You looked out of the window, your ears flaming in shame; to think she thought you so ignorant. You had finished school – perhaps if the quota system at the Malaysian universities had been more open to Indians, you would have even completed a bachelor’s in History by now. So what if you didn’t qualify for a bachelor’s degree in Malaysia, you had completed a secretarial course, and bagged a job at a large multinational company where you had met her son ... and what about her son? you wanted to ask. The well-thumbed pornographic magazines were hidden in a cupboard below the winter clothes he had no occasion to use in Kuala Lumpur. You wanted to show her the stack of those pictures, some gummed together, some poses so unimaginable that you thought they had been photoshopped.
But you didn’t say anything. You looked out the window and pretended not to hear while the old lady sucked air through her teeth in frustration.
The doctor at Pantai talked to your mother-in-law, explaining the tests. You were scheduled for multiple visits. After your marriage, you had given up your job; you understood how awkward it would have been to be the secretary of your husband’s colleagues. You had thought about getting another job; with your new family’s connections this would have been easy to do. The emails from overseas crowded your mailbox, from classmates who had been academically weaker, but whose parents could afford the tuition in Australia and Canada. Two of your Malay classmates were on government scholarships in America. You felt hollow inside, but reasoned that with your options, you had done very well for yourself. You secretly hoped that your husband would soon be transferred to the headquarters of his oil company in America, so that you could enroll at the University of Houston. You had already looked through the website online. You talked to your husband about Houston, but he was dismissive; although he didn’t want to join the family business he didn’t want to leave his family again either. He told you to keep busy in Kuala Lumpur, like the women in his family.
Then the migraines got worse, and the vomiting, and there were regular doctor’s visits, and in a moment of clarity you realized that working was not what women in this family did. Your husband’s sister-in-law, the one that lived in the same house, was an occasional aromatherapist, your mother-in-law was a women’s activist who appeared regularly in iridescent saris on the pages of What’s On, either holding huge bouquets of flowers, which dwarfed her, or giving out checks to a bowing recipient. Your husband’s sisters were mostly, when not plagued by their marital and financial woes, talking about starting a boutique in Bangsar in the near future.
You started to want a baby too – you willed it to happen – for the magic of a little being to make all your problems disappear, with a fairytale pouf of air. By then, the doctor had started shooting ink into your fallopian tubes to take pictures. The pain was excruciating. You had gotten used to the invasive prodding by nurses and interns and now your legs fell open easily, like a prostitute’s limbs. You thought of cuddling a baby in your arms, and when even that wouldn’t work your thoughts started growing dangerous: Why doesn’t anyone test him?
You never voiced this thought, but you must have willed the doctor to hear it, for that’s what he suggested. Your mother-in-law flapped about like a crazed chicken, outraged that there could be anything wrong in her family, after all she had birthed six children, and the other five of those children already had a child or two. She kept stressing that her other son was expecting the second child soon, as if it validated your husband’s virility. Her sons, she shouted, had nothing wrong with them; both her sons were masculine enough to carry on the family name.
Your husband submitted ungraciously to the tests, telling you that he had, at MIT, sold his sperm by sitting in rooms with a magazine, but there was a time and an age for that. He made it sound as if it was your whim that led to this public humiliation. When the results came, and it turned out that your husband had low sperm motility, the doctor assured him it was nothing to worry about – maybe that’s when the trouble started. The doctor went through the causes, all of which were treatable: elevated levels of zinc, hormonal imbalance, use of tobacco, and so on. Although the use of alcohol could also cause a problem, your husband did not come home until the next morning, his breath reeking of whisky.
Everyone crept around the house on cat’s feet, barely looking at you. When your husband woke up at noon and lumbered to the dining table, the voices became forced happy, your pregnant sister-in-law trilling a laugh which grated on your heart. They plied him with fresh orange juice and massaged his temples, but you refused to go near him.
You wanted to stop this humiliation that was threatening your marriage. That night, you first suggested adoption: How about a baby that looked like you both, from one of the orphanages in Malaysia, or even a newborn baby from India? That was the first time he hit you, slamming your face against the dresser, so that your lopsided face looked like you were sucking a sweet inside your right cheek for that whole week. He was immediately contrite and twisted himself like a snake at your feet, weeping on your toes, saying it would never happen again.
Your husband was traveling frequently by then, to the east coast of Malaysia, where the oil rigs drilled black gold into the Malaysian economy. He left for Terengganu the next day, even pecking you on the unbruised cheek in a public to show of apology. You felt like it was a new beginning, maybe things would get better from now on.
But a part of you knew that things had changed, irrevocably. There was the new smell in his hair, the way he started to grow a small beard, although you protested that it tickled your thighs unpleasantly. Once he came back from Terengganu with moon-shaped crescents on his skin, four distinct red marks. When you asked, he said that he had got caught in some thorny bushes when they had veered off the marked path to the rig. He described the big scratch on another engineer’s arm, how they worried that it might turn septic in the tropical night.
You looked at his face, and smiled at his lies, powerless to do anything else. You quietly started to plot how to get away, from this, from him, and you told him you were thinking about learning how to drive. He agreed at once, telling you it was an excellent idea, anything to make you happy.
