by Ho Sok Fong
Aminah had returned. Her figure, in the gloom, walked the length of the dormitory, in front of the lined-up prayer mats. Every pair of eyes saw the soles of her feet, and the trail of mud and grass in their wake.
She passed by the praying warden, who lost track of her prayers. Aminah’s fingers appeared frail in the moonlight, as if about to melt away. There was not a thread of clothing on her skeletal frame.
The women had stopped praying and were holding their breath, waiting for this naked, sleepwalking body to pass. They did not turn to watch her but listened as she moved around behind them. She climbed into bed. A thin sound arose from it; a gentle murmur, like the fizz of a carbonated drink, quickly absorbed into the long cry of the mosque.
The warden was shaken. Her internal recitations cut off. The women went back to their beds, but she stayed on her mat, trying to collect those fallen sentences, unsure where to direct her forehead. Aminah’s damp tracks glistened on the floorboards. They were not quite fully formed footprints. Moonlight came in at a slant as the moon dropped behind the mountains. The majesty of the azan drowned out the echo of the wind in the valley and the cats’ grating wails. It reverberated around the dome of the sky. She could no longer hear the crickets. No longer hear Aminah, or any other sound.
The administration had temporarily canceled afternoon classes, otherwise there would have been a line of students sitting in the dining hall, ready to repent. A coffee pot sat on the table. Coffee had splashed onto the tablecloth. To perceive a stain is to embed it in your heart; you can never wash it out. The rims of the cups were scalding hot. When they couldn’t say what they wanted, they loudly sipped their coffee. They talked a little about everything but ultimately said nothing at all.
In the beginning, they had known only a few basic facts about Aminah. Born in 1975 in Baling New Village, Kedah. Paternal grandfather, Abdullah Ang; paternal grandmother, Xu Xiao Ying. Father, Hamza Abdullah; mother, Gao Mei Mei. Occupation and whereabouts of parents unknown. Neither appeared for the court proceedings. Cohabited with a non-Muslim male in Cheras district, Kuala Lumpur, at No. 35, Road 7/4A, Indah Gardens. Employed as, variously, a waitress, bar girl, and hairdresser’s assistant. In 1993, applied at the Syariah Court to leave Islam. On August 20, 1997, the Syariah Court denied her request and ruled her still a member of the Islamic faith.
They had read her file aloud, giving voice to these details, but the voice had skittered across their brains; the moment the folder was shut, they forgot most of what they’d heard. And after that forgetting, they knew hardly anything about her at all. They remembered that she was from a Muslim family, had conducted herself in an immoral manner, had attempted apostasy.
Now, several months later, they knew a few other things. These were not written in the file. Aminah was wild and unruly. Aminah hated Islam. When Aminah sleepwalked, she could pick a lock with a piece of wire. What nobody knew was when this farce would be over.
“What else can we do?” asked one teacher. “How do we get through to her?”
“I give up,” said the warden. “Even hiding the key doesn’t work. Can’t we send her away? She should be in an asylum.”
Along the edge of the table, a wave of shaking heads. A few letters were passed around. A stack of documents shifted back and forth between coffee cups. All as quietly as possible. Someone repeated the warning that had come down the telephone line: “We can’t send her away. Think about what they’ll say. They’ll say we did this to her. That we drove her mad.”
“She’s not mad, she just sleepwalks,” insisted another teacher. “Sleepwalking is not the problem here.”
“Well, then what is the problem? And what are we going to do about it?” The speaker’s lips pursed over the rim of a coffee cup, pained and deadly serious. “Because whatever we’re doing at the moment, it’s clearly not enough.” The table rocked slightly, as a finger knocked down to emphasize the last three words. “We need to ask ourselves some serious questions.”
And so, for the next two hours, they went around repeating to one another those same phrases they had used a hundred times before: “There is no hiding from God.” “We will bring Aminah back to the path of righteousness.” “We will do our utmost to care for Aminah.” “We will love and care for them all.” “In this way, they will come to know Allah.”
“This is His test for us,” said one.
