DIGNITY

Mirandi Riwoe

I hear the muezzin’s call to prayer. His chant pulses through my body, dredges me up from my sleep. I grasp Asep’s chubby wrist, but not too tightly. I don’t want to wake him. I don’t want to lose him. I nuzzle into the nape of his neck, sweet with sweat. But the dream flickers, the grey light of dawn seeps through. He is not here with me. His tiny form is not cradled into mine. My nose is pressed into the pillowcase, into where I have dribbled in my sleep, not into his wispy baby hair. I even dreamt the muezzin’s call, for all that can be heard in this place is the roar of the machinery, the groans of the cranes, as another building claws its way high into the blue skies. My nightdress is damp with perspiration because the air-conditioning in the kitchen doesn’t quite reach my tiny room.

*

The delivery boy places the bag of groceries on the tiled floor. He’s new, maybe from Myanmar. Or Bangladesh. Not Indonesia, though. Few of us are coming over here anymore. Our president has called us home. Wants to preserve our dignity.

I lock the door behind the boy and return to the kitchen to finish preparing the porridge for breakfast. The flakes of oat puff into the saucepan from the red box that has travelled all the way from Australia. I add milk, and stir it over the gas flame. I’d like to cook the family some bubur ketan hitam. I think they’d like the black rice sweetened with palm sugar, but I know if I ask Mrs Bowman she will shudder, say no. When the porridge is ready I ladle it into three bowls. I retrieve a banana – organic – from the basket. Its skin is yellow and soft, easy to peel. Not like the green ones that grow on the trees in my village that are as small as my thumb and tough to peel. But sweet. Sweeter than these bananas. I slice its firm flesh across the top of the porridge.

I lay the table how Mrs Bowman likes it. Cutlery at attention next to her white plates; a jug of milk, dewy cold from the fridge; a carton of juice. Three place settings. Three glasses. The coffee machine is switched on, gurgles once in a while. I’ve heard Mrs Bowman tell her friends that she doesn’t know what she’d do without me. That makes me happy.

The family is not up yet. It’s Sunday. No rushing to the office for him, no protein shake before the gym for her. And I won’t have to walk Thomas to the mini-van that takes him to the international school. I too have the day off as long as I make breakfast and return home in time to prepare dinner. There’s not much to do during the eight hours I have free, but I sense the family like to have the apartment to themselves for their day of rest, so I usually go to the shopping mall.

*

The lift in the Bowmans’ apartment building is stuffy, bodes of the heat that lurks past these air-conditioned walls. I travel down to the basement, to the second level of the car park, because servants are discouraged from using the main entrance on the ground floor. As I walk towards the exit I see that the woman is still there, still seated in her big, shiny blue car that is parked over in the furthest corner. The shadow of her head moves behind the tinted windows. About a week ago I caught a glimpse of her when she was taking a blanket from the back of her car. Her hair was faded orange, her skin the shade of a sun-bleached shell.

‘You have noticed Mrs Alice,’ says Laksmin, the parking attendant. His English is better than mine. He says in his country they learn English all the way through school. I like him the best of the men who work in the carpark. He’s a little older than the rest, and friendly. But friendly in a way that doesn’t creep up my back as I walk away from him, that doesn’t make my smile tense until my jaw aches.

‘I will be in a lot of trouble if the bosses find out she is parked here,’ he says. The bristles of his black moustache remind me of the shoe brush I use when I shine Thomas’s school shoes. ‘But I don’t have the heart to make her leave.’

‘Why she live in her car?’ I have seen many people who live on the streets among the dogs and the chickens. I have seen whole families living under a bridge, near rubbish heaps, even crammed into a car like that Mrs Alice. But never a white person.

‘Her husband ran out of money and had to go to jail. So until he pays back the government or does all his jail time, she is stuck here too,’ says Laksmin. ‘That fancy Range Rover is all she has left.’ He laughs, but he’s shaking his head too.

