Outcasts of the Islands: The Sea Gypsies of South East Asia

At first light and without further ceremony, Sarani had rolled up the pandanus mat that had marked the seat of Mbo’. The taboo ended, it became an ordinary part of the boat’s fittings once more. Sarani leant against it as he prepared the day’s first wad of sirih pinang.

As soon as the boards were up, Arjan jumped down onto the nets in the hold. His feet disappeared into the monofilament and caught in the mesh as he tried to pull them out. He fell over onto the mattress of nets, and his arms became entangled. He wriggled about, squealing with laughter, kicking his legs against the net. His arms freed, he stood up again so he could throw himself forward once more. It looked like too much fun for Sumping Lasa not to join in.

Sarani and I wrestled the nets up onto the bow deck, where Pilar waited to transfer them to his boat. The last net was one I had not seen used before. It had a larger mesh and it looked new. ‘Si Sehlim gave the money last time we were in Sandakan. Thousands, and now look what the rat has done. Here.’ Sarani had found a section that had been shredded, very neatly, into strands of spaghetti that scattered into the bilge as we lifted it out. The hold was empty now, but there had been no sign of the rat. I stepped down into the hold to join Sarani. Arjan and Sumping Lasa peered over the edge of the planks. Minehanga was positioned as backstop by the engine well. The hunt was on.

Sarani moved forward to the bow locker, separated from the main hold by a half bulkhead, and pulled out the coils of rope, the floats, a new anchor, a punctured football, and an old coconut that were stored there. I was expecting the rat to come bursting out at any moment, to bear down on where I stood in the hold, gripping a length of wood. But nothing emerged from the locker. The rodent had to be aft.

The waves lapped against the hull. The water in the bilge was hardly moving. We scanned the shadows under the cabin boards, below the engine and beyond to the stern. Nothing. Sarani started slowly towards the stern, poking his stick into the crannies between the ribs and the gunwale, squatting down as he checked under the cabin deck, rattling the stick under the block of wood on which the engine sat. Nothing. A movement at the edge of my field of vision startled me into raising my stick. It was only a cockroach, but now my heart was pounding.

Sarani moved out of sight under the deck beyond the engine. Any moment now. Where else could it be? I was now the lonely backstop. I crouched over the bilge, commanding the approaches to the bow locker. Any moment now. But Sarani had found nothing in the stern hold either. He called to me that I should check the bow locker again. I wondered if it might have hitched a ride onto Pilar’s boat with the nets. I peered into the locker, prepared to meet the stare of beady eyes, but there was nothing. I was running my stick around inside the rim of the car tyre when Minehanga cried out. It was on deck.

I got there as Sarani was coming up through the boards of the stern. Minehanga had seen the beast, its head poking out from behind a plank leaning against the gunwale. She had thrown Sumping Lasa’s flip-flops at it. The gap between the board and the gunwale had created a covered run above decks that the rat was using to double back towards the bow. Sarani took the stern end of the plank. I took the other, my cudgel raised, ready to Bat-A-Rat. Slowly we pulled the top edge of the plank away from the gunwale. The rat was halfway between us, crouched in defence, halted in its retreat towards the stern. When the light touched it, it turned again and bolted in my direction. It had too far to go. What had been a refuge was now a trap. Sarani opened up the old ammunition crate that held what tools he had and pulled out a sledge hammer with a rusty head. The body of the rat settled onto the sea bed near a spinney of black urchins. It was no longer there the next morning.

In the days that followed, waiting for Sabung Lani’s return from Bongao, my role aboard the boat filled out. I had been a deck-hand from the start, but the purchase of disposable razors made me ship’s barber too. Sarani was my first customer and he sat patiently presenting a toothless jaw while I tried to work up a lather on his salty oil-skin face. The performance drew a crowd. Arjan watched fascinated, raising his grubby hand to his forehead from time to time as though something were bothering him. Sarani told me he had fallen into the engine well while I had been in Semporna and had cut his scalp. Barber and leech, I washed away the dried blood matting his hair to reveal a wound that should have been stitched. It was showing signs of infection already. ‘You have medicine?’ asked Sarani. I had a small supply of antiseptics, and set about shaving the area surrounding the cut. ‘That one looks like water,’ except it was H2O2 instead of H2O: hydrogen peroxide, the diver’s remedy. When applied to a cut it turns white and fizzes like a dose of salts. Arjan’s cut was volcanic, a bubbling vent in the middle of the bald patch. There were murmurs of surprise. ‘It’s like Coca-Cola,’ said Sarani. I swabbed the cut with betadine and pulled the edges as close together as I could with the plaster, wondering just how long it would stay on a head like Arjan’s. Thereafter I was asked to look at wounds old and new, from the nick on Sumping Lasa’s finger to the long invaginated gash in one young man’s leg. I did what I could.

