Isabella Sin turned away from the man preparing her char kuey teow to look up at the sky. It was yet another hot tropical day, and she would rather not watch the beads of sweat on the noodle hawker’s face coalesce into a globe that would then start rolling down the slope of his cheek, gathering momentum until, with the man’s next energetic slide and toss of his wok, it launches into air, missing the dirty rag draped around his neck to land on her lunch-in-progress without so much as a plip.
The sky blazed blue. Little puffs of white clouds scattered about, their edges jagged, carelessly torn and discarded. Isa narrowed her eyes to locate the sun, just to see where it was. She looked away quickly the moment her vision blurred with brightness. Four and a half miles away, Maxwell Hill roosted on the horizon, and above it hovered dark swathes of monsoon clouds, nothing like the trifles hanging over her head. It would rain later today, no doubt.
Isa caught herself and shook her head, half smiling. According to family legend, both her grandfathers had been competent cooks, but here she was, waiting her turn for greasy street food. Her cooking was so terrible that no one wanted to marry her—that was Isa’s mother’s pet theory number one. Pet theory number two blamed Isa’s marital status on her beige-flecked eyes and propensity to speak proper English. These traits were simply too off-putting to local men, who thought her stuck up beyond words. “Too good for Manglish, izzit?” some would sneer. “If you like speaking like ang moh why you stay here lah?” others puzzled. Like the town of Taiping itself, she was too globalized to attract those seeking unalloyed rural peace and quiet, and yet not sophisticated enough to be metropolitan chic. A year in London had ruined her, Isa’s mother said. She should never have gone. And all she had to show for it was family shame coursing through her veins, her grandparents’ illicit marriage sheening her irises pale topaz under strong sunlight.
Among her inheritance was the highly practical gift of rain betting. Today’s first raindrops would fall around 3:15 p.m. Isa squinted at the hills and nodded. Gong Gong had been a local legend in the field. Even after he’d become chairbound, he insisted on perching in front of the largest, best window of the house. When it did rain, he grinned gap-toothed and victorious at drizzling skies while Isa hurried to jam the jalousie window panes shut, for fear of the old man getting drenched.
At least he was really, really good at something, Isa thought wistfully, entering the shade of her office building. She used to want to be a writer. She’d spent years writing poetry and starting the Great Malaysian Novel. Now here she was, almost thirty, writing ad copy in a town whose biggest advertising opportunities lay in calls to franchise global brands like Starbucks and KFC. She and the town, they were both forever playing catch-up, waiting for trends to play out elsewhere before catching the last carriage of a train pulling away.
At 2:59 p.m. Isa peered out the window closest to her desk. The remains of her lunch lay next to her in a recycling wastebasket meant for paper, wafting smells of refried oil around the air-conditioned space.
Yes, as she’d predicted. The little torn cotton balls from earlier had become black and solid, reminding her of the wads of makeup remover she wiped over her eyes every night. She waved hurried byes to her colleagues and left to collect her clothes hanging out on lines to dry. If she didn’t get home before the rain began in earnest, she would have to wash those clothes all over again. She straddled her motorbike and looked up at the skies one last time before kicking the machine to life.
Nobody in town had a dryer. No one that Isa knew, at least. Everyone relied on the sun’s wholesome, germ-destroying rays to toast their laundry. Off on the horizon lightning flashed, a heavenly redwood tree spreading golden roots down to earth. Then rain fell. Drat. Her prediction was off after all. She was still a few minutes away from home, but the rain, lazy and steady, had already soaked her back through.
Near the top of a slope, where she could almost see what lay beyond on the other side of the mound, she revved her motorbike. It lurched under her. Together they crested the slope, and then she was pulled into descent. She leaned backward to counter gravity, left hand squeezing, engaging the brakes. The back wheel stiffened and dragged. The motorcycle slid faster anyway. She looked at the houses going by on the left. There was the one with bougainvillea in many colors, next to the mosque. Another where an old man liked to sit on a stone bench abutting his rusty gate. But no one was out now.
Finally, her own gates came into view. Water ran down her blouse as she dismounted. Next to her the bike hummed, propped up and listing to one side, as she slipped her hand through rusty metal bars to reach for the latch. From the clotheslines strung between two papaya trees, skirts and dress shirts hung heavy, gorged with rain and swaying dully in the wind. She dashed around, pulling them off and cradling their limp carcasses in her arms.
