Every now and then, Aya Merikan would ask if I was keen to go along to Lingga, a town downriver from the longhouse commune where we lived in interior Banting. I was then a few months into my ethnographic fieldwork at my grandmother’s longhouse community in the Simanggang division of Sarawak, west of Malaysian Borneo.
As longhouse headman, Aya Merikan made frequent trips to Lingga, meeting officials and traders, visiting his daughter and ferrying residents. A cousin of my mother and a doting uncle, he knew that I relished the hour-long boat ride down the Batang Klauh. These excursions let me revel in fresh air, make merry with fellow commuters and, in drought season, spot sunbathing crocodiles on the riverbanks. But what I was especially fond of was lingering around Lingga’s shophouses, sitting with others at one of its two kopitiams.
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- Tags: Damina Khaira, Issue 40, Malaysia