The passing of time was marked by gratifying moments that showed I was progressing from being tolerated on the boat to being accepted. Arjan could sit on my lap without fidgeting or pulling my chest hair. At meal-times Minehanga no longer gave me my own bowl. As the men of the household Sarani and I ate from the same dish. We were served our food before women and children, but often Mangsi Raya could not wait and would crawl to my side, staring into my eyes with unnerving trust as I fed her flakes of fish. Sumping Lasa’s tantrums were becoming less frequent and I realised with a pang that the traits in her character I found so unlovely had in fact been symptoms of the disquiet my presence had caused her. One night when the wind was cold, I was woken by a movement against my back; it was Sumping Lasa snuggling in behind me for warmth. I let her stay, despite Sarani’s warning not to sleep too close to the children. ‘You will be wet,’ he said. ‘They will pee on you.’ I got wet anyway; the wind brought rain soon after.

Analisa, one of Sarani’s granddaughters, a pretty girl of ten, shyly proffered the bamboo louse-pick to me one day. I had watched the operation often enough and knew the right noise to make on discovering a louse, ‘tsss’ on the inhale, and on killing it, an exhaled ‘hmm’. It worked like a progress report. I took the pick and she lay down on the deck in front of me waiting to be groomed. I parted her wind-blown hair with the bamboo slat and scanned her scalp for louse spoor. I was an inept tracker – I failed to find a nit even – but Analisa had thought it natural to entrust me with this service. Bunga Lasa, Sarani’s youngest child by his first wife, relieved me of the pick when she had seen enough of my incompetence and was soon going ‘tsss-hmm’ as she cut a swath through the parasites. Then she turned on me. It did not occur to me that she might find anything that would summon the sound effects, but she did. ‘Tsss-hmm’, once, twice, announced acceptance into a club I would rather not have been joining.

My familiarity with life afloat was growing on a subconscious, physiological level as well. I knew without looking the state of the tide. My balance was improving as my body came into synchronism with the periods of the sea, its broad movements, its grace-notes. I could walk the length of Pilar’s roof while the boat was under way. I could even walk the length of the dug-out without bending to hold onto the sides. My eyesight became sharper, revealing shapes on a farther horizon. One morning when the deep-water net had shifted in the night, I was the first to spot the polystyrene float. I began to be able to read the sea, the shallows and currents, from the colour of the water and the pattern of waves. Sarani had me steer when both he and Minehanga were busy.

On our fishing trips in the dug-out I had worked my way up from baler to net-boy already. Sarani began to pass the pole to me more often while he prepared a quid, or caulked the canoe, or worked on the net. Then came the day at Kapalai when he let me get into the water for the first time.

I had always been a tourist on the reef before then, as a diver or a snorkeller, and as a diver you are taught to touch as little as possible and take nothing. My instructor in Cairns had made it clear: ‘ “Take only photographs and leave only footsteps” except underwater, if you know what I mean, and then you don’t want to be walking on the coral, so no footsteps at all actually.’ The reason Sarani did not walk on the coral was because he was barefoot. He certainly had no qualms over bashing it about a bit, rattling his new spear into holes and crannies or excising a giant clam. I soon quashed the reluctance that came with putting on my mask and snorkel and collected shells alongside him.

We were covering areas of the reef which a sightseer would ignore, the zone of sea-grass and scrubby coral that grows in lumps from a bed of sand; we were not in search of beauty. I knew what I was looking for, but I was not entirely sure where I would find the shells. I stayed close to Sarani as he combed the sea-grass, pulling the canoe behind him. He would reach down and the first I would see of a kahanga or a téhé-téhé was as his hand brought it up through the water. The dolen were easier to find, scattered on the sand between the coral heads, though a surprisingly high proportion of the shells were occupied by hermit crabs. After I found my first kahanga, my eyes became accustomed to their shape and I found many more. The urchins were more elusive, covering themselves with a camouflage of vegetable matter, so that you had to look for an unnatural agglomeration of sea-grass fragments rather than for the creature itself. I made a considerable contribution to our day’s haul.

