Читать книгу Outcasts of the Islands: The Sea Gypsies of South East Asia - Sebastian Hope - Страница 11

It was still dark when Sarani called. I came awake instantly. ‘Come,’ he said. I started scrabbling around with my luggage. ‘No, come, look.’

Two boats were moored outside the seaward door, Sarani’s and another, from which a crowd of faces watched me as I climbed down onto its bow. The ceremony began.

A young woman stepped forward, a bright print sarong tied off under her armpits, her shoulders bare. She had the listless air of one who has just woken. She squatted on top of a wooden rice mortar, and an old man wearing a strip of blue cloth around his head and thick spectacles held on with string poured water over her from a coconut shell. He mumbled words that were not meant to be heard. An old woman smoothed down the girl’s long black hair with her hands, the strokes progressing none too gently down to her shoulders, sweeping down each arm, muttering all the while. A young man came forward and was treated to a more perfunctory bath. They each put on dry sarongs and settled down to eat with the others from a large bowl containing a mound of cassava decorated with plantains. Their engine chugged into life, they pushed off from Sarani’s boat, and they were gone, the eastern sky lit as though by orange footlights.

‘They are going to pull up their nets,’ said Sarani in answer to my question, but he was more elusive about what the ceremony meant. For him it did not have a meaning; for him, everything about the ceremony, its form, its purpose, was self-evident. ‘It is Mbo’.’

The sun was already fierce as Sarani poled the boat out to the edge of Mabul’s reef. The tide had started to go out, and we had to get to Kapalai while there was still enough water for us to cross over its fringing reef. It used to be an island, Sarani said, smaller than Mabul and waterless, covered in scrub, but then the house-dwellers of Pulau Tiga cleared it, as they had Mabul some years before that, to plant coconut palms. It washed away quickly, the palm roots unable to hold the sandy soil against the lapping of the sea at high tide, let alone against a storm. All that was left of the island was a sand bar, covered at high tide, but even from Mabul you could see the straight black line of the new jetty that was being built over the reef. As we drew closer it became apparent just how big the structure was, three hundred feet of walkway high off the water, made of top quality milled timber. Obviously it had nothing to do with the Bajau, and Sarani confirmed that one of the resorts was building it, but why they needed such a major platform at Kapalai he did not know.

The sand bar was showing and we steered for the other side from the jetty where a small fleet of boats grew from specks on the horizon. I could count twelve as we skirted the edge of the reef to find a passage through the coral heads. The boats lay in a skein parallel to each other, bows pointing into the wind, and as we came up past them from the stern I caught glimpses of the life of the afterdeck. We throttled back as we passed the lead boat, dropped the anchor, killed the engine and became part of the floating community. It felt unnerving no longer to have a destination. My journeying was at an end and I had arrived in the middle of other people’s lives. I turned away from the lure of the horizon, from the point of the bow that seemed still to forge ahead as it rose and fell on the light waves. I surveyed the flotilla ranged about us like cygnets behind their parent and above the soft noises of the empty sea came the sounds people make when they are at home. We had stopped, we had arrived, but we had not really gone anywhere. We were still on the boat, but the act of stopping, of taking our place in the group, had changed its nature. For the first time, powerfully, I saw Sarani’s boat as more than a vehicle; it was a vessel and I ducked down into the shade of the awning, into the life it contained.

‘This is Arjan,’ said Sarani, and the naked boy, hearing his name, shrank further behind his father’s shoulder. He had a cheap string of shells from the market around his neck and a snotty nose. He must have been two years old. ‘And that is Sumping Lasa.’ The little girl in a dirty patterned green dress, three maybe, with straggling hair, scratching her head. She looked at me suspiciously from a safe distance, her mouth slightly open. Minehanga, Sarani’s young wife, sat nursing their youngest child, a daughter called Mangsi Raya. She had large, strong features and a sharp voice that would carry far across the water. Her jet black hair was twisted into a knot high on her head. She put the kettle on to boil over a kerosene burner, still in its cardboard box, whose lid flaps she used as a windbreak. Mangsi Raya held on to the teat with both hands as her mother bent forward. She had thin light brown curls and a pale skin that had yet to be burned by the sun. She had been born on this boat, on these loose boards, under this tarpaulin.

We were hailed from the boat directly astern and Sarani slackened off the bow rope until our stern was alongside its prow. It belonged to Pilar, Sarani’s youngest son by his first wife. Pilar had a dug-out to return, and his wife, Bartadia, had our breakfast in a basin, strips of plantain, battered and fried. She wore a sarong piled on her head and a face mask of green paste to protect her skin from the sun. She was pretty nonetheless, and her eye-teeth, like Pilar’s, were capped with gold. Their eighteen-month-old son, Bingin, burst into tears the moment he saw me and hid his face in the folds of his mother’s track-suit top. Mother and son stayed up on the bow while Pilar climbed down nimbly, tied off the dug-out’s painter and threw Arjan, his half-brother, who was already clamouring for the food, high into the air. He went up screaming and came down laughing, reaching for the basin as it passed over his head. He plonked himself down on the deck hard by the rim and tucked in with both hands. He burnt his fingers.

Sarani answered their questions about me as we sat on the stern eating – of the other adults only Pilar spoke any Malay – referring to me occasionally for confirmation. ‘You do come from Italy, don’t you?’ Arjan spoke a language all his own as he waved his food around, and threw some over the side, but he understood when Sarani sent him off for his Tupperware betel box, running up to the bow and rattling the loose planking. Sarani prepared a plug and climbed down into the dug-out to sort out the net that lay in its bottom. Minehanga put the rest of the plantain into another bowl and passed it down to him. He wedged it into the bow with his betel box, spat red juice and said, ‘You want to come fishing?’

I had been in dug-outs before, though not on the sea. They are tricky craft at the best of times, and the best of times are when you are safely in and sitting down, with your weight low and a paddle in your hands. The getting in and the getting out are the interesting bits, and getting into this dug-out had the potential to be very interesting indeed. I had not fallen out of one before, but there is always a first time. My audience, which had grown from the occupants of our two boats to include everyone on the sterns of the other boats nearby, waited expectantly. This dug-out was old and leaky, but it looked big enough and broad enough in the beam to take us both. Its sides had weathered to the point where the soft wood in the grain was rotting away, leaving the surface corrugated. Cracks were caulked with coconut fibre, strips of flip-flop rubber and plastic bags. There was seaweed growing on the inside, a fine green algae, watered by a tidal pool that never drained completely. A baby crab the colour of coral sand tried to hide under the net. Sarani was perched nonchalantly above the bow, squatting on his heels, one foot up on either side of the dug-out. I doubted my embarkation would show as much poise. Sarani turned the canoe so that I could step down into the middle from where I sat on the stern of the boat. I kept my balance long enough to sit down in the puddle, which brought a laugh. Sarani told me to move down over the net, to the plank seat in the stern. I was not too proud to crawl.

