Once We Were There

by Bernice Chauly

  He gave Del a long hug and then kissed her forehead. Father and child held each other close. He saw the resemblance. Del had her father’s eyes, his mouth.

  “Papa, this is Omar.”

  Omar held out his hand and Del’s father shook it.

  “Come in,” he said.

  She smiled and walked away.

  The study was big, lined with books in wooden bookshelves from floor to ceiling. Beautiful carpets were strewn across the floor and three large paintings of landscapes hung on a section of the wall. The room smelt of sweet tobacco, and there was a small ring of white smoke hovering over a large Dutch antique desk. An old air conditioner rattled, cooling the air. Del’s father walked slowly towards the leather armchair behind his desk and gestured for Omar to sit. The desk was covered with papers, books, fountain pens. The room reminded Omar of a scholar’s den, that of a quasi-madman who had retreated from the perils of the world and into the sanctuary of books.

  Del’s father picked up his pipe and started puffing.

  “Sit, sit. You are back here for good?”

  Omar sat down, the leather chair squeaked. Del’s father continued puffing on his pipe.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You work?”

  “For my father’s company. We import parts for luxury cars. There’s a KL office and that’s where I work now.”

  “Ah, and your parents?”

  “They live in London, sir. My mother prefers to be close to my grandmother. I have a younger sister in university.”

  “And she is reading…”

  “Sociology sir.”

  Omar felt that he was back in boarding school, being quizzed by his Headmaster. There was a sudden silence.

  “I love my daughter very much, my wife…” He gestured to a picture behind him.

  “I understand, sir.”

  Del’s father took another puff of his pipe and the vanilla-flavoured smoke curled upward lightly into the air before it dissipated into nothing. Omar was perplexed. He wanted to say, “But you have a daughter who needs you, she is here, alive, in your life.” But he didn’t.

  “You love my daughter, yes?”

  Omar nodded.

  “Then you must be good to her, for she deserves only kindness…your love.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “So be it then. Know that I am grateful.”

  Omar nodded. Del’s father spoke clearly, assuredly, as if he had rehearsed what he was going to say. It was succinct, concise. It felt like he was making a deal.

  “Now if you’ll excuse me, I will get back to my reading.”

  Omar stood up and, on an impulse, asked, “May I ask what you’re reading, sir?”

  Del’s father looked up.

  “Baudelaire, his essays. In the original French. You know his work?”

  “No sir, I’m afraid I don’t.”

  “Well then. Perhaps you will one day.”

  “Perhaps. Thank you, sir.”

  Del’s father looked down at his book and Omar knew that he had been dismissed. He got up and glanced quickly at the picture on the wall behind the desk. It was a wedding portrait. Del’s mother was seated in a chair, her hair coiffed, her face in a fixed smile. Omar could see that she had been beautiful.

  At the door, Omar turned to take one more look at the old man now hunched over a book, immersed in a world that only existed within the pages of a book, confined in the walls of that room. And in a moment of clarity, he understood that Del was utterly alone. She was an orphan. That her father was dead to her as he was to the world.

  We started campaigning for Keadilan while Anwar was in jail, serving his sentence. We’d heard that he was in solitary confinement and that he was made to sleep on the floor, without a mattress, aggravating his already bad back. Elections were coming up and we knew that we had to galvanise as much support as possible. Keadilan was a new political party and it had to be prepared to contest in the election. Public sympathy was ripe, and we needed to capitalise on it. Every day Omar and I arrived early at the campaign headquarters, packing large boxes of leaflets into the car and then distributing them in housing areas. This had to be done on foot—by lunchtime we would have canvassed an entire housing estate.

  We focused on areas like Kepong, Jinjang and Segambut, which were opposition strongholds. This was the Chinese heartland, and many of these voters had voted for the Democratic Action Party for years, and were angered by Anwar’s arrest. We met old ladies and old men who would give us the thumbs up when we handed out leaflets.

  Itu manyak teruk la.

  Kesian itu Anwar.

  Macam mana boleh buat macam itu?

