Runner-up in the 2021 Contest in Prose. Read judge Cristina Rivera Garza’s blurb here.
Old Enough For This
The police came for me when the sun was sinking. One of the officers greeted my husband with his hand raised, “Assalamualaikum, Teacher.”
Teacher replied, “Walaikum salam. I’m sorry for this disturbance. Please don’t harm her.” He stood behind a half-closed door. My idiot sister Aisha watched from our front window, smiling in that vacant, treacherous way of hers.
“Don’t worry, we’ll take care of her for you,” said the policeman.
Teacher had called me a murderer before he rang the police. Maybe he was right. Maybe it wasn’t an accident. God have mercy on me. Maybe a part of me did want Aisha’s baby dead.
The policemen came closer. I picked up my father’s old machete and hacked the air. I flung dirt at the men. Threw stones at the house. Spat. My body—slack one moment, wild the next—did what it wanted, losing control was a freedom. I opened my mouth. The wail that came from it was my tongue pulling out a sound from my gut, a chorus of all the dead versions of myself that I had been and would never be.
I toppled into the shallow grave. I fell a long, long way down into the dirt. The dead baby was wrapped in my sarong. God help me. I was guilty. From inside our house, Aisha shouted, “Motherer, motherer, baby motherer.”
Sixteen
On the morning of Rohani’s sixteenth birthday, I baked her a chocolate cake. Rohani and I go back a long way. When we were seven, we found ourselves seated next to each other on the first day of primary school with identical schoolbags. Rohani said, “My favorite color is pink. What’s yours?”
I liked yellow, but I said, “Mine too. Pink.” That lie sealed our friendship and nine years later, Rohani was still my best friend.
Teacher had gone out fishing that morning. As always, I wished he would drown, but I knew he wouldn’t. He would bring home his catch of fish around asar prayer time and I would have to gut their clammy bodies. Gutting fish was something I disliked but I was skilled; my father used to fish and had made me learn when I was old enough to hold a knife. One clean slice back to front and press the knife through the bony bit below the gills. Hook my fingers, pull, and their innards would slime my hand with blood that smelled of coins. If I pulled out a pouch of roe—flesh-pink like something I once shed during my period—Teacher would look proud, as if he had chosen that pregnant fish out of all the fish in the lake.
I had a few hours to do what I liked without Teacher looking over my shoulder. I iced the cake with butter cream and decorated it with candied cherries. Aisha’s baby snuggled against my hip in a sarong sling and I let her lick icing off my finger.
I said, “Say Mama. Ma-ma.” I was determined that she would say those first words to me and not to Aisha. The baby burbled, old enough to be pleased by sugar, but too young for words.
Aisha called out from her room, “Aisha is Mama. Aisha is baby’s Mama.” Our plywood walls were thin and she had heard me talking to the baby.
I kissed the baby and whispered, “No, she’s not. I’m your Mama. It’s Auntie Hani’s birthday, sayang. Let’s go give this to her.”
Aisha said, “Where are you going? Aisha wants cake.”
“I’ll get your cake from the shop later.” Aisha’s sweet tooth and appetite for junk food cost me all my savings from my small food business, but I consoled myself that she would eat herself to death. Every ringgit I spent on her cakes and crackers would hasten the day when I would be rid of her.
I drove over to Rohani’s and knocked on her door. She opened it and yelled, “Nain! What a wonderful surprise.”
I said, “Wait! Careful, watch the cake.”
“Look who’s here, everybody! It’s Nain!”
She embraced me and pulled me through the door. I had not intended to stay, but her mother patted my cheek and said, “We haven’t seen you in ages, Nain. Look at you, prettier than ever, but too thin, girl. All skin and bones. Come, come, have something to eat.”
They were the closest thing I had to a complete family. For a few hours, I was a teenager in a home that welcomed me. They admired my cake, fussed over me, and we sang “Happy Birthday” at the top of our voices. Rohani and I talked while she held my hands. No one ever held my hands the way she did, so tenderly as if our fingers were conduits for our conversations. She complained about how difficult mathematics was and spoke about choosing between a teacher training college and a university matriculation program after her Form Five examinations. I tried not to cry.