He had some social calls to make. We toured the busy afterdecks of our neighbours’ boats. At one we handed over the plantains and received a baler in return, a cut-off plastic motor-oil bottle that I was given to use. At another we filled our bowl with cassava damper. At all the curious were told I was from Italy. We turned away from the fleet and poled our way slowly over the sandy shallows, still under a fathom of water, towards the reef. The wind dropped away as though before a storm and ahead lay calm water and the three hottest hours of the day.

A silence enveloped us, complete apart from the pole dipping into water, trailing a bright arc over the surface, dipping again. As I looked over the side of the dug-out, through the green-tinted, vitreous translucence, a shoal of anchovies turned in unison away from Sarani’s pole, invisible until the moment the sun caught their silver sides and they broke from the water in a sudden effervescence. ‘Ikan bilis,’ said Sarani, ‘delicious, dried then fried.’ A small ray flew away over the sand between the coral heads, and he started up with a hunter’s reactions, though he had no spear. He stood on the bow and watched for where it would settle, but it did not stop within sight. He scanned the shallows for a long time. I had noticed how his bearing changed the moment he stepped off the land, where he seemed at a loss, walking with bent legs and wearing a half-puzzled, half-fearful expression. Now we were in his element, on the sea, where his actions had the grace of instinct. Standing in the bow, his feet seemed to rest on the horizon itself.

‘We will go over there, sana, and put down the net,’ and we resumed our lugubrious progress. The tranquillity seeped into my body, the heat, the rhythm of the pole moving us forward in spurts, each thrust like a slow pulse, the water in the dug-out washing back and forth, rushing towards Sarani as he pushed on the pole and the bow dipped, flowing back between strokes. I timed my baling to coincide with the flood at my feet. The crab went over the side. I felt like a young boy given a simple task vital to the enterprise, given a stake in it.

Sarani talked. ‘That’s Si Amil. You can’t see Danawan, but it’s only as far away from Si Amil as we are from the boat now. When we came from Bongao we stayed at Danawan for a time. We were three boats, three motor. We had not used lépa-lépa for a long time already, although I was born on one and I have built more than ten in my life. Pilar was still small, but his older brother Sabung Lani was already married and had his own boat. There were many Bajau Laut there already, and many House Bajau in the village. There used to be many fish too, but then people started using fish-bombs.’ (The phrase main bom, ‘playing bombs’, like main futbol or main badminton.) ‘Suluk people. Bajau Laut people only use nets and spears. We are frightened to use bombs. They’re dangerous and illegal. Now there are no big fish left at Danawan. We were the first to come to Mabul, and then other boats, and then the people in the village and now kurang ikan, few fish’ (kurang can also mean ‘not enough’). ‘We will put the net down here.’

Sarani found the end of the net, a monofilament gill net about four feet deep, and snagged it on a coral head using his pole. Propelling the boat with one hand, he teased out the mesh with the other. ‘It’s going to rain,’ he said, and pointed with the pole to the dark clouds rolling off the hills of the distant mainland.

‘My first wife was still alive when we came to Danawan. We already had seven children, well, eight, but one died in the Philippines when still a child. Take the net off that snag, can you? She is buried in Labuan Haji, on Bum Bum. She had family there. When Pilar got married I could have stayed with him, but a young couple should have their own boat. So I built another boat and got married myself. Why not? I was still strong, for pulling up nets, for playing love, main cinta.’ I watched the muscles working across his shoulders, baked dark chocolate, his sturdy body and powerful limbs. He was still strong, his fingers thick and worn, his feet broad, their soles bleached by salt water. ‘It is unusual for someone already old to marry a young woman, but I knew Minehanga’s father and he said yes, though only if she said yes. I paid a higher bride price, about sixteen hundred ringgit (£400), some cash, some in goods – rice, salt, cloth, tobacco. What is the bride price in your country? You don’t have one?’ and when I explained the old custom of the dowry he let out a long ‘oi’ in surprise. ‘Good, if you’re a boy. This boy getting married tonight, his family have paid one thousand ringgit, twelve hundred maybe, to the father of the bride. Here, it’s good to have daughters.’ He paid out the last of the net. A lump of polystyrene went over the side to act as a marker. We drifted away from it as Sarani prepared another plug of betel. We turned and backtracked slowly along the length of the net some ten yards away from its line of floats and Sarani rattled the pole underneath the coral heads to frighten fish towards it. Shapes of fish shot away from the stick, and sometimes their flight was stopped abruptly by a wall of monofilament. We turned again at the anchored end, turned towards the mainland. The clouds were over the sea and the patterns of the rain showed on its surface. ‘It’s going to rain, soon,’ said Sarani as he put on a pair of goggles, made of wooden frames and window glass, and slipped over the side.

He started to swim back along the net, his face under water, pulling the dug-out behind him. He ducked down, the white soles of his feet kicking at the surface. His head came up, as smooth as an otter. He clutched a fish in his hands which he threw into the boat, followed by another. A pair of goatfish flipped around at my feet. They raised and lowered spiny dorsal fins. The large scales of their flanks were nacreous below a black lateral line, a black dot near the tail, and above were shaded yellow. I watched them dying and remembered the colours of mackerel fresh-caught, the moment of regret, and as the goatfish weakened, a colour the shade of pomegranates seeped over them as though their scales were blotting paper. The sky ahead was purple now, but we were still in sunshine, lighting the turquoise shallows, turning the emerging sands of Kapalai into a bar of pale gold. The colours were so intense, the crimson fish against wet wood, Sarani’s brown back in the turquoise water. A wrasse landed in the boat, bright blue spots, ringed with black, on a chocolate brown field, a triggerfish, back half yellow, front half black, that seemed to talk, tok tok tok tok. More blushing goatfish, as the first two faded to grey, even the black markings only just visible, as though their normal coloration had been sustained only by an act of will. A polka-dot grouper and a parrotfish, lime green with purple trim. ‘Kurang ikan,’ said Sarani and he climbed back into the boat. We pulled up the net in the rain.

The wind had brought us the sound of it, white noise hissing across the sea. The light became livid, the colours dead. Kapalai disappeared, drenched behind a curtain of rain which we watched sweep on towards us across the shallows, seemingly solid. In its midst the wind was chill and the noise ended conversation. Water ran from my head in streams. The surface of the sea seemed to pop with pearls, the drops rebounding. And then it had passed and we could not see Sipadan any more. Sarani unsnagged the end of the net and began to propel us towards a deeper part of the reef; the hull of the canoe was beginning to catch on the larger coral heads.