The air smelled faintly of chemicals. Isabella stood at the kitchen sink, rinsing out the tin mug she had used to drain the last of some mystery alcohol she’d found on the top of the fridge. The rain had stopped. Through the kitchen window she could see the washed-out sky, bland like cheap pasar malam clothes after their third wash, all bled out.
Just when she was starting to feel better, it was time to go back to work. She moved her tongue about in her mouth, touching first one cheek, then the other. She had dawdled as long as she could, but the excuse of rain had worn out. From the bedroom she picked through the pile of still-damp clothes for a jacket. It was a short trip to the office, but the winds could be nippy after a bout of rain.
She didn’t register the drops of revenant rain until she was on her bike. She cocked her head. The second wave was a pitter patter against her helmet, almost playful, like a wooden fish in the hands of a monk with no sense of tempo. Isa revved the bike. Her neck felt stiff and her tongue was still oddly heavy and clammy from the alcohol. She wanted to course through the drizzle, zipping in and out of slow-moving, cow-like cars. And then rain roared. Without transition, the fickle monsoon weather let loose. Above rooftops, telephone lines thrashed wildly, as if carrying messages so unspeakable they could not bear it. Next door, the antenna on the neighbor’s car thrashed about, demonically possessed.
The last scene Isa saw before she rushed into the house was the trees in her compound bending double, clotheslines yanked taut. She hoped they would not snap in the storm. Overhead, water poured so fast and so hard that it all seemed a vibrating solid block, no individual component discernible. It would be an hour, maybe more, before she could go back to work, and by that time there would be no point. Isa’s heart lifted. She thought regretfully of the empty bottle in the garbage.
Still, the afternoon was hers, and the house, hers. She sat down on a rattan chair in the half darkness. The marble floor was chilly against her soles. The house grew dimmer, and soon she could not see very much at all, just dark lumps surrounding her. She thought about getting up to find a book to read—something she hadn’t done for a while. But books were no longer about distant worlds and alien people who did unimaginable things. Now she was too old; she knew too much. She couldn’t truly inhabit fictional worlds anymore.
She drifted off to the sounds of waterfalls.
The sun was down when Isa woke. Her throat felt parched.
Something was wrong. The house was too dark. It must be raining still. She could hear it, a rushing of water in the background.
She groped her way against furniture and walls to reach the kitchen, flicking on lights as she went. Maybe there was more mystery alcohol to be found, stashed behind fine bowls and trays never brought down to use. Strange, but the more light switches she flipped, the louder the rain sounded, as if her senses were dependent upon each other. And then icy marble turned into lukewarm liquid. Isa yelped. Water eddied about her ankles. All around her, the kitchen was a tank of tepid, dirty broth.
The water invading the house seemed calm, content to mill, but somewhere outside she could hear a different version, angry and unceasing. She stood rigid in her kitchen pool, dazed, looking at the wall clock ticking. She had only been asleep for a little over an hour. How could this have happened?
She saw now that the water, brown with dirt and thick with soil, was coming in fast through the kitchen door sill. That door usually opened to a thin scrap of land on which she grew a pair of hunchback rambutan trees, the favorite toilet of her neighbor’s turkeys. She heard the fowl now, cackling like nihilists greeting the end of the world with joy.
Was there a bucket in that cupboard under the sink? The mop was in the hallway closet. And somewhere, gathering dust, was the old-fashioned chamber pot she had accepted, sniggering, from Gong Gong.
The water was creeping up her calves now, translucent nude stockings she was slowly, very slowly, pulling on. Isa felt wild. She wanted to close her hand around the wooden door’s knob and swing it wide open to let in the rabble of furious water. It would be better than the maddening slow seep. Toaster, kettle, microwave, tudung saji. Those would be gone soon, ruined by dirt water. Radio, table, chairs, refrigerator? She swept the kitchen, taking inventory.
