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