Just then Rasheeda woke up and stared at him looming over her, his crotch in her face. In her shock Rasheeda’s lips closed automatically over him. She made a strangled sound. He thought confusedly of pulling out, but he could not. Not then. Afterward, he couldn’t remember when he thought she wouldn’t mind or how he held her sleep-dazed head still and ignored her struggling. It was all over in seconds anyway. She got up, ran into the bathroom, and didn’t come out for a long time.
I could have touched her brain if I’d wanted to, he thought, feeling excited and mellow at the same time. I was so close to where she lives, not somewhere down there far away; I was more inside her than I’ve ever been. Then he fell asleep even as he was thinking that he would never be able to sleep.
Rasheeda was still in the bathroom when he woke up in the morning. She hadn’t come out even when he left for the store, three hours later. When he came back in the evening, Nusrat, who over the years had developed a certain degree of familiarity with him, took it upon herself to have a word with him. Rasheeda had stayed in the bathroom the whole day.
“She refuses to go to a doctor, says there’s nothing wrong with her,” she said, looking genuinely worried.
Rasheeda went to the bathroom twelve times the next day. Ten times the third. She did not stop frequenting the bathroom even after a week, yet she refused to see a doctor. Naseer, frightened for her life, even brought one to the house. The doctor, a small, skinny man who looked as if he’d received his degree only months ago, stood nervously in their bedroom, clutching his brown leather medicine bag to his crotch.
“I am fine, Doctor-saab, please go away,” Rasheeda yelled from the bathroom.
“Get a peer. They know about these strange afflictions, this nonstop diarrhea and suchlike things,” the doctor stuttered and fled.
Naseer couldn’t bring himself to summon any sorcerers with their magic cures into the house. Maybe she would get better on her own, he thought.
But Rasheeda wouldn’t stop. She claimed the outside bathroom for herself. It stood next to the small vegetable garden in the backyard and had been abandoned after the new bathrooms with concealed plumbing were built. She gave herself up to its white-tiled interior at regular intervals. Every hour on the hour, like the BBC. Right in the middle of tying bows in Farhana’s hair, she would set her comb down and hurry to the bathroom. Halfway to the greengrocer’s down the road, she would stop and head back to the house, overcome by her colon.
Yet nothing else seemed to be the matter with her.
Naseer could hear the sisters-in-law talking and laughing in the kitchen as he ate his breakfast alone. “The whole day she’s in the bathroom, but she doesn’t look sick or lose weight,” they would say. “It is sort of unnatural, don’t you think?”
He had to admit it was true. Rasheeda’s plump white arms and open luminous face still looked as desirable as ever as she pushed past him, hurrying toward the bathroom.
Since Rasheeda didn’t get any sicker, the household adapted quickly, resilient as always. This peculiar new bump was absorbed quickly and ironed flat into its texture. Rasheeda’s vigils in the bathroom soon ceased to be an event and became part of her Rasheedaness, protected from comment by their very familiarity and repetitiveness. Even the children tired of shouting “She went ten times today” at him the minute he returned from work. His brothers didn’t offer their irritating commiseration anymore.
The children came home from school and went straight to the outdoor bathroom, confident of finding Rasheeda there. They stood outside the door to talk to her.
“Gunjan stole my orange. I hate him,” Siddiq would say. He hoarded complaints like sweets.
“The math teacher is horrible. You come and tell the principal that he shouldn’t give us so much homework.” Farida, Nusrat’s little princess, could appeal only to Rasheeda, since her mother didn’t believe in coddling children.
“I need ten rupees to pay the PT fees tomorrow.” Even Adnan, his initial embarrassment forgotten, leaned against the outer wall of the bathroom and held shouted conversations with her.
“Never mind, I’ll give you another orange tomorrow . . . Don’t talk about your teacher like that. Have you no respect? . . . Adi, ask your father for the money.” She’d answer each of them, serene and inviolate, firmly embedded in their world.
Gradually, as the days became weeks, even the vegetable sellers and fishmongers pushed their handcarts to the back gate near the bathroom and Rasheeda. They would lean over the gate and make their appeals.
