of that lot comes down even operating a mobile phone is risky. Two flowered Malaysian red admirals wove around the window, their tipped yellow and black wings hovering and manoeuvring like delicate machines. Darkness would soon be falling like the blackness fired down the barrel of a gun.

‘We have no dusk here’ Dada said, everything is either day or night, life or death’.

‘Have you been at this place long?” I asked over my shoulder.

The caretaker immediately replied: “Five years” – as if he had been waiting, forever, for me to ask. Then he talked for a long time. He would have been very surprised if anyone had told him he`d end up a caretaker in an old people`s home in this district.

‘That’s just the way things happen,’ he shrugged

He was seventy four years old and from Kuala Lumpur. I interrupted him to ask: “Ah, so you`re not from around here?” Then I remembered that before taking me to the director`s office, he had talked about Dada. He`d told me they would have to bury him very quickly but not as quickly as the Muslims because it was so hot in the open country, and especially on a hillside where he could see the water. Three days was the maximum they could keep him but in southern China he realised that that was only for the poor. They sometimes kept them ten days there. That was a real wake. He looked at me as if he had said too much. Then he told me what he loved about the capital city of Kuala. He found it difficult to forget it, he said.

‘ Back there he said it is so green and people stayed with the ill and dying a long time because they knew that for as long as they were breathing they could still be with them. The tree line comes right down through the city to the water and gives it  a sense of peace. Twenty four hours after they had passed away they had to be buried and gone. There was, no hanging around like some who never leave the side of the coffin. There was no time for that, you`ve barely come to terms with what`s happened when you have to rush out to bury them. Here by the sea it’s ok but in the interior it is very different.’

‘They can’t wait to get rid of you’ he said.

Then his wife said: “Do be quiet, you shouldn’t be telling the young man such things.” 

Dada 71

Even though the caretaker was old, he had beautiful bright blue eyes and his face was an even brown with deep creases below his grey hair. He brought a chair over for me and then sat down himself a little behind me. The nurse stood up and headed for the exit. The way her hair bobbed under her scarf  made me feel strange and I realised it was like my mother’s , the way she wore hers, red and white striped cotton and a bulge of shining silk behind her neck..

At that moment, the caretaker said: “She has a big family”. I didn’t understand so I looked up at the nurse and saw that she had a bruise around her cheek bone just below her eyes. It sat a flat blue like an island under some depressed skin that acted like a sandbar away from the side of her face. From where she had been sitting, all you could see was the raised skin around the mark. It made me think of Iskra’s mistress and the way he beat her; the way they beat all women in this watery world, wives, mistresses, lovers or whores.

 “She has to work with you” the caretaker said.

After the nurse left the room, he said: “I`ll leave you alone now.”

 I don’t know what gesture I made but he stood at the back of my chair and didn’t move. His presence behind me made me feel uncomfortable. It was late afternoon; the room was bathed in a beautiful light. ‘We have reached the mountain,’ I thought. It had been a typical day, for this island, hot and humid with a grey pewter coloured sky shot through with sun and misty visibility that always looked to be clearing. I spotted the butterflies, flying outside all around the yard and the early click of the Cicadas as an early soundtrack to the evening. Amongst the pine trees and rhododendrons, white and mauve cat’s whiskers were flowering in the increasing gloom of landscaped patches that had been cultivated by the home’s residents outside their ’homes’.  

Dada 70

 I went inside. The room was very bright, whitewashed, with a glass roof. There were chairs and trestles in the shape of an X in the centre of the room. Two stools supported the coffin and it pointed a particular way towards the wall. The lid was closed. All you could see were its shiny metal screws, barely secured, sticking out from the stained walnut planks. Near the coffin there remained the  Indonesian nurse in a white smock, wearing a brightly coloured scarf over her head.

At that moment, the caretaker came in behind me. He must have been running. He stammered a little as he spoke:

“We closed the casket, so I have to unscrew the lid for you to see him.”

He started walking towards the coffin but I stopped him with my hand.

“Don’t you want to?” he asked.

I replied: “No. He’s here inside me’ I pointed to my heart.

He stopped and I felt uncomfortable because maybe I shouldn’t have said that. Maybe there is a responsibility that you have to view the body. After a moment, he looked at me and asked:

 “Why?” but without sounding reproachful, just as if it was simply asking a question.

I said: ‘I don’t know.’

