Dada 93

She was right, although all I could think of was the pimp who was beating her. There was no escaping it.

Certain moments from that day have stayed with me. The look on the Kim Songs face when he caught up with us for the last time nears the village. Great tears of fear and pain were flowing down his cheeks. But because he had so many wrinkles, they collected there. They formed little pools in the furrows of his devastated forehead, covering it in a glistening film of water like the tar pools on the road. I was sorry for him. The way you are always sorry when you have been through something with someone, a resistance, an uprising, a trip outside of the ordinary matters of the everyday where everything close seems to suddenly to dissolve. I could see why he and the Dada were such friends.

Then there was the grave, the plot freshly dug up the hill side where the Dada could look out over the sea. I would not say to home because his face might as well be turned to Europe the way he spoke of the Blue Funnel Line and its great diaspora among the Chinese. Borneo was his home but you would not think so the way Ma and Da spoke of his betrayal. One who did not belong among us, neither to them nor to the federation of Malaysia itself.

Village people came out on the streets. Red geraniums were sprinkled all the way up to the grave to clear the ground of ghosts. In the little cemetery area, there was a moment when someone fainted. They sank like a puppet doll collapsing to the stage when the master lets go of the strings. The earth – the colour of blood even through the puddles – the throwing of wood and smoke over Dada’s coffin, the soft white of the blue and black and yellow cloths, the smell and cologne and tobacco all mixed together a great perfume that only the Catholics offered the Dada. More people, more voices, the village, was comforting me as it would with any of the fallen. It would not let me stand alone. I was suddenly grateful.