Dada 161

He would sing in an old ring or fairground if they would let him. Some would laugh, most of them migrants from over the border; maybe that’s why the Malay hated him and called him traitor. The song came from more than forty years old. It was no matter of time for him. He sang it until he went up the river to the home. Try as I might I could not picture me hanging from a scaffold in some quiet room of the prison. When you come to think about it there was a distortion on what the judgement was based upon and the sequence of events that ran up to it before the verdict was delivered. I did not mean to kill anyone when we set out that day. What happened was that I found myself in the middle of something outside my own actions like a small wooden doll. History suddenly washed me along its broken path as if a bottle was suddenly dancing on the tide; fated more than premeditation; chance rather than deliberation. The fact that the verdict was read out so late in the afternoon when it might have been done just after lunch, when the sky was different, the clouds softer, the possibility of sun; all of this would have had a bearing in making it seem better, easier for a man like me. At some point of the day we are all naked. Why make such a fuss of this Malaysian federation stuff when everyone knows we hate each other. We just want to get on with our own lives. All of this cultural stuff surrounds us like clogging weeds. It deprives us of that certainty.