“Fresh tomatoes, four rupees, Bibiji. Ekdum fresh!” the vegetable wallah would shout.
“Three is quite enough,” Rasheeda would bargain with zest, and they’d give in easily, bemused by this new method of commerce.
“Only for you, Bibiji, don’t tell anyone else, only for you three rupees.” The transaction concluded, the vegetable wallah or fish wallah would go up to the kitchen and get the payment from Aliyeh or Nusrat.
For a time there was the problem of the keys. As the eldest daughter-in-law, only Rasheeda had the honor of carrying the keys to the pantry and the cupboards. Since the doors were kept carefully locked against the pilfering servants, Aliyeh and Nusrat had to trek down to the bathroom and Rasheeda every time they needed supplies.
One day Naseer saw Nusrat standing outside the bathroom door, tapping her foot impatiently. When she saw him, she muttered under her breath. The next morning Naseer sent a carpenter he knew to cut a small door in the center of the larger one. Rasheeda, temporarily out of the bathroom, said nothing, but she came out from the kitchen to watch him as he planed the sides of the small square of wood and attached hinges and a latch. She offered him tea when he was done, the carpenter reported when Naseer asked him, his voice as studiously casual as Naseer’s. Naseer almost started to say that now all Rasheeda had to do was pass the key through the hinged door to whoever came knocking, but he caught himself in time. No need to add to the gossip that was surely circulating already. That evening Rasheeda brought Naseer his tea and set it on the table before him silently. He raised his head eagerly but she walked away before he could say a word.
One Sunday afternoon, when Rasheeda was taking her siesta, Naseer walked around the vegetable garden and, after making sure no one was watching, peered into the bathroom. It was hot inside the dingy room, with a thick, spongy heat that reflected down from the tin roof. On the ledge beside the commode were seashells, a bottle of glue and some pasteboard, someone’s half-finished math homework, a recipe in Urdu, and the small transistor radio he had given her. She’s destroying our marriage because she wants to listen to Hindi songs in the toilet, he thought. She had metamorphosed even as he watched, like the women in the fairy tales of his childhood, who turned into houris or winged ponies if a man dared to spy on them. Only he was dislodged. Everything else went on as normal. The TV was loud in the living room—the entire family was watching Star Trek. He couldn’t understand the fascination with weird-looking space travelers. His life was in shambles; there were objects collapsing inside him, shivering apart like a dilapidated house struck by a cannonball, and they were watching TV.
Rasheeda had left his bed the second day after her visits to the bathroom began and now slept with the children, who were delighted; within minutes she had turned it all into an exciting game. Some nights he would hear them giggling behind the door in the other room.
Lying awake at night, he stared at the faintly luminescent square of the window and struggled to form the sentences he wanted to say to her in the morning. He would wake up and she would be gone, sucked into the everyday chaos of the household. He imagined himself marching into the kitchen to drag her out and confront her with the state of their marriage. But the thought of his sisters-in-law looking up aghast at him—the omnipotent, respected elder—made him cringe at the potential embarrassment of it all. In the meantime, Rasheeda continued to orbit around the toilet like a penitent devotee seeking absolution.
As the days passed, even
the ladies of the neighborhood resumed their customary afternoon visits. They sat with their teacups in the shade of the tamarind tree in front of the bathroom and talked about other housewives who weren’t there. Rasheeda would go in and out of the toilet, and the conversations would continue uninterrupted. Naseer had had the roof of the outhouse tarred so now it was a lot cooler inside.
Miriam, one of the young women down the road, had started dropping in more frequently than the other housewives. Her brand-new husband listened more to his parents than to her, she pouted, the color rising in her cheeks.
“It’s as if I am nobody, just someone he can . . . you know . . . and then ignore.” She caught the end of her blue dupatta between her teeth and stopped. The listening women sighed sympathetically. They knew.
One afternoon, Rasheeda called Miriam close to the door of the bathroom. Miriam smoothed a few strands of hair away and pressed her ear to the door. All the straining women could hear was a low mutter from inside. Miriam had a secret smile when she left. A few days later Miriam was back—all glow and giggles. Whatever Rasheeda had advised had worked like a charm. He’s my little puppy dog now, Miriam crowed.