Thunder sounded directly above. The house dimmed for a beat and the lights flickered twice, as if lightning had been brought indoors, just like the mud and rain. Isa waded out of the kitchen and into the bedroom. Dresser, footrest, gold-embroidered slippers, tacky music box with a lid that did not fully clamp down on overflowing jewelry. She picked the box up, put it down. In the living room, television, jade Buddha statuette, decorative piano no one played. She tried lifting the television, just to see. Too heavy.
Back in the bedroom she found a suitcase that was still half-filled with shirts and underwear, crumpled, and a handkerchief, neatly folded. She shook the clothes out onto the bed, then splashed about filling the suitcase with what she could, trying to be smart about it—was the object’s worth equal to the volume of suitcase being taken up? Music box, in. Delicate antique cup, okay. Gong Gong’s gold watch, sure.
In no time the suitcase was full. She clamped the lid shut and hoisted it, panting, onto the top of the piano, unsettling a patch of dust. When she clambered back down, the water was waist-high. She would have to leave.
But first, she moved her legs with difficulty and made for the kitchen. In times of emergency, the authorities always advised storing potable water. From above the sink she took down a Sustagen water bottle and started filling it from the purifier hooked up to the faucet. And then she glanced down upon the breadth of water surrounding her, and the absurdity of what she was doing kicked in. She laughed until good water trembled into bad water.
Snorting, she took a half step backward and fell into the bad water. Under the surface, the flood smelled at once rotten and too alive. The urgent gushing above turned into a dull gurgling below, like someone trying to rinse with a chunk of food wedged in one cheek pocket. Isa went into a half-hearted breaststroke. Her feet kept brushing the flood bed. With one last look at the kitchen door (was it bowing?), she paddled her way to the front of the house, fighting the dragging waters. If the scourge was coming in through the back, then perhaps leaving the front door open would allow the house to be more of a conduit and less of a trap, within which the entirety of her things waited, doomed to be ruined.
Her hands slapped the front door. She floated upright. The fear ratcheted up, doubling, tripling, infiniting. She pushed down hard on the handle and unleashed water everywhere. It tackled her by the legs, forcing her forward like a mob into the yard, then flattened her so it could trample on top and race ahead faster, gathering rage.
Her ears popped when she resurfaced. The front yard was a filthy swamp with random islands of bald dirt rising above opaque sludge. Her clotheslines were still cinched tightly to a tree trunk on one end, but the other drooped, trailing off into the marsh, offering hope and help to whomever might fall in.
It took her almost a minute before she noticed she wasn’t alone. Her neighbor, Mrs. Rao, was in her own front yard, soaked to the skin. She was bent over, examining something Isa couldn’t make out over the low wall separating their two houses. Isa scratched her own skin. It itched from the flood, lukewarm indoors but cooling now, the wetness not so much crusting on her skin as growing into it, melding and putting down roots.
Mrs. Rao’s hair was plastered to her skull, streaks of scalp showing. A drip of water fell from her forehead.
“Texture macam yogurt,” she announced as Isa splashed closer, referring to the mud. “Milo yogurt.”
“Hmm,” Isa assented. She surveyed the damage in her neighbor’s yard. A rattan stool with rigid strands unfurled and sticking out like broken springs, and rock-hard sofa squares covered in flowery fabric. An old boom box stranded nearby, a glistening rectangularity.
That night, tossing on a motel bed, Isa dreamed of Gong Gong, strumming an abacus like an instrument, smiling the whole time.
Kuala Lumpur was no London. Hell, come to that, it wasn’t even Shanghai or Singapore. Sure it tried hard enough; there were things like Berjaya Times Square, the world’s largest something or other built by a French company, and Tribeca Kuala Lumpur, “a contemporary expression of downtown living.” Cyberjaya answered to Silicon Valley. But no: it was like buying counterfeit Gucci and Prada, just not the same at all.
At least her sublet was in the heart of this wannabe metropolis. Isa watched a sliver of skyline beckoning between two office towers across the street. Her mother had just called, and Isa had let it go to voice mail. She didn’t feel like explaining for the umpteenth time why she’d chosen to move by herself to KL when there was a perfectly fine spare bedroom in her mother’s semidetached unit.
“It’s just for a while, until they restore my place,” Isa’d said.
“How long?”
“One month, maybe two.”
“Wah! Must be expensive! How come must take so long?”
