Lock all the doors securely, I told her. I checked all the windows, too. But if I lock them, how will you get in? she asked. I didn’t answer, as if I knew I wasn’t coming back. I just kissed her lips, caressed her stomach, grabbed a flashlight, and went out into the drizzle that was starting to fall. That drizzle had turned into a storm and, one by one, the lanterns hanging from the roof of every house had gone out. Wild dogs had come out to roam and we shivered. Now the drizzle is coming again, and I hope this will be the end, and there won’t be another infernal storm.
Miso takes a small gong from a box and strikes it three times. I hope for a reply from Karmin, but none comes. I see the young kid, sitting stock-still in his corner, turn pale, his lips trembling. This is his first night keeping watch—he’s filling in for his father, who’s been laid out since getting bitten by a snake earlier in the day. He hasn’t spoken in quite a while. Miso also looks at him, and then strikes the gong again, three times. Still no response.
“Alright, I will go after him,” Miso says.
He takes a conical bamboo hat to protect himself from the drizzle. I want to stop him, thinking that if he leaves maybe he too will vanish and never return. But, sitting there shivering, my mouth stays clamped shut, and a sudden but powerful drowsiness weighs down my eyelids. Go then, and I will always remember you. Miso turns on his flashlight and walks off through the curtains of drizzle towards the east, still hoping he’ll bump into Karmin. Now and then he strikes his gong, but then at some point the light from his flashlight disappears, and we don’t hear him anymore.
The kid, Hamid, looks at me questioningly but I’m exhausted. I don’t respond but lean back against the wall of the security hut trying to rest a bit. Then suddenly I climb down out of the hut, stepping on the earth in my bare feet.
“Where are you going?” the kid Hamid asks, almost inaudibly. I just have to go pee, I think, but can’t bring myself to speak. I run a few steps and take shelter from the falling rain under a banana leaf, urinating there. That slow breeze comes again, the dangling dried banana leaves dance. The lantern light dies again and we are caged in darkness once more. I grope around to tie the drawstring of my shorts. I’m not holding a lamp and so I stumble back. The kid shines his light, illuminating my path.
Aided by the light of the kid Hamid’s lamp, I examine the lantern. That little gust of wind just now must have blown it out, I think. But I am wrong. The oil reserve is all used up. Nothing can be done. I sit where Miso was sitting just a while ago, and soon I can hear the kid rustling, and then he comes to sit beside me. The beam of his flashlight lights up the path to the east, muddy and deserted, before he turns it off.
Submerged in darkness, all we hear is our own breath. The wind has stopped and everything around us has turned to stone. I focus my gaze on the village, hoping a light will turn on, but there is nothing. They are all sleeping, and will never wake again, I think. I tremble more violently and hear the kid Hamid’s teeth chattering.
It is an hour past midnight. The cocks don’t crow and no water gurgles in the stream. So I just listen to the sound of the silence, like before, and our snuffling breath.
Then I hear another sound. I quickly grab my flashlight and shine it into the thatch of banana trees. A wild dog. He looks at us then turns around and, his tail wagging, heads back for the hills. I shine my light towards the village and its beam strikes the narrow alleys, gray walls. Not a thing stirs. There is stagnant water here and there, a drenched bolt of cloth hangs from a clothesline, a dead chicken floats in a puddle. Everything seems like an unfinished sketch, almost like a place I have never known. Where is my house? Ah, go along that alleyway and turn left, there my wife is lying under her blanket. Maybe the bajang has already gnawed through the wall and got in. I turn off my flashlight—I can tell from its pale reddish tinge that its battery is already weak.
Hamid climbs down out of the hut and takes another small gong, strikes it—not just three times but again and again and again. Then he falls silent and listens. We don’t hear anything in response.
“I’m going to look for Karmin and Miso,” he says.
“No, I’ll go,” I say.
“I don’t want to be here in the guard hut alone,” he says.
“So let’s go together,” I suggest.
“No, someone has to wait in the guard hut.”
“Alright, I’ll wait here. You be sure to come back. Let me know where you are with your gong. Just keep striking it so I know exactly where you are.”
The kid turns on his flashlight, and I see him nod. At first he seems to hesitate, weighing whether he should go to the west or the east, but finally he chooses to go in the direction Karmin chose, before he disappeared.
I see his flashlight light up his path, sometimes vanishing for a moment in the shadow of the mahogany trees, and I hear his gong being struck in a constant rhythm. But at some point his light, too, vanishes, and his gong goes silent. He too has disappeared and is not coming back, swallowed by the darkness. I feel the blood drain from my face and pinpricks of sweat squeeze out of every pore in my body, underneath the blanket of the cold air. Now I’m alone, and my turn is about to come. I’m still hoping Hamid will beat his gong, but as time passes my hopes fade. I pound the gong that hangs in the corner of the security hut as hard as I can, again and again, making a racket. It’s enough to wake up everyone in the village and all the ghosts in their graves. But no one stirs, no lights go on. I don’t see any signs of life. With shaking hands I keep striking the gong, in a meaningless fury.
