The Dayak Room

Osborne House on the Isle of Wight has a room Queen Victoria built to hold an empire she never saw: the Durbar Room, its ceiling carved by an Indian craftsman, its walls lined with gifts and trophies from a country she ruled but never visited. It is a strange kind of honesty, that room — a confession that empire was, in the end, something collected. Istana Kenyalang in Jesselton has its own version of the room, though it was built for a rather different reason.

The Dayak Room is where Julian and Samuel receive their guests, where the pua kumbu that Indai Ujan wove and gave, rather than sold, hangs above the doorway, where the lantaka stands as more ornament than weapon now, and where Belayan once stood, newly a man, and was given a parang across that same threshold. It is not a trophy room. It is closer to a family's memory made visible: the things a household keeps not because they are valuable, but because they are loved, or because someone who is loved once carried them.

This page is my own attempt at that room, brought out of the fiction and onto the page. The objects gathered here are real. They sit in my own home (Brooke Hall), on shelves and in drawers, gathered over seventeen years in Borneo and the years since, and I have given them a home in the Dayak Room because that is where, in my imagination, a family like this one would keep them. Some are Iban, some Dayak, some Malay; the household was never only one thing, and neither is this room or my collection.

The notes beside each object are not so much essays as the labels a curator might pin next to them: what it is, where it came from, what it was used for, and what small, unrecorded life might once have handled it. My hope is that readers who meet these objects here will recognise them again when they turn up later — on a sideboard at the Istana, or in a hand that is not entirely sure why it is still keeping this thing after all these years.