Then he twirled his grey moustaches through his fingers and, without looking at me, he said “I understand.” He kept looking at my face to check I was really Malay. He was not as delicate as the director. Dada would have laughed.

Dada 69

I stood up without saying anything and followed him out the door. On the staircase, he explained: “We put him in our little mortuary so we don’t  upset the others. Every time one of our residents dies, they feel anxious for two or three days. That makes it difficult for us to do our job.”

We walked through a courtyard where there were a lot of old people chatting in little groups beneath the trees. They stopped talking as we walked by. Once we had passed, their conversations started up again. They sounded like sea birds calling in the distance and I thought of Old Srino and his parott. When we reached the door of a small building, the director stopped:

‘I`ll leave you here, Mr Rama Abdullah. I`ll be in my office if you need anything.” He paused to go.

He  looked at me strangely again as if he wanted to say something.

‘The funeral is set for ten O`clock tomorrow morning so you can attend the wake of your dearly departed. One more thing: Your Dada, it seems, often told his companions that he wished to have a Chinese burial but in this particular Catholic style.’ 

Maybe Dada had thrown that last bit in for good measure just to make sure everyone knew he was different or did he really seek to make his penance ?

‘I have taken the liberty to arrange everything. But I wanted to let you know this.” The director said.

I thanked him. While never professing to be an atheist, Dada had never once in his life given much thought to all that religious stuff. He was too busy with his wives and girlfriends, not to mention his beer and brandy and rum and his resting days with his buddies and the solidarity of the sea.

‘The Buddha is within inside us all ‘ he used to say and laugh.

Dada 68

“You have no reason to justify yourself. I`ve read your Dada`s file. You were able to look after most of his needs but he required a nurse. You earn a very modest living. And to tell the truth, he was happier here with us.” 

The unspoken question of my ma and da hung in the air. The Director did not ask why this was a Chinese funeral, a Catholic funeral like those that take place in the ports of southern China,  or Singapore at the bottom of the peninsula whose name we still include within our country.

I agreed and said: “Yes, Governor.” The Chinese doctor said quietly that the Dada had friends here.

‘You know’; he added, “ The people of his own age loved him. He could share his interests of the past with them. You`re young and he probably was bored when he was living with you.”

It was true, the latter days, when we lived together, Dada increasingly spent all his time in silence. He would finger the lapels of his collar watching people come and go and sometimes hug his arms around him as if he was cold. When I went to live with him he knew  I was conscious of his shame. He shouted down to people but less now, nor got excited in the way he once did. He was becoming tired. The first few days he was at the old people`s home, he often cried. But this was because his routine had changed. The ma and da would never come to see him and I was working.

After a few months, at the place where he came to call his home he would have cried if he`d been taken or moved away for the same reason. That was partly why I had gone to visit him as much as I could during his early time there. I went less and less this past year. It took up my whole Sunday not to mention the time and effort to buy the ticket get the bus and travel for two hours each way. It was worth it at the time when he first went in there but then my own life changed and I needed some space .

The director was talking to me again but I was barely listening.

Then he said: “I assume you would like to see your Dada.” 

Dada 67

The hospital is in the village. I walked. I didn’t want to see Dada right away. .There are things you should not think about. Even when I was little I heard the ma and da talking about how the Dada had brought disgrace to us all. We were the disgrace of our kampong. I can remember my face around the door. My father told me that Dada was a bad man and that I was not to talk of him. I nodded.

Poor old Dada had gone back ‘home’. My father once told me that he had a ‘Chinese character with a Dayak soul and that is not good for Malaysia’.

‘Why can’t we talk about him’ I asked my ma.

My da must have heard. She might have told him. She swore she didn’t. My old man instructed me to go upstairs and lay on my bed. He followed me. He took off his rattan belt and that is where another episode in my life began.

The care nurse informed  me I had to meet the doctor first. He was busy. I had to wait a while. The nurse talked the whole time. She was Indonesian. Then I saw the director.

He showed me into his office. He had the Chinese doctor with him. He was a short elderly man, who wore the legion of Independence pinned to his jacket. The director looked at me closely with his pale blue eyes, I thought he looked at me a little strangely. Then he shook my hand. He held onto it for so long that I didn’t quite know how to pull it away. He looked at some papers, and then said: “Your Grandfather came to us some time ago. You were the only one who would support him financially then.”

I thought he was reproaching me for something and I started to explain about my Ma and Da. But he stopped me. 

