by Ho Sok Fong
Bi surfaces from the quicksand just in time to snatch the words from Shaimah’s exercise book through Aminah’s eyes. Aminah sees that everyone else has written Shaimah sweet little messages. Dearest Imah, may you be happy always. Happy Birthday, over and over again, big and small. Pages and pages of it. The authors seem to have used the square guides in the middle of their rulers to write in, because all the letters are perfectly even. This confuses Aminah, but then she thinks, Well, if no one writes to Imah, Imah must write to herself.
Then she reaches a page where the neat blue writing morphs into a messy scrawl, scratched right across the staples in the middle of the page.
I hate myself, I hate that I was so stupid, why did I listen to that policeman? Why? Maybe I was afraid of what he would do to my family. Almighty Allah, deliver me from this suffering.
Aminah feels a vice squeeze around her chest. Her eyes are misty again. The sky never seems to brighten. No matter how many times they wash the windows, it’s always gray behind the window’s lattice. A webbed foot sticks to the wall and silently glides past. A webbed hand is like fog: it can’t show Aminah the way. Fog seeps through the windows and onto the floor. Aminah watches it swallow her knees and the table legs, watches it swallow the dead frog.
The coffee on the table has gone cold. The women’s afternoon coffee break is almost over. These days, none of us like to look at the clock. Our fingers make more sense than our eyes. When the coffee is cold, it’s the men’s turn to come in.
The men sit on the left side, the women on the right. The men have their entrance and we have ours. Neither Aminah nor I ever let our eyes glance in their direction. Seventeen-year-old Junaidah is always dawdling in the middle, her headscarf ending in sharp points over her breasts.
The wind flings open an exercise book lying on the ground.
It was flimsy enough to start with, then Shaimah went and ripped half the pages out. The ones left behind are falling out now too. Her handwriting is very ugly and jumps all over the place. That’s right: Shaimah does not like studying, and neither do Aminah and I. School wasn’t much better than here but at least Kai was there, and we used to sit up talking all night long, before the sun came up, when the lights were out. We talked like that for two years without saying anything at all. There were things I wanted to know and things I could not say and things I absolutely did not want to hear.
In those days, I wanted to flush Aminah down the toilet.
Ants are carrying crumbs down the table legs. Can they tell that they’re not horizontal anymore? A straight path extends from the crown of their heads. Once again, Aminah feels the sand flowing into the crown of hers. Her neck bends. A webbed hand industriously scoops the sand away, as though preparing to plant a vegetable.
The rain keeps everyone a prisoner indoors. Outdoor activities are on hold, no one is allowed out, there’s nothing to do other than read aloud from the scriptures. Or copy the scriptures onto a stack of flash cards and then glue them to the wall, until the wall disappears. Or polish the floor and windows, over and over again. Or watch religious films, like Virtuous Maria and Memorial Day of the Battle for Southern Thailand. In the evenings, the girls lie on their beds, scribbling in their diaries.
At first, Aminah refused to write a single word. She would press her head into her pillow. She did not believe any of the friendly messages the others were writing. Who wanted to remember this hellish place anyway? No one takes their diaries with them when they get out. They chuck them in the trash outside, into the jumble of empty jars, plastic bottles, and plastic bags. The rain makes the ink run.
And yet still the warden does her rounds, gathering them up. Who knows why. They sit in a pile on top of the cupboard behind the library sofa.
Who knows if anyone ever reads them. Who knows if the ustaz really pray for us all. Maybe only Allah knows, Allah the Almighty. We can stare all we like, but only He knows whose eyes are truly reading.
Supposedly we won’t be here in the valley much longer. They are looking for land to build a bigger, better House of Faith. Then we’ll leave and so will they. Sooner or later, every single one of us will toss this valley to the back of our minds. We’ll leave this never-ending rainy season right where it is and stride off down that sloping mud- and horseshit-splattered road out of here, without ever looking back.
The wind spins on the road.
“This horse is blind,” I say to Aminah. “The light’s too bright, it can’t see anything.”
Our hands entwine in front of a candle. A shadow horse canters over the floorboards, through the vacant glow of the flame. A few seconds and it’s gone. It had a hole for an eye. In the candlelight, our hands are very white and the shadows are very black, engulfing the corners of the room.