I walk up the ramp and Laksmin presses the button so that the garage door trundles open. The glare of sunlight bleeds into the darkness, but the heat slams in, searing my face, baking my clothes. I walk to the bus stop, and tiny granules of sand crunch and skittle under my shoes. I’m used to hot weather, to hanging out wet clothes in the blinding sunlight, to the line of sweat that trickles down my spine. But the heat in my country is lazy, drapes over your skin like a blanket, not like this ravenous heat that shimmers off the desert, pursues me into the enclosed bus stop. I wipe the layer of silt from the bench before taking a seat. I know that if I sit here long enough, I will become a pillar of sand. I will disappear.

*

Gazing out the bus window I think of Asep. Hendra sent me a photo of him yesterday, to my phone. Asep is losing his baby fat, but his eyes are still bright, still pretty with those long, inky lashes. Every time I think of his soft skin, the creases under his chin, his throat, it feels as if there’s a sponge high in my chest that is being squeezed tight, like all my tears are on the inside. A boy grows a lot in seventeen months. And there are still another seven to go before my contract is up, before I can see him again.

Hendra said my mother is taking good care of our boy. He called me last night, as he does every Saturday night. I never ask him about his work. I wait for him to tell me.

‘Pak Sudirman says he still doesn’t need a driver,’ he said. His voice dragged, was resigned. ‘Even the Chinaman doesn’t want a driver. He has some fancy boy from Bali.’

‘How are your vegetables going?’

He grunted. ‘The cassava is nearly ready to take to market, but the kangkung needs more time, more rain.’ I heard him suck on his cigarette; I could almost smell the thick clove smoke. I pictured him, hunkered down on the doorstep of our house in Gunung Batu, the ragged banana trees by the roadside, the litter strewn in the rubble.

‘My money? Is it still reaching you?’ I asked. My pay provides the rent for the three-room cement house we share with my parents, and for the weekly rice stipend, maybe some fish to fry, some chickens to raise. My stomach curled away from the question, from rubbing against Hendra’s pride, but I wanted to make sure all of this is worth something, to someone.

‘Yeah. I picked it up from the agency yesterday,’ he said. Two years ago they had offered him work here too, in construction. But we’ve both heard of the concrete beehives full of foreign workers, mostly men, who battle against the desert to erect more high-rises and wondrous gardens. Men who sometimes never make it home again. It is better this way. I can see that.

*

The bus pauses at a vast shopping mall, a shopper’s palace of steel and glass. Some of the other passengers get down, but not me. I’m not even sure the security guards would allow me to pass into its marble halls, not with my scuffed shoes and my black handbag that’s peeling away at the edges. I wait five more stops until we arrive at a more modest shopping centre. This one has Mrs Bowman’s favourite supermarket, where I can pick up some vegetables for dinner. Mrs Bowman likes that the produce is organic, from farms far away. But I will never get used to the prices. One little punnet of tomatoes costs the same as feeding Hendra and my parents for two nights, I am sure. They could go to the local warung, sit cross-legged on the blue plastic tarpaulin and eat a bowl of nasi goreng each. They could even get a fried egg, or a chicken leg, on their fried rice for that sort of money.

I wander past the shops slowly, for there is no hurry. I have the whole day to fill. Once I went to see a movie, but the subtitles were in Arabic, and I could not keep up with the American actors’ shouts between gunfire. I felt conspicuous seated alone in the dark cinema. There were four men a few rows back from me. Three times I felt popcorn hit the back of my head, land near my foot. But I didn’t look around.

So I pass the purple carpets of the cinema entrance and make my way into the department store. I ignore the clothing and the cosmetics. They are beyond any price range I will ever afford. I take the escalator down to the basement level, to where there is row upon row of boxed colours, plush toys, baby dolls with golden hair. Every Sunday I stroll these aisles, wonder what my boy Asep would like. I think he might enjoy the tiny piano, the one with five fat keys, each a different colour. I imagine him pressing the blue key, laughing at the tune it plays. But the packaging says it is recommended for children up to thirty-six months. He might be too old for it by the time I get home. Maybe it is better to buy him the toy with the yellow plastic steering wheel. He can learn to be a driver like his father. But maybe not. We should work hard to keep Asep in school, is what I think. I don’t know what Hendra thinks.