The new spear came into action to good effect against porcupine fish. One of the many strange fishes that employ methods of defence other than flight or shoaling, the porcupine fish inflates its body when threatened, thereby erecting the spines with which it is covered. Obviously this strategy offers no protection against an attack with a spear. Sarani stopped the blow short, so that it was a jab rather than a lunge, and the porcupine fish would obligingly immobilise itself. His second strike speared the fish. He took three. They plopped into the canoe spurting water through the spear holes and deflated like beach balls in a rock pool. We ate all three, boiled, for lunch.

I was at a loss as to how to eat what appeared to be a plateful of spines, and puffers in general are renowned for their toxic viscera. I waited for Sarani’s lead. He kept the spines towards the front of his mouth, cleaning them of flesh one at a time, turning them around with his lips. Not having teeth seemed to be an advantage. A sharp end would poke out at intervals and when the spine finally emerged, I recognised it instantly as the mysterious object I had found on tropical beaches in the past. I collected a handful once and they reminded me of a set of jacks, or of those fiendish anti-cavalry devices that, no matter how you scatter them, always land with a point sticking up into the air. Or into the roof of your mouth, your tongue, your gums, your lips. There was a knack to eating porcupinefish which was eluding me, and what I did manage to get off the bone had a very strange texture, fatty and elastic. It tasted surprisingly good.

Nightly visits ashore also became part of the routine for Sarani and me. Our first trip had had purpose – to find a haft for the spear point I had bought in Semporna. On subsequent nights, our visits to the island became social calls, a way of filling time before the boat needed propping up, the tide drying close to midnight. If he felt guilty about deserting his family for a while, he expiated it by coming back with treats – packets of crunchy snacks for the children and a bottle of Coca-Cola, decanted into a plastic bag, for Minehanga. She would wake on our return and drink it on the spot through a straw she kept for the purpose.

Mabul is not a large island; it can be circumambulated at a stroll in half an hour. On occasion our path would take us through the Sipadan-Mabul Resort’s compound, though it made me nervous. It felt like stumbling across Las Vegas after years in the desert, the lights, the music, white people sitting at tables in the open-sided dining room eating meat and salad, drinking beer and Australian wine and Scotch. I have been a holiday-maker in such places often enough, but in Sarani’s company I felt alienated from my own people. I would keep to the shadows as we passed, until the night Robert Lo spotted me.

‘So you made it.’ The dislocation from the place and circum stance of our first meeting made this reunion surreal: from the noise-filled hall of Earls Court, to a balmy tropical night on an island with a fraction of the floor-space; from suit and tie to shorts and a T-shirt. He had looked more at home in a suit. Sarani put on his confused old man act in Robert’s presence and excused himself to keep an appointment he had made to massage a shopkeeper’s wife. Robert was busy with some Taiwanese guests and took me over to the table where two of his diving instructors sat.

Sam and Tim were both English. Both had long sun-bleached hair and the sort of incidental tan that comes from working outdoors in the tropics. Robert introduced Sam as Samantha and she chided him – ‘only my Gran calls me Samantha’ – in an unmistakably Yorkshire accent. Tim was as Cockney as Bow Bells. If anything I found them more amazing than they found me when I told them what I was doing on their doorstep. ‘You mean those dirty old boats out from the village? They use fish-bombs, don’t they?’ They were relieved to hear that my hosts only used nets and spears. They saw the damage that was being done to Kapalai close-up and on a daily basis. That morning Tim had taken a group to a spot known for its beautiful coral and bizarre fish life, and he had found a pile of rubble.