“It’s run somewhere deep, deep inside,” says Aminah. Her eyes follow it into the darkness. The horse only had a head and a neck, so we can’t watch it run.
“You hear that?” I ask.
“Hear what?”
“Hooves.”
We saw the horses when we were driven in, although at first they were almost invisible through the evening rain. One horse galloped around the pasture with its head down and its neck twisted, and gray clouds piled onto the ground around it, as though taking it prisoner.
“If it was nighttime, you’d see them asleep standing up,” said the driver. “There’s no need to tether them, they just stand by the fence. They’re good horses.”
The car wound its way up the little mountain road. When it reached the fence, one of the guards got out to open the gate. The gate was heavy and its rusty corners scraped noisily across the pavement. Perhaps that would have been the moment to throw open the car door and escape, but we just stayed sitting there like a corpse. Anyway, there was another guard in the car with us and she gripped Aminah and me tightly by the shoulder, her wrist like iron.
The car passed through the fence. The tires had to churn through piles of horseshit to reach the iron gates of the House of Faith. Every morning, those good horses carry their masters past the gates and up the mountain. We hear their hooves disappearing into the distance along the rocky jungle path. Clip-clop, clip-clop, like a band of cheerful drummers, loud and crisp and then gone.
“They’re asleep. They won’t be running around at this time of night.”
“You’re wrong,” I say. “Don’t believe everything that driver said. There’s a horse out there, listen—clip-clop, clip-clop, clip-clop.”
“Well, then it’s a bad one,” says Aminah. “Or else a blind one, that can’t tell the difference between day and night.”
The wind spins in my brain.
sementara = temporary
How long is “temporary”? How long before it doesn’t count as temporary anymore? Time flips like a coin. Wake up, sleep, wake up again.
“It’s so meaningless,” I say.
“No, it’s not,” says the teacher.
“God’s love is the rule,” says an ustaz.
“We must delight in God’s love,” says another. “If freedom amounts to nothing other than satisfying one’s base cravings, one’s nafsu—well, then renounce this freedom.”
The wind blows across my father’s father’s grave, trembling on the Qingming pineapple leaves.
nama = name
There is a creased line where the ceiling meets the walls. It’s like the room has been torn apart and stuck together again. It’s like being inside a totally different room.
There’s a game that goes like this: say a person’s name out loud. Swap names with them. Don’t stay attached to your old one. If someone calls your new name and you don’t answer, or else calls your old one and you do, then you’re dead. There are no second chances, dead is dead. Instant elimination.
“You will take the name Aminah,” I heard the ustaz say. “It means ‘a loyal heart.’”
Barbed wire coiled along the top of the walls. The hammer came down, banging April into a long, long chasm. A voice shouted from it: “A
minah, Aminah.”
Born again.
A hand passes through my brain. A 5 a.m. wake-up. The call to prayer booms across the sky, the sound like an enormous bell crashing behind me. I follow it onto Aminah’s prayer mat.
The wind carries the shouts a hundred thousand miles, all the way to the Gombak River.
I drag Aminah here and there, and it’s like dragging a heavy iron hammer. I want to smash everything into tiny pieces but cannot muster the strength. Eyes slide over me as I stand in the garden, cursing like a mad old woman. “What are you looking at! Don’t you all have cunts of your own?”
My elbows used to be hard as rock. My neck bent for no one. Maybe people talk behind my back, but then again maybe they don’t. Maybe they say, “Poor Aminah, she’s even more wretched than that girl Maria.” Let them. Maybe all that pity makes them feel better.
The curtains are heavy. Water drips from towels hung over the indoor washing line. The doorjambs are moldy.
The name Maria is like a spear stabbed into the ground at my feet. Back in the 1970s, Maria was a white girl with two families fighting over her. Her adoptive parents were Muslim but her birth parents were Catholic. The case was heard in the Netherlands and Singapore. The straw mat we sit on, in front of the television, is divided in two, one side for men, one side for women. The light from the screen flickers on our faces. We watch the case of virtuous Maria. All the shouting is dubbed. The subjects weep as they tell of how they have been wronged, robbed of love and honor. The voice of the narrator roils in the background, as though there’s a raging furnace in there. It’s not just in the past; the fires are stoked, even now.
