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.’
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