Sarani returned and was sitting with some of the resort’s boatmen on a bench under the palms in front of the restaurant. Sam was keen to meet him and meeting her put a twinkle in his eye. I acted as translator. He was very surprised to hear that she was unmarried and was working here as a diver. ‘Does she go diving at Sipadan? Are there many fish?’ Sam went to get a fish-identification book from the resort library. It was a treasury, every species illustrated with a photograph of a specimen in its habitat. Sarani’s eyes lit up at the pictures of sharks and I told him Sam had seen four different species on one dive alone, including oceanic hammerheads. ‘He says if they catch one of those they are rich for two months. If they catch two, a son can get married.’ Sam’s expression dropped a little when she realised Sarani had at one time or another dispatched examples of most of the species in the book. ‘We saw dolphins today at Sipadan as well. Tell me they don’t catch dolphins.’ I could not, and I could not lie; Sarani accompanied his explanation of how to harpoon a dolphin with hand gestures. She took it well. She saw the difference between traditional hunting and commercial exploitation, but when Sarani turned the page to the rays I though better of telling her how much he could make from a manta. Tim stopped by on his way to bed. ‘What’s he doing, reading the menu?’

I was not keen to foster relations with the resort while we were at Mabul – I felt closer contact might taint Sarani and would certainly tempt me – but he was very taken with Sam. Of more immediate concern was our continuing run of poor catches from the deep-water nets. And then the engine failed. Pilar diagnosed a worn-out valve. Going to Semporna would have meant a trip in Pilar’s boat without enough sea produce to cover the cost. Sam suggested we go on the resort’s speedboat which was making a run in the morning. Tim had a day off and decided to come with us.

Sarani was fascinated by the boat. The twin 200 horsepower outboards lowered into the water at the push of a button, the hydraulics whining. They started at the push of another. He held on as we skimmed over the light chop at what was light-speed in comparison to his boat. It was thrilling to be travelling at thirty-five knots through the bright morning air, the controlled forte of the engines behind us, the sea a precious blue, and on the flood tide we streaked across the Creach Reef. In the Semporna Channel, the water was dead calm and we seemed to be floating above it. The landmarks whizzed past, the mangroved inlet, the detached stilt village, the turn at the south point of Bum Bum into the home strait. The outskirts of Semporna were upon us, the fish farms, and then we were pulling up to the jetty next to the ice house. Sarani was unfazed and started unloading his various empty jerrycans before the boat had been tied up. He set off to find a man who owed him money. Tim ushered the departing guests to the minibus waiting to take them to Tawau airport. I was making plans for a breakfast of fried rice.

The bald lieutenant was in the café with two other men, one in a policeman’s uniform. They both had the sleek air of authority about them and the man out of uniform, the elder of the two, wore rich clothes, a gold watch and a gold ring. The lieutenant called Tim and me over.

‘This is our ex-Deputy Chief, and this is Inspector Amnach of CID.’ The Deputy Chief had been posted to the Peninsula, a post with more responsibility, and he was saying goodbye in his civvies before he left. He had picked a good time to leave, when the whole Semporna establishment was under scrutiny, and he projected self-assurance, knowing his career would always run so. He spoke courteous English and asked Tim about the diving and Tim in his usual manner, at once blunt and long-winded, replied, ‘Sipadan’s great. Mabul is so so. And Kapalai, well, you can forget about Kapalai in a couple of years. Why? Fish-bombing. You ought to come out and see sometime.’ He started a long and repetitive lecture on the stupidity of playing bombs. Every time he seemed to be finishing, he would come up with a different way of saying what he had just said and add, ‘You know what I mean?’ in such a way, raising his eyebrows and wrinkling his freckled forehead, blue eyes wide, lips pursed, as to force one to treat it as a real question and say ‘yes’. Diplomacy was not one of his talents, but his manner was so good-humoured and earnest that it was hard to take offence.

The implied charge of incompetence did not offend the ex-Deputy Chief. He was patient in his rehearsal of the difficulties facing the coastguard in its operations against the fish-bombers. Tim had a solution for every one: the reef is too shallow? use inflatables; they throw the evidence overboard? have divers on hand to recover the bombs. He offered his own services. The ex-Deputy Chief spelt it out.

‘It is not our job to protect the reef. Our job is to catch criminals. Of course the people who are playing bombs are breaking the law, but as I have said we cannot catch them there. Do you know how many reefs, how many islands there are on this coast? We only have posts at Tawau, Semporna and Lahad Datu. If we go to one reef, the bombers go to another. Our operations are concentrated on the detonators. We cannot arrest someone for having an empty bottle or fertiliser or petrol. These are innocent things.’

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