I run after the kid Hamid with my dimming flashlight. It runs out of batteries on the edge of an embankment, and its light goes out. I try hitting it. For a second its light goes on and I see a pair of glinting eyes. A cat—no, it’s a civet. Ah, it’s the bajang. My flashlight dies for good and won’t go on again. Caged in thick darkness, I begin to surrender. I don’t walk anymore, and then I can no longer even feel my feet touching the earth. I will not return tonight, I say under my breath. Weeping, I think of my wife.
KITCHEN CURSE
“And We shaded you with clouds
and sent down to you manna and quails.”
Quran 2:57
Maharani went to the city archive hoping to find some new recipe ideas, but this is what she found instead:
Once upon a time, a Bugis fishing boat capsized in an Atlantic storm and sunk. The sole survivor, a young man clutching a leather pouch stuffed with spices, was rescued by a Portuguese trading ship. He found the food on the ship torturously bland. On tasting it, he ran straight to the kitchen and revealed himself to be a master of flavor. That night, all the sailors on that vessel burnt their tongues, discovering a completely new sensation, one their ancestors had never known.
Despite the fact he changed the course of history, out of all the history books and such like, there is only a single volume of a Portuguese encyclopedia published in 1892 mentioning that man’s name. We have this forgotten man to thank for the arrival of Western traders, who came to buy those spices, bringing along the rats stowed away on their ships: that was the origin of European greed. In time, the Dutch brought their large companies here too, but truth be told, even as they aimed to dominate this entire archipelago, they could never master the spices they so craved. The story of Diah Ayu’s dramatic rebellion, which I am about to tell you, is authentic proof of that.
Maharani was not a good cook. She had always felt cursed by her husband, forced to cower in the kitchen and sometimes in the bedroom, too. She’d never realized that she was living in a country God had created as a paradise for all things that bloom and grow, and she read on:
Everything grows here, and almost all of it is edible. I say almost, because a few plants, if you eat them, will make you die an agonizing death—but, then again, if you are already dying an agonizing death and you eat them, they just might also save your life. These plants are our most well-kept secrets, guarded for centuries, passed down from one generation to the next.
&n
bsp; Even though in truth it happens all the time, to die of starvation in this country would be the stupidest thing imaginable. The forests are dense with trees whose fruit, leaves, bark, and even sap can be consumed. There are farms. There are rivers and lakes and ponds where the fish are fruitful and multiply quicker than humans. How wide and deep is the ocean! This, too, is brimful with fish. The wild animals are as tame as doves. Just toss something onto the ground, and it will take root and grow. If it isn’t a dream come true, then this country surely must be heaven on earth.
Alfred Russel Wallace came here and was astonished by thousands of different species, living and dead; Eugene Dubois excavated fossils of extinct hominids. But of course it was the Dutch merchants who calculated the immense profit to be made from this country so full of treasure.
For years, all Maharani had known about was how to bear children and prepare a simple breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Now she knew that Dutchmen had stayed in her country for more than three centuries.
First, the Dutch established businesses and then they took over kingdoms. They sent a Governor General, who quickly put the machines of bureaucracy to work throughout the country: magistrates, prefects, and controllers. They subjugated small-time kings, turning them into district regents, and the regents subjugated the district officers, and the district officers subjugated the local headmen. The Dutch also controlled the Chinese merchants, who bought the right to collect taxes on all kinds of commodities sold at auction: herbs, spices, livestock, salt, and opium.
And that was how business went in those days. We had to plant what they wanted and not plant what they didn’t want. We made long roads, laid down train tracks, and built ports because that was what they decreed. Then came the first of many things in this country: the first post offices, telegraphs, gas lamps, telephones, and newspapers. Outside of this bureaucratic colonial machine, of course, other Europeans privately owned their plantations and their indigenous slaves.
That whole situation set a good stage for native uprisings. Heroes were born, and heroes fell. We already know about some of them, because their portraits are painted in the murals that adorn our schools. But there are more. Unlike all those other famous fighters, one woman carried out her rebellion without any spears or bamboo spikes: Diah Ayu, the woman who made war from her very own kitchen.
Maharani only knew a handful of seasonings and a few recipes she had learned from magazines. Now she was intrigued to hear that a woman could become a warrior by mastering spices.
Who was that woman? A famous cook, she was a patriot fit to be idolized by schoolchildren. But what we think we know from the tales about her, perhaps heard for the first time in elementary school, is rubbish. Somehow the storytellers all spoke nonsense about her, as if merely drawing on their own imagination rather than from any accurate data—or as if there had been an effort to erase her from history, and though her memory had been salvaged, all that remained was the portrait of a woman who had never really existed.