Dada 66

For now, it`s still a little as if Dada hadn’t died. After the funeral, however, it will be over and done with, a matter officially closed. I got the bus at two o`clock. It was very hot.

I felt a little strange because I had to go up to Jalima’s place yesterday to borrow a black tie. I also asked for a piece of red cloth to tuck in my sleeve. She lost her uncle a few months ago.

I ate at in silence at the market restaurant as I always do. Everyone felt very sorry for me, and Jalima said:

“You only have one Dada.” When I got up to leave, they walked me to the door.

Dada’s resting place is a country institute with a set of individual “homes” built around it`s perimeter All  of the dwellings are daubed in white or yellow or green like the different kampongs around our city districts.

‘Community is very important here as with all our customs’. The director told me.

Ha ha poor old Dada had gone back ‘home’; a  poor old man as conduit  between the sea Dayaks and conceived on a couch but never between the silk sheets of the ‘french’ house.

‘ Who would have my provenance ‘, he used to ask?

A bastard son passed  over to one of the Chinese tenants who posed as step dad and got Dada on the blue funnel boats. He stayed there more than twenty  years out of sight until the seamen’s strike.

‘The sea absolves everyone’ he said. 

After I had collected my various pieces of clothing and been fed, I ran to catch the bus. Rushing around, running like that, plus the bumpy ride, the smell of petrol, the sun`s glare reflecting off the road, all that must have been left behind me in my running was why I felt so drowsy. I slept for nearly the whole journey. When I woke up, I was leaning against a market woman who smiled at me and asked if I had come a long way. I said “Yes” so I wouldn’t have to talk anymore. 

Dada Eight

When Dada died I received a telegram from the home in the northern country district. My ma and da would not go to the funeral. They despised him in life and were no different at his death,

‘We will not be hypocritical’ they said. Their note finished, ‘very sincerely yours’.

It might have been a man from another world they were writing about rather than my ma’s father . A full half century since Dada’s traitorous act was nothing to them.  They would not attend his funeral because they feared the stain would remain forever marked on our family.

‘He brought shame down upon us all’ they said.

The old people`s home lies within its name, ‘The Far Star’, eighty kilometres from Kuching. I could get the bus at two o`clock and arrive up there for the evening, stay for the wake and the burial and then set off back to the City the following afternoon.

That way I could attend olences. He`ll no doubt say something the day after tomorrow when he sees me in the full blue dressall the ceremony including the long stretch and be home by tomorrow night. I could also wrangle a little time extra for myself like any Dayak pirate would do. I asked my boss for three days off. He couldn’t say no given the circumstances. But he didn’t seem happy about it.

I even said: “It`s not my fault.”  He did not reply.

Dada 65

Here was Sunday nearly over and I still hadn’t examined the Meth . That was a good sign. I did not want to smoke alone although it was now physically possible with Dada not being here. I did search for some silver foil but with not much heart. There was none anyway and so I gave up. He was dead and buried now and I was back at work. When all was  said and done it was between us. It was our life and nothing had really changed.

There was a sound outside the door and I turned the lock to see who it was. Srino was staring at his feet and his scabby hands were shaking. Without looking at me, he asked: 

“Tell me Rana Abdulla they won’t take him away from me.’ They’ll give him back to me won’t they. Otherwise, what will happen to me?” 

I told him that the police kept all live animals for three days in case their owners came for them and that afterwards they did what they thought best. He looked at me in silence. Then he said: “Good night”. He closed his door and I could hear him walking back and forth. His bed creaked. And when I heard a strange little sound coming from the other side of the wall and I realized he was crying. I don’t know why, but Dada kept filling my thoughts .I knew I had to get up early to arrange the final documents .

Dada 64

Everyone knew that work  as much as the rain would arrive soon. Only the pirates thought different, little wonder the rulers  categorised them as ‘vagabondi.’

Then the street lights suddenly came on, softening the first stars that appeared in the night sky. I felt my eyes starting to hurt after watching the changing light and masses of people swirl around for so long. The lights made the damp pavements glisten and the smell of the trees seem greener. Every few minutes the head- lights of the buses would  light up someone's  clothes or  hair fall down from under a scarf, a smile or a silver bracelet would be caught in an arc of light like a film itself.

