Two
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