She said, kindly, “You can do this too, Nain. You were always the smartest one in class.”
I said, “You know I can’t, Hani. I didn’t even finish Form Three and now there’s the—.” The baby. I realized, with a dreadful certainty, that I had forgotten the baby in the car. When I made it back to where I had parked, she was already dead in the noonday heat. I blew into her mouth. I shook her limp body which had turned the color of a fish’s underbelly.
Panicked, I drove. I sped past the hospital that I thought I was headed for and drove into the rubber plantations until I ran out of tarmac. I stopped and prayed for a miracle. The next thing I knew, I was digging her grave under the yellow frangipani tree in our front yard, my nails black with dirt. Outside our house, there was a bucket of gasping fish, and bags of bahulu cakes and fish crackers. I didn’t remember stopping for the snacks either.
Fifteen
Aisha ate and ate. She grew more obese every week; her body inflated and strained the seams of her clothes until I realized it was not fat that bulged from her body. She was pregnant.
Teacher said, “I thought she couldn’t conceive.” Aisha was thirteen years and four months old, and she did not menstruate.
He must have fucked her during the school holidays and weekends while I was out delivering my orders. Or when I went to the shops or the market. Or when he allowed me to visit Rohani. I had seen Aisha rub his moustache and tug his beard with childish affection. He stroked her back, combed her hair, and patted her backside; I told myself that these were fatherly gestures and looked away. I didn’t want to be responsible for Aisha. I couldn’t be, not when I needed someone to hold my own hand. I couldn’t protect her when no one had taken care of me.
Aisha was born with a hole in her heart and a brain that stopped learning at six years old. My father used to say that if you put an ear to Aisha’s heart, you could hear three gurgles and a slosh every minute. Aisha would say, “Three giggles and a splash,” and offer her chest to whoever wanted to lay their head there. She must have let Teacher put his head under her blouse. I wondered what my father had taught her before he died. Maybe he had taught her to hide her secrets from me.
Teacher said, “It’s your fault, Nain. You told me that she never has her periods.”
“It’s true. She never does, but you …” I could not bring myself to name what he had done to Aisha. I said, “Maybe you should marry her.” Obviously, Aisha was old enough for it. I was her age when my father gave me away. Teacher could have a second wife but not if they were sisters. He would have to divorce me to marry Aisha and I prayed that he would.
“You dare to say that to me? You’re getting too bold. Don’t forget, you need me to take care of you. If I kick you out, what will happen to you? Two second-hand girls with no education. Where can you go with your shame?” We were living in my dead father’s house but I held my silence.
Men like Teacher and my father had their way of fixing problems. All they needed was some money and obedience from girls and women. We hid Aisha’s pregnancy, which was not difficult to do; Aisha never left the house and our nearest neighbor was too far away to spy on us. A few lies that Aisha was ‘The same as always, getting chubby’ whenever people asked about her was enough to stop most questions. I even kept it from Rohani. Babies and sex were a world away from her homework, science experiments, and sports days.
When it was time for the baby to be born, Teacher took Aisha away. A week later, they came back with a baby. A girl, with her hands in fists, her legs curled up to her stomach, and her eyes closed to the world as if she already knew her life was going to be hard. Teacher told people that his poor cousin from out of town had given her up. If Aisha said the baby was hers, no one believed her. Or rather, it was easier to believe Teacher.
I became the baby’s mother. I fumbled with her baths and cried when I pricked her with a diaper pin, but I learned. Some nights, I left Aisha and Teacher fast asleep in the house while I made a bottle of milk and put the baby in a basket in the backseat of my father’s car. I drove slowly, looking for roads that led darkly away from the town. The baby would sleep, lulled by the car’s hum. Somewhere, when all that was familiar outside had disappeared, fear would overcome my half-dreams of running away, and I would circle back, go home, and sneak into the house like a shamefaced thief.
Fourteen
On my wedding day, I sat on a dais next to Teacher under an arch of plastic roses in my school’s badminton hall. I too was decorated, with lacey patterns of henna on my hands, false eyelashes like crow feathers, and bracelets like handcuffs.