  They spoke in broken Malay, but it all meant the same thing. This is a terrible thing. Poor Anwar. How can they do this to him?

  One morning after we arrived at the party headquarters, we found Wan Azizah agitated and upset.

  He’s been poisoned.

  Anwar had been taken ill and rushed to hospital. He had been vomiting and complaining of severe abdominal pains. Wan Azizah was denied visitation at the hospital and we staged a noisy protest outside the hospital gates. Hundreds of people showed up. Days later, the forensics report stated that it was arsenic.

  Ten thousand people took to the streets again. We were tear-gassed. The water cannons were brought out in full force. The water was laced with something that made us itch uncontrollably. Omar hurled furious insults at one FRU officer and he was taken down with a baton. I rushed to help him, and I felt a hard thwack on my head and blacked out.

  When I woke up, I was inside a lockup. My head throbbed and my right arm felt numb from the way I had been lying down. The floor was damp and smelled of urine.

  Hey, you okay?

  It was Sumi. I nodded.

  Bastards are taking their time. They’ve set bail but they’re making us wait. How’s your head?

  I tried to speak, but my mouth was parched and dry. I managed a croak. Slumped against the wall, I felt an odd sense of calm. There were women I recognised. The youngest looked like she was still in secondary school. We all smiled at each other. There was nothing really to say. We sat quietly and retreated into silence.

  There was a long, narrow window with bars just below the ceiling. Outside, I could hear the noise of the traffic. I imagined people bustling to and from work, having tea, fried bananas, coffee. I was hungry; my stomach churned loudly. I imagined a mound of steaming rice on a banana leaf. Minced spinach with spiced coconut, fried bitter gourd, a dollop of fiery chicken varuval, crispy popadums and a pool of chicken curry in the middle of the rice.

  Fuck, I am starving.

  Me too.

  We both laughed. Sumi and I sat and held hands. Food. The only other thing that bound us together as Malaysians. Anger and food.

  Two hours later, we were let out. I saw Omar sitting on a kerb, talking to someone and smoking a cigarette. There were about fifty of us who had been arrested and locked up overnight. There were hugs, high-fives and chatter. I ran to Omar and kissed him.

  You okay? I asked.

  I am now. A bit bruised. You?

  Head hurts like hell, but I’ll live.

  The Dang Wangi police station was right in the heart of the city, and from a distance I heard the call to prayer.

  Sayang, let’s eat.

  Fairman had come for Sumi in his car. We all got in and headed to the best curry house on Jalan Gasing, and there we ate our fill.

  Marina introduced me to her world. And had a story that moved me to the core. I learned about pre-pubescent street urchins from the backwaters of Sabah and its derelict sea town shanties, headed to KL to find the only source of work they could. As sex workers. She had come from a village flanking the small town Lahad Datu, the eldest son of a fisherman and his wife, and the eldest of four siblings. Cross-dressing was not frowned upon in her family as generations of men who felt like women had existed in seafaring communities in that area. Religion and social norms were tied to a hybridity of Islam, Christ
ianity, and Dayak and Bajau beliefs steeped in magic that came from the mountains, the rivers and the seas. For fishermen especially, the worship of the sea and its gods and goddesses was paramount. The sea brought fortune, but also great hardship and danger. Marina’s mother knew that her son had female inclinations and never stopped him from tying his sarong the way women did.

  When Marina—or Rashid then—was 14, the neighbour’s son kicked down the flimsy zinc door of their house and sodomised her repeatedly until she passed out. Marina’s father hacked the boy up with a parang and threw the pieces in the sea as a sacrifice to the gods. Fearing retribution, Marina had had no choice but to flee the village. It was the last time she saw her family. She hitchhiked to Kota Kinabalu where she begged on the streets and started sniffing glue with other runaway kids.

  By night, they sold roses wrapped in cheap plastic to young lovers and tourists at the city’s many waterfront cafés. When the chill of morning arrived they huddled against each other for warmth on thin mattresses in a derelict house belonging to the begging syndicate they found themselves indebted to. They scrounged for scraps from local restaurants, occasionally getting full meals from a portly Pakistani who owned a tandoori place and demanded payment in sexual favours.

