2023
In the moments she steals from her day Hana sits with her three books. Brow knitted and finger tracing the lines as she reads. But like a fish in a pond she slips away when she senses my shadow fall over her. I have not had so much as a chance to clear my throat and re-offer my pedagogical services. You would think I was not the one who bought her the books in the first place so convinced does she seem that it is a great secret she is keeping even from me. I cannot deny that the irritation and the disappointment are there even as I try to swat them away: you cannot force, in the end it is her choice, etc. etc.
So how is it that little by little I find my heart softening towards her? She is not the ingratiating type. No attempts to insinuate herself into Mama’s good graces by complimenting her clothes or massaging her feet. One gets the impression that if she could have one superpower she would choose invisibility but not for the purposes of righting wrongs or catching villains. Light-footed silent quick and so slightly built that you could almost miss her inside her clothes. The T-shirts and trousers appear to be walking around uninhabited by a person. Yet when she enters the room my joints do a funny jellifying thing: weak in the knees people say and always I thought it was just a way of talking but no it is a real softening of the bones.
It is as if by offering her one small shred of education I have claimed her for my own. Go ahead and laugh; I myself am laughing at the ridiculousness of it. But perhaps when you have never done anything for anyone this is what a first act of charity does. Tethers the object of your charity to you forever even if they cannot see it yet. If I had been feeding a stray cat downstairs in the car park or a bird on the balcony from my hand I would feel the same way would I not? Here is my cat here is my bird we alone have a special bond no one else can see.
And just like such a cat or such a bird Hana herself does not waste her time philosophizing about our connection. The cat eats the fish head you have set down the bird pecks its grains out of your hand without naming you as the source. Yet at the customary hour they wait eagerly and when they catch a glimpse of you their little hearts soar. So it must be that Hana does not need to think It is tuan who bought this book for me each time she opens one but the feeling oh yes the feeling is there vivid and keen if she lets down her guard. This is why she avoids me: this shock at the intimacy of it.
When I think of it the skin on the back of my neck awakens and I find myself teetering in a strange and unsettling way between monstrous cruelty and mad love. Do you know what I mean? It is as though as that trusting pecking bird perches on the palm of my hand I realize that I could stroke its feathers with one gentle finger or I could crush it to death: here I am suspended in that moment when both seem not just possible but desirable. And then to rise and rise to pull myself up to the peak of the wave before it comes crashing down always on the side of love. The blood rushing right to the head and the breath knocked out of me. But my hammering heart full of loving kindness.
You have jumped to inevitable conclusions. You think I am spouting pure bullshit to hide something ugly. You think of course that I have outlined for you the reactions of all my body parts except the one that really counts here. The one between my legs that is really leading this dance. I say loving-kindness and you hear filthy lust. But that is not it. As much as Mama hoped when Ani first came to us many years ago that such a thing might be possible for me. I still remember her shameless whispers: “Think about it. What’s wrong? She’s a good woman. Strong and kind. You could have a good life with her.”
Of course it is only desperation that could drive a middle-class mother to matchmake her son with an Indonesian maid. She had given up on me by then. Not daring to ask questions and not wanting to know anyway. But she need not have worried because my preferences in that regard have always been rather orthodox. I was not as she might have feared secretly lusting after lorry drivers or messenger boys. With Ani she finally dared to make a last-ditch effort and I laughed in her face.
I felt nothing at all for Ani. Nothing between the legs nothing in the joints nothing in the belly. But I knew only the first option. What I feel for this waif I did not know was possible. When I teeter between love and the impulse to destroy you must realize that I do so because I am afraid of this kind of love. It will destroy me. Perhaps this is what mothers feel for their babies. I am no mother nor even a father but I imagine it must be like this: this fearsome sensation of a tiny living thing entirely under your power. I even feel—now you will really think I am raving—that I played a part in her creation. Not in the biological sense but in some more mystical way. There was a space that needed to be filled and like a god I conjured her up to fill it. I conjured her up with my unnamed longing and now here she is pulling on rubber boots five sizes too big for her—her legs rattling around like sticks in them—to go off and scrub someone’s porch. Here she is skulking back from the pasar malam with a fistful of hideously ugly hair clips she’s spent her extra pennies on. (Why does she feel she needs to hide them behind her back? Out of habit perhaps. Or perhaps out of fear that her auntie will scold her for wasting money on colourful plastic rubbish. Or perhaps out of some misguided notion that a grown man’s eyes should not be insulted with the sight of red Hello Kitty clips.) Here she is slipping past me on the stairs so close that the smell of her cheap astringent shampoo fills my nostrils and splits my heart clean in two. Tomorrow I will give her a few ringgit to buy herself something more forgiving to the hair.