My father said, “Stop crying. Your make-up is smearing. You’ll look like a ghost in your photographs.”
Teacher and I were dressed in matching gold brocade. He had a tanjak in the same cloth on his head instead of the skullcap that he usually wore to school. When he smiled at me, my stomach clenched and twisted.
I watched my school headmaster, my teachers, my classmates and their parents, and my father’s friends help themselves to the wedding feast. Everyone was in good spirits. There was a buffet of oiled rice, chicken and beef rendang, fruit pickle, cakes, fruit, and rose syrup. Rohani came up to take a photograph. She straightened my headpiece, a gold thing that made me look like my head was pierced with a dozen filigree needles. She held my hands, and whispered, “Queen for a day. You look wonderful, Nain.” I could see she was glad she was not me.
My dream of travelling around the world became moving five kilometers into Teacher’s one-bedroom flat. My days in his flat were a succession of chores, cooking, and sex. Teacher said, “The sooner you stop crying, the sooner you’ll get used to it.”
Not long after the wedding, Aisha called and said, “Abah can’t get up.” By the time I got to the house, my father was dead on the steps to the house, killed by an illness I had refused to believe he had. He was buried by sundown and I had no tears left for him. The crows in the cemetery wailed, “Take care of Aisha. Take care of Aisha.” I hurled stones at the birds and they rose from the trees, laughing like boys. I could not forgive my father for dying. For throwing me away. For letting Teacher own me. For leaving Aisha to me. Death had come too conveniently to him.
Teacher and I moved in with Aisha because she refused to leave the house. I bought her snacks from the same wholesale store that my father went to. I made cakes and serunding to sell. I delivered them in my father’s car to customers. I drove unsteadily, grinding through the gears; I wasn’t old enough for driving lessons. But I saved a little money, a few ringgit from every cake or tub of serunding sold. I dreamt of escape while I cleaned, cooked, washed, and ironed in the house that I had vowed to leave.
Thirteen
My father made me learn all the recipes a girl needed to be a wife: curries, kormas, sambals, serunding, and rendangs for special occasions; quick dishes to whip up in a cinch; tricks with eggs and tinned sardines when the fridge was empty; and cakes and sweet soups for tea.
He put a man’s long-sleeved work shirt and a pair of front-pleat pants in the wash every day so that I could practice ironing a knife edge fold down the middle of the pant legs and along the shirt sleeves. He only ever wore T-shirts himself. I scorched three shirts in protest, but he just bought another one. I pressed the iron down in frustration. At thirteen, a man to me was a cotton sleeve, belt loops that snagged the snout of an iron, and maneuvers around the seams of a hot shirt.
I thought that I had several more years to make my plans. Adulthood was still a vague shadow, an air-space three sizes bigger that I carried around me like a shell to grow into. I was too young to realize that time moved faster for my father. Word circulated that a daughter of a widower was ripe for a husband. He had spread the word of my availability in the market and at the mosque. I was a prize catch, a thirteen-year-old virgin well-trained in housekeeping duties.
Suitors started coming to the house. My father negotiated money and gifts with them. Some had other wives, some were bald, and a few were older than my father. He pledged me to the first unmarried man who had a house, car, and job. He was Teacher Zubir, my English teacher. Even my father called him Teacher. I threatened to run away. I packed a bag and ransacked the house in vain for bus ticket money. My father said that I would be raped on the road.
I said, “I’ll cut my face. I’ll kill myself.”
He said, “Go ahead.”
“I’ll kill Aisha. I’ll gut her like a fish.”
“You’re not brave enough.” He was right. My hunger strike lasted two days before I collapsed in defeat in front of a plate of rice. I pleaded for him to let me finish Form Five. Form Three. “Just two more years of school. Please, Abah,” I begged. He gave away my school uniforms and my school shoes, and returned my books to the school. He even threw away the coloring books and my colored pencils that I was fond of.
He said, “I’m sick, Nain. I can’t last much longer. This is for your own good. He’ll take care of you.” I did not believe him. I believed it was a ruse to get rid of me.