  Marina, who had then grown into a sleek, beautiful boy of 18, got on her knees three times a week to suck the man’s fat penis in the restaurant’s dank toilet, almost gagging, not from the bloated penis that threatened to suffocate her, but from the odour of rotting food that clogged the drains behind Restoran Al-Tandoor.

  When Marina turned 20, she had saved enough money to buy a plane ticket to KL and headed for Chow Kit. She had been told by a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend that it was the best option for someone like herself—you could start work at 10am and be done by 2pm if you were lucky. Marina met many others from Sabah, young, lanky boys who were Bugis, Bajau, Suluk, Bisaya and Rungus, or a little bit of everything. The mixing of tribal bloods in Borneo had become more fluid than ever. And then there were boys who felt like girls and boys who had no other option than to end up on a street in KL selling themselves for cheap.

  Marina spoke simple English—she had learnt it from reading newspapers and on the streets in KK when she tried to converse with tourists—but mostly Sabah Malay, peppered with “bah” instead of “lah”, the colloquial equivalent to the peninsula slang.

  Kau ni kawan baik bah.

  Yes, we had become good friends.

  You need to stop worrying about me, Del. My life is hard, but it’s good. I can pay my bills, send some money to my mother, I have nice clothes, shoes, make-up, its okay. My life is okay.

  I felt like I had to save her. From what, I wasn’t sure. But in spite of all her tragedies, Marina still smiled, opened her mouth, and spread her cheeks to allow men to penetrate her in all manner of ways, to ram their sorrows away into her body.

  * * *

  The miscarriage made me realise the certainty of motherhood and the mystery of pregnancy. To have something grow inside of you until it becomes a person is a miracle. But in time the despondency lifted and work became once again the focus. The elections were weeks away and the campaign for Keadilan’s first foray at the ballot box was going to be the beginning of a new era in Malaysian politics. There was so much work to be done, and although it was difficult not to be radical, that fervor was still something we had to capitalise on.

  We met activists who were musicians and poets. We met intellectuals who were riding on idealism and political will. We met people who were just plain angry, and the flag we all carried with us was the hope that one day, justice would arrive at our doorstep like Santa Claus, bearing gifts of repentance and goodwill. Many disaffected youth were coming to volunteer for the party. At the end of each day, when they returned to the sanctuary of their underground clubs where punk music ruled loud and hard, they took with them their anger and their rhetoric.

  Fairman and Sumi were busy with The Review and Imran was basking in his celebrity-type status, attracting scores of young female fans whenever he went out. Sumi kept me abreast of all his conquests. Yeah, students. He’s got a type now. The Canadian journalist Murray Hiebert had been jailed for a month and the conviction drew foreign journos to the city once again. Imran was writing and entertaining non-stop.

  There were times when I thought about my mother, in her smallness and her growing belly. Did she suffer from morning sickness? Was I an active foetus? Did I make her heave and groan with discomfort?

  I found myself in bookstores, sliding my fingers through pregnancy books. Countless images of robust bellies, cross-section diagrams of mother and child, black and white babies in slumber. Upside-down babies. I wondered if I would ever know. I wondered if I would ever be able to push a child into the world. I wondered if Omar really and truly knew what I felt like, still.

  There were times when I felt like all I wanted to do was to look after him. Be there when he woke up, serve him coffee and breakfast, say goodbye honey, have a good day! Buy the groceries, pay bills, clean the house and be there to welcome him when he got home from work. I wanted to be the all-Asian wife, consummate in her mediocrity and in her mind. No worries, except for what to cook and what to wear. If only life were that simple. Perhaps it really could be that simple. Perhaps. Living together was agreeing with me. With us.

  I tried to make our apartment as comfortable as possible. On weekends, we scoured Malacca for antique furniture; marble-top coffee shop tables, teak dressing tables with oblong mirrors, Peranakan dressers with ornate lion’s feet, pre-war medicine bottles, heavy black Dutch lamps, green glass baubles once used by fishermen on the east coast, blue and white ceramics, silver cutlery, old lace.