The name Maria is like a spear tossed past me, sharp enough to slice off a toe. Maybe it has. I feel like I’m missing something, as if my foot is no longer my own. Behind my back, the others are probably spitting out pronouncements like seed husks: “Aminah’s more broken than Maria.” “Only the greatness of Allah can make her whole again.”
Maybe we only know half of Maria’s story, just as we only have half of mine.
The wind makes the doors knock in their frames.
“hari depan = afterward,” writes Aminah. I watch her write.
The clock is wound. Tick-tock, tick-tock. The sand flows thickly. Another day. Another week. It’s yesterday and it’s tomorrow.
Aminah can only write a few simple words. They are not my usual words, but everybody says they will be with us all our life. And who knows how long an everlasting life might be. Should an everlasting life be spent draped in a prayer robe or with hair draped wild and free over one’s shoulders? Should an everlasting life be lived with endless freedom to strive or is that freedom, when all is said and done, just another illusion? Does an everlasting life mean a life spent racing across constantly shifting ground?
During the everlasting rainy season, we all sit together and stare dull-eyed at the square glow of the screen: endless grassy plains, the dog-eat-dog world of the African wilderness, a snake swallowing whole a chicken thrust into its cage. A deer running like the wind, a flock of geese migrating from the southern hemisphere to the north, their cries gradually fading into the distance. Aminah’s eyes are wide. A vast world where there is no need for language, a world untouched by humans. If only. She writes: That is the other shore.
Later, in the classroom, she half-closes her eyes as she copies from the board.
The board is green and the twisty Jawi script is written out in white chalk. The sentences are short but the time is long; it hardly seems to pass at all, like it’s backed up forever and ever inside this room. Today’s lesson is on minor sins. Yesterday’s lesson was on major sins. Inside Aminah’s exercise book, sins are ripped apart and torn out, held like a bunch of uprooted mimosas, dropped in the trash when her hands start to ache. Time is like a wheelbarrow ploughing through soft mud, rolling down a hill.
Reading from the Quran mends mouths, but they sin by mispronouncing syllables. They sin by secretly skipping pages. They sin by lying. They sin by gently pinching someone else’s palm, and sin by pressing someone else’s face into their laps and trapping their hair between their knees, stroking their head. The scent of wrongdoing wavers on their lips. The corners of their mouths collapse inward, forming two sharp little caverns.
It is all major. As major as the crumbs carried by the ants.
The wind blows the rain sideways, blows clothes sideways. The clothes never dry.
muram = desolate
It’s the day before Hari Raya Haji and everyone has gone home. Only Aminah is left behind. Every hour the warden comes looking for her with eyes like pincers. The emptiness weighs on Aminah. It feels like she has swallowed a bowl of stones, or maybe a spiky fruit. Her lungs, heart, stomach are empty rooms.
On the day of the festival, starting from the dawn azan, she spreads herself as wide as the garden. Or, to be more specific: for the whole day, she walks and scatters herself. Her skull splits into four parts. One part sleeps on her pillow, one falls into a washbasin, one is forgotten in front of the television, and one is left behind on the sewing table.
Her tongue stays behind in her cup. Her toes lie on the doorstep. Her elbows rest on the edge of the dining table. Her mouth slides inside her pencil case. Her eyes press against the window glass. Her fingers are wedged behind the bolt for the gate. Her knees roll off the top of the fence. Her ribs fall into a clump of flowers. She can’t go any further. The outside world is a hundred paces beyond her fingers. Aminah is everywhere.
When she wakes up, she’ll realize that this is all a dream. The difference between dream and fantasy is that the latter might cheat you, but the former never does.
The evening of Hari Raya Haji, Bi arrives at the edge of the compound. That night, noise crashes through the jungle. Some of the sounds have names: owl, window, bucket, leaves, wind. But others do not. Panic and listen all you like, but you’ll never know for sure whether they’re of this world or not.
Like the horse. It sounds like a horse: clip-clop, clip-clop, clip-clop. It paces through your mind, as though it’s come inside the fence.