They all agreed, and started to eat cookies. Sparrows hopped around pecking at their crumbs. The garden scenery was as familiar as always, seemingly impervious to the passage of time. Sunlight poured down and the shrubs quietly sprouted.
There were no walls around the dining hall and the light flooded in from all sides, blinding the teacher Hamid, forcing him to squeeze his eyes shut, as though he had been pulled underwater in the sea.
“We can’t know everything,” he said. “We’re not God.”
“It’s true,” someone agreed. “We’re not.”
So far, Aminah had only ever been naked while sleepwalking. When she was awake, she was fully dressed, sometimes weeping quietly to herself, other times talking softly. But when she sleepwalked, she stripped off her clothes and wandered around the garden. She was surrounded by fencing and barbed wire all the way to the sky. They were not worried that she would escape, they were worried that they might see her.
Beyond the fence was forest and wilderness. There was one lonely road, which had split off from the North–South Expressway on the west coast and ran deep into the peninsula’s interior. Along it, transmission towers loomed over the vegetation, like used-up yarn shuttles dragging their last threads across the horizon. Evening mists settled quickly and dark clouds blew in on the wind. In the final waves of daylight, the horizon was as chimerical as fog, as far-off islands.
This was how it had looked from the car, when Aminah first arrived. She had stared and stared, until the power lines disappeared, and the trees, and the distant mountain range, all swallowed by the thick black fog.
When she entered the building, her limbs went soft and she could barely stand. Her insides felt like stones, piled to the top of her neck, and her legs were sacks of rocks that dragged along the floor. During the day, she choked on the unfamiliar food. At night, she lay in bed but could not sleep. They presented her with a white prayer dress and she hurled it onto the floor, then spat on it and told them all to go to hell. She yelled insults at anyone who happened to pass by. A little later, she allowed the dress to be placed at the end of her bed. After they gave up trying to convince her to put it on, she lay around sulking, muttering to herself in a language no one else could understand. She treated them as if they were invisible.
“Zombies,” she said. “Pigs.”
When she thought of the lovers who had abandoned her, of the relationships she could never make official, of that miscarried child, a crack spread through her body. It rose from between her knees and sliced her in two. It buzzed. Deep inside her forehead something shattered, and the noise sealed off her ears.
She buried her head in her pillow, feeling the cotton stuffing press back against her nose. My name is Hong Bee Lan, she told it, her voice sinking into the folds. They would say: That claim is no longer valid, you cannot be Hong Bee Lan. It had been read aloud in court, clear as day. No right of appeal. It was settled. No more changes.
Aminah.
Eventually, her hair grew long enough to hide behind. Her hair felt like all she had.
When Aminah had first arrived, she had still been willing to talk. Every so often, she responded angrily to questions, or pleaded tearfully with the warden, or erupted into broken Malay, trying desperately to explain herself. In other ways, she was just like everyone else, traipsing edgily in and out of the classroom. She too sought relief from the redhot glare of the sun and the monotony of the dormitory, and followed the others as they shifted location through the day. Like them, she hated studying and never set foot in the library. No one did. They had been judged guilty of licentiousness, deviant ideology, ge
nder confusion, apostasy, and forced into studenthood; none of them felt compelled to enter the library and thumb through tomes expounding on righteousness.
“If Muslim blood flows through a person’s veins, they will be Muslim until the day they die.”
The warden said so. Hamid said so. Inside the chainlink fence, every teacher said so.
“Aminah binti Hamza! All I’m asking is that you put your trust in God, is it really so difficult?”
Hamid was bewildered. The warden had asked her the same question, in the same tone. Inside the chain-link fence, the same question passed from one mouth to another.
It was a boiling afternoon, the breeze as indolent as a cow. The air beneath the fan pasted itself to the skin.
Hamid was drenched in sweat, a torrent of words spilling out of him as he labored to make his point.
“The Quran is perfection! Not a single word too much, nor a single word too little, because it was written not by mortal beings, but by All-Powerful God.”