I lift up the toy and pull the steering wheel to the left, press the red button. It drones out the numbers from one to eight in an accent I think is American. It sounds like Mrs Bowman’s friend, Miss Linda, who sometimes picks her up for the gym. It costs a little more than the piano, but if I keep saving some of the money Mrs Bowman gives me for my Sunday lunch I should be able to buy it in only five more weeks.

I snatch my hand away as a sales assistant approaches me. She’s young and very pretty. Her long black hair is slicked back into a plump bun, and her large lemur eyes are dark, velvety. I think she might be here to usher me on my way, but her lip-sticked mouth widens into a lovely smile.

‘May I help you?’ she asks.

I wave my hand towards the toys. ‘I was choosing toy for my son.’

‘How old is he?’

‘Two year old.’

I am used to the look of boredom that sweeps across the faces of sales assistants or waiters who serve me. The lack of eye contact, the short speech. But this girl is interested. She pulls forward the toy boxes, reads what is on offer.

‘I like the piano, but maybe he be too old for it,’ I say.

‘This one is very popular, madam,’ she says, showing me a colourful train that has letters and numbers printed across its body.

I look at its price. It would take me six months of Sunday lunches to pay for it.

‘Yes, it is a very good toy,’ I agree.

I wonder if she is from Indonesia. She has the high cheekbones, the smooth mocha skin of the local Bandung girls. But I do not ask her. She might be from the Philippines, or Malaysia, and people can get offended by this sort of thing.

She shows me a spinach-green dinosaur with a jaw that snaps up and down. A mother, pushing a pram, walks into our aisle, asks the assistant for help. When they move off I slip away.

*

The food court is near the supermarket. I used to treat myself to a glazed doughnut, and a small bowl of curry but now I am saving that money for Asep. My lunchbox of leftover rice and canned tuna is tucked away in my bag, but I will eat it later at the bus stop, not now, surrounded by others eating their burgers and noodles from clean, white styrofoam. I buy a Coke, take a seat on a bench and sip my drink, watch other shoppers pass me by.

That’s when I notice Mrs Lee. Seeing her makes the skin on my thigh itch. I’m surprised to see Pramiti shuffling behind her. Pramiti looks too skinny, much skinnier than when I saw her last. She needs to eat goat soup for a full week, suck the marrow from the bones. I glance away quickly, towards the shop to my left, at the khaki shorts, the row of blue shirts with a pineapple print. I’m sure Mrs Lee and Pramiti don’t see me, though. Mrs Lee is not interested, and Pramiti has her gaze to the ground. From the corner of my eye I see Mrs Lee go into the supermarket.

The scar on my thigh rasps against my black pants. It’s like a tree-root, traversing my flesh, leeching across the tender skin of my inner thigh. Whenever I brush the sensitive skin with my fingertips I feel a thrill of revulsion, even though it is no longer sore. It is soft, ridged, like the crocodile leather of Mrs Bowman’s handbag.

Someone sits down on the bench beside me and, turning slightly, I see it is Pramiti. She had noticed me after all.

My eyes search out Mrs Lee but she’s not in sight. ‘Pramiti. How are you?’

She shrugs. ‘Nothing has changed.’

Her black, wavy hair is pulled back into a red barrette and she wears faded jeans and a baggy t-shirt. My eyes are drawn to her throat, to the scar that is the twin of mine. It creeps from below the frayed neckline of her shirt, reaches for her right earlobe. When Mrs Lee had thrown that bowl of laksa at us, screaming, Can you once and for all stop putting so much fucking salt in the soup, it had landed mostly on Pramiti, over her chest. I was seated beside her, in the kitchen, slicing snake beans. What hadn’t splashed across Pramiti dropped into my lap. I think it was the coconut milk, and the palm oil, that burnt so badly. I don’t think a plain chicken noodle soup would’ve done so much damage.

