by Ho Sok Fong
The heart is a battleground.
An evening wind blew through, sending dew raining from the leaves. Drops slid into his collar, cold against his neck. He felt calmer now. He saw the warden and collected himself, and briefly explained the situation. The two of them hurried back to the teachers’ dormitory but Aminah had gone, leaving only a trail of muddy footprints along the verandah.
“You see,” said the warden, “the girl is ruined. It’s her nature, there’s no changing it.”
Hamid stooped to pick up an exercise book that had blown away on the wind, into a dip at the bottom of the steps.
“There is only one nature that Allah has instilled into mankind,” he said. “And that is to rely on Allah.”
The warden made no other comment and left soon after, muttering to herself. The air was clammy and the wind crashed around, rattling the exercise books on the table. Alone again, Hamid sat in a rattan chair, staring blankly at the page he’d been writing on before, covered in his black crossings-out and annotations. His mind was in turmoil. He wasn’t sure what to think. Perhaps Aminah hadn’t really appeared at all; perhaps he’d just nodded off and dreamed that she had.
The foil-stamped lettering of the Quran glimmered faintly in the dull light.
In his youth, during trysts with his girlfriend, Hamid had made sure the Quran was carefully stowed away in a drawer. He recalled one long-ago evening, just before he went abroad for religious training, his last chance to indulge. They had said goodbye, the shadow of the curtains swaying across their naked bodies as they embraced, teeth sinking into one another’s skin, the marks deep but fleeting. And now that labyrinth of emotion soared all the way along those ten interminable years and landed on the table, flipping the strewn books. The lamp rocked in the breeze.
He opened the Quran, suppressing those old hurts and reminiscences, and started to pray.
The pitch-black sky seemed to possess a purity worthy of protection. And, much like looking for someone across the vast passage of time, the realization filled him with anguish. Yes, that was what he had to defend. That. In this worldly life, a pure heart is the most precious possession of all. Verily, Allah loves those who are pious.
How do things decompose, buried underground? The mud was acidic and stung the skin of unaccustomed city folk. When they rinsed it off, they found little red spots, which itched briefly and then disappeared. They were young and so they healed quickly; if they had been older…well, with older bodies death is always lingering overhead, gearing up for its performance.
Heavy rains came and flowers wilted, although new buds continued to sprout defiantly from the branches. The earth was soaked. In the distance, a thick mist wound around the mountains. The wet season. Spores floated in on the wind and rapidly reproduced, covering logs and tree trunks in layer upon layer of fungus. A dead bird lay stiffly in the undergrowth, legs to the sky. Frogs ran away and cicadas screeched. Dead leaves industriously grew white spots, their rot bestowing blackness upon the soil.
New shoots surfaced through the mud.
In the vegetable garden on the mountain side of the compound, the women pulled up weeds that covered the ground like a net. Monitor lizards skulked along the periphery fence, provoking screams of horror. Even so, there were happy moments. If they cast aside thoughts of the restrictions and regulations, if they managed not to take them to heart, then these so-called licentious women, women whose moral conduct had been found so wanting, were perfectly capable of entertaining themselves. When the guards relaxed their watch, the women’s shouts and raucous laughter echoed through the valley, mixing with the cries of birds and the wave-like hiss of the leaves, carrying to the other side of the dormitory blocks and dissipating into the wind.
The women loosened the soil and earthworms frantically burrowed deeper in, away from their shovels. Hamid preached.
“If all you do is read the Quran, you’ll never understand. We have to experience it for ourselves. Only those of us who have planted seeds with our very own hands can comprehend: mankind is weak, but Allah is Almighty. It has been this way since antiquity. Mankind will gain nothing from going against the Will of Allah.”
The sun came up over the men’s dormitory, causing the single-story building to cast a long shadow across the men’s side of the garden. The men were weeding, spreading manure, adding a layer of soil, sheets of newspaper, another layer of manure, another of soil. Layer upon layer upon layer.