The family found you an instructor from a good Tamil family – after all there was all that time spent in a car alone, your hand below the Driving Instructor’s on the gears, they wanted to be sure of the propriety of it all – and after three years you were suddenly out of the mansion, and on the roads of Kuala Lumpur, without any member of the family with you. The Driving Instructor was a 22 year old boy, he called you Elder Sister, Akka this, and Akka that, for two hours, three times a week. You felt intoxicated. You knew he was engaged to be married to a girl from Teluk Intan, it was an arranged marriage, so a little bit of harmless flirting seemed so delicious. Especially as your husband was away from the house more and more and came back as a stranger.
You didn’t plan it to happen, but suddenly, the driving lessons involved going to dense tropical forest reserves where you discovered the joys of your body again. You took no precautions, thinking that if you did get pregnant, the child would look like your husband. It was thrilling to think that this was how it was done in Indian epics too, a barren queen going to a mystical sadhu, and hey presto, a child! The Driving Instructor and you got bolder, and his calling you Akka took on a husky sexiness that made you wet, even when you heard him on the phone. One day, while he was driving, you took him into your mouth. It took him by such surprise that he side-swiped a Sikh driver’s taxi, taking the front fender right off and dragging it a few meters before both the cars could stop.
There was a truck driver leering at you from his height as he passed. You sank into the dust of the roadside, horrified by what you had become. The Driving Instructor spoke in rapid Hindi to the Sikh taxi driver – he watched a lot of Bollywood movies and was pretty good at groveling in the language – he even prostrated himself on the ground playfully to show how completely sorry he was. The Sikh driver let you both off quite easily, after collecting some
money for repairs. Before he got into his taxi, the Sikh driver glanced at you as if you really were a worm, still squirming on the ground.
Of course word got around. You heard that your younger brother had gone with a bunch of boys to the Driving Instructor’s house and roughed him up. You said the driving lessons made you panic, so you stopped. The wedding card was in the mail in two months, and even your husband came back for that wedding, forcing you to go in a peacock-blue sari with green tassels, weighted down by tons of the family gold, looking very wifely and traditional. The Driving Instructor looked splendid as a bridegroom, but as soon as he saw you he looked away. The bride from Teluk Intan (she looked like she was 18) clasped your hands in her own and breathed: Thank you so much for coming Auntie, your blessings mean so much to us both.
In one stroke, you became his auntie. You could hear someone softly tittering, and you felt old, tired by it all, especially as so many nights had passed without your husband’s touch. In fact he hardly touched you now except to hurt you. It was as if the sight of you reignited his inner raging demon.
You started to explain away the bruises more and more creatively, losing track of what you had said to whom. One day, explaining to your brother (the same one who had roughed up the Driving Instructor) about how you had fallen off the banana boat on a recent trip to Thailand, you were interrupted by his hand on your arm and his gentle voice saying, Akka, you’ve never been to Thailand. And you saw your misery, as well as that unacceptable pity, mirrored in his eyes. This was your little brother, the only one who still lived at home with your sick mother (your father had passed away eight years earlier) and he was the only one who still seemed to care.
When your brother got into trouble, and was arrested, you were so detached from the outside world that you hadn’t seen the signs. Your brother had joined the ten thousand Indian protestors, who, swelling to a mass of angry humanity, had gathered in temples that smelled of milk souring in the midday sun. The protestors, defying three days of official warnings, had finally mobilized the anger against the growing arrogance of a master race of Malays.
You watched the protest on TV, thousands of people, walking through downtown Kuala Lumpur as a pulsating human wave. A lone police car had pulled up onto the pavement, as if to make room for the swelling crowds. More people were coming from around Masjid Jamek and the LRT station, and you could see the Federal Reserve Unit and police cars amassed in that area. A group of men were coming down the road with a sky-blue banner, and the banner shivered in the wind.
You felt your heart tighten with premonition – the crowd looked like a sea of your relatives – Where was your brother in this?
The phone rang incessantly as you speed-dialed his number, but no one picked up at the other end. On the screen, you could see three men jump up onto a makeshift podium and wave Mahatma Gandhi’s picture. A man with a megaphone started a speech in rapid Tamil, but was interrupted by passing protesters waving a banner How Is Our Future Going To Be? while chanting in loud voices. Then came the red fire trucks, rumbling in from a distance, the BOMBA lettering on the side clear in white. Red berets, black uniforms, red boots. Without any warning, the first canister whizzed toward the metro station with a plume of tear gas. There were distant screams, running hordes. The fire trucks aimed water jets spiked with chemicals at the panicked mass. The man holding a tall banner, protesting the destruction of Hindu temples, doubled-up in resistance to the jet, mooning the police, but he soon fell to the floor. Slogan-shouters were hurling water bottles and stones, then flower pots and shoes, at the advancing police before being beaten and dragged into police trucks. You could see hundreds of them, men and women, like little ants being drowned in a sea. Chants of Hidup Rakyat and People Power started up, then died down again.
