Chapter One
The Night The Story Changed
The trouble began on an ordinary Thursday night, at a wedding kenduri in Kampung Tanah Timbul, between the third battle and the clown scene, which is exactly where a dalang’s mind is most at ease.
Pak Su Din had performed the old hikayat perhaps two thousand times. His body knew it the way a boatman’s body knows a river: where to lean, where to hurry, where to let the current do the work. He sat cross-legged behind the kelir with the lamp warming his left cheek, the peti open beside him like a mouth full of heroes, and the orchestra at his back, Abang Leman’s serunai climbing and falling, the drums talking to each other, the gongs keeping the floor of the world steady. On the far side of the cloth, he could hear the audience the way you hear rain coming: children close to the screen, aunties on the plastic chairs, young men at the food stalls pretending not to watch.
He was seventy-one years old, a widower of two years, and the last dalang for three districts. Once there had been six of them between the ridge and the coast road, enough for rivalries, and now there was Din, performing at weddings and school fundraisers, teaching a culture class in town on Saturdays, keeping the art the way you keep an old parent: with love, with expense, and with the knowledge that the neighbours think you mad. Since Mek Yam died, the wayang had become his whole conversation with the world. She used to sit out front at every performance, third row on the left, and laugh at the clown scenes before the jokes arrived, because after forty years she knew the jokes, and knowing them was the pleasure.