‘There are lots of fish at Sipadan, big fish, turtles, but we do not go there any more. It is not allowed, not since the resorts came. No one can fish there. We cannot go close. Do the tourists take the fish when they are diving? They are also not allowed? Hmm. They only look? Why? You do not have these things in your country? What is it like then?’ and I told him about cold, coral-less seas, rocky coasts and kelp forests, islands that have no palm trees and see snow in the winter. ‘Ice from the clouds? And the girls must pay for the boys? What a strange place.’ Sarani paid out the net again.

As soon as the storm had passed I could see a small flotilla of pump-boats streaming across the open sea from the direction of Bum Bum. They grouped at the far edge of the reef, six of them, two figures in each boat, and spread themselves out around the drop-off. I thought nothing more of them, fishermen. The net was down and Sarani was back in the water looking for shellfish. Cone shells – dolen – came over the side, lambis shells, kahanga, that look like one half of a Venus fly-trap, a pink-slitted hollow with five delicate tusks curving out from its lip. They landed higgledy-piggledy, but after a while the pile began to move as the molluscs tried to right themselves. A long, red-brown claw emerged from the slit, and a pale olive mantle flecked with white unfurled over the smooth inner surfaces. Horns poked out. The claw slipped round the edge of the shell and hooked powerfully, looking for a purchase. Those that were the right way up were dragging themselves along the bottom of the boat, mingling with the dying fish. Sarani collected sea-urchins too, téhé-téhé, not the vicious black ones with eight-inch spines whose tips break off in a wound, but ones no more prickly than a hedgehog, with feelers between the short spines that attached themselves to the palm of my hand. The bottom of the dug-out was beginning to look like an aquarium. Sarani found a large clam and set about opening it on the spot. He smashed an opening with the blunt edge of his parang, cut the muscle holding the halves of the shell closed, and quartered the contents. ‘Kima,’ he said. ‘It’s delicious, if you have some lemon juice, some chilli, some vinegar, some garlic, some Aji No Moto.’ (Sarani used the local brand name for monosodium glutamate.) It was better without, tougher than an oyster, and as salt as the sea.

When I first heard the noise I thought it was thunder, but the sound was too percussive, too short. The sun had come out again and the clouds were white and broken. ‘Main bom,’ Sarani explained, pointing to a pump-boat far behind us. The boat closest to us had its engine going, cruising over the seaward drop-off where, in theory, the big fish lay. It would slow at intervals so that the man in the front could put his head over the side. He signalled them on until they were far in front of us. Against the glare of the sea I saw a figure stand and pitch a speck out in a lazy arc over the water. The figure sat down. A beat, and then the water near the boat shivered and rose in a spout twenty feet high. The boom came last. ‘You see? Playing bombs.’ Sarani could not tell me exactly what a fish-bomb was, but he knew the effects of one well enough. ‘All the fish die, the young fish, the small fish that the big fish eat, all the coral, all the animals that the small fish eat, dead. You see? Kurang ikan. We are hungry. Before, this canoe would have been half full already. We cannot stop them. If we fight them, they come to our boats and throw bombs inside. I have seen this happen in the Philippines. Kami rugi, we are the losers.’ He pounded a betel nut with feeling.

Four of the goatfish were prepared for cooking, Minehanga cutting them roughly into lumps with a parang, while Sarani deftly gutted the rest of the catch, splitting the head and cutting in by the backbone, opening the fish out like a butterfly’s wings. These went into a bowl to salt before being laid out on the deck to dry. Minehanga had boiled the fish. There was no lemon juice, no garlic, no vinegar, no chilli, no Aji No Moto, not even any salt in the water, just plain boiled fish. It was served with more cassava damper, made from a tuber that is almost pure starch and produces a flour that turns into a glutinous pancake when baked in a dry wok. The cassava was hard work and I wondered how Sarani managed to get through it with only gums. The fish was boiled to smithereens. Sarani at least had no trouble with that; nor did Mangsi Raya, but then she already had double his tooth count. The bones went over the side. The bowls and our hands were washed in the sea. The rim of my glass of tea tasted of salt. Sarani stretched out under the awning, chewing betel, resting on a pillow. In the heat of the afternoon only the children were active. Even the fish-bomb detonations became infrequent. We were afloat again and the boat stirred with the water, its motion acting on me as quickly as a drug. Planks of wood had never been so comfortable. I fell asleep thinking about the pillow … and lice …

I was more wakeful after the wedding. We had returned to Mabul in the evening to join in the celebration of the village nuptial. The music continued under the palms long after we had returned to the boat, past the setting of the moon, and complemented the rhythms as it rode at anchor with its bow to the wind. The waves clunked under the hull. The boards creaked as the bow rose. The loose glass mantle of the oil-lamp clinked. It was soothing, until the elements of the polyphony began to change. The creak lengthened and multiplied. I could no longer hear the oil-lamp clinking over the noise of the flapping tarpaulin. Pots rattled. A glass tankard toppled over and rolled back and forth, the handle stopping it after a half-turn either way. The wind was cold and it had come around.

No one else was awake. Mangsi, cradled in a sarong hanging from the roof-tree, was still as a plumb line. The others seemed to be attached to the deck with Velcro. The wind promised rain. Sarani stirred in response and came forward nimbly on his hands and knees. He knelt in the bow, braced against the gunwale, and began to pole the bow round into the wind. Unbidden, I seemed to know what to do. I stumbled forward to the anchor rope and began to pull. I knew when to stop so that Sarani could go aft to cast off the stern line. I pulled us up to the anchor as he came forward again, and then hauled it onto the gunwale while Sarani, standing now, punted the boat out to deeper water. He nodded and I let it go. He stowed the pole, and took the rope, setting the anchor and tying off the line over the projecting bow and an iron spike driven into the stem. The sky was dark with clouds. The first drops of rain felt sharp and cold on my back. We turned our attention to the waterproof sheet that rolled down to close off the forward opening, tying the corners to lumps of coral that doubled as net weights. It was raining hard by the time we slipped round the sides of the sheet and under cover of the tarpaulin. The rest of the family were still asleep.

The two of us sat in silence, drenched, and watched for leaks in our shelter. The wind flapped under the sides of the tarpaulin and blew in gouts of rain. Sarani tied them down. We moved all the soft furnishings away from their usual stowage along the gunwales, bundles of clothes, pillows, a plastic shopping basket full of knick-knacks and hair oil. Minehanga woke up and moved the children, though they stayed fast asleep. Sarani dried himself off with a sarong which he then wrapped around himself. He reached for his betel box. We waited grimly for the storm to pass. ‘I’m going to build a roof,’ he said.