A little while later, as the trams passed by less and less I decided to go home; the house would be empty that was true but if it was only me and it would not be the case for long. Someone would always rent Dada’s room. You can’t get these apartments anymore and the landlord would be glad of the money. Anything was good that would  keep me away from thoughts of the DaDa.Even my mother and father who I hated with their swollen dreams under the beneficent gaze of the authorities served a purpose in distracting me.

The night grew even darker above the trees and lights, and the streets below began to empty little by little, until the first cat slowly crossed the road, deserted once more.

Then I thought I should have some supper. My legs hurt a little from stopping and starting so much on the way home back. I bought some bread and noodles, prepared my meal and a hot pepper sauce and ate it in a bowl while standing up at the window. I smoked another cigarette, stood between the frames but it was cooler now and I felt a little uncomfortable. I closed the windows against the river and the stars the way I had always done.  As I stepped back into the room, I saw, reflected in the mirror, at the edge of the table some bits of bread were lying next to Dada old storm lamp. He kept it so many years and would like to tell stories around it. 

Dada 63

 I remembered them all, especially the one that was played on him by his birth and the Chinese comprador that acted as his father or the estate he managed as a lackey  of Sir Wyver’s  vast domain. One that stretched all the way from the borders  with Kalimantan to the high mountains of Sabah and which the Malays, in their outrage, like my father, followed a similar path of forgetting.

Time passed. Above the rooftops, the sky grew green to grey and then to a streaked red. As night fell the streets started filling up again. The people who'd gone out came back, a few at a time, some in better repair than others. I recognized the distinguished-looking family. The children were either crying or letting them- selves be dragged along. The man held one of them by the hair. Her screams bounced off the walls. Behind him, his wife sailed up the pavement like a galleon on a calm sea. 

The local cinemas suddenly let a wave of spectators out into the street, all at the same time. Some of the young men were more animated than usual, which made me think they'd seen a thriller. The people coming back from the movies in town arrived a bit later. They looked more serious. They were laughing, but only every now and again. They seemed tired and preoccupied. They lingered in the street and knew that  Monday was waiting for them all. They were coming and going on the pavement opposite. The young girls from the neighbourhood walked together wearing their hijabs loose. The young men positioned themselves so the girls would have to pass directly by them. They made friendly and encouraging remarks and the girls would giggle. 

Dada 62

'We thrashed them Rana your Dada would be proud!'

 And I nodded my head as if to say 'Yes'. After that, more and more traffic began streaming by in an endless exit from the city once this quiet time was over. The clouds still gathered.

Dada was strange, everyone knew him but he was still strange. He laughed a lot. He seemed even stranger when the Malays could not place him and the Chinese turned to one side in that way they have but the Indonesians loved him. They called him Sam even though his name was Kim. He laughed with everyone. He told me he had to. What was the alternative; when the Chinese down below threatened to throw him overboard or burn him with their shovels, when his mother said he was more Chinese than Malay, or when the bitter word Sea Dayak entered the room. What else could you do ?

Even when his wife then his own daughter disowned him, sold him like a piece of silver for her own place to be part of the ‘real kampong’ or his son in law threatened to have him put away again, maddened by the way he had betrayed his ‘own’, Dada still laughed. He said he had bad dowager stock served upon him from the day he was born. What could you do but laugh and even married a Malay girl to be accepted. But that had gone wrong, he chuckled again. Those who laugh at tragedy only stoke up their own dementia, someone told me later.

‘Too many years at sea have washed my days’ he used to say. The shroud of shame still followed him to his final village even if it did not deter him. He carried on, found new friends, drank his brandy, told his stories, sang his songs.

Everyone knew him from his time on the balcony or when people came up to the apartment but he had to be careful. He laughed with everyone but only the Kalimantan’s and other immigrants could really understand him when he told his jokes about all of them. Nothing to him was sacred, everything profane and even when that changed and he became tired, his lips still could not contain a chuckle.

He laughed at the officers and governors of this blighted island and even more at the whites before them with their family kingdoms served in perpetuity by the Blue funnel Company or the Borneo Steam Packet . He could talk of Australasia more than any boss of mine and said he believed in it especially the catholic outback west. He was full of laughter and a stranger to his own family. His jokes went with him to the grave.

