by Nuril Basri
When Inu answers he sounds a little worried. “I don’t know. I’ve never touched her hair.”
“Don’t lie. Your nostrils flare when you’re lying.”
Inu snorts and touches his nose.
“Does she still come around?”
It’s like he doesn’t want to answer, because he is afraid. “Hmm, about that…”
“About what?”
“She’s been here twice. But I told her not to come over anymore.”
Inu waits for my reaction. Maybe he thinks I’m going to explode, because of what he’s told me. “When she came over, why didn’t she clean the house?” I say. “It’s so messy. The furniture’s all dusty, your clothes are all over the floor, I thought she was happy doing that kind of stuff.”
“Actually she doesn’t like doing all that,” Inu replies, sounding relieved.
“What do you mean?”
“She only did it because you were around.”
I have to process this. “So she suddenly becomes a housemaid when I am around? What am I, some sort of domestic maid agency?”
Inu laughs aloud.
“She told me she used to wash your clothes for you.”
“She took my clothes to the laundromat,” Inu says. “I never even asked her to.”
“Ugh, what a…” I squint. “It’s as if she only wanted to show me she deserves to be with you more than me. She’s saying that she’d make a better wife, and that I was…”
“Let’s not talk about her anymore,” Inu says softly.
“It’s like she’s really in love with you,” I say. How can I ever be comfortable with that?
We are quiet for a while. Then Inu shifts. He holds my face, holds it in front of his. He looks at me very, very seriously. I blink and blink and my heart pounds. It’s been some time since I’ve seen Inu like this—this close. I’ve missed this.
“You don’t need to worry. I was never in love with her. I love only you,” he says, and his voice is the gentlest, kindest voice I’ve ever heard in my entire life.
I feel myself dissolve. My heart, my body is like candy floss, melting in the sun.
“So, you’ve stopped calling me ‘Mr Inu’?” he asks.
“Nope, Mr Inu, not yet,” I answer, snickering.
“Why not, Ms Ratu?”
“We need to get remarried, first. Then it’s official.”
“Okay. But now let’s pretend we’re already married, ya?”
he grins.
“Eh? Why, Mr Inu? What do you want?” I ask, trying not to laugh.
“I want to kiss you, Ms Ratu,” he says and he pounces
on me.
I try to push him off, to get away, but I’m too ticklish and he holds me down and we wrestle on the sofa until we’re both just shaking with laughter. Inu reaches out and pulls a book from underneath the table. Oh, I remember this. The diary that Nilam gave us. He opens it to the bookmarked page, and shows it to me.
“A hippopotamus brushes his teeth with sand from a riverbank. May your heart be as pure as his teeth.”
And I double over, reading that.
“Look. The chicken feather grew after all.”
My eyes grow wide. “Wah, ya, it did.”
We stare at the feather, transfixed. Miracles do happen. At least, it happened to me. Suddenly I feel like I’m not the stupidest girl in the world anymore. Maybe I’m not as stupid as I thought. Hehe.
So I get married. Again. We hold the wedding ceremony a second time. Of course we are still legally married—we never got legally divorced. It wouldn’t have been possible in religious terms anyway (according to Hans) since I’m pregnant. (Though, when I actually asked the imam about this, he told me that pregnant women could be divorced, provided they are financially supported. Damn, Hans really fooled me. Though that’s not important anymore.) “No, a pregnant woman may not get married,” the imam says. “Not until after she gives birth and once the period of iddah is over. But because you are both already husband and wife, though the wife has been subject to single talak, you don’t have to reaffirm your vows with a wedding because the wife is technically in iddah.”
Never mind you; I don’t understand a word of it either. But, Inu and I—and I, especially—we feel something is missing. I want to feel truly married to him. A marriage from the heart this time. I want to say our vows with real intent.
This time Inu gets me a modest wedding ring—gold-plated, three grams or less. Nilam quietly tells me that the first ring he gave me was a real diamond that cost 9,000,000. I snort regretfully, angry at the salesperson that bought it from me for just 2,500,000.
