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.”