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