The Useless Boy cried out in a last ditch attempt to convince the older girl, “Come on! You will be protected there, Ani!” “With guns? By people like your friends? People like you?” Barani shot back.
For all the revelations emerging, Ria only saw the way the Useless Boy was treating her sister—holding her, spewing anger at her. Ria wanted to reach out, remove his hands from her sister’s arms and tell him that he had no business using that tone on Barani. But there was only Ria’s uncertain silence.
The Useless Boy caught sight of her. He let her sister’s arm go— just one, not the other—and instructed Ria, in a voice an adult would often use on a child they thought should not know any better: “Ria, be a good girl and go to the kitchen, eh?”
Ria did as she was told and made for the dark depths of the kitchen. There she could hear a rush of voices, but refused to make them out. Her chest rose and fell fast but the air could not catch up. Her eyes fell on the square of light on the kitchen wall and it drew her to the window, its single shutter propped open by a metal prong. She remembered the policemen. The shelter couldn’t be anywhere nice if policemen were involved. When she was being naughty in the past, the three things she was told could carry her off were the devil, jungle people who only came out after dusk, and the policemen— devil to a hell palace, jungle people to another realm and policemen to a square hole underground called the jail. No way home from any of them.
There was a table underneath the window where her sister kept packs of salt, sugar and dried spices. She pushed these aside, cramming them into a corner. Bracing her feet on the wall, she managed to haul herself up and climb out through the window. The shutter slammed shut just as she came to a painful, crouched landing on the ground outside. The stick ended up beside her but the window was too high up for her to replace it.
Going around the house, she saw that the rest of the men were no longer at the veranda. One of the policemen had also left his post to join them inside. The other two guarded the dirt path to the inland village. They were still in the same pose as before—feet apart, hands clasped—neither of them speaking as they idly watched the house. There was a pompous air about them, and the handcuffs they wore at their belts had the same evil gleam as the shiny black bodies of their batons.
She walked up to them. Seeing her, one of them held out his hand telling her that everyone must stay inside until the business had been concluded. What business-business, she didn’t care. All she knew was that they had no business wearing their handcuffs, harbouring plans to haul her and her sister off to the jail when they didn’t do anything wrong.
When she came near, the policeman who had been warning her froze, hand out, eyes and mouth opened wide in surprise. She didn’t have her scarf on, so maybe that was why. Every strand of her hair was clustered around her face as if they all wanted to take a harder look, weighing her head down as they did so. She felt the tug of migraine again, though not so intense this time that she had to close up around herself and grit her teeth, and the policeman greyed over, outwards from his face to the rest of his body. His upper body had already hardened, but his feet continued to move towards her, so when they, too, became stone, he fell over. His companion watched his body fall, saw parts of it break on impact, before he raised his own eyes to hers—only to meet the same fate.
Ria stepped around their stone forms and made her way down the path to Kenanga, where children were taught that people like her were not to be spoken to, or to be associated with, and where someone had decided that people like her did not deserve a roof over their heads, by marriage or by birth.
Barani vaguely heard the kitchen window slamming shut but couldn’t move herself away as all the men around her tried to convince her into signing an agreement to give over Nenek’s land to their fancy urban development plans. It wasn’t that she hadn’t expected it. On her odious errands to Kampung Kenanga, she had already seen the beginnings of the plans creeping in with surveyors and the officials going from door to door, talking to people, taking photographs of various paths and corners. People at the outskirts were already being moved out. The coastal village was still largely untouched but no one could ignore the increased number of tugboats and cargo ships on the water’s horizon. It was a sign of things to come, the mostly-Scerean villagers would say as they stared out to sea from the rickety verandas of their homes, and in low rumbled whispers near her corner stall in the marketplace. Even Cikgu had left shortly after Nenek’s death to take up the post she’d been offered at a government school in the city. Barani remembered Ria clinging to the teacher, pleading with the woman not to leave, as if she, her own sister was not good enough company.
She had thought—no, hoped—that she would be married, that Abang would have a home for her and Ria. The way she saw it, that was not happening. He was not the doctor he said he would be when he left her those years ago. And two girls with snakes for hair were not the family he’d imagined, and that was what really pained her. She was beautiful, yes, but she was not good enough to be a respectable wife.
He’d taken hold of her arms when he began shouting again after Ria left. Barani shrugged them off, the force of her action sending him reeling slightly. Giving him one hard stare, she turned to check on Ria in the kitchen.
She had expected to see Ria: if not helping herself to the boiled bananas under the straw food cover, then at least sitting in a corner narrating stories, or just generally talking to herself the way she always did when left on her own. She found only an empty room. Nothing seemed disturbed at first, but then her eyes were drawn to the window with its single shutter down and the packs of cooking ingredients out of place. There were marks on the table’s surface that looked like they had been made by grimy feet. Barani rushed to the table, her breath in her throat, and pushed open the window to see the unstirring forest.