The rain died away, though the wind remained strong. As I lay down on the damp boards I could hear the wedding organ start up again. I had to admire their stamina. Sarani spat out the betel dregs and moved aft to the bilge pump, a contraption of grey plastic waste piping that projected above the deck with a ram made from shaped flip-flop rubber attached to a stick. He set up a steady counterpoint to the music until the bilge sucked dry and he settled down to sleep again. We had gone through the whole procedure almost without comment. We had worked together for the boat, satisfied its demands with promptness; a dragging anchor is not a piece of guttering blown down in the night that can be left until the weekend. What did the people ashore know of a rough night at sea? The wind in the palms, the thatch rustling, a child moving closer for warmth. The newlyweds, asleep now maybe, would know as soon as a baby came what it is to tend a boat through the night. Sarani, who had been born on a lépa-lépa and had spent no more than a handful of nights ashore in his long life, took rest when he could in a home that needed pumping out four times a day, propping up on a falling tide, battening against weather.

The kettle was on, and Minehanga was breastfeeding. Sumping Lasa had taken over the sarong cradle and was using it as a swing. Arjan was running around on the afterdeck looking for things to throw overboard. Life did not stop because we were underway and by the time we reached Kapalai Minehanga had dealt with a tantrum from Sumping Lasa who had been pushed out of the swing by Arjan, a puddle on the planks courtesy of Mangsi Raya, and the attentions of the hungry boy as she peeled plantains for breakfast. Sarani stood in the stern, one foot on the tiller, scanning the lightening horizon.

We arrived at Kapalai as other Bajau boats were returning from pulling up their nets, Pilar’s amongst them. He anchored close in behind us and began to sort out the pile of net on the bow, paying it out again, to wash it in the shallow water. While Minehanga made up a batter for the plantain Pilar transferred his catch of blue-spotted ray into the dug-out behind our boat, some still lashing the air with barbed tails, and set about gutting them. The tails went first and were flicked over the side of the canoe. I made a mental note to watch where I walked at low tide. The eyes and gills were removed like an apple core. The ray were hung out to dry on a pole. Pilar broke off to eat breakfast with the rest of us.

The sun was already hot and its strength was redoubled by the glare from the water. I retreated to the shade of the awning, only too aware after a night on the boards of the sunburn I had suffered the previous day. I could not go fishing. I watched from the boat as Sarani poled away in the dug-out over the bright shallows until his figure, standing in the bow of the canoe, became a silhouette at the edge of the reef against the empty eastern horizon.

The fleet had reassembled around us and in this social hour of the morning canoes plied between the boats, paying calls, returning a borrowed bowl, bringing food, others heading for the fishing grounds on the falling tide, collecting a pole or a paddle or a parang. We had our fair share of curious visitors. I listened without understanding to the lilting cadences of the language that seemed at odds with Minehanga’s sharp voice, listening for something that sounded familiar. I wondered how the two of us would get on without a common language. She spoke no Malay; I would have to learn Sama. This was my first time alone with her and I had no idea what she thought about my presence in her home. As helpless as one of her children and with a smaller Sama vocabulary than even Arjan, I had invaded her nest like an outsized cuckoo chick, an uninvited mouth to feed. She talked loudly and slowly at me, showing her buck teeth, and I felt like a Spanish waiter being mauled by a British tourist. I struggled to pick out something that I understood. Melikan was a word that had come up again and again in her conversations with the visitors. Now she was saying it and pointing at me. Half of it sounded familiar; ikan is the Malay word for ‘fish’. Was I expected to go fishing as well? It began to dawn on me that Melikan referred to what I was rather than what I was supposed to do, that it was a corruption of ‘American’ and meant ‘Westerner’ in general. And so I was named. She would say ‘Melikan,’ and point to a sarong near where I sat and I would pass it, or ‘Melikan,’ miming striking a match and I would proffer my lighter. We rubbed along.

Sumping Lasa was still scared of me. I only had to look at her and smile to send her running to her mother’s side. Mangsi Raya cried the moment she was more than a yard away from Minehanga. Arjan was more bold. He would run up to me, shout and run away chuckling, making the boards jump in his wake. Minehanga told him to stop, but he did not and on his next sortie he bumped into Sumping Lasa. She landed hard on her backside and started to cry. Arjan got a cuff round the ear and joined in. After the first few gusts of tears Sumping Lasa got up and went over to Minehanga for attention. She stood next to her mother, her hands cupped behind her ears, her mouth open wide and silent as her convulsed face began to redden. The silence was agonising, her face a mask of pure grief. It went on. Her mouth opened wider. And then the full force of the tantrum struck. She let out an awesome bellow, almost as long as the silence, followed by another and another. She had her mother’s voice. When it became obvious that Minehanga was not interested, she started hitting Mangsi Raya, who was startled by the surprise attack and began to cry as well. Whereupon Sumping Lasa got a clip round the head and doubled her efforts. Mangsi Raya stopped crying the moment the nipple touched her lips. Arjan knew he had won and dried his eyes. He started running up and down the boat again, his upper lip glistening with snot, taking care to avoid Sumping Lasa as she drifted around in a blur of tears, slapping my foot each time he passed. Sumping Lasa started drumming on the boards with both feet, running on the spot until she fell over. In the midst of the mayhem I caught Minehanga’s eye and we smiled.

‘Kurang ikan,’ was all Sarani had to say about his fishing, ‘but today there is no one playing bombs. Maybe they thought the wind would be strong, like last night. You were scared, no?’ He laughed at the memory. ‘It is not the season for strong wind. In this season, the wind comes from there’ – he pointed north – ‘and in the other season it comes from there’ – the south – ‘and that is when there are strong winds. Normally in this season we stay on the other side of Mabul and on this side of Kapalai.’ I was keen to find out their range, to find out just what sort of a ride I could expect. ‘We fish here and at Mabul. Then there is one reef past Mabul, Padalai, just a reef, no island. We go there sometimes. There is one more reef towards Danawan, called Puasan. The Bajau Laut from Danawan also fish there. After that? The season of the south wind comes in two months more [dua bulan, literally ‘two moons’]. We stay here for a time after that, maybe one moon, and then we go to the islands near Sandakan to catch shark. When the season changes we come back here.’ It seemed extraordinary to me that Sarani could tell me exactly how his year was spent, exactly when the south wind would come, and yet not be able to say how old he was. I asked him how old Arjan was, thinking he would be able to remember how many times he had been to Sandakan since his birth, but he did not know that either. It was almost as though there was some taboo surrounding age that prevented him from saying if he knew, or maybe from even reckoning age at all. I could not understand it. Living so close to the Equator and its perpetual equinox means that the length of days and nights does not vary much year round. The words ‘summer’ and ‘winter’ do not have a useful meaning. But the Bajau Laut live in a world full of other time signals, just as regular, just as significant. There are two tides a day, a full moon every twenty-eighth night, and a change in the prevailing wind every six months. These events are so central to the pattern of their life that it seemed inconceivable to me they would not tally them.