Aminah was distracted. She was so hot that her whole body itched. She was not wearing a headscarf. Her tangled hair hung down over her shoulders, and her exposed neck was covered in scratch marks. A few Orang Asli, who had also tried and failed to shed their religion, sat in the chairs beside her, heads lolling as they dozed off.
“Where is your scarf?” asked Hamid, keeping his tone cordial.
Aminah did not answer. She collapsed across the table, inert as mud, her matted hair like weeds.
Hamid recalled his colleagues talking about Aminah’s volcanic explosions. He weighed his words carefully before speaking.
“If your boyfriend truly loved you, he would not have abandoned you. He isn’t coming back, you know.”
Aminah said nothing.
“And if your mother truly loved you, she would not have forsaken you. I don’t understand—if they don’t love you, why are you so desperate to go back? We love you more than they ever did. Why won’t you let us in?”
Under the eaves, sparrows darted and chirped. Out in the garden, all the living creatures were stirring. Palm tree shadows flickered back and forth, back and forth, creating a shifting patchwork of light and dark.
At first, Hamid thought the wind was ruffling Aminah’s hair. Then he realized she was trembling. She was hiding behind her hair, huffing and hissing to herself. Whatever she had concealed there, it was only a matter of time before it exploded. Her Malay came out in staccato bursts, but the meaning was perfectly clear.
“Why not talk to my father? That fucking pig, never gave me a sen. You! Are! All! Malay! Pigs! You’re Satan! You get a toothache, you love Allah, I don’t care—it’s your business, not mine. Why do you care so much about other people’s hemlines?”
Hamid could hardly believe his ears. Satan. He shifted from foot to foot, trying to think how to convince her.
“You can’t say things like this. Don’t hate God because you’re angry at your father. Allah has plans for your father, just as he has plans for you. Promiscuity is wrong. Going around with nonbelievers is wrong. It will not make you happy, it will simply degrade you. If you cannot try to please Allah, your life will be utterly without meaning.”
Aminah lifted her chin and stared at him through the black hair shielding her face. Her mouth drooped. She put her hands over her ears.
He avoided her eyes, letting his gaze travel down to her collarbones, where he could make out those faint, mysterious scratches.
“We will find our true reward in the afterlife, where there will be splendor even greater than that which we see before us…”
She would not accept it. This saddened him. He thought, This girl is unworthy of the name Aminah. “Aminah,” a loyal heart. The bearer of this name should love and serve our God.
But still he felt compelled to save this lost Aminah, to rescue her from the abyss.
Aminah gave up hope. No one came. The outside world felt far away and she no longer raged or cried. After the first one hundred and fifty days had passed, the others brought in with her went silent too, leaving only the twittering of birds, high in the sky, and the rustle of wind through the trees. Ants climbed blades of grass, gnawing the edges as they went.
The court order for an extension of her sentence came. Another one hundred and eighty days. It wouldn’t have happened if you had behaved.
The white cloth was bright against the warden’s hands. It had been washed. It looked pristine. Obediently, Aminah pulled it over her head, covering herself right down to her feet. It was too big. The part covering her face shook with her breath. It felt like another layer of skin. This is where she would live from now on: she would wake up inside it, she would die inside it. Until Day 180. But after Day 180 there would be another one hundred and eighty days.
A black cave concealed each woman’s face, and each woman dragged a long shadow behind her. Aminah dragged a long shadow too. Beneath her chin, on her chest, at night, it was as if there were someone lying between her and the women on either side. A gray person, lying between the beds, with a voice that leaped from their vacant body onto her mattress.
Aminah. Aminah.
Born again.
Was it all an illusion? An illusion, severed from the months, the years, the past. You need a fresh start. The hammer’s come down now, and it won’t come down again. Why not accept that you’re Aminah? What good is your old identity to you now? What good ever came of your past anyway?
Their white gowns rustled against their bodies. They spread out their mats, knelt down, and in a few moments their foreheads were touching the floor.