Barani ran back up to the ibu rumah, pushing past the men to get to the veranda. She could sense Abang behind her; heard him above the cloud of noise in her head, demanding she tell him what was going on. She saw the two policemen with the mark of her sister’s gaze on them.
She did not bother with the steps when she made her way down. Instinct told her that she would not find Ria anywhere in the compound. Trying not to look back at the house, she hurried down the bald path towards Kenanga.
She peered into houses and under kolongs, over crude window stalls and into houses that had been improvised into shops, later around the newspaper stand located in the village centre. She went up several sets of stairs to several verandas before she slowed down in the courtyard of the final house, staring out at the patchy grass field that stretched to an empty horizon.
All the people were frozen in place, as if they were entities in a photograph. Barani walked back to the village centre where she spun herself round, staring up at the moving roofs and the circling clouds on the sheet of blue. If she shouted, she was sure her voice would echo back and so affirm what she was trying not to see, even though every shadowy interior of every home, every open veranda, every courtyard and kolong told her the same story.
Men and women stared, some surprised, some appearing like they were just looking up to see who was greeting them at the door or the foot of their steps. A woman still held in her hands a long bean stalk she was breaking into smaller pieces for cooking. A man had a chicken ready for slaughter on a large cutting board, the edge of his knife at the edge of its throat. An umbrella still shaded the head of a young woman who had been walking alongside her bareheaded friends.
She found Ria halfway down the single tarred road that ran along a row of ground houses at the eastern edge of the village. She was clomping around on homemade stilts made out of tall milk cans, manoeuvring them with the twine strung through holes punctured into the bottom. Stillness reigned around her, making her movements strange and out of place. She played by herself among children, all stringy in build and uniformly grey from head to toe, and even to the clothes they wore. Some stood watching her as if in amazemen
t and others peered up at her over their shoulders from where they squatted. Those children would never move, would never grow to adulthood. Ria raised her eyes to her sister and even as she smiled at Barani, the cheeriness she had always kept in those eyes was no longer there.
Barani saw what her sister was capable of, but could not comprehend it. She tried to see if the smile held malice, a reason perhaps for turning the villagers to stone, and how, how it could have taken place as fast as it did, how Ria had not missed a single person and raised no alarm. Yet, as if her vision had tunnelled, all she could see was a deep regret that could not muster itself into a proper expression. She didn’t know if the regret was her sister’s or really her own.
Barani bent over and grabbed her sister by the shoulders. She wanted to ask, “Why?” but the word died in her throat and she knew from Ria’s steady eyes on her that she was staring. Instead, giving the girl an unrestrained shake, she asked, “Ria, are you mad?”
Even as she asked it, she retracted. Madness? This was not madness. Angry shouting manifested in silenced heartbeats and scrutiny in unseeing stares. The authorities were going to build roads and erect clean housing on the land where Nenek’s house stood. This was Ria’s way of trying to stop all that.
If Barani did not have snakes that would bite her, if she had real hair, strands of them to pull, she would have pulled them. If she could have just turned anyone in Kenanga to stone, she would have. She had been tempted. Every time she had gone to the inland village on errands, women had moved their children out of her way and men had stared at her openly. As she protected her family’s money cent by precious cent, she had been met with derision from those she bargained with for home necessities. They said her mother had sinned and sometimes Barani even believed them because she did not know who her mother was.
After Ria, Nenek had been the closest thing she had had to a real family. A few times, wishing to right any sins she might have committed, Barani had asked Nenek if she had ever tried to turn Nenek to stone in a time she could not remember. The old woman’s reply was always the same: Have or don’t have, not important now.
The fear, the hatred—both hers and those of the villagers; the responsibilities of dealing with the world they knew and the one that was fast approaching from newspaper pictures—the riots and the roads, the tall buildings in close proximity: these were the things Barani wanted to protect Ria from. When Nenek was alive, she had reminded Barani over and over that she was to be a good influence on the much younger girl. Nenek had revealed once, over the pounding of chilli and shrimp paste in a mortar, that under that vexing, scrappy exterior was a little girl who thought the world of Barani.
Barani wanted Ria to always remain the same—always with her eyes big and innocent, always to make epok-epoks too big even though she’d been shown countless times how to make them the right size, and always to be frightened of the dusk because of the tales they told her about the jungle people.
Perhaps Nenek had seen what Ria could become, what she could do. Like an omen, a single chilli seed had jumped from under the pestle into Barani’s right eye. It burned, and Barani, hissing, “Ah, it hurts! It hurts!” groped for some water to wash her eye with and the conversation was pursued no further.
In the present, months after that conversation, Barani looked down into the eyes that peered up at her. She saw tears welling in them. She thought she heard a tin plate drop and drum its spinning rhythm on the floor of the distant house, before Ria heaved in a deep breath and let her eyes dart around her. Barani, too, let her eyes wander; taking in the stone forms of what was once alive. She often wondered what kind of curse was placed on their ancient predecessor, so that their eyes could make still what moved, immortalise what aged, and—she turned to look at Ria again—blind what once could see?
