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.