That was the beginning of it. Later, when there were lines of young women waiting to talk to Rasheeda in the bathroom, the original story was repeated proudly by Miriam. I was the first, she’d say, walking importantly through the small knots of women waiting to recount their troubles to Rasheeda. They told her things they wouldn’t tell their best friends. Most of the talk was about husbands and in-laws, the trials and tribulations of living in joint families. Sometimes all some embattled girl wanted to hear was her own voice. They called Rasheeda Sandaz Begum—Madam Bathroom—affectionately. All she did was dispense commonsense advice. But the women kept coming back.
To Naseer this meant that he saw Rasheeda even less than before. She spent even more time in the bathroom. There were even more people who demanded her attention now. His mother, disgusted by the goings-on in the backyard, called him into her room and said some sharp words to him.
“Who does your wife think she is? Some kind of guru or what? What is all this khoos-poos whispering with women in the backyard? Would your father have tolerated all this nonsense?” She spat a thick brown stream of tobacco into the silver spittoon beside her bed.
One Saturday, after he had spent an hour watching the women murmur in front of the bathroom from behind the curtains of his bedroom window, Naseer realized that each of these women had probably spoken longer with Rasheeda than he, her husband in the eyes of Allah, had in the past few weeks.
Rasheeda banned consultations on Sunday so she could do whatever she did in the bathroom in peace. When she came out to prepare the evening meal, he cut a four-inch-square out of one of the bathroom’s wooden walls and covered the opening with steel mesh.
“It will make it easier for you to hear the women’s complaints,” he told Rasheeda the next day, putting his mouth close to the mesh. He had stood in line behind the women for twenty minutes. When they saw him, they hurriedly veiled their heads and shifted in embarrassment at having this man in their midst, not knowing whether to stay or leave. But he didn’t move, not even when his brothers and their wives peeked out at him from the windows of the house. Now the children took their places, some standing on tiptoe to look over the balcony wall. Except Adnan. He had left the house the moment Naseer stepped into the back garden. As he got closer to the mesh, Naseer imagined Rasheeda looking at his face framed in the square, open and naked to her gaze in the sunlight. When he finally peered in, blinking from the sun, he could see only her dim form and little else in the gloom. She turned toward him abruptly, startled by his voice.
“Just wanted to make it easy for you to hear the women’s complaints,” Naseer repeated. She looked at him and said nothing. He thought he saw her nod. After a few moments Naseer left his place in the line and walked back to the house.
At dinner that night, Rasheeda reached across the table and heaped a ladleful of rice onto his plate. When Naseer looked up at her, she was looking back at him. Before she turned her face away to answer one of the children, he was quite sure he saw her mouth twitch gently at the corners.
FIESTA OF THE DAMNED
Han Ong
Forty-four, Filipino, a failure, the American returner Roger Caracera was ferrying his father’s body back to Manila. He would deliver it to the festive grief of the Caracera clan, who would make sure, before interring it into an awaiting hole at Quezon City’s Kalayaan Cemetery, to provide services that would give the man one last taste of the family’s money.
It was on the plane, his father’s coffin in the cargo hold (to the back? at the side? below them?) that Roger Caracera’d first heard of it.
Harvey Keitel on the very flight they were on, himself en route to the Philippines.
He was about to shoot a movie financed by Twentieth Century-Fox called Fiesta of the Damned, based on the very successful book of the same name which recounted the final heroic hours preceding the rescue of American survivors of the Death March to Bataan. His costars, variously on their way or awaiting Mr. Keitel’s appearance in Manila, were John Travolta, Robert De Niro, Samuel L. Jackson, James Caan, and Bert Convy. This was the fifth production in as many months to be shot in the Philippines; the others also based on best-selling accounts and regurgitating, as Fiesta of the Damned hoped to, one more episode of World War II by which could be memorialized a peak period of American manhood, filled with decisive action unencumbered by feminine ambiguity; and whose tagline was therefore, as Roger Caracera knew, having had more than a passing acquaintance with the same sentiment voiced by bar geezers he’d sat next to over the course of a drinking lifetime: Ahhh, Those Were the Days . . .