I sought help from the ustazah in school who taught us religious studies. She said I had to respect my father’s wishes. She said, “It must be difficult for a man to raise two girls alone with your sister the way she is. You must help him.” I ran crying to Rohani and she cried with me, but her father said to her that it was best not to meddle in the family affairs of other men. He said that people carried burdens unknown to others.
After the betrothal, I stopped going to school and Teacher started coming to the house. He brought me gifts: pretty sandals, a sarong, a blouse, a beaded bracelet. My father would lock me in the room with my favorite cookies. They would undress me, a little more each time, and touch me here and there. And my body would shrink like the pokok semalu weed, closing into itself. But sometimes, the same body, confused and curious, would open to their fingers against my will while I covered my face with a pillow in shame. They laughed and said, “She’s definitely old enough for this.”
Teacher would unzip his trousers and force me to look at him, rigid and alien. My father would say, “Patience, Teacher. Soon.”
Teacher would laugh and say, “The longer the wait, the more rewarding it will be.” To me, he said, “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of you.” And later, I would wash his slime from my chest and my face and wish that I was Aisha whose happiness was in knowing nothing.
Twelve
When I was twelve, a boy groped me in school. I had grabbed the offending hand and twisted it hard enough to make him cry out and apologize in front of his friends. Pleased that I had taught him a lesson, I told my father about it. I expected praise for standing up for myself. Instead, my father slapped me twice: forehand across my left cheek for passing close enough to the boy to be touched, backhand across my right for making a scene.
He said, “How many times have I told you not to go around asking for attention? I don’t have time to worry about you, Nain.”
My tears ran hot. I said, “I wasn’t asking for anything and you’ve never worried about me,” I said. He raised his hand. I flinched, but he did not hit me again. My face smarted with injustice. My father was friends with the boy’s father and he never did anything about it, never said a thing when they went to Friday prayers together at the mosque. It was as if nothing ever happened.
My father worried only about one thing and that was Aisha. Aisha consumed him, sucking up all his time and his attention. She ate him up like a tamarind sweet, biting off the sugar-coated pulp and spitting out the seed for me, hard and stripped of affection.
When I had my first period, he opened his cupboard and took out a pack of sanitary pads and seven headscarves. I was to wear the headscarves from then on; the white ones were for school, the black ones for weekends. He said I had to make sure my clothes covered my body to my wrists and ankles. Every day. Even when I answered the door or opened a window.
He said, “Guard your modesty, Nain. It’s the most valuable thing you have.”
I said, “Isn’t my brain the most valuable thing I have? You used to tell me that when I was little.”
“You’re not little anymore. You’re old enough to make a baby and the way you look is a curse. You attract too many eyes, too many flies.”
I didn’t believe him. I was not cursed. Aisha was, hexed with gluttony and a child’s brain. But Aisha didn’t need to cover her hair because she didn’t leave the house. She did not answer the door.
I suffered cramps that made me double over as unmade babies twisted my insides into knots and wrung out dark blood. My body had suddenly become a wickedness to be punished every month. A body where a curl of hair loosed from a headscarf could be a taunt to a boy, the flash of a calf an invitation to a man.
At school, boys slipped notes into my books with dates and places to meet. I threw away their scraps of paper but they trailed me on their bicycles. Some days, they clustered outside my house, three or four of them with their shirt tails out and school bags slung across their backs. My father would shout and wave his machete at them and they would scatter, laughing like a pack of monkeys.
He said I was a danger to myself. “It’s not my fault,” I said. “I don’t talk to them. I don’t even look at them.” I did not look at them but a half-smile when they sang my name was encouragement enough for them to continue their teasing. Standing a certain way against the wind with my school blouse blowing against me would raise a collective sigh amongst them. All these I could do at arm’s length with no consequence except my amusement. I was no different from the other girls in school except that being beautiful was to be my escape.
I was going to leave our house, our dead-end town, and those deadbeat boys as soon as I finished school in a few years. Grown-up Nain was going to climb to the peak of the tallest mountain and fly away over the sea. She was going to wear a golden dress and a tiara, shout her name from all the places of the world and rocket across the solar system. Grown-up Nain was going to be somebody worth being. I could almost feel it in my bones.