The Indonesian student seemed to have forgotten Siti Hajar. He had been resisting all instruction, but now appeared engrossed in his weeding. Hamid took this as a sign that his recitations had done some good.
On the mountain-facing side, the women planted bits of everything—melons, beans, vegetables. Behind the dormitory, the men planted bananas, chili peppers, and taro. Hamid knelt down to pat earth around the base of a sapling, thinking of his grandmother’s funeral.
“Planting seeds is called ‘tanam,’ the same word as for burying people,” he told the students. “Planted seeds will sprout and blossom. After a person has died, their soul remains. To know where you will end up after death, you need only to reflect on your one, brief life, and ask yourself if your deeds and conduct have been pleasing to Allah.”
All living things die and are reborn, he thought to himself, his frustration mounting. In a matter of weeks, we will harvest this garden. Is that when they will receive new life? Will they be saved? He continued to lecture, just as conscientiously as always, until the end of the session. The men exchanged glances among themselves, making furtive jokes or pulling faces, their hands caked in mud. No one was listening to Hamid. He wanted to yell but restrained himself. Instead, he looked around at all those lost men, ones who had yet to be saved, and he pitied them. No matter that they had clearly indicated their disdain for his efforts to rescue them, still he would treat them with kindness.
“Aminah!”
One of the men suddenly shouted the name.
Hamid froze. Noticing that the man’s eyes were fixed on a point behind him, he turned, but all he saw were low-slung sunbeams, the shadows playing in front of the dormitory, the deserted verandah. Nothing out of the ordinary. The swaying outlines of the trees, sparrows riding the wind, fat leaves flapping beneath them. But, as he surveyed the area, he realized that he wanted her to be there. He was scanning this complex world for Aminah, poor, pitiful Aminah, with her poor, scarred body. Somewhere in that familiar scenery, deep in the undergrowth, hibernated a creature both familiar and extraordinary. It was in the shadows, sleeping endlessly beneath the wide-open sky. For a moment, the silence was complete and all-encompassing.
He felt that Allah’s grace and mercy were truly present, descended upon all things and all living creatures, and that holiness and corruption were but a hair’s breadth apart. He wished there was no guilt. The thought seemed to arrive out of nowhere, a longing that rose like water in his chest, so that he almost overflowed.
He wanted to speak but there was no one to talk to. Nowhere to go and say the things he wanted to say. Instead, he silently turned to face the lost men, squatting in the dirt of the vegetable plot. And there they were, of all ages, from all backgrounds, each one scouring their surroundings for the legendary naked Aminah.
The tales grew more fantastical with each retelling. In the kitchen, the cleaning lady and a huddle of students whispered about the sleepwalker’s supernatural ability to free herself from constraints. It was a gripping thought, at once tense and exciting, although they dropped it after a few sentences, fearful of summoning evil spirits. But this underlying dread seemed only to propel those sentences further and faster, sparking an ever greater desire to listen and fabricate. At the staff and teachers’ meeting, they considered the potential damage of this belief. They could not completely disregard it, because in Malay folk tradition the roots of this kind of superstition ran deep. Neither could they hope to eradicate it, when it was so embedded in people’s minds; superstition was something they clung to for reassuran
ce. And so they held a meeting to discuss it, and the meeting ran off and on for an entire week without nearing any conclusion. They searched the Quran for guidance, for a clarifying verse, but opinions differed widely. The debate continued until their shared faith and unity seemed to teeter on the brink of collapse. To avoid misunderstandings, they agreed to pause proceedings until the principal returned from holiday. Hamid, that promising young teacher, the one they had always looked to for solutions, felt his interest waning, and slipped wordlessly away.
Aminah was always back by morning. One day, she returned seeming exhausted, as though she’d been walking for miles, and quickly fell asleep. Weeks passed without any further escapades and the warden dared hope that the farce might be over, just like that.