I first saw Bi in a dream. There was skin between Bi’s fingers, very soft. Cutting it out was painful and there was no point anyway, because it kept growing back, layered with scars. A hand webbed like a fan patted lightly against a harmonica. There wasn’t much of a tune, but all the way through what passed for one, I heard the knock of those hard-hard scabs, keeping the beat: tip-top, tip-top, tip-top.
The wind pulls hair straight and puffs jacket pockets.
bahagia = happiness
My dearest abang, how are you? Are you eating enough? Drinking enough water? Are you well? Do you miss me?
Here the writing is spiky and tall, different to how it was before. This book has a lot of pages. Does Shaimah have a boyfriend to call “abang”? No, Shaimah does not. This isn’t her handwriting. All through the interminable rainy season, the girls write down their deepest longings, although their only readers are each other. As their books are being read, the authors turn to look bashfully at the wall, as though the wall has the power to calm them. Rain patters against the other side. If they don’t know what to write, they write song lyrics. If you’ve never loved, you’ve never existed. Heaven, if you can hear me, turn these feelings into rain.
To: Zhang Mei Lan.
In July, my mother brings me a letter. It’s from Kai, and it begins: Dear Mei Lan, how are you?
The rain stops for two weeks. The world becomes almost transparent; the mountains seem to retreat. I’ve landed in a circle of glorious light. I want to open my mouth wide and scream into the wind and feel my voice sucked into the high and distant sky. I imagine galloping like a horse. But it’s not time for me to gallop yet. The boys are playing football in the field. For now, the field belongs to them. For now, the girls belong to the vegetable patch.
Just one little jump and I could be hanging upside down in a tree. Sway, sway, a newly planted daffodil blooming in my brain. Ah, ah. Blue spro
uts from the branches. My feet kick about, kick about like crazy.
It’s not just because of the name.
In August the valley is sodden once more. Out in the parking lot, Aminah looks up into the rain. It falls in silent needles from the sky, then shatters noisily against the ground. A pregnant cat drags her heavy belly across the lot, the poor thing. This weather is so boring.
So boring that visitors don’t show up. Aminah feels like all the sand inside her head has collected on one side. It takes a long time to return to normal and in the meantime she leans against her pillow, writing laboriously, one stroke and then another, sobbing poor thing poor thing poor thing poor thing until she can’t write anymore. Two candles cast her as two shadows. Why are we so strange? She bites my nails, staring fixedly at the wall. A spider climbs across her blank gaze, as if climbing up a tombstone. On the third day after Hari Raya Haji, at five in the morning, the wind blows the doors open and Bi comes in.
We notice Bi at the same time, in front of the prayer mat. When we lift our forehead from the floor, we see a trail of damp, muddy footprints leading to Bi’s long, webbed feet. Bi is a gift from above. Heaven’s answer to our prayers. Bi is all sinew and bone, dry and shriveled, scales almost too big for her body, like a frog just returned from the desert. Why does Bi look so strange? With our back to the light, we watch Bi fade away, like watching a shadow fall across a mirror. Who made Bi like this, amphibious, dual, neither of earth nor of water? This is the question, hidden like frogspawn in the sand of the hourglass. We did, is the answer. Aminah and I. And the understanding undoes us, what to do, what to do. Go back to yesterday, the day before yesterday, the day before that—time is like a steamroller, crushing everything flat as a card and vanishing it into endless blackness. Aminah and I prefer to pretend that Bi fell from the sky. Fell like rain from on high. Imagine how far Bi must have come.
The wind blows umbrellas away. They turn somersaults across the grass, rolling to the edge of the compound.
lari = escape
It’s hard to say whether this story is being written by me or Aminah. Sometimes I help her edit the story line and sometimes she tries to correct my wording. But most of the time we can’t tell which of us thought up which sentence. It’s the same when we try to work out where Bi came from. It’s impossible to know anything about Bi’s ancestors. At the very beginning, one of them must have fallen into a river (surely it would have been a river because the ocean is far too big) and then slowly moved toward dry land. This ancestor followed the coastline, kept on going through swamp after swamp. Swamps are good at swallowing footprints and also at swallowing names.