Dada 172

My father reached to his waist. A bead of sweat dripped from his moustache. His white shirt was lightly stained from the food we had eaten that evening. Rain started to hammer against the blinds. At first you could hear the tack tack tack against the windows and then the rivers streaming down the panes and then the lightning crackle in the trees. ‘Your Dada could have ruined the very foundation of this island and all the kampongs of the peninsula with his communism’’ My father’s belt was out now and raised. I picked up a knife from the kitchen work top and held it, the steel jutting from my fingers the way our pirates held the Kris. ‘Come near me and I will put this ‘I raised the blade ‘just below your ribs.’ My mother screamed. I told her to fucking shut up. Maybe the holy man had helped to connect my history with my present. Nothing, nothing, could shift that importance. This sight of the river and a small ship and the population of many nations of tribes and identities pouring off it to seek what they could find along all its trading routes along these islands echoed through me like a cymbal. Its children sang to be with me this dawn and tomorrows dawn and so it blew, a slow persistent sound from my past and from the people they call the sea Dayaks.. The wind ran with the rain and the sun to the fish dock and it ran from there to be here at this very moment, a wind that blew my whole life long, to people who I’d known and loved. The Holy Man could leave now. He knew my silence. On its way, that wind had levelled out all the ideas that people had tried to foist on me on all the years of my own journey beneath my mother’s and father’s fear. Who were the ‘white rajahs’ themselves if not pirates dressed in their tropical silks and linens and what difference had the woman in blue made with her infantile stories.