When a niece called about your brother being in police custody, you called your husband immediately. He was in Penang that day, and although he said he would try to pull some strings, he was distracted on the phone. Your father-in-law made it clear that this was a problem of a certain class of delinquent, unemployed young men, and you should have nothing to do with them. Late in the night, your sister-in-law came into your bedroom and pleaded with you – your husband’s brother was going to become a Datuk soon, he had certainly paid his dues – they didn’t want you to do anything to compromise the family’s future.
So you did not visit your brother before he was released.
You started to drink, only a little at first, to dull the pain, but it was never enough. Your husband was not at home anymore, and with you swaying around the house all day, the in-laws panicked. One day, there was a ticket for a pilgrimage to Tirupati on the dining table, just for you and your husband.
You wanted so much to believe. You wanted the sight of this great God to cure the unhappiness at the core of your being. When your husband promised to shave off all his hair in the ritual penance, you believed the miracle had already started. India’s crowds, its smelly marketplaces, the long lines of sweaty people at the temple, made you feel sick, but you bore it all with a smile. The sight of Tirupati blinded you with all that gold and diamonds glittering among the flower garlands, for this was the richest Lord in all of India, and surely the most powerful. Your husband made his way to the Kalyana Katta and emerged with his head shaven. You were both abstaining from sex, meat and alcohol during the pilgrimage, and the heat blurred the days into a mass of inertness until it was time to go home to Kuala Lumpur.
It took only two months for your husband to come home raging and incoherent again. This time, he slapped your head against the wall before he even began to speak. You screamed. You could hear the huddled listeners outside the door, and a very gentle knock, and over it all you heard your husband cursing the Gods, pulling at the short strands of hair tufting his head, and moaning, yes moaning, that even this woman, the one that he had tonsured his head for so that he could finally have a son, had a miscarriage today. He had hoped so much. In his raging vomit it all came out; this young 19-year old who had a miscarriage today, the Chinese woman in Seremban, the Bidayuh woman in Sarawak... there were more, and all were infertile.
You knew he was seeing someone else – how could you not know? But for him to speak of it so openly, to speak of all the women he had been fucking just for one single son was unreal. You lay on the ground next to him, letting the blood seep through your hands. You thought of the young 19 year old woman, probably huddled all alone into a corner in the apartment in Ampang, probably bleeding a lot more than you.
The in-laws started to talk about adoption the next day. It would be easier and anonymous if you were to go to Sabah and get a child from there. They started working out the logistics of it all; the air travel, the hotel, the payments that would be made. They said your husband would prefer a son, and you snarled, yes, a son, for who would bring an accursed daughter into the world and want her to live your life?
It wasn’t difficult to drink through the night, alone in your room, one bottle after another, until the room started to sway every time you raised your head. You forced yourself to drink another glass, then one more, then crawled out into the night. It was a moonless night, but the stars blinked luminously in the sky. You were burning up from a fire inside and you focused on that one light by the swimming pool, the only one that lit up the shallow blue water, only 4 feet deep. The guard was sleeping, but his dog lifted his head to look at you, then put his head on his paws again.
The water was far away and the breeze heavy with the fragrant quisqualis flowers unfurling pink and white. You puked, then forced yourself on, snakelike, to your blue oasis. There was a splash of water, the croak of a frog, then your gasp as you struggled to the surface. Your body grew heavier as you wondered if your husband was too well-connected to be held in custody for long.
You let your body surrender to the water despite the gasps for life, until you felt the peace of swimming in amniotic fluid.
You thought of how the family would hold a live chicken over your bl
oated face, the feet slashed exactly over your hair parting so that the blood would mark you as a married woman who had inauspiciously died. They would wrap you in the peacock blue silk sari you had worn for the Driving Instructor’s wedding, then surround you on all sides with bouquets of lilies and roses and jasmine and marigolds, garish next to your grimace of death. Your husband would blubber to everyone how hard he had tried to save you, but it had been a matter of time. Your own family would come, a collection of sisters and brothers and nieces and cousins who would watch from the sidelines, too intimidated to participate.
Your body sank in the water, totally at peace.
Your brother would place a small white bouquet under your folded hands and walk away. Later the in-laws would say, how cheap, real flowers also cannot lah, only filler stuff for bouquets, but what to expect from people of that class, but that would be the only bouquet you would carry into the huge oven that would become your pyre. A small white popcorn of flowers which was the baby’s breath.
You felt the fetal pull of another life, the swirling warm waters above your head, the maternal blood thrumming through your veins, then heard the shriek of an ambulance shattering the calm.
HOW TO MAKE WHITE PEOPLE HAPPY
TIMOTHY L. MARSH
Way over there on the Asian side of the Earth, on the saddles of two or three tectonic plates that buck like rodeo bulls every couple of months, sits the island republic of Indonesia – a shifting, fractured, shattered dish of a dominion with roughly 17,000 bits and pieces of itself spilled across the eastern equator. A lot of these pieces are unchartably small, some are quite large. A few are greatly inhabited, many are not; but all of them, regardless of size or population, share at least this one thing in common: they are all exceptionally poor, even the ones where white people go.
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