When she finds out Inu and I are back together, Nilam goes off on a non-stop rant, saying how Inu’s an idiot for trusting a whore like me, saying all kinds of things. Her spit flies everywhere for three whole hours. She screams herself hoarse. In the end she gives up and assents. Fine, be together, she says. She looks at my belly. She says she wants to see our baby. But she warns me. In a tone that chills my blood into ice, she says: “You better watch yourself. If you dare cause trouble again, I’ll stick a fork up your ass.” I’m never going to cause trouble, I swear.
On the other hand, Ferlita takes her defeat like the perfect lady, with the utmost grace. She just keeps quiet and swallows her feelings and lets them eat her up inside. She pulls me aside like a secondary school student about to rag a freshman, but she says nothing. She only stares at me, meaningfully, as if she’s transmitting her thoughts straight into my brain. I can’t read her mind, but I nod anyway. There’s nothing she can say or do to me. She’s lost. Inu doesn’t love her. She knows that. (Poor thing.)
At the religious office in Bogor, I wear an old kebaya, the same one I wore to my graduation. Inu wears a shirt and a rented jacket. My parents are here, along with some people from the religious office, to serve as witnesses. Also Ferlita, Nilam, Hendritian, Lala (“I’m so jealous!” she says) with her boyfriend and Bhetsy—who looks like she’s itching to give a speech. Thank goodness there’s no stage and microphone here. So we get married.
“It’s official!” the imam says.
We all breathe a sigh of relief. Inu kisses me in front of the imam, without shame.
“Don’t worry. We’re official, aren’t we?”
It’s the sweetest wedding I have ever seen. You would’ve been jealous too.
When we get out of the office, we get into a rental van. No fancy sedan dressed in ribbons or luxury coach for me. We flag down a van and pile in. Everybody is loud, talking at the same time.
On the way, bouncing and swaying, Inu and I look at each other and hold hands. A wonderful moment. I won’t ever forget it.
“Oh, we were in such a hurry I didn’t prepare anything at home. There’s no food!” Mother suddenly says. I don’t blame her. All this happened so fast.
Inu yells for the van to stop. It brakes and we are thrown all around. Ferlita and Nilam fall into a heap together, laughing. Hendritian just grins. “Ow!” Lala screeches.
“Why are we stopping?” I ask Inu.
“Come on, everyone out,” Inu yells. “Here’s the wedding buffet!”
When I get out I see bakso sellers on the roadside. My heart jumps in my chest, tossing little flowers of joy. Without another word we swarm one of the stalls and order, order, order. There’s laughter, we immortalise this moment with selfies on our phones. On the bakso seller’s cart a beat-up radio plays romantic pop ballads. And there, in that place, I feel as if those songs are playing just for me, by request for my wedding day.
“Hey, so, I noticed, back then, at our first wedding, that you were staring at these stalls,” Inu whispers to me, as I’m heaping the sambal in my bowl. I laugh aloud.
“Thank you,” I tell him and stuff a spoonful of bakso into his mouth.
“Where are you all from, miss?” the bakso seller asks me, grinning toothily, after serving all of us.
“We’re bride and groom, mister,” I reply, smiling, holding out my hand to show him
my ring.
THE END
(But, no.)
Once again in my life I feel—and I am sure—that alas, it’s true that there will be no happy ending for a fat girl like me. This tragedy is not something I could ever prevent. It happened, just like that. I can’t blame anybody for it. Except myself, maybe. I am broken, and humiliated, and it is hell.
It’s not what you think. No, we didn’t all get food poisoning from the bakso and then all end up in the hospital, dying in agony one by one. That didn’t happen. It should’ve. It would’ve been better, I think. The van we ride home in didn’t flip and dive into a ravine or get crushed by a big truck. We didn’t all die horrifically. It didn’t get into the papers and they didn’t make a movie out of our tragic story—Dian Sastro would’ve played Ferlita, of course. None of that happens.
After gorging on bowls of bakso by the side of the road, downing bottle after bottle of soda and tea, we all decide to go back to my parents’ house. Nothing there, but we’re all so happy and in the mood to just hang out and spend time with each other. How could I think anything would go wrong? Ferlita and Nilam hold my hand and don’t lecture me at all. I have a good husband, and new friends, good and very supportive friends. My baby is due in a few months. Oh, I’m the luckiest girl in the world! Everything is perfect. For all I’ve been through, I deserve to be happy. God is just.