HAN ONG is the author of a first novel, Fixer Chao, as well as a playwright. His plays include Watcher, Middle Finger, The Chang Fragments, The L.A. Plays, and Swoony Planet. He was born and educated in the Philippines, and came to the United States as a teenager. He has been awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. “Fiesta of the Damned” is excerpted from a forthcoming novel entitled Beneficiary (working title).
Direction would be courtesy of a twenty-three-year-old kid genius best known as an acolyte, and archival overseer of the films, of the late Stanley Kubrick. He was also a quarter-Filipino and had cast the aging Filipino superstar Nora Aunor and the newcomer matinee idol Arsenio “Paduy” Macapagal in sizable supporting roles in the interests of flushing the Philippines out of the narrative and historical background into, well, if not exactly the foreground, then, the “ummm, sea-level and not sunken like buried treasure.” Miss Aunor and Mr. Macapagal would be playing a mother and son caught in the maws of the Japanese-American conflict, the former an unwilling whore to the Japs and the latter a messenger between the insurgent anti-Jap native forces and the American army who, through the course of the story, is caught and forces his beloved mother to trade her freedom for his life. Until they are rescued near the end by men led by Harvey Keitel playing General Douglas MacArthur.
Any of the information not available through the gossip that passed down from first class and which was further augmented by the thrilled stewardesses could be found in the in-flight magazine in an article bearing the title “Philippines: Hot Hot Hot!,” which, besides its comprehensive coverage of the recent popularity of the Philippines as a Hollywood outpost, was pocked again and again by the mystery-giving phrase “jungles of the Philippines.” Repeatedly, even when he was forced by a sudden seething that was a compound of bitter humor and voluptuous horror to read no further and only skim the article, the phrase kept snagging his eyes. Its reference point, the center from which it radiated, turned out to be the rerelease in the upcoming year of the “cinematic masterpiece” Apocalypse Now, this time with half an hour of extra footage and newly retitled Apocalypse Now Redux.
The film had been shot “in the jungles of the Philippines.” During production there had been “delays exacerbated by storms in the jungles of the Philippines.�
� Martin Sheen, one of the principals, suffered a “heart attack in the middle of the jungles.” Budget overruns costing “enough to transform the jungles into whole cities.” Cast and crew “stranded in the jungles of . . .” “Beautiful and treacherous Philippine jungles.” “Napalm dropped on the jungles of . . .” Marlon Brando finding a “counterpart to his beloved Polynesia in the jungles of . . .” “Con-radian habitats of the provinces of the Philippines”: reading which, Roger Caracera imagined whole acreages of trees like an endless expanse of paper towels having to sop up and sop up a steady stream from the cut veins of American guilt. Had he seen the movie?
Yes. He remembered now. He’d been on coke and speed at the time. And the movie had kept fucking with his high. That was all he’d remembered of it. He’d gone having heard it was a great movie to trip on, much like 2001: A Space Odyssey and that Disney movie with Mickey Mouse as Merlin the Magician had been for previous generations. And instead he’d been rewarded with the debut of the gremlin that had, from that moment on, taken up residence directly over his lungs, sitting on his chest with the sole intention of crushing the breath out of him.
Looking up from the magazine, he saw the man seated next to him flashing a smile. It turned out that the man was among the crew headed for the Fiesta of the Damned set in Manila.
Forty-four, Filipino, a failure, the American returner was restored to his childhood home in Makati, where he slept in his long-ago bedroom. Outside the windows of the room, which was on the second floor, was a calamansi tree. The leaves and branches had begun to scrape at the windows with regularity, vanes announcing the arrival of the monsoons. At night they made a sound that brought him all the way back to childhood. Their insistent krrk-krrk against the steel guards added to the shadows the lights on the property caused them to cast on the walls of his room gave them the same power they had had when he was a boy: giant skeleton fingers endeavoring to claim him for the devil.
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