Dada 150

‘I have described to you the series of events which led this man to kill his victims when he was fully aware of what he was doing. He has even admitted to you himself, the effect of drugs was wearing off and that it was mere irritation rather than threat that led him to this action. ‘This man was fully aware of what he was doing ‘he repeated. ‘We are not concerned here with an act of homicide committed on a sudden impulse and with one single and fatal stab which might serve as an extenuation of the circumstances but a sustained and prolonged assault along a path he had already chosen and which confirmed his intention.’ The prosecutor wiped his brow. ‘We know the prisoner is a criminal, but we also know he was educated at the High school, until he chose to leave. He is not without some education. You will have observed the way he answered my questions. He is intelligent enough and he knows the power of words. It is quite impossible to believe that he committed these crimes without being aware of what he was doing.’ The intelligence that i supposedly possessed was being used against me; any solidarity with my Dada a construction in the use of narrative to show the overwhelming manner of my guilt. I missed what he said next except that when I looked up I heard him exclaim in a manner of exaltation, the way tourists sometimes greet the sunsets over the river after the rain, a sort of hallelujah of righteous indignation yet it came with almost a whisper. ‘Gentlemen and Ladies, not once in these proceedings has this man once uttered the least act of contrition.’ Muddied blood, I thought. ‘We know what sort of man his Dada was, the prosecutor continued’. Turning towards the dock he pointed a finger at me and went on in the same strain. I really couldn’t understand why he harped on so much about this point, Of course he was right. I was so tired, I didn’t feel much regret for what I had done. What had happened , happened . But I own the prosecutor had tapped into a certain history. The court room was electric. Dada was no plaster saint. He had frequented his own time, his ships and his women. He was not a pirate but he could have been. I was being hauled up high before my history. Would I kill again? No I certainly would not but that was not the issue, what was missing was the situation, the place that chance had led me into.

Dada 149

‘Please instruct your client to be quiet. His comments are to be struck from the record’ the Judge said. My lawyer nodded in agreement.. The prosecutor said, ‘Here we have an example of this man’s heartlessness, was there a word of sympathy in any of his narrative, or that last soliloquy, for his victims, was there one moment of doubt given for their suffering families in the home of democracy. He does not even know the age of his grandfather, the visit to the bathing pool with his friend, the purpose of the visit to the pictures, the day at the beach house with Shabela and his good wife; all these were motives for his own gratification. His voice sank as he rehearsed again the laws of this land and the offences committed between men. He turned quickly as if to move away from those who had helped in this judicial proceeding to my friend Iskra. Here the lawyer showed a certain deftness, a card sharps speed, away from the ‘crimes’ Mo and I had committed in our time together and back to the perpetrator’s aquaintences. All he said had sounded quite plausible. It was true I had written the letter in collusion with Iskra so as to entice his Mistress to his room and so to let her be punished . But it was pushing the boat out to call him a ‘dark creature of the night, one who deals with drugs and with women and sordid café’s as if he has been born to them’ Full of drugs I had provoked a brawl with Iskra’s enemies in the course of which Iskra was wounded. I had then asked for his knife. With one sole intention I drove with Mo and Iskra to town in a night full of wind, stars and rain and purposely engineered a fight with the poor white boys. When they refused my advances and stepped back, I challenged them and hunted them like animals before stopping and mercilessly slaying one then the other. After the first knife wound where the victim lay prone beside me , I pursued his friend and then in frenzy stabbed and stabbed again until there was only stillness!!! ‘That is my case, ‘the prosecutor said.

Dada 148

The prosecutor’s speech was especially boring and I had looked away before he was half way through. The only things that really caught my attention were occasional leaden phrases then with a sudden switch of gear, his gestures towards some new and elaborate tirade but that was only because I was thinking of the trees that lined my Dad a’s new village or the colour of the beach before the rain that rose yellow and green at the outcrop of the rocks that Sunday morning. What the prosecutor was aiming to show was that my crime was pre meditated. An action ordained rather than the extenuating circumstances that my defence was putting forward. A sin of commission. No one spoke of pure chance. I remember him saying at one moment, ‘I can prove his culpability to you, ladies and gentlemen of the jury. The facts of the crime are as clear as daylight. We have the weapon, we have the prosecution witnesses, but more importantly, he leaned forward, we have the character of a man who possesses a criminal and traitorous mentality even before his use of the knife, who consorts with the dark side of the night and the people who are drawn to it, a violent dangerous place into which these poor white tourists stumbled and which thankfully as a nation we have denied ourselves the iniquitous dens the accused and his friends inhabit.’ He started to sum up the facts from the day of my Dada’s death but it was not me he was talking about. ‘What about my mother and father’ I shouted, ‘were they not also responsible; the way they banished Dada and said he was not Malay but a child of the comprador and white oppressor, that he led the strike through his own bitterness and the way he oppressed all our family.’. I said all this in a rare mood of defiance. The judge rebuked my counsel. My mother shuddered in the court house. She sat next to the woman in blue who nodded as if everything she said was coming to pass. My Father was absent.