And then it happens. Everybody is busy talking, laughing. Some, like Bhetsy and Hendritian, leave to get snacks and drinks from Indomaret. Lala has a little argument with her boyfriend; she’s scolding him, asking him when he will propose. Nilam is wandering around the living room looking at all the photos on the walls, on the side tables.
I go to her. I want to tell her that I’m not as she thought. But I end up just standing next to her, looking at these same pictures, telling her about them.
“Ah, that’s you as a little girl? What’s that trophy for?”
she asks.
“Kindergarten beauty pageant,” I say. Hah. In kindergarten, during graduation, everybody took home a trophy.
Nilam sniggers. “The judges must’ve been near-sighted.”
Damn, still so mean! But never mind. She is Inu’s only relation. I need to love her as a sister. Even though there’s something wrong with her.
“I want to get rid of all these earlier wedding photos.” I point them out. “Switch them with photos from today.”
“Eh, this!” Nilam says, grabbing a gleaming frame from the table.
“Oh, that was when I was in middle school. I was prettier, wasn’t I?” I ask her.
“Isn’t this Inu’s ex? When he was in senior high school?” Nilam says, pointing at my sister, smiling wide in the picture, by my side. “I just remembered!” she shouts.
I don’t say a word. Stunned.
“Ah, you really look like her,” Nilam continues, pointing at my face, and my sister’s face in the frame.
I stay quiet.
And then she realises what she’s done. “Ah,” is what comes out of her mouth. She doesn’t say anything else. She puts the frame back on the table, and then scurries away.
Now I know why Inu married me.
Acknowledgements
An abundance of thanks to Edmund Wee, Amir Muhammad, Zedeck Siew, Cynthia Tay, Whang Yee Ling, Hannah Ooi and Chee Jia Yi. I wrote this novel in a food court in a mall just outside Jakarta, sipping affordable coffee every day. Thank you, too, to those who passed by and kept me company during the duration of my writing.
Translator’s Note
The most interesting challenge in translating Love, Lies and Indomee involved pronouns:
In Bahasa Indonesia, the distance between Ratu and Inu is reflected verbally; talking to each other, they use the first-person pronoun “saya” and second-person pronoun “anda”— polite language, the kind that airport announcers might use.
It is a sign of growing intimacy when they begin using “aku” and “kamu”, instead—casual forms, used between friends. Both characters remark on this shift. At various points in the story, they switch between the two sets of pronouns, as conflict ebbs and flows between them.
Such interplay was impossible to directly render in modern English, which only has the first-person “I” / “me” and second-person “you”. My solution involved having the characters call each other “Mr Inu” and “Ms Ratu”, which implies a kind of deliberate petulance—“Mr Inu”, “Ms Ratu”—not quite present in the original.
Prior to this, I’d never translated a Bahasa Indonesia text. I read the language okay, but speak it like a tourist. I have never been to Jakarta. I was intimidated.
Nuril was present throughout—clarifying my lack of context, correcting my mistakes. I am thankful for his patience. I am glad to have got to know him, his work.
To quote poet and translator Goh Thean Chye: “It is surely true that translation is an artful bridge connecting two banks, the palates of two tongues, an open way through which two different hearts may meet.”
About the Translator
Zedeck Siew is a writer based in Port Dickson, Malaysia. He has been a journalist, essayist, editor and game designer. He writes short fiction in English, and translates from Bahasa Melayu and Bahasa Indonesia.
More information can be found at www.zedecksiew.tumblr.com.
About the Author
Nuril Basri was born in a small village in Tangerang, Indonesia. He writes tragicomedies and bildungsromans with themes of loneliness, insecurity, friendship, dysfunctional families and the minorities. For Nuril, writing is a means to escape and relate at the same time. He was a grantee of the Indonesian National Book Committee’s writing residency in the UK in 2017. He was also a 2018 grantee of the Crossing Borders programme jointly run by the Robert Bosch Foundation and the Literarisches Colloquium Berlin.
While writing, Nuril has worked as a salesman, internet café operator, waiter and cashier. His published works include Halo, Aku Dalam Novel (2009); My Favorite Goodbye (2015); Enak (2016); Sunyi (2017) and Not a Virgin (2017). His novels have been translated into English and Malay. Love, Lies and Indomee is his second novel to be translated and published
in English.
More information can be found at www.nurilbasri.com.