For several nights in a row, the warden woke in the early hours of the morning. Unable to fall asleep again, she would listen to the soft fizzing of rain on the roof. It pattered onto leaves and soaked the window panes. Everything felt muted. One such night, still bleary, she noticed a cluster of dark shadows hovering around Aminah’s bed. Instantly alert, she tiptoed over and found three sisters from one of the northern provinces, performing an exorcism. They sat cross-legged around the bed, spat into their palms, and began chanting under their breath, the chant interspersed with violent exhalations. After a while they brought their palms to their mouths again, exhaled sharply, and then returned to their recitations.
The warden reprimanded them, keeping her voice low and restrained. She tried her hardest to seem reasonable, even kindly, but the women paid no attention. And so the warden felt her temper rise, forcing its way from her chest and emerging as a sharp, hard voice.
Even that voice was not enough to stop them. They had been transported to another world entirely: their eyes were open but they did not see. They kept repeating the same actions, over and over again, as though possessed themselves—a circle in the air, a wave, hands back to mouth, spit, chant, exhale, arms out again, a circle in the air.
The warden gasped in horror. The thought flashed into her mind: They are all possessed. She looked around the dormitory and saw that several beds were empty. Not only those belonging to the three sisters, but others too. There were bedsheets tangled on the floor. She stepped back, despairing and terrified, and quietly fled the room.
Oh Allah, protect us.
She fled into the rainy night, where all she could see was a tearful sky and tearful trees. The treeline penetrated the deepest part of the darkness, where cricket-chirps and owl-hoots blended into one another, like garbled fragments emerging from a cave. She hurried along the damp path, clutching an umbrella, feeling the icy moisture on her toes. Water ran off the umbrella onto her back and shoulders. She passed through the circles of light beneath the lamps, speeding up in the shadows, heading toward the security hut at the entrance.
She rapped the counter with her knuckles.
The guard was sitting idly behind the glass, just as always.
“Gone,” she said. “Run away.”
“What?” replied the guard.
“I don’t know! I don’t know what to do,” she said, stumbling over the words. “They’re all possessed…”
The guard did not react as she had expected. He didn’t even yawn, simply stared at her blankly. She stepped back, her whole body shaking. The guard’s eyes were heavy. His expression was unsettling, although she couldn’t say why. The small circular speaker-holes drilled into the glass blurred his mouth and nose.
She returned to the path. A cat shrieked in the courtyard. Every so often, she heard the thud of fruit against a dry roof. A quick bump and then gone. Dead leaves fell as silently as passing time. It was an exceptionally black night, the moon as slim as a fingernail clipping. She sat on the wooden staircase outside the dormitory, her back to the line of narrow doors along the verandah. She knew the sounds coming from behind them, knew they were from the women who had stayed inside, who were still lying in their beds, sleep-talking and grinding their teeth. That’s how it was all night long; enough to give you goosebumps if you woke up to hear it. She did not want to hear it anymore. In front of the steps, wind whipped up the fallen leaves, blowing them crisply across the concrete.
She closed her eyes.
Time passed, and she opened them again.
Her eyelids were so dry that she could almost hear them blink. Her hand still gripped the umbrella, and the umbrella was bone-dry. There was no rain on the concrete. A chill swept from the top of her head all the way to her toes. She wanted to stand but her legs and bottom were too numb to move, as though she’d been leaning against the railing for hours, not just a minute or so. Her shoulders ached and her neck was stiff. She touched her headscarf—one of those soft, shiny ones. She had never worn one before.
Aminah, she thought. Sleepwalking Aminah. It was as though something came and sucked all the clothes off Aminah’s body, peeling them off and dumping them on the dormitory floor.
The wind blew in from who knows where. The sky was full of stars about to fall. She shivered with cold but resolved to withstand it, tried not to think about it—in fact, she couldn’t have done anything even if she’d wanted; she had to wait for the numbness to pass.
The crescent moon tilted, gradually sinking behind the mountains. She watched, conscious that this very moment was the darkest, the one just before the sun rose.