Dada Fourteen

The finish of the case came like a song; the conclusion to a drama, the end of a rainbow being emptied into the sea, rubbed away by the sound of the wind and incessant rain. But I was wrong. The full stop did come with a certain stillness but it was accompanied by the mad bedlam of the labyrinth. It made me wonder who was really on trial. Was I as much of a traitor to Malaysia as my Dada or was I the bit player, the man holding a triangle in a great orchestra; only the State or eternity of these islands would know if I was allowed any say. It is always interesting for the prisoners in the dock to hear oneself being talked about. And certainly in the speeches of my lawyer and the prosecuting council a great deal was said about me, more about me personally than about my crime. In reality there wasn’t much difference between the two speeches. Counsel for the defence raised his arms to heaven, spoke about my ‘deprived’ associations and pleaded guilty with extenuating circumstances. The prosecutor made a similar gesture but asked for the guilty plea due to my ‘depraved’, sodomite and traitorous background. There was nothing ‘extenuating’ about my circumstances he said. One matter about this aspect of my trial was irritating, quite often when being spoken about so much I was tempted to put a quick word about myself. But my lawyers expressly forbid that. It would do me more danger than any good he said. ‘You won’t improve your case by talking’ he warned. In fact there seemed to be a conspiracy that was being waged against me to keep me from opening my mouth. Were they scared of what I had to say? My fate was going to be decided out of hand. They did not want to hear about this fucked up island and its history ; or that we Dayaks of the coastlines and rivers were not made for farming but running the waters in junks and sampans and gigs; or of robbing and coming back to our villages to lie in hammocks to feel the sun and watch the sky. Our time was not to be measured by the fields and the clock or the passage of the great lighted ball around the earth but of the moon and the night and the pull of the tides. We were as unusual as the Chinese but we lived here first and our primary love was of the moon and the sea and the blessed waves. It was quite an effort at times for me not to not cut them all short and say; ‘Shut your fucking traps. Who is on trial anyway. Does the prisoner have any say in what is going down here.’ It was me who was sitting in the dock on trial for murder, could I not speak? On second thoughts, I had nothing to say. It would make sense to them anyway. Hearing yourself being talked about for so often you start to lose interest very soon and could not be bothered to score the points. It was too tiring within that heat with everyone sweating until the conditioner was turned so high that the cold ran through the court like a knife and some of the jury started to sneeze. I thought of the nurse at Dada’s funeral with her bruised face and her notion of the shiver. The air cooler would then go back to its lumbering uncertainty and we would all sweat again. Under those circumstances it was no wonder my attention wandered.

Dada 147

After I left that house the evening hour would come when I generally felt so well and would look forward with contentment to sharing a bowl of rice noodles with my Dada and to listen to his stories. I would go to my bed with the sounds and smell of ships and what might have been in my dreams when my kinfolk the pirates paraded, long haired and laughing beneath the moon. This was the same hour but it was different now. Dada was dead and I was going back to a cell. What awaited me was a night full of foreboding of the coming day and of Mo and the manner in which he was led down the path by those questions to make my betrayal complete. I traced the main features of all these islands with my fingers across the cell wall then extended them upwards, north and west to the Philippines and down again through the territories of this land as far south as Java and the spice islands. Borneo, a paradise disguised as hell, a hell disguised as paradise whether it is driven like a sailor across the sea or to die on some rubber plantation with its poisonous fronds and white beaches. It is not only the northern hemisphere that reaches its soul to the stars but for prisoners like me to trace their fingers around their own freedoms and suffer their own confinements. These islands are as much a prison cell to the innocent as a carefree sleep to a tourist beneath the sky.

Dada 146

The prosecutor’s words and the thought that all would testify against me ran like the beat of a drum through my insides. I suppose when you look at it though what else could they have done. Shabela knew they were watching him for drugs. Iskra they had down for pimping and distributing. Even Jalima, they could tap into anything with her for association or waltzing the tax. I was glad the woman had been declined. Sometimes a defence is worse than a prosecution. This guy was tricky. And Mo, poor Mo, they would have him for the most heinous act on this island, a sodomite, an infidel. They would throw him to the wolves if he spent a day in prison or his buttocks were lovingly exposed to await the singing lash in the manner of which they like to administer here. None of them were to blame for their ‘confession’s’. It was what they did here, turn everyone against each other. The pirates in their brutality were the only ones with honour; little wonder the Rajahs had to kill them all to establish power. Before I went to live at Dada’s, my father was working in the up country on an estate where they process the palm oil. He brought a young man to the house one day, a Kalimantan whose eyes alone could tell you of the distress he had suffered. I could hear him sobbing in the spare room like Old Srino wept in his kitchen before the birds started to sing. My father had been missing for some time since we had eaten our dinner. My mother turned her face away when I asked where Da was. ‘ I’m sure he’ll be somewhere’ she said. ‘I expect the Indonesian has been misbehaving again’. ‘Your father has been very kind to those who come to work on that estate’ she said. I laughed.

