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 ?