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.