Dada 145

'Each one of them would turn their evidence if offered the chance or if they were on trial here today' he said. He jeered at Shabela and Iskra. ‘ Only one has had the decency to come forward and stand before you with an honest heart.’ he said. You could still hear a rack of sobbing from the court but I could not look at the place where it was coming from. It was like the weeping noise of the stream behind the hut that fateful Sunday; the gurgling sound of the woman who gushed out her truth to me like broken waters around a rock. She could be my auntie, my mother’s sister, my Dada’s daughter, my mother? The prosecutor’s words seemed to make much effect on the jury and the public. My lawyer merely shrugged his shoulders and wiped the sweat from his forehead but you could see he was rattled. Mo’s words had not been good. Then the court rose like a flapping of wings. As I was being taken from the courthouse to the prison van, I was conscious for a few brief moments of the once familiar feel of a Spring evening out of doors, the cool and the rain were there of course, we would never escape that, but there was a lightening sky west of the river that sprang from the south China Sea and momentarily set everywhere pink. Sitting in the darkness of the prison van, with the rain drumming on the steel grilles like some form of corrugated chorus, I recognised that after this light there would be a sunset. With all that came the characteristic sounds of the place I loved, the buzz and thrum of the docks, the gangs swarming to the ships and those in from the country for the early markets walking through the dusk. This certain hour of the day I had always enjoyed and walked home in the thought of food and the television and the rain, and of the sun spreading across the island from the rivers in the west to the forests of the south. The shouts of newspaper boys, dressed all in plastic above their shorts, their papers protected, the call of the gulls on the wharf or starlings in the city gardens, the cries of the hot noodle stalls and squeal of the trolley buses that ran between the water and the central districts, the sounds that came down from the upper town of my prison and how they met with the sounds rising up from the suddenly still harbour come to form a sort of whispering chorus that became quieter and quieter until the real darkness hammered itself down upon me.

Dada 144

After making this pronouncement he asked Mo to give a full account of our doings on the day when I had forced myself upon him and we had intercourse. Mo would not answer at first but the prosecutor insisted. He then he told Mo that only by agreeing to the proceedings before the Magistrate could he be helped. Mo said that we had met the second time at the public baths, gone together to the pictures and then back to my Dada’s house. The prosecutor then informed the court that as a result of certain statements made by Mo before the magistrate, he had then taken this opportunity of acting as a witness for the prosecution. Turning to Mo, he asked slowly and carefully, how many times did the prisoner use the knife on the tourists. ‘Once, twice and three times sir’ Mo whispered. ‘Once and twice for the first man and three times for the second;’ Mo nodded. The prosecutor then took the jury through the events that had unfolded that night at the waterfront. ‘Was it then, you realised things had gone too far and that you must give evidence against this man’ the prosecutor asked Mo nodded Looking very grave the prosecutor drew his small frame up to his full height as if standing on a stone and with his robes around him stated. ’ Gentle souls of the jury I would have you know that this man who stands before you in the dock is a criminal of the highest order and sentence of the highest order should be placed against him. That is all I wish to say’ When he finished, the courtroom was so still you could have heard a pin drop He sat down to the same dead silence. Then all of a sudden Mo burst into tears. He’d got it all wrong he said. It wasn’t like that really. The law had bullied him into saying what the opposite of want he meant to say was. He knew me well and he knew in my heart I was a gentle character. At a sign from the presiding judge, one of the court ushers led him away. The hearing continued. The prosecutor was not finished. He jumped to his feet and again draped his gown around him and said he was amazed at the disingenuous way the defence had been taken in by these so called friends of the defendants.

Thirteen

It was Mo’s turn next. He wore a hat but quickly whipped it off under the unrelenting glare of the prosecutor’s eye as he entered the witness box. His head was shorn. Where was the lovely weave of his hair as it floated on the green water that Sunday. I wanted him with his hair returned. From where I was sitting I had a glimpse of his firm chest and the little undulations of skin above his hips. He appeared very nervous and fiddled with his hat but in a different way that Shabel held his cap as he bent to look at me. Mo did not look. The first question was how long he had known me. Since the time when I walked from my office to the fish dock, he replied. Then the judge asked him what the relations between us were. He cleared his throat and whispered, ‘intimate’ Answering another question, he nodded when it was put to him that this was against the laws of the land. The prosecutor who had been studying a document in his hand, asked him rather sharply, when our ‘liaison ‘had begun. Mo gave the date. The prosecutor then observed in a rather casual air, that this would be around the time of the Dada’s funeral. After letting this sink in he remarked in a slightly ironic tone, that given the laws of the land and as this was a ‘’delicate’ topic he could sympathise with this young man’s feelings but, here, his voice grew deeper in his chest, his duty obliged him to waive considerations of delicacy. ‘We are a stern but fair nation’ he said