But then why bother counting? When the tide falls you prop up the boat. When the moon is full you go fishing at night. When the wind changes you move your anchorage. You do not have to plan beyond the next tide and the next visit to the well; there is no need to lay in store for winter, as there is no winter. There is no need to know how old you are. When you are big enough you learn to swim and paddle a canoe. When you are strong enough you help with the fishing and the housework. When you reach puberty you work and wear clothes. When the bride price has been raised you are married. While your strength lasts you are parent and provider. When your strength fails you do what you can to help. These are the only markers of time that make any sense, the events of a personal history, and there is no need to count them as they happen only once. I would ask Sarani when things happened and he would say, ‘I was already wearing shorts,’ or ‘Before my first wife died,’ or ‘While I was still strong,’ or ‘When the coconut palms were so high,’ or ‘Before Kapalai was washed away.’ These were the singular events against which his time was measured.

The heat had gone out of the afternoon and Minehanga had been busy while we were talking. She had cooked up the dolen Sarani had gathered – the téhé-téhé had been given away. A steaming dish was brought out to the bow, the motive claw of each mollusc projecting now that it had been boiled, and forming a dainty handle by which to pull it from the conical shell. They tasted like whelks. ‘Kahanga are better, but we save them for market.’ The empties went back into the water, waiting for squatters; eventually the dead shells would rise up and walk away on the legs of hermit crabs.

Pilar came back from the reef and began to sort out his deepwater net. We went with him when he set out to the south-east to lay it off the Ligitan Reef. We talked more after a supper of boiled fish, sitting out on the foredeck in the darkness before the moon rose. The boat bobbed in the light breeze. Arjan came out to join us, sitting in the crook of his father’s legs and banging on the Tupperware betel box. Minehanga was singing Mangsi to sleep, a lullaby sung in her raucous voice above the soft noises of water and air, but it was strangely soothing in the glow of the oil lamp.

Across the dark sea the lights of the Water Village showed where Mabul lay and reminded Sarani of something that had been puzzling him.

‘Many tourists go there. Woi, many.’ I agreed. ‘I have seen many white people there, men and women, husbands and wives. But I have not seen children. How can this be? Do they not have children? Do they not sleep together?’

‘Of course there are children, but they do not always go with their parents.’

‘They leave their children behind? How can they do that? I could not do that. Arjan would just cry and cry.’ He thought awhile. ‘They have many children? As many as we do?’

‘Sometimes, but usually two, maybe three.’

‘So few? I had seven with my first wife and now three more. It’s a problem for me. I am old, and I have three young children. If they live, I don’t want to have any more. Minehanga doesn’t want to have any more. It is very difficult. I am still strong for playing love. How can they have so few?’

‘Ada obat, there is medicine.’ Obat is a general word in Malay, and takes in herbal preparations and traditional cures as well as what a doctor would dispense. It can also include magic. His expression brightened.

‘Obat kampung? Village medicine?’

‘No, there is a pill.’

‘A friend told me this, but I did not believe him. And I can drink this pill?’ He was eager to join the fertility revolution however late in the game.

‘No, it is for the woman.’

‘Oh, I see. Can I find this pill in Semporna?’

I tried to picture Minehanga with a blister pack in her hand, popping a pill through the silver foil, remembering to do it every day, and could not.

‘It is not just one pill.’ I replied. ‘It is one pill every day and if you forget one day maybe it does not work. Maybe it is not good for Minehanga. But there is also medicine for the man.’

‘Oh? I drink this one?’

How to explain a condom? I did not even have the requisite vocabulary for the body parts involved. I improvised and came up with a gloss along the lines of a rubber sock that stopped the white water from going into the body of the woman. There was pointing involved, hand signals. Sarani got the message.

‘Do you have any of this medicine? Can I find it in Semporna?’

I found myself wondering how sexual relations were conducted in a communal living space, amongst sleeping children and relations, and the answer was: quietly. The boat rocking anyway, the planks creaking, who would notice?

Throughout our conversations Sarani appended the phrase ‘if they live’ to every mention of children. I could imagine infant mortality being high in this environment, but the way he said it was like touching wood, as though to expect them to survive were to be presumptuous. Maybe this was the thinking behind the casual attitude adults adopted towards children, paying them surprisingly little attention, trying not to become too fond of them in case they did not live.

The breeze died away. There were stars down to the edges of the sky, and the waxing moon rose massive on the horizon. In the calm, sounds came clearly from the other boats. Pilar was pumping out the bilge, the handle squeaking. The light from a hurricane lamp brightened to a glare in the stern of another boat where figures moved, lit from the waist down. The lamp was passed down into a dug-out and strapped to the bow. It moved slowly out over the reef. Other canoes followed.

‘They are looking for cuttlefish. When the moon is bright, the cuttlefish come out. When there is no wind you can see into the water. If you have a lamp. Then you can spear cuttlefish and ray and trepang. If you have a spear. My lamp is broken. I have no spear. We cannot go.’ We watched as a canoe slipped past close by, a young man standing in the bow, poling with the blunt end of the spear, his face illuminated from below by light escaping around the metal lampshade. He was peering like a heron into the bright pool at his feet. The shadow of the keel passed over the sand in a halo of light, exaggerating the colours of the red and orange starfish that had crept up on us with the tide. A long-tom burst from the edge of the lighted circle and we could hear it skipping away into the darkness.

‘You can catch long-tom at night, but not with a spear,’ Sarani said. ‘They are frightened of the light. If the light touches them, they run. You can catch them with a net, a different net that floats right at the surface. If you have a flashlight, you can sweep it across the water, you see, and drive them towards the net. But they can be dangerous. Their nose is very sharp. When I was still strong, in the Philippines, a man was hit by one.’ He was laughing now, and the rest of the story had to wait until he could keep a straight face. ‘You see, he was fishing at night, and another canoe came close to him, and a long-tom ran straight at his boat. It stuck in his leg like a spear. He was so angry he took his parang and cut the long-tom up into little pieces and burnt it on the fire until it was only ashes. He walked with a limp after, but he had luck he was not sitting down or he would be dead.’ He laughed again. ‘You see, a dangerous fish, but good to eat.’