Aside from the few lamps in the courtyard and the patches of light in the guard’s hut and the prayer hall, everything was black. In a moment, the dawn azan would start. It would drown out the voices of those ten thousand unknown beasts and insects in the mountains, its holiness resounding up the river and inland to the deep recesses of the jungle.
She attempted to recite lines from the Quran in her head, but the only thought that came to mind was this: Pious souls flow like water over moistened ground. Nothing else. The moonlight was very weak. She looked at the black ground. It looked so deep it seemed bottomless.
Wind through the Pineapple Leaves, through the Frangipani
Note: The name “Aminah” is very common in Malay society; as with Sarah or Mary, there can be many Aminahs.
A LIGHT BULB SWAYS beneath the eaves.
An idea floats up, making my heart pound. I want Aminah to run away. But her mind is somewhere else, hanging upside down, the sand in her brain flowing into the top of her skull. A frog-like person appears; let’s call them Bi. But Aminah will only notice Bi once they have swum up the hourglass and surfaced from the sand. And now Shaimah’s coming over and Aminah’s sipping bitter coffee. Let’s try again: an amphibious person appears. An early morning dream. Aminah does not remember the rest. She opens the door and sees a pair of webbed feet.
Shaimah wants to be Aminah’s friend. She brings over her diary for Aminah to look at. I encourage Shaimah to thrust the book into Aminah’s hands, but Aminah has not yet come to her senses. She flicks through the pages, the words shuffling to the outer corners of her eyes and then onward into the dull light of the torrentially rainy afternoon.
Imah misses her ibu, her ayah, her little brothers. Ibu, when will you come for Imah? A lot of new people have arrived. Ibu, don’t be angry. Don’t be shocked. Imah has something to discuss. Imah wants to get married now. She can’t study anymore anyway, school’s over for her.
A dead frog lies at the foot of the table. By the time Aminah sees it, it’s squashed flat. Smaller than a petal, maybe only recently born, one little foreleg pasted to the black floor. It looks like it snatched ahold of something in its final moments. Its dead webbed foot is flat and dark and disproportionately huge.
Aminah looks at Shaimah. Shaimah is two years younger than her.
“You really want to get married?” she asks.
“No,” says Shaimah, embarrassed. “Imah is just saying. Aidah went home. The day before yesterday, her parents came up to the fence and started shouting, saying she had applied to get married. They brought the certificate to show Kak Roni and so Aidah got to go home. Imah wants that to
o.”
Aminah looks at “Imah.” She has one hand resting on her belly and the other supporting her waist. She arrived four months ago, looking just a little plump. Her parents brought her in and never came back. In the months since, her body has expanded like cooked rice. Yesterday, the warden took her for a check-up. The nurse said the test was negative and the warden screamed like a madwoman in the clinic. “It’s not possible! It’s got to be wrong, it’s got to be.”
It’s time Shaimah got married, but who will her husband be? Not the policeman who raped her; she hates that son of a bitch. Sometimes she cries hysterically in the evenings. Sometimes she gets so desperate that she pulls out her hair. But she calms down whenever there’s singing.
Aminah’s thoughts turn back to herself. She’s been here four months. The new court ruling came the day before Hari Raya Haji, decreeing that she should stay another four. Aminah did the math: one hundred and twenty days, two thousand six hundred and sixty-six hours. Rain gurgled through the drains. She ran into the parking lot.
“Come back here!” shouted the warden.
“I’m waiting for someone,” said Aminah.
“No one’s coming, it’s not Saturday.”
Every two weeks, Aminah meets her mother in the parking lot. Her mother hasn’t been able to get her out yet. Marrying her off would be a good strategy—after all, who better than a nice Malay husband to honor her Malay mother, and who better than a nice Malay husband to make sure she keeps faith in Allah. But if Aminah were willing to do that, there wouldn’t have been any problems in the first place. Aminah does not want to get married. She would rather die.