Dada 61

The sky grew darker as I walked home and the thought of the summer storms to come brought a cloud over my mood and did not make me feel better. Dada said that in In Australia it stays sunny for weeks and even months. Here the sun is always broken by the rain and mist even in high summer. You could never take a chance or go for days without rain. This time by some miracle the sky cleared again and for an instant there was a beautiful green light over the harbour. But the constantly passing clouds had left the threat of a downpour hovering above the street and made it look more dismal in its beauty as if it was awaiting bad news. I stood still and looked at the sky for a long time and watched the rain form in sheaths from the black underbellies of clouds as they rode like ships across the sky.

The vans and buses came back at nearly six o’clock, making a lot of noise. The smart guys and young men had been to the sports stadium in the suburbs and the buses carried groups of spectators who were huddled on the running boards and hanging on to the guardrails. The next cars were full of the players; I recognized them by their sports bags. They were shouting and singing at the top of their lungs - their club would go on forever and songs of individual players. Several of them waved to me. One of them even called out:

'We thrashed them Rana your Dada would be proud!'

 And I nodded my head as if to say 'Yes'. After that, more and more traffic began streaming by in an endless exit from the city once this quiet time was over. The clouds still gathered.

Dada was strange, everyone knew him but he was still strange. He laughed a lot. He seemed even stranger when the Malays could not place him and the Chinese turned to one side in that way they have but the Indonesians loved him. They called him Sam even though his name was Kim. He laughed with everyone. He told me he had to. What was the alternative; when the Chinese down below threatened to throw him overboard or burn him with their shovels, when his mother said he was more Chinese than Malay, or when the bitter word Sea Dayak entered the room. What else could you do ?

Dada 60

In town the shows would had all started and the Chinese would be making money. I suppose like with all money makers you have to work for it. Only the shopkeepers and a few cats were left in the street. They looked a bit like me. The sky was clear but not very bright above the cypress trees that separated the water from the street. On the pavement opposite, the tobacconist had brought out a chair. He put it in front of his door and straddled it, resting both arms on its back the way Dada used to do. The buses that had been jam-packed just a short while ago were now almost empty. In one of the little cafes ', next to the tobacco shop, the waiter was sweeping up and clearing down the tables in an almost empty dining room.

I loved strolling home at this quiet time. It was even better because I knew that next Sunday I would be free. Every other week was the deal. It was like having money in the bank. I had my pockets full from a little clandestine trading with the boat people myself. Our apartment was empty but that suited me, like Dada I enjoyed the space and besides I knew the others like Old Srino and Iskra were holed up in their own little rooms and they were my neighbours after all.

Dada would turn his chair around the way the tobacconist did because he found it more comfortable like that when he got tired of standing. He’d  smoke his  cigarettes, and then go  inside for a piece of chocolate and would come back and stand  next to the iron railings  to chew a piece, get some sugar inside him and then shout some more.

‘Chocolate and women are good for my throat’ he said. 

Dada 59

He had hundreds of these old notebooks. He’d read them sometimes when he was eating and crumbs would fall down onto their ridged and crumpled paper. When he was finished he would wash his hands and go out on to the balcony where he would shout out his thoughts to the street. Short of the visits from the detectives, those who lived around here learnt to pay him little attention.

The balcony looks out over the main street of the neighbourhood. He would stay there for hours on beautiful afternoons. People who passed by were in a hurry but he would call down to them anyway

‘Have you heard this, do you know what they’re upto now ,’ he would roar.

They were many families who would go out for a walk for their Sunday afternoon. Little boys wearing their best suits and shorts with shiny shoes or the girls in little sarongs that draped delicately down to their ankles. They looked a little awkward in their formal clothes – got up like this with one little girl with a large pink bow in her hair and black patent-leather shoes who flashed her eyes from side to side as if expecting someone to laugh.

Behind them was their mother, an enormous woman in a brown silk sarong, and their father, a rather frail-looking, short man I'd seen before. He wore a suit and ties even in this heat and carried an umbrella for the rain to come. Seeing them together, I understood why
Dada said that they looked distinguished in the way the woman carried herself.

I sauntered home along the quays. It was a good time of day. I caught up with them a little while later and  the local young men who had passed me by: slicked- back hair, red ties, very tight jackets with embroidered handkerchiefs sticking out of their pockets and shoes with square toes. I thought they were probably going to see a movie in town after their promenade. That was why they were leaving so early and laughing so much as they hurried to catch the bus. After they'd gone, the quays gradually became deserted. 