I kept Sarani company until the tide fell and he could complete his last chore of the day. He slipped into the water and I passed down the props to him. He wedged them under the gunwales with his foot. He changed into a dry sarong and chewed a last wad of betel while he pumped out the bilge. He settled down next to Minehanga. They exchanged mumbled words. I stayed on the bow a while longer, drinking in the peace and the solitude, the lights on the reef like floating stars, a road of moonlight across the water.

Watching the net come into view I sensed again the excitement I had felt as a boy pulling up a lobster pot in Donegal. My father would set them close in to Loughros Point and it would be my job to pull them up, while he kept us off the rocks. The pot would emerge like a coffer from the deep, shimmering, magnified, full maybe.

There was a long pull before the first fish appeared in the net, a glint of silver blue light from way below where the net’s parabola could last be seen, the pure white belly of a ray. More were following. Pilar gripped them by the eye sockets, which offered the only safe purchase on the streamlined body, and pulled them through the mesh of the net, throwing them into the corner between gunwale and splashboard, right below where I sat. I watched the heap grow, olive-brown ray with light blue spots flapping their wings on the deck. Some landed on their backs, mouths working, the gill vents opening and closing, seeming to sigh.

We netted fourteen in all, but Sarani was not happy. ‘Before, we could catch forty or fifty ray in one netting. Now, you see, how many tails? Kami rugi, ba. In the market we sell three tails for two ringgit (50p). This catch is less than ten ringgit. And how many ringgit of oil did we use? Going and returning putting down the net, going and returning pulling it up, maybe five ringgit over. And how much oil to go to Semporna to sell them? Kami rugi minyak, we are wasting oil. Also, you saw the holes in the net? I think there is a rat living in the hold.’

Most of our fishing trips ended this way, with Sarani complaining about the price of fish and the cost of diesel. The dwindling of the local fish stock was threatening their survival, and it was not just under attack from the fish-bombers. Sarani told me that they used to catch lobsters in their nets, but the ‘hookah’ fishermen had taken most of them. A weighted diver equipped only with the sort of goggles Sarani used and a nose clip goes down to the bottom breathing from a free-flowing air hose to collect them. I had read reports that they often stay at depths of 60–100 feet for as long as two hours and surface without decompression stops. The bends are a commonplace, known as bola-bola, ‘bubbles’. The method can also be used to catch desirable species of fish; the diver stuns them by releasing a cyanide poison into the water. They are sold to the ‘fish farms’ that lie in the channel between Semporna and Bum Bum. Often the ‘fish farm’ owns the boat and the compresser. They are not so much farms as way-stations. No breeding goes on. The fish are kept in pens until the cyanide has been purged from their system and then they are sent live to the Hong Kong markets.

The Bajau Laut cannot compete against these fishing methods. Sarani blamed them for the declining ray population, but the Bajau Laut themselves seemed the most likely culprits in that case. The Mabul fleet could not lay ten nets, say, catching forty ray daily for ten years and not have had an effect on the size of the stock. I had been watching the last gasps of a ray on our way back to Kapalai. It was on its back. Shivering sighs passed through its body. Its gulps for water became less frequent. Finally the muscles of its belly went slack, and a rush of fluid came from its cloaca, followed by a tiny, completely formed pup, its wings rolled over under its stomach like the curled-up sides of a tongue. It was alive, born mimicking its parent’s weakening death throes. I flicked it over the side; they are also born with a sting. Being viviparous makes the ray population extremely sensitive to the loss of mature adults.

We poled out to the edge of the reef and anchored so that we would not be caught by the falling tide when we wanted to leave Kapalai. We were joined by two other boats, Pilar’s and that belonging to Merikita. He had married Pilar’s elder sister, Timaraisa, and had become part of Sarani’s group. They had two sons and a daughter a little older than Arjan. Their boat was neat and painted in the same colours as the rest of the fleet, light blue and white and red-brown, no bigger than Sarani’s but roofed like Pilar’s. The roof showed that their recent outings had been more successful than ours. They had more than twenty fresh ray hung out on poles and twice that many already dried, tied into bunches. Timaraisa sat in the stern shelling a string bag full of clams with a parang. She scooped out the flesh into a bowl and then strung them up to dry. Merikita had already set off in his canoe to catch lunch. He had a stocky and powerful physique and a round face. He was shy and softly spoken. Sarani always referred to him as ‘Merikita, the fat one’, never just ‘Merikita’, but in a matter-of-fact way, without judgement, and often it was ‘Merikita, the fat one, rajin sekali, dia, he’s very hard-working. His children are not hungry.’ I never heard him pay a higher compliment. We weighed anchor in the afternoon, headed for Mabul where we would spend the night before moving on to Semporna in the morning.

There were more boats strung out over the shallows south of Mabul than there had been at Kapalai, and word went round that we were bound for Semporna. Canoes started to arrive and produce was loaded onto Pilar’s boat, ready for an early start. We would use his boat; not only was its engine more powerful, but also because it would no longer be afloat if left all day with no one to pump out the bilge. Timaraisa arrived with dried ray and clams on strings like bunches of keys. I sat with Sarani, making out a shopping list. We had not talked again about money since the first day when he suggested I pay him for a five-day tour of the islands. He knew more about me now, and it seemed, mercifully, he had forgotten his plan. I hoped that I had shown him that I wanted to help where I could, to join in their life. I would help with supplies if necessary, but the old aid-workers’ adage seemed particularly appropriate: ‘Give a person a fish, and you feed them for a day; give them a net and they can feed themselves for life.’ Over-simple, maybe – there have to be fish to catch in the first place – but, as Pilar took Sarani’s hurricane lamp to pieces and named the parts that needed replacing (Sarani was not so good with technology), I wrote them down on my list, happy in the knowledge that for a few ringgit I could double Sarani’s fishing opportunities on the reef. Fish-spear tips went onto the list. I added condoms. And delousing shampoo. And, Jayari reminded me when we went to visit, ‘if you pity me’, cough syrup. It was dark when we left his house. I had watched him sitting at the seaward door, smoking a Fate as the sun set, as I had when I had first landed on Mabul.

We weighed anchor in the first light, the sun just edging over the horizon as we passed the last stilt houses, and ran straight across the Creach Reef on the highest of the tide. Looking back at the island I little expected that this view would change overnight.

All the traffic of the coast was funnelled into the Semporna Channel, the port’s only approach from the south. Jongkong and pump-boats were putting out from the jetties of Bum Bum, from the creeks and estuaries of the mainland, filled with people bound for the market. We overhauled a commercial fishing boat, idling home along the coast from Tawau waters after a night netting squid by arc light. The crew were sorting the catch on the afterdeck. We left dug-outs bobbing in our wake, old men solemnly jigging handlines at the edge of the reef.