‘You are still with Mrs Lee?’

‘I still owe them money. For my board, my agency fees. I cannot leave until that is paid,’ she answers, staring ahead. Her cheeks droop.

‘Can your agency not help?’

‘No. No help. Mr Lee, he has my passport. My papers.’

Three days after Mrs Lee had hurled the soup on us I’d packed my things, crept away while she was at the hairdresser’s. I’d been there for nearly four long months by then. But I was luckier than Pramiti. My agency had kept my passport and, although they couldn’t get my pay out of the Lees, they found me my new position with Mrs Bowman.

Glancing around to make sure Mrs Lee is nowhere nearby, I slide a little closer to Pramiti. Her hands and wrists are darker than mine, but long, almost impossibly slender. She still has the same nose-ring, a golden stud with a red stone. Plastic, maybe. I breathe in her scent, a pungent combination of layered sweat and sandalwood. Oh, how I’ve missed her company, her cheerful chatter, her terrible stories that left me feeling skittish, as if I’d drunk too many cups of coffee. When we lay down to sleep on our mats on the kitchen floor, she told me terrifying tales of servants who were beaten or starved. She told me of the time she saw a woman tug on her servant’s hair so hard, big clumps fell out, leaving a bald bloodied patch. And of the servant girl who hated her masters so much she murdered their baby. I could never keep up with whether she’d actually seen the dreadful things she told me of, or if she had caught snatches from the television news as I now do. Watching Pramiti’s dark face, I suddenly remember the time the master ushered her into his office and locked the door. I shied away from knowing, busied myself with the pots, the scrubbing. I shy away even now.

‘Did the Lees replace me?’ I ask.

She shakes her head. ‘No. I am alone.’

*

When I walk back into the garage at the Bowmans’ apartment building, I see that the faded lady, Mrs Alice, is still seated in her car. The window is down. She has a phone to her ear. Her other hand pounds the dashboard. Then her head falls forward and rests against the top of the steering wheel. She is trapped like many of us. For one reason or another.

*

For dinner I am cooking Mr Bowman’s favourite – chicken cacciatore. Mrs Bowman taught me how to cook it soon after I started working for them. While I marinate the chicken pieces I take out the ironing board, pull the clothes from the dryer and go to my room to iron.

‘How was your day off?’ asks Mrs Bowman as she stands in the doorway. ‘Hit the shops again?’

I dip my head. ‘Yes, thank you.’

She glances into my room, at the small pile of clothes Thomas has grown out of. She lets me keep them so I can take them home for Asep. Pausing in the doorway, she gazes at the baby photo of my son that I keep next to where I sleep.

A small frown puckers her brow. She looks a little sad. ‘You must miss him.’

I press the collar of Mr Bowman’s shirt with the iron, and nod. ‘Yes, I miss him. But I like working for Mrs Bowman too.’ I smile for her.

‘And he lives with your parents?’

‘Yes. And my husband.’

‘You should tell them to get the internet put on,’ she says. ‘Then you can skype whenever you want. You can use my computer.’

I keep smiling, and think of the erratic electricity we must buy on credit in my village, the grainy television picture, the phone kiosks.

When I return to the kitchen I pour a can of tomatoes into the pan over the chicken pieces. As I add the olives, and the oily fillets of anchovy, I imagine the ayam serai I will cook for my son when I get home. I will rub turmeric powder into the chicken drumsticks until my fingers are stained yellow. I will layer lemongrass, ginger, onion and garlic over the chicken, add a dash of water, wait until it simmers. I will let its fragrant steam mist across my face. Last, just before I serve it to him with boiled rice, I will add short stalks of shallots. I know my son will enjoy this.