“The flood did quite a bit of damage, Mum.”
“You won lotto meh? Come stay with me lah! I cook for you!”
But no, Isa had preferred to interpret the flood as a sign. She’d been ready to leave her job anyway. Bigger things awaited, she felt sure of it.
She reached for a laptop on the dining counter, which was positioned only a few feet from the front door. The studio was undeniably small. She planned on living frugally and alone for a while, so the size suited her.
On the laptop’s screen was a colorful poster. While exploring KL, she’d seen a paper copy tacked to the trunk of a streetlamp, but that one had been stripped of its vibrant colors by tropical heat and humidity. The poster called, in English and Malay, for a congregation of citizens. It prophesized the biggest peaceful demonstration against governmental corruption and injustice the country had ever seen.
Isa felt vaguely ashamed. She had read in the newspapers about rampant corruption at the top, of course, but living in a small town had somehow removed all urgency from the topic. Taxes kept rising, while the ringgit kept dropping. More and more people had been arrested for dissent (called “sedition” by those in power). In Taiping, these events had seemed as remote and immovable as the mountains, always there, bringing rain or blessing fair weather as they wished. It had never occurred to her that she could do something about it. But now that she was in the heart of the action, she could feel the restless power of the people crackling like static in the air. She wanted to hum along with it, tune into the frequency.
She got up early the day of the protest. She was ready. There was a chicken floss bun in the fridge and a new orange shirt laid out at the foot of the bed. It was hours still until the protest. On the internet, a rumor was going around that the government had ordered a shutdown of LRT and monorail lines. It seemed silly, hoping to thwart protesters by taking away public transportation that was infuriatingly unpredictable to begin with. She sneered. Yeah, that would make angry people shrug and go home all right.
The orange shirt was one she had picked out at random in a pasar malam. It was several shades off from the “official” orange modeled by organizers in posters, really more persimmon than tangerine. But with a bandanna tied around her forehead, there could be no doubt who she was with.
When she was still a secondary school student, then Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad had vowed that Malaysia would become a developed nation by 2020. She had been impressed back then, awed that one man could make such a grandiose promise and be responsible for dragging a whole nation to the peak in his wake. Now there were only a handful of years left until the deadline, and one dollar from neighboring Singapore was worth more than three ringgit. They were about to default on that mad boast, and Isa realized that there had been nothing wonderful about one man staking a whole country’s honor in such a spectacular way. She felt that Mahathir had signed away some inexpressible thing that belonged in part to her. Somehow, it fell upon the citizens to feel sheepishly ashamed.
She chugged a whole cup of coffee and regretted it. What if there were no bathrooms? She might have to hold it in for hours and hours.
One last look at the event invite for walking directions. A mouse scroll brought into view a photo of a sinewy young man. Isa felt a twinge looking at the face of the movement, his hair spiked and his arms crossed. So young. Years younger than she was, and they were calling him the hope of the nation.
Foreign and local commentary alike were predicting crackdowns. If things get desperate, run—that was what she had read in her brief research on what to do during a demonstration.
Outside, it was relatively cool, really quite a nice day for a protest. At least heat stroke was one less thing to worry about. Otherwise there might be more martyrs than expected, suffocated by halos of soaked cheesecloth air and shrouded in auras of sticky, weighty sweat. Isa walked along the edge of a tar road, staying in the shade thrown by tall buildings: banks and business towers and corporate plazas. The streets were unusually deserted. Afraid of looters, shop owners had shuttered their businesses for the day. The weather was so fine, though, that the scene did not seem sinister, nothing like a zombie movie. As she got closer to the designated congregation point, she fell in with others wearing orange, mostly young or middle-aged people of all races, and now and then a senior citizen. At least the seniors all seemed to be with companions, probably neighbors or family. But she’d seen an ad for fortified milk recently that had a CGI depiction of old bones snapping readily. It made Isa worry for them. She looked at one protester, layers of wrinkles barely holding up his cheeks.