We made the last dog-leg into Semporna roads, the scattered villages on the mainland shore coalescing into the stilted suburbs south of the town. A jongkong from Bum Bum passed close by, a mixture of ages and sexes, all freshly scrubbed and ready for the mainland. The children were in school uniforms, red and white or blue and white depending on their grade. The men and women were smartly dressed too, the women in brightly patterned dresses, many of the men wearing the traditional Malay songkok velvet hat and the name badges of clerks and officials on fresh short-sleeved shirts. The Bajau Laut have their own caches of clean clothes. Above his dark shorts Sarani had put on a gingham shirt in the red-browns and pale yellows of Ralph Lauren’s Western palette. He looked very fetching; only the tear at the shoulder and his long white stubble let him down. I put razors on my list. The women looked comely in clean blouses and tight sarongs. Sumping Lasa wore a lacy dress and her hair in bunches. She was taking her flip-flops for a test drive, running to and fro through the cabin. There was very little clearance between her head and the roof beams; I did not want to be near when she grew that last millimetre. Arjan had been persuaded to wear his one shirt, grubby beyond measure, pseudo-Tom and Jerry characters in pink and yellow chasing across his back, the front held together, sometimes, with a safety-pin.

We passed the fish quay where the trawlers were unloading, the ramshackle drinks stalls and ice houses at the end of the mole, and on into the mêlée of craft milling around the margins of the water market, jongkong nipping in and out, disgorging their passengers, taking on cargo, pump-boats puttering around in between. We came in slowly, shouldering our way to a place at the mooring, and trading for our catch had started before the engine had been cut. A pump-boat from Bum Bum with a family aboard came up astern, and the matron in its bows started to bargain for fresh clams. We docked and before we had tied up, there was a man on the bow deck, picking over the shark-fin. Another shouted down, did we have any kahanga, and who’s the whitey? He climbed aboard to examine both. The women seemed to be in charge of selling the produce, so Sarani and I went to a café. We stepped up onto the walkway and were swallowed by the crowd.

The water village, the kampung air, is a particularly Malay phenomenon. Most coastal towns have one, in fact most coastal towns began life as a kampung air, a hamlet on stilts over tidal flats. It is a practical way for a coastal people to live. Your doorstep is the jetty to which you can tie up and from which you can launch whatever the state of the tide. Your house catches even the lightest sea breeze and living beyond the beach you are untroubled by the mosquitoes of the coast and the diseases they carry. You are ideally positioned should danger threaten from the land to escape to the sea, and vice versa. On land, the mosque nestles at the edge of the coconut groves; behind the palm belt are the well and the gardens. Sanitation and waste disposal are left to the care of the sea and its creatures. The system works just as well on rivers and in estuaries. Such is the Malay idyll, a life of simplicity, sufficiency and virtue, and such is its continuing power in the Malay imagination that ‘to go back to the kampung’ is a rustication much wished for by urban types. To be ‘just a kampung boy’ is certainly no barrier to high political office. Dr. Mahathir, the Prime Minister of Malaysia, was a kampung boy.

Leaving sewerage to nature is all well and good whilst the concentration of effluent-producers remains low. Garbage disposal is equally simple if the packaging is biodegradable – rattan and woven palm-frond baskets, banana leaves and coconut fibre string, containing foods clad in skins, scales, peels, rinds, husks, shells. Introduce plastic into the equation and trouble is not far away. As we shuffled with the crowd past dry-goods stalls, selling slabs of cassava sealed in plastic, sugar, rice and tea at pre-measured weights in plastic bags, the sweets and snacks, the pills and cigarettes, all wrapped in plastic, all waiting to be carried off in a black-blue-white-pink stripy plastic carrier bag, it depressed me to think that much of it would end up in the sea.

The café’s television was already on, loud. It was at the far end of the room, but where Sarani and I sat, at the back, near the door, was not a quiet spot. The sound was quadraphonic, the set vast; they were showing a beat-’em-up movie on laser disc player. To think that a lad from, say, Pulau Tiga, an island with two papaya trees and a volleyball net, could come to Semporna and watch phoney American kung-fu films on laser disc, in a kedai on stilts that felt as unsteady as a tree-house and shook every time a boy-porter trundled his blue wheelbarrow along the sun-lit walkway the other side of the wall from our table, toting jerrycans of fuel, sacks of salt, that I was sitting here watching extravagant fight scenes, more blows to the head than a skull could take, and the pugilists getting up to crack more ribs, to extract more gut-wrenched groans, in quadraphony, that I was watching with an old man who had two teeth and lived on the sea – I was in a state of culture shock for a moment.

A man in a songkok put his head round the door and greeted Sarani in Sama, ‘Magsukur, Panglima,’ shook his hand, touched his own to his heart. ‘Good morning,’ he said to me in English. He sat down at our table, and studied me carefully, my hair dirty and swept back by the wind like Sarani’s, four days of stubble and sun on my face. I did the polite thing and offered my food to the new arrival; he did the polite thing and refused. ‘Who is this, Panglima?’ The conversation went ahead in Sama, but words like ‘Italy’ popped out.

‘But what does the American eat?’ This I could understand, my first complete Sama sentence, ‘Melikan amanggan na ai?’

‘Pangi’ kayu,’ said Sarani.

‘Pangi’ kayu? Cassava?’ he said, glancing at the plate of fried rice in front of me.

‘Aho’,’ I said, ‘yes,’ a Sama word I could pronounce with confidence. It was a cheap trick, but it took him aback. Sarani was delighted.

‘You speak Sama?’

‘Belum, not yet,’ I had to admit, in Malay.

‘But he speaks good Malay,’ Sarani added, and I got the feeling he was a little proud of me. The man studied me a while longer. I slurped my iced coffee.

‘So what does he drink?’ – this in Sama again.

‘Bohé, water.’

‘And where does he sleep?’

‘On the boat.’

The man was silent as he looked at me, until his manners recalled him, and he nodded and smiled. I sat back in my chair – a chair! – the heat of the chilli still on my tongue, the cold milky coffee, the sweetness of a clove cigarette on my lips – and listened to no more of their conversation.