The figure of Diah Ayu became strange, melancholy, and tragic. Legend tells us that her father sold her to a Dutch plantation owner, who bought her for her beauty. But that’s not true; she wasn’t pretty at all, although the Dutchman did sleep with her a few times and she bore him two children. She was in fact bought for her extraordinary ability to oversee the seasoning, preparation, cooking, and serving of delicious food.
Another fabrication was that she secretly taught the servants how to read and write, and they taught others in the neighboring households, until many native servants of the Dutch became educated, and then she organized them and led a rebellion on one unforgettable Thursday. That’s false; Diah Ayu was illiterate. But she did teach the servants her kitchen secrets—specifically, how to wield spices like weapons.
To Dutch families living in the territories, a clever cook was not just a symbol of a family’s wealth, but also a source of pride to be shown off at evening banquets. That is why it’s unsurprising that native women—spice experts—often found themselves kidnapped, bought, or sold. And even though their status in the family was never any higher than that of a concubine, the household would hold on to a talented cook at any cost.
There were a number of reasons for this. First, Dutch women on colonial land, just like their men, enjoyed an opulence beyond their wildest dreams. They became lazy creatures, passing their time on verandas that looked out over the lush carpets of tea plantations, reading fashion magazines that had been sent straight from Paris. Second, even if a Dutch woman tried to learn the most treasured recipes—the real knockouts—she would never be able to actually cook them. Miss Catenius van der Meulen tried it once, traveling around, visiting the families of famous cooks and writing down their recipes in notebook after notebook. The resulting cookbook looked splendid but, because she hadn’t realized there were so many untold secrets that never made it onto the page, the recipes were not.
Diah Ayu was one of the bearers of that clandestine knowledge. She could turn anything into a sumptuous meal—or something else. Of course, these islands are teeming with wild edibles. Here, you can eat the stalks of banana trees and not just the bananas. You can eat young bamboo shoots and palm tree buds. Grasshoppers and moths and snails and frogs can all be cooked and served at the dining table. It’s beyond obvious that in this country no one has ever had to pray for manna, like the Israelites had to beg from God. But watch out, there are secrets hiding in our extravagant lunch menus! There are certain seeds of certain fruits that can dry you out until you’re nothing but a crispy little chip, or even kill you in seven days if blended with vinegar and salt. There are secret mixtures hidden in the kitchen—secret power lies in the hands of the women who grind spices and boil potatoes. Some of their dishes will be exquisite meals fit for the gods, some will be miraculous healing medicines, and some will be merciless killers. And it is only those women, those cooks, who know the difference.
Discovering all of this, Maharani felt really ashamed—she herself was certainly not the pride of her family kitchen. She grew all the more engrossed in the archive, hoping to find some more useful knowledge about seasonings that might improve her sense of self-worth. But instead Maharani would soon learn how Diah Ayu, in her extraordinary wisdom, carried out her rebellion.
She could blend a strange potion that would make a man impotent forever: and she used that one after the Dutchman gave her two children. In the next phase, she emboldened herself to prepare the most dangerous concoctions, those that could kill someone but make the death look natural. She chose her master’s dinner guests as her first victims. Of course she did this secretly, hiding the murderous mixtures in a vegetable curry. And in order to avoid suspicion, she used ingredients that only took effect a week or two after consumption.
Her working methods were really quite extraordinary, and she was able to take down even more victims than those who fell on the battlefront—one year after her first murder she had already killed fifty-two pure-blooded Dutchmen. That was when the newspaper began to report the “suspicious rise in the natural death rate” around Batavia. Perhaps one or two of those dead men were not her victims, but it would be practically impossible to get a more accurate total.
Her personal protest become truly terrifying once she taught the other servants the secrets of her kitchen, and in brief furtive meetings, those servants taught the servants in the neighboring households. The kitchen secrets, which in previous generations had only been harbored by a select few, were suddenly shared by almost all the cooks in the city. It was Diah Ayu who turned spice into a murderous weapon. And it is true that she organized all those cooks in an awesome rebellion one fateful Thursday—the servants did rise up and kill their masters simultaneously, but not with their kitchen knives; they did it with mushroom soup.
That was a very dark day indeed for the colonists—142 pure-blooded Dutchmen died all at once. It happened in 1878.
People already know enough about the end of Diah Ayu’s life, so we won’t go into it here�
��and if we got a few other details wrong, it doesn’t really matter.
One thing is for sure, the key to her method—and perhaps the real reason why she has been left out of the history books, although it probably sounds like an excuse for the sexist bent of history—was its subtlety and its flawless purity. Sure, others tried to copy her methods by putting arsenic in the food, for example, and poisoning people that way. But only Diah Ayu used everyday spices to cause natural-seeming deaths, and that’s why there has been so little mention of her in the official public record, practically nothing left of her but misleading myths, vague memories.
Today this invisible history has been revealed to Maharani and now she has the secrets of the kitchen in hand. She will go home from the city archive knowing how to kill her husband at the kitchen table. She will be free from the curse of the kitchen and the bed—and soon.
Kitchen Curse Page 11