Dada Seven

I thought of all the people who used to come to the apartment when Dada was there but I could not remember any of them well. On Sundays he would eat his eggs straight out of the frying pan if there was no bread. If he was bored he would wander around the large apartment. He loved the space. He used to say he liked the sound of his feet padding on the floor. It was heaven compared to the stokehold of his many ships. He had never been used to space with his life spent in the engine rooms of the Blue Funnell line. It was practical for him to pace and wander and to call down to all his friends.

He was always tidying. ‘To make more space is like making your bed and clearing your head,’ he would say.

He moved the dining table into the side room and made me live in my bedroom to stay in this one room now with a few straight chairs and a comfortable mattress; the closet with its yellowing mirror, a dressing table and the blue and white coverlet over the sheet, a remnant from the fleets of Alfred Jones and the Borneo Steamship Company. He said when I came to live here everything had to have its place. Nothing could be left where it was after you used it less you would always be chasing after your immediate past and that was not important. He constantly used the empty room to pace about and to call down to the street. He had his scrap books that he would get out or cut something from the papers that amused him just like my boss did with the Thai fishing boats. 

Dada 58

‘ Do you listen to history’  he said. He rolled his blue cigarette papers in the wind.

‘Do you want the white Rajahs back like those Japanese who rode in from across the Peninsula and their followers in peace time. What of the natives and those of mixed blood ?

He paused and shuddered as if a breeze had blown across his grave.

 ‘We were seen as traitors, pirates from the ports of south china who had come and settled here and taken up business and land. Ha ha, such is our poor seamen. My family too they scorn me. I was a Dayak  and Chinese, I married Malay and we had your mother. She is Malay. She is fiercely Malay. They think that I betrayed the federation by bringing out the seamen. We cared for all the seamen, not just the Chinese but the Iban, the Dayaks and the Malay. We were all one in the pockets of the Borneo steamship Company.’

 ‘They say I have squandered my birth right.  They forbid me from family. They jailed and beat me but what do I have in common  with Peking or Kuala Lampur , Rome or Mecca , I am a Borneo seaman. A man of the Sunda Islands’

‘And what of this daughter, your other daughter’ I asked him.

‘She was with me through those terrible times but now she has gone’ he said. His voice was quiet.

I cooked myself some eggs and ate them at the back of the shop which pleased my boss. He could see I was trying to catch up after the Dada’s funeral. After lunch I pulled a chair outside the shop and only got up when someone wanted to buy. Most families were home now. Even the boss was looking at his watch. His wife was fierce. He’d leave me in charge. This was the best time of the day. I could read from the newspapers that he brought in that so amused him. He had marked the exchanges between the Government and with the Thai politicians and the immigrant fishermen who would use the Burmese on their illegal ships to flood our harbours. It was doing him no harm.

‘Life is always a problem in business. You cook your own goose. You can benefit from anything  if you show you are in control ’ he would say

Dada 57

Towards the end Dada was telling me stories as if he couldn’t get them off his chest quick enough. This one was before his time, even before the time of the white rajahs and his poor mother, when the whole of the south of the island was threatened by a plague of sword fish. A young, poor bright boy came to the Sultan with a solution. When the crisis was over and the sultan had sent presents to the boy and his father, he called his prime minister to him and told him to send two trusted guards and to go and kill the boy and his dad. The prime minister chafed,

‘But the boy did us all a great favour’

No’ the Sultan said.

‘No ‘he repeated. The boy thought and spoke above his station and caused a rift in the natural order of things. I rule by divine right and you preside over day to day matters because I have delegated you that right. If we let excellence decide promotion and start judging people by worth and not by birth, then society will collapse throughout Malaya and with all Malayans. I cannot allow that’

‘That’s the way they think,’ Dada said, ‘it is what they believe deep down.’

I could picture him now in full flow; see him with the sunlight on the water from our place on the wharf; from our balcony when he stumbled and had taken a drink. But there was nothing wrong with his voice.

‘Lee Kwan Yew knew what he was doing’ he’d shout. ‘He knew what was going on in Borneo. He saw the situation we seamen were trying to address. He knew the Sultans and Rajahs and Tuns would all want their place back. And our place was down. Every nation has an elastic border; our western boundary is the South China Sea, how could we all know each other. We are the outsiders because we exist outside the borders. Were we meant to think less of our own nation when we took action, went on strike?. Our passport does not reveal anything about our identity. To be a nation does not mean you are bounded to everything great or small. We were trying to change this and to change the lunatics who wanted Mao Tse Tung or the return of the sultans of Malaya.’