Sarani cracked a red-lipped grin at me after he had left. ‘You see, he was very surprised,’ and he laughed out loud. ‘Pangi’ kayu! He said he had never seen an orang putih like you before! Pangi’ kayu! Did you see how surprised he was when you said aho’?’ His old eyes creased up, his twin teeth like comic store vampire fangs, and it was the same wherever we went together, the surprise, the questions were the same. ‘Pangi’ kayu?!’ That seemed to surprise the interrogators above all and indeed I had come across this low opinion of cassava before. I cannot say that the prejudice against it is unjustified. Given the choice between a ball of steamed cassava flour and the plate of fried rice I had just put away, I know which I would prefer. Yet it is not just that cassava and that school canteen favourite, sago, are not as savoury as rice. They are both poor man’s food, and above all it is the fact that they are the staples of ‘primitive’ people, orang asli, the wild people of the woods who eat pig and monkey, haram foods. By association sago and cassava are considered uncivilised, un-Malay and un-Islamic.

Rice on the other hand, that gives twenty-fold, is revered. Throughout South East Asia, there are propitiatory rites to be observed at its planting, from the spilling of blood to the casting of spells. Its harvest is celebrated. Rice is the cornerstone of all South East Asian civilisation. Where there is wet-rice cultivation there are royal courts, god-kings, temple cities, art, and people. Java has three crops of rice a year from its rich volcanic soil. Its population density is 800 people per square kilometre. In Borneo, where there is one crop and cultivable land is confined to the coast, it is around twenty-five. That a white man from a culture they regarded as the acme of civilisation, a man of means, should eschew rice in favour of cassava was eccentric in the extreme. After a week of nothing else I wanted to spend a night in Semporna to redress the balance. Sarani came with me to the hotel.

We picked our way through the market towards the shore, shrugging off the attentions of the barrow boys, past the wet fish stalls, through the aroma of dried fish and the tunnels of second-hand clothes, past tailors cross-legged beside old Singers, hairdressers’ stalls where mincing transvestites primped, looking uncomfortable out of drag, past the Islamic paraphernalia booth, selling Korans and calendars and posters of the Ka’aba. The kampung has grown seawards through a process of accretion, the outer edges made of bright new timber, the walkways airy. The alleys of the older core closer to land were shadowy, the boards underfoot worn and patched, and below the sea had retreated to expose the stinking flats to the sun. We emerged at the back of the vegetable market next to the golden domes of the mosque.

For a Malay kampung to grow into a town, into a commercial centre, it relies on Chinese capital. This has been true of all South East Asia in the twentieth century; business has become concentrated in Chinese hands. Reactions to this trend have varied. In Malaysia the balance of economic power tilted so far towards the Chinese that there were race-riots in 1969. Town centres burned. The arsonists did not have to be particular about which businesses they torched; they were all Chinese-owned. We crossed the road, Sarani very wary of the cars, and shuffled through the narrow alley, past sellers of contraband cigarettes and lottery tickets, past Suluk money-changers waving wads of Filipino pesos, past the Chinese gold shop doing business through a gap in its steel shutters, and into the high street. The arsonist, or the pirate, would not have to be any more picky today in Semporna.

In my room Sarani plonked himself down on the bed and tried to bounce, but the dead mattress on the wooden box-frame gave nothing back. Still he said, ‘Good for playing love, eh?’ and chuckled. ‘By the way, don’t forget that medicine we talked about, that medicine for boys.’ Sarani tried out the bed some more, but became serious. ‘I must go. That man in the café, he told me his wife is calling me. She has pain in her leg. I must go to her now. After I will meet you here?’ I was intrigued.

‘What will you do, Panglima?’

‘Massage.’

‘Massage only?’

‘There are words.’

‘What kind of words?’ Sarani looked blank.

‘Are they magic words? Islamic words?’

‘No.’ Sarani knitted his brows. ‘But they are special words.’ He studied the bedspread, tracing the pattern with a thick finger.

‘And massage and words will make vanish her pain?’

‘Kalau Tuhan menolong, if Tuhan helps.’ What the nature of Sarani’s power was, whether it was given or learned or acquired, its extent, remained unclear to me. More puzzling was his concept of Tuhan. This Malay word for the ‘Supreme Being’ is most often used as a name for Allah. Was that the way Sarani was using it? He had used the same phrase when I questioned him about the washing ceremony I had witnessed outside Jayari’s house, ‘if Tuhan helps’, but it had not sounded like a translation of the Arabic insha’allah, ‘God willing’, then either. The Muslim deity wills things so; Sarani’s Tuhan helps.

When we met later I had already visited the pharmacy. Sarani was impatient for his medicine.

‘So you tear it open like this, and inside is one fruit.’ My primer offered no suggestion on the correct number qualifier for condoms. Buah, ‘fruit’ seemed closer than biji, ‘seed’.

I looked at the wrapper for instructions in Malay, a diagram even – something that would help me explain – but the picture on the front of a fully-dressed modern-looking Malaysian couple embracing would not exactly spell it out for Sarani. The condom emerged from its amnion, glistening and wrinkled, and unfurled itself on my palm. I held it out for Sarani to see. The teat erected itself expectantly.

‘It looks like a jellyfish,’ was his only comment. I had a long way to go.

‘And then you put this on the end of your botok, when it is big, before you put it into the puki,’ I had learnt the right words. I had the condom over two fingers. I was trying to remember the wording of the Durex instruction booklets I had studied in anticipation during my adolescence. ‘You have to make sure there is no air in the top.’ I think that was the way it went. On an empirical note: ‘You have to make sure it is the right way up. Then you roll it down like this, but you have to be careful the bit you have unrolled does not go under the bit you are unrolling or else it won’t unroll any more. You see?’

‘What?’ said Sarani.

‘Never mind. So you roll it all the way to the bottom, as far as it will go, and then you are ready for playing love.’

‘And after?’

‘And after the mani has come out, and before your botok goes small again, you take it out of the woman.’ I couldn’t bring myself to say ‘Minehanga’. ‘It is best to hold the bottom when you are doing this.’

‘And then I can wash it?’

I told him he must throw it away; at least the condom, if not the wrapper, was biodegradable. I told him that if the wrapper was broken, or punctured, then the medicine would not work and he must throw it away without using it. I threw my demonstration model in the bin to underline the point. He nodded and stowed the packets in the belt-bag under his shirt. It seemed a little late in the day to be giving contraception lessons to a father of eleven, but perhaps my absence from the boat that night would give him the opportunity to practise. We went to look for hurricane lamp parts. Maybe he was planning a night of fishing instead.

In the late afternoon when the tide had again covered the stinking flats, I waved goodbye to Sarani and his family and hangers-on, as he cast off from the kampung air, Pilar’s boat laden with supplies, and Sumping Lasa said her first words to me. As they backed away from the dock, she came running out onto the bow deck in her best frock still wearing her flip-flops, and she waved to me. ‘Bye-bye,’ she said. ‘Bye-bye.’