Ria was distraught. Barani, while groping for a way to comfort her, suddenly remembered the men who were still at their house. They would have found the petrified policemen by now. There was little time. She could only think to get Ria away.
Nenek had once told her that if anything went wrong, she was to take Ria towards to the old, abandoned quarry. Nenek never gave further explanations, only mentioned an old Tuyunri tribe still living within its depths and that she was to look for a door. “Humans can be an unobservant bunch. They won’t find you there.” And she would fold the betel nut into a single sireh leaf before popping it into her mouth, then say nothing more.
Barani took hold of Ria’s small hand and with a gentle tug got her down from her tin-can stilts. She’d just turned around to go back up the path to their home when the rest of the men rounded the bend and ran towards them.
“Kakak…” she heard Ria say fearfully.
Barani kept Ria behind her as the men came to a halt at the sight of the stone children, Abang at the head beside the one remaining policeman.
“Ani!” Abang cried out, turning horrified eyes to her. “What—”
He cut himself short when he spotted Ria. The horror became mixed with fear and as a policeman reached for his holster, Barani heard Abang say, “What? No—”
At the first silver flash of the revolver, Barani struck. All who looked at her—all the men who’d come to her house—greyed over instantly.
She noticed that the stone forms she’d created were a few shades darker than Ria’s. She might have wondered why, but Abang—no, no, this Useless Man—stood before her as a statue. She remembered how in her bright-eyed youth he had promised to find a cure for her “condition”; remembered the way he kept telling her how beautiful she was, though it was with his eyes closed and his sweat-covered body pressing—gyrating—into her. In a flood of sentiment, she raised a hand to touch him but clenched it into a fist just short of his face. She could not afford to cry or to regret what she’d done. Turning back to look at Ria, she noticed her sister’s own hand was raised to touch her, and knew like the hand, Ria’s expression of alarmed pain was a mirror of her own.
Nelroote
Back at the hut, they packed what little they had into an old suitcase Cikgu had given them right before she left. Ria knew they were criminals now and that they must be gone from the house before more policemen came, so she did everything she was told without the usual arguments. She kept glancing furtively at Barani as they worked. Barani would not look at her after they made for the house and guilt rose in Ria like a putrid stench from a dead animal. She knew it was her fault that Barani had had to turn the Useless Boy to stone, her fault that they were running around the house grabbing clothes and what few belongings they had, and prying off the floorboard in the corner of the kitchen to take the emergency money kept hidden in the nook. But every time she tried to apologise, the words found no way of expressing themselves to Barani’s averted face.
The heavy suitcase held everything they needed to bring. Ria had some books that Cikgu had given her for the day she would be able to read books without pictures. These she wrapped up in her scarf. She held on tight to the bundle as Barani took her free hand and hefted the suitcase. They released all their chickens and chased them around the courtyard until every single one disappeared into the foliage. As they were doing so, Ria looked back at their old home. The door and the single front window formed an eye and a mouth, blindly staring and screaming. She imagined Nenek and Barani breaking long beans on the veranda, and saw an image of herself wheeling a hoop in the courtyard among the chickens, before the house and all its memories disappeared behind a rush of greenery.
It began to rain soon after, which was strange because Ria had not noticed the leadening of the sky or the drenched smell of the air when they made their run. Barani’s shawl was soaked through as the downpour intensified to the point that even the canopy above failed to shelter them. Ria worried more for the books than where they were going.
Barani kept walking at a hurried pace, around buttress roots and over leaf litter, holding Ria tightly by the hand. Gritty wetness got in between Ria’s toes and her blue-and-white slippers wer
e slick underneath her feet. Already two sizes too big for her, they threatened to slip off with every rain-heavy step. But Barani kept going as if pursued by hunters with guns and spears, even though Ria knew it would be some time before anyone discovered their house.
Ria tried to say something, but Barani appeared not to hear. Not in the rain, the persistent falling of which drowned out all sounds of the forest. Even if Barani did hear, Ria doubted that her sister would slow down in her search for refuge—for it had to be refuge, for her, for Ria, for people like them whom the world did not want to see. Ria expected that their refuge would be on an island they would swim or take a boat to, and that they would eventually come to a river or a coast. Ria didn’t know how to swim but an island would be safe. An island surrounded by blue water, with no road or bridge to the mainland, would be very safe.
Much to her disappointment, however, it was no river or coast that they came to, and there was no boat to take them anywhere either. Instead they found themselves staring down a slope covered in ferns. Below them, level ground had been stripped to reveal red earth turned to mud by the downpour. A sort of vehicle, with a giant rolling pin attached to it, stood near a mound covered in blue-and-white striped canvas. Across the red ravine was another forest, like a distant island behind a rain-streaked blur. Across a stretch of redness, it looked isolated and foreign—safe beneath a barren sky.
Barani had her face partly hidden by her shawl, so drenched now that Ria could see the brown and black of her snakes and their individual long, sluggish bodies moving through the already pale material. Barani turned around and tugged at Ria to follow.
The Gatekeeper Page 4