Her steps slowed. Somewhere ahead, the vanguard she couldn’t see had crawled to a stop. Overhead a helicopter buzzed by. Media? Police? To them the protesters must have looked like an accordion, the center packing into itself as more and more people shuffled in from the two opposite ends of the congregation point. Isa looked at a few people crossing the two-way road toward where she was standing. A sudden impulse made her want to push through the bodies and jostle her way to the middle of the road, onto a narrow divider overgrown with weeds stirring in the breeze. She wanted to skip along the divider, balancing herself, and clear this can of sardines. It could be a shortcut of sorts to the heart of the protest. But too many layers of people hemmed her in. It was probably safer being crushed like this anyway, she thought—strength in numbers. There was no reason for her to feel uneasy.
The crowd inched forward a bit more, and she saw them, the police, standing out in deep navy and some sort of helmet and gas mask combo. The respirator-helmet was bright red, just a little bit orange under the sun’s glare. The back of the contraption read “POLIS.”
Many protestors looked expectant. Some seemed grim. At least—she looked up at the sky—it certainly would not rain today. Funny that she’d come to inspect clouds so minutely, never having been one of those kids who pretended that clouds looked like dogs or cars or whatever. The clouds looked nothing like anything. They were useful skybound tools that could offer a glimpse of the future.
A speech started somewhere down the road. From the quality of the sound, someone was using a handheld megaphone. Isa stood on tiptoe to see better, but everyone else around was also agitating to be witnesses.
“Demokrasi!” a man close behind her shouted abruptly, interrupting the speech and making her jump. She felt her heart thrum. There were isolated cheers and echoes in response to the outburst, but the majority seemed intent on listening to the unknown speaker. It must be the very young man featured on the poster.
“Tanah tumpahnya darahku!” the voice projected, tinny. “This is the land on which our blood is spilt!”
“Our blood! Yes! Our country!”
Now the full force of the crowd could be heard. Sharp whistles and a blended roar traveled up and down the road, creating such a thick, substantial atmosphere that Isa felt she would be able to crowd surf on top. She was still unconsciously on tiptoe, smiling, not because she wanted to see better, but because she really did feel buoyed. This was right. Everything was right. She was here, and she mattered, and they would have to listen.
She matched every inch gained by those ahead, shuffling her feet along. They all wanted to be closer, hear the young man better.
“Where is our money?” he roared.
“Who gave Leonardo DiCaprio Marlon Brando’s Oscar?” he demanded.
“Why does the PM’s wife have so many handbags? Whose money paid for Miranda Kerr’s jewelry?”
“Ours! Ours! Ours!” everyone chanted.
“Make them explain! This is our country, not theirs, no matter what they say. When they say you are not patriotic, you say you are! Because you love Malaysia”—cheers—“you do not tolerate those who are greedy and want to suck the country dry. We love Malaysia! The PM does not love Malaysia!”
“He does not!” screamed the crowd.
“Let’s make him explain! Tell us where our money went!” the youth’s voice cracked. Isa’s heart soared. They would now wind their way through the streets of KL until they reached the royal palace, where they would submit a petition asking the prime minister to step down. They had been assured it was a respectfully worded document.
The procession snaked for maybe three hundred feet, then convulsed. She tripped into the person right ahead. Behind her, the wall of humans started jostling, food atoms in a microwave.
“Hey!” she cried out, shoved off-balance again.
“Merdeka!” someone shouted.
“Merdeka! Merdeka!” Different sections of the crowd picked it up.
“Demokrasi!”
A loudspeaker whinnied from far off, then a different voice came on, not the youth. “Everyone! Friends! Do not provoke. Do not push the police! They are allowing us to walk peacefully to the palace. Stay on the path!”
Smattered booing. Isa tried to keep pace as well as she could, stepping on others’ shoes a few times. Suddenly the crowd ahead of her loosened, blank spaces appearing like in a slinky stretched. A cheer rose from behind, then everyone rushed forward, sweeping her along like so much flotsam. She hurried her feet and thought of the flood, feeling suspended in some thick jelly medium, legs paddling uselessly in place. The crowd veered sharply. Then chaos. Some people screamed for them to stop and go back the way they’d come, while others shouted the imperative to push forward and show the country what people power looked like.
When the nets of tear gas whirred over her personal piece of sky, Isa ran. Those who had buoyed her up had scattered. The loudspeaker had ceased; no more instructions from voices high and thin in their effort to carry. She ran blindly and immediately started choking, stumbling onto one knee. She had not cried during the young man’s passionate speech, but tears came hard now, government chemicals turning her body on itself.
