Dada 139

The prosecutor who had been making dabs of pencil marks on his file like he was joining the dots of a drawing, suddenly looked up. He made no comment but his eyes narrowed like a peregrine falcon’s and he seemed to nod to himself at this traitorous turn of events. There was a short break of five minutes during which my lawyer said that the case was going very well. Then Shabela was called. He was introduced as a witness for the defence. Now and then he threw me a glance. He kept squeezing his cap in his big hands. He was in his best suit, the one he sometimes wore on Sundays at the beach house he said. His stomach popped through his shirt buttons. I became fascinated by this when he breathed. I could remember the last time, I saw him walking into the sea. Asked if I was one of his friends, he said, ‘Yes, a good friend.’ Asked to state what he thought of me, he said I was ‘okay’ and when asked to explain what he meant by this, he replied that everyone knew what ‘ok’ meant. Was I a secretive sort of man he was asked, ‘no he answered I wouldn’t call him that and he told them what I’d said when I saw the Thai fishing boat coming into the river. He thought me patriotic. The prosecutor asked him if I always paid my bills on time. Shabela laughed and said, No. ‘But you’d have to ask Jalima that, she is the one that runs the restaurant. With me he said, he always paid on the nail all right’. The prosecutor, slightly flustered, then asked him what he thought of the alleged crime that had been committed by the defendant. Shabela placed his hands on the bar and I could tell he had speech already to go with. ‘To my mind it was just an accident or a stroke of bad luck, or if you think about places and times. A thing like that can throw you off your guard if you are in the wrong place.’ He was about to continue but the judge cut him short, ‘That’s all thank you’ he said from the bench. The head’s of all the jury swung around towards him. Shabela seemed flummoxed. H drew himself up to his full height and said he hadn’t finished what he had come here to say. The Judge told him to continue but to make it brief. He could only repeat that it had been an accident and that I was a good buddy’ ‘That is as maybe,’ the judge observed, ‘but we are here to try such accidents according to law, which in Malaysia runs like a silver thread throughout our history.’