I really hope Hendra is managing to save some of my pay. I must remind him to plant more vegetables in time for my homecoming. I can help him harvest them, take them to market. Maybe I will get some cleaning work too, near our home. Maybe the rich people, in their compound of new houses, will employ me now that I have this experience here.

I clean the kitchen, eat a small bowl of the cacciatore. I will leave the mopping until the morning. The Bowmans are still watching television, but I am weary, ready for sleep. I lie down on the single bed, stare at the photo of Asep. I know he’s bigger now, but when I close my eyes I picture him as I saw him last, flopped across my chest, asleep.

*

I’m handwashing Mrs Bowman’s silk blouse when she asks me to join her in the dining room. I wipe my hands down my pants, the detergent slick across my palms.

Mr Bowman has already left for work, and I have seen young Thomas off. Mrs Bowman gestures for me to take a seat. I lower myself onto the cushioned chair. It feels strange to be seated at the glass-top table.

Mrs Bowman sits across from me, bends to put on her running shoes. As she ties the laces I wonder if she is angry at me. I undercooked the bacon again this morning. I will never get used to the smell, the way it curls as it fries.

‘Don’t look so worried,’ she teases. ‘I just want to ask you a question.’

I try to smile, nod. ‘Yes, Mrs Bowman.’

‘Now, I think you only have another six months or so with us, huh?’

‘That is right.’

She pulls a hairband from her wrist, ties her blond hair back into a high ponytail. ‘Did you know that Indonesian people can no longer work overseas as domestic workers?’

‘Yes. I heard this.’

‘But because you are here, we can ask your agency for an extension. Did you know that?’

I shake my head. No, I did not know that.

Her lips lift into a smile, her pale eyes crinkle, entreat me. I have seen this look – when she is cajoling Thomas into eating his carrots or when she wants the concierge to pick up her dry-cleaning. ‘I’ve spoken with Anthony. We would love you to stay on with us. Maybe another year. Maybe two. Whatever you choose.’

Anxiety tightens my breathing, is white noise in my ears.

Her hand taps the back of mine. ‘We love having you here. We’d be so sad to lose you. And it will be good for you too. You can save more money. You can send more back for your lovely baby.’ She looks at her watch, stands up. ‘I’d better get to the gym.’

As she hooks her gym bag over her shoulder, she says, ‘Think about it. It’s totally up to you.’

*

I rub and rub the suds into the blouse. I won’t tell Hendra, I think, as I rinse it with fresh water. If I tell him, he will want me to stay. Make more money. Tears press against the back of my eyes.

Swirling the blouse around in the bucket, I make sure the water is clear of detergent.

I know I should stay. That is more money we can put aside for Asep. For school, for clothing. Maybe we could even buy him a small bicycle like Thomas has. I think of the train, the red and yellow one the sales assistant showed me yesterday. I can save up for that, too.

But then I won’t see Asep. I wring the water from the blouse, tap it against the side of the sink. I won’t be able to hold him again until he’s four, maybe five years old. He won’t know me. We won’t know the smell of each other.

I walk out onto the small balcony off the kitchen where I dry Mrs Bowman’s handwashed clothing, the clothing that cannot go through the dryer.

I won’t tell Hendra.

A new building is going up across the road. So far it is only a steel cage, but soon enough it will be clad with cement, marble and glass. I peg Mrs Bowman’s blouse to the airer.

Maybe I won’t tell Hendra.

I hear shouts. I peer over the side of the balcony. Below me, seven floors down, a shiny blue car swerves out from the garage onto the road, screeches to a halt. One of the parking attendants, I can’t see which one, jumps out from the driver’s seat, runs back into the building. A few seconds later he pushes someone forward. I see flashes of faded orange hair as he slaps her around the head. She ducks to her car, hands flapping, like there’s a myna bird swooping around her face. Her cries float up to me on the still, desert air before they are drowned out by the stutter of a jackhammer across the way.