She was on both knees. Not fair, she kept thinking. My tears are supposed to be for me, to cry for my country swooning to ruins. It shouldn’t be like this. I haven’t even cried for my father yet.
A hand hauled her up by one armpit. She sucked in a big gulp of air in surprise and pain. Her body rose, hacking and choking, against her will. She was shuffled lopsided down the street, away from the advancing tear gas trucks. She tried to lift her head to see how far away the enemy loomed. She couldn’t; she was puking dry toxic air. A damp shirt met her outstretched hand. Someone gloved her hand with their own and helped clamp the shirt over her nose and mouth. She struggled. The hand became a vise. Soon she realized she felt better. The soggy shirt was acting as a filter, keeping out some of the poisoned air. What was it wet with? Drain water? Rain puddles? Sweat? Spit? Urine?
The trucks closed in. The arc of their discharge sagged and swelled, sagged and swelled, gaining ground. In another moment their ejection would splash over her.
Isa’s handler changed directions. They had been limping along the traffic road, taking the same path the trucks took, trying to outrun them. Now they swerved, making a diagonal cut to get off the streets, heading toward a row of shuttered retail shops.
“Help! Tolong! Open!” It was a man holding on to her, and he had a deep voice. Close to her nose, a fist started banging on the shutters of a watch repair shop, the pounding reverberating through her body. She tried to lean less against the man propping her up.
“Please go away . . . I’m just a poor shopkeeper! Please lah, I can’t help you!” came the muffled reply through rusty shield-like shutters.
They tried a few more shops, the sound of metal meeting fist punctuating their noisy attempts to breathe. Once, the fist slowed, came off the shutters, and shook itself around like a wet dog. She shrank. The man cursed.
At last a kedai runcit lifted its gate. Isa stumbled in, shoved from behind. The Malay shopkeeper looked at her with pity visible even through tear-blurred eyes.
She was steered toward a plastic stool. “Breathe,” a woman whispered. Isa felt a swell of gratitude, and more tears came. “Thank you,” she whispered back.
The shopkeeper brought water. She looked up into his face. It was wrinkled at the ends of both eyes, but perfectly smooth everywhere else. She took the shirt off her face and shivered, inexplicably smelling the crispness of a sunny winter morning. She scanned faces to find the one who had gotten her away. A man, thin limbs, thick square eyebrows, nodded. Isa offered the shirt to him.
“It’s not mine,” he said.
Isa knew she was lucky. There had been arrests at the protest, people roughed up. The authorities had managed to sink their claws into the young face of the movement, who’d been held for days, then unceremoniously released. Since then, there had been no word from him, which was unusual. The movement issued statements saying he was recovering, but word on the internet was that the police had broken him, snapped his spirit like fragile old bones.
Isa wondered what had been done to him. She imagined beatings, psychological tortures, and threats. Would she have held up in his place? How long? She tried to imagine, measuring her own worth. Which was the one that had gotten to him, physical or psychological?
She felt surer about withstanding any mind tricks they might play on her, so it would probably be something physical that would make her succumb. But she had read that women could bear much more pain than men could. On the other hand, there were things, physical things, which could be done to women that were not usually done to men.
Isa shuddered. She abandoned the thought exercise and got up for water and food. Her throat felt forever parched these days.
Carefully, she spread open a greasy bundle of newspaper and banana leaf to reveal the nasi lemak wrapped within. Then she groped for her mouse and nudged the coconut rice aside to make way for navigation. She’d started feeling paranoid out there alone, so here she was, in the safety of her own place, ready to learn more about the secrets her government was keeping from her.
She clicked on five articles, started four, and finished one. They were all about a recent scandal that would have made Malaysia, once again, an international laughing-stock, if only the international community actually cared enough about the country to pay attention. The Federal Court had reaffirmed Anwar’s sodomy conviction. It was ridiculous! Amazing enough that they had gotten away with locking up a deputy prime minister and opposition party leader for six years—six years!—over a charge like unnatural sex, of all things! Now it seemed there was a legion of shadowy, disposable young men waiting in the wings, ready to emerge, spread