  I wanted to make our home, yes our home, as comfortable as possible. Prints of old Malaysiana. Fabrics, photos, paintings. Omar filled his study with books. We had a guest room. It seemed so adult, civilised. I became a little housewife of sorts, and Omar didn’t mind. In fact, I think he liked it. He cooked too from time to time, and talked about frequenting farmers’ markets on weekends in London to concoct and cook his own recipes.

  I had never been in love like this, and I wondered if it would have the same kind of pitfalls I experienced with the man who took my virginity one chilly winter’s night in Montreal. It was after the Cowboy Junkies had played at Les Foufounes Électriques and the DJ had started playing a remixed version of Kate Bush’s “The Jig of Life”. Already intoxicated from wine and the sonorous, sexy voice of the lead singer Margo Timmins, I’d danced, twirling my long black skirt on the dance floor and I felt dizzy. Wild. We smoked a joint on the stairwell and everything felt loose. I wanted a man that night, and the music, the cheap wine and the sharp breeze on the walk home, had added a spring to my step.

  We hummed “Sweet Jane” as we stumbled into my apartment and peeled our clothes off. José and I were in the same Philosophy class and he had asked me out that evening, on a whim. He was from Guatemala and was articulate, bold and effusive. His dark curls and black eyes were radiant that night and I took him into my bed—and into my heart—for three whole years.

  Our nights were spent getting stoned, eating falafel with day-old bagels from the Jewish café downstairs, drinking copious bottles of cheap Bulgarian wine and sleeping curled in each other’s arms on my futon after lusty lovemaking. But I knew it wouldn’t last and I didn’t see him coming to Malaysia, so things got bitter. He became cruel and hurtful and one night slammed me against the wall, screamed puta puta puta and left. I saw him only once again after that, and he apologised for saying what he did and that he really did see us as professors with babies—him in Philosophy and I, English—living a suburban life with holidays in the Canadian Rockies and South America. He did love me and I suppose I loved him too. But it would never have worked, and that same sense of practicality was what made me fearful to invest in Omar.

  In the lead-up to the election, we spent days putting up flags, banners and posters all over KL. No tree, lamppost or wall was
spared. Swarms of banners engulfed entire neighbourhoods, some being torn down like an unwanted pestilence. Wan Azizah was running for Anwar’s constituency up north in Penang, but we had to make the party as visible as we could.

  One Friday night Sumi and I stood right outside Echo, a bar and club owned by a friend. After a few shots of tequila, we started shouting Reformasi! while waving the Keadilan flag with wide grins on our faces. Some cars starting honking in support and one driver started shouting back at us. His thick, swarthy face was red with drink.

  Sodomy lah, beb.

  He continued: Anwar likes ass.

  Sumi screamed back. Yeah, stick it up your ass too! Asshole!

  Not everyone agreed with us. There were too many old alliances at stake and many who thronged these bars and clubs were not only privileged, they were also corrupt. Not everyone wanted change.

  Bangsar had become upmarket almost overnight. Establishments tried to outdo each other and KL’s glitterati poured onto the streets in stilettos and high slits. Three rows of shoplots that used to teem with cat-sized rats which had been exterminated to make way for sleek convertibles driven by rich kids from Damansara Heights who waved their bling-ed hands to shrieking friends.

  On a Friday night, Bangsar was the place to be seen in. It set the stage for upward mobility, for the rich kids of politicians and technocrats and social wannabes. Those who stood with the right crowd, and did the in-thing. Drugs were cut and sniffed on toilet seats, pills were passed around from fingers to tongues. It was a good time to be young, beautiful and rich. Catwalk models towered over young captains of industry, beauty queens mingled with DJs, men with skinny girls, men with boys, women with older men, women with boys. All dressed to party. All dressed for sex. Music spilled onto the streets. Techno, hip-hop. A veritable carnival. The endless clinking of glasses, the swish of hair, tight asses and perfume. This was the generation whose parents survived the war and the Japanese occupation—the foundation of the new federation, who were half this and half that, who had trussed up trousseaux and trust-funds, international school educations and western degrees.