After evening prayers, Hamid felt revitalized. He sat on the verandah sipping coffee, scooping out sugar from the bottom of his cup with a teaspoon. The clouds were low, almost touching the roof. He stared dreamily at the jade-green vine that curled around the verandah railing, entranced by the glossy sheen of its leaves. The long line of daffodils behind had contracted leaf mold and the flowers were slowly withering, despite the gardener’s best efforts. Hamid felt sorry for them, but also felt that the world was progressing as it should. Allah’s decree extends to every tiny detail. Allah the All-Merciful manifests His mercy in all things under Heaven. All living things have their place.
Hamid turned on the verandah light and started reading through the students’ homework.
He did not remember the background of every student. He knew that one young man had returned from Indonesia and would expound at the slightest opportunity: “Read the book of Siti Hajar! Save yourself from eternal damnation!” A few others were instructors from religious institutions, sent to the center to correct their completely misguided interpretations of the Quran. Hamid did not understand how people could be so stupid.
An ignorant heart is incapable of discerning truth, he thought. That was the tragedy of it.
The more he read, the more he sighed. Not a single story was new; history just kept on repeating itself. One diary read: The universe is Allah’s dream. Dream? Siti received enlightenment from a dream. In this world of illusion nothing is real other than “me,” for the illusion is born from “me,” and therefore this “me” is Allah.
It was absurd. It was astonishing that anyone was convinced by these obvious fabrications.
It continued: Since everything is an illusion, what evidence is there that Paradise is real?
They didn’t believe in anything. Not in God, nor in honoring their obligations. Not even Paradise.
Hamid wrote, One can see that a person without faith is noticeably more frail than a person of faith, for they have to live their lives thinking that Paradise is an illusion.
Then, feeling that wasn’t quite right, he crossed it out and corrected it: Paradise is the place to which the souls of all true believers will return.
The moon rose in the sky, then darkened.
A shadow fell across the page. Hamid looked up and saw Aminah. He was so shocked he almost knocked over his coffee.
Aminah’s eyes were wide open but unfocused.
It was immediately clear that she was asleep. She was sleepwalking but had drawn to a halt, as though sensing an obstacle ahead. She was not wearing any clothes and stood there before Hamid, moving neither forward nor backward, utterly exposed.
Oh Allah! Internally, he called on God for assistance.
He held his breath as he looked at her, bewildered by her body. All over her skin, on her breasts, her chest, her abdomen, were finely etched scars, like the veins in a leaf. The evening rose up and closed around them, perching on the verandah railings. For a long, long time, the dusk was the whole sky, calm and windless.
Hamid’s heart raced. The scars made him pity Aminah. He wanted to reach out and touch them.
Satan.
The enemy name flitted through his mind, sharp as a warning whistle. Just in time, he moved his gaze to the Quran on the table. Don’t you know what she’s dreaming about? Some confused thought seemed about to become clear, but then vanished back into nothing, like a wisp of smoke. Oh Allah, he implored again. His chest felt tight. He reached for the Quran but it weighed too heavily in his hands, and fell to his feet with a bang.
Hamid hurried along the path to the women’s dormitory, damp, black branches scratching at the sky overhead, his unease like a scalding-hot coin against his forehead. I would never call a nonbeliever “Satan.” Satan is Satan. A nonbeliever is a nonbeliever, they are not the same thing. But they get confused, he thought. The internal debate carried on: I have not failed, it’s just Aminah’s crazy talk, it’s unsettling me. As Allah speaks through us, so Satan is always lying in wait.
This comforted him; he had preserved his Muslim dignity. Wicked thoughts are the same as wicked deeds, but then again, what counted as a thought? What if it was here one second, gone the next, left no trace? I have not thought anything, seeing as I was not in earnest. It was a moment of weakness, that’s all. We must all be vigilant about nudity. One should not be naked aside from washing, visiting the toilet, or lying with one’s wife. A man should not feel arousal for any naked body other than his wife’s. Oh Allah, have mercy. If my mind must waver, let me be judged by my actions. I have controlled myself, prevailed over desire, and for that let us rejoice.