Centipede Gangster

June, 2008.

Habli Dali, 24, is sitting by himself on the porch of a rickety shack held up on stilts, swatting mosquitoes as he looks out on a country road in north Borneo. There isn't much to do except try to keep from sweating, talk about the massive centipede tattooed on his upper arm and think of the man he almost murdered.

He was barely 18 when he founded his gang, and each member had to be initiated with the black insect crawling up his torso. "We were getting so wild," he says, looking over the overgrown tangle of jungle below, "that we were holding people at knifepoint in broad daylight. We didn't care if anyone saw us because it would be over in three minutes. And we'd always only steal money, not possessions. Money cannot be traced back to a villager. Sometimes, we'd make 300 ringitts a day, but the most we stole from a single person was 3,000. He was just walking out of the bank."

But Habli was running too hot for his own good. The Centipedes clashed with the rival Scorpion gang, and Habli knifed one of them, leaving him for dead. The man survived, but Habli had finally committed a crime that could be traced to him.

"I was sitting at home eating dinner with the family — my parents, grandparents and wife — in our village house. My elder brother, who is a policeman, arrived with a couple of cars full of cops, ran into the house, and tried to arrest me. I ran for my samurai sword — I swear I would have chopped him up — but he had already hidden it away. I tried to fight him off but they overpowered me, slapped handcuffs on and dragged me out in front of everybody."

Habli spent three months in jail for knifing the other gang member, but it was the shame of being exposed in front his family, and being captured by his own brother, that shattered him. "I wouldn't steal from someone even if you offered me 10,000 ringitts!" So Habli sits in the rented house that his employer has provided him: a giant, dilapidated, soggy construction that gives the impression it might cave in any second. "It's best if my wife stays away from this house. Besides, she has to send our children to school." So Habli visits the family once a month, returning at night because there is no one else to take care of his employer's trucks, parked outside the house on stilts.

Habli is lonely here, far away from family and friends. The most he can manage is a wave to a passing motorist as he looks out from his perch. Habli is an orang asli, or original inhabitant, of Sabah, belonging to the dusun tribe. His boss is of Chinese origin and from Kuala Lumpur, and won a contract for Sabah Railways, which Habli is helping to renovate. He drives the heavy machinery parked outside the shack, from the truck to the road roller, learning on the go between ten and seven, earning RIM1,300 a month or more with overtime. Work is a half-hour drive away, where he manoeuvres his earthmover into the ground and prepares for new tracks that will come from Kinaruth.

After work, he returns home to cooking that revolves around vegetables and rice, though he sometimes might break open a can, and then just sits listlessly on the balcony with the blank stare he will repeat the next morning. In three months his year of contract will get over and he'll be out of here, faster than you can yell Centipede Gang. "I'm already going crazy all alone here," he admits. A radio might help, but he'd gifted his to the wife on a visit home.

Back home in Danau, he will give his wife between 5—800 ringitts a month, depending on how much he can save. A couple of hundred pay for the schooling. Others his age are farming in Danau, taking care of vegetables or rubber plantations. Habli has his own land there, gifted by his parents. But village life was never enough, and he will eventually move on to Tenum, where the railroad work will continue. It will be better, he thinks, because there will be villages in the area, and that means Habli will finally have company.

It must have turned almost nine by the time he had finished his story, sitting there in the muggy morning air, with the mosquitoes woken up and an ever so slight breeze beginning to blow across the road, catching in the dense vegetation under the house and not quite making its way up the rotting wooden staircase to where we sat.

Such atmosphere hadn't left the previous tenant alone, either, and he had written his sad story on the faded paint of the wall. He was of the suluk, a tribe of Sabah, and in love with the teacher's daughter. He was writing to her in pain, felt pen pressed hard against the damp wood, for he was too poor to afford her RIM50,000 dowry. For, as he cried to the house, the girl and no one in particular, "Even if I had the ringitts for your marriage, where would I find the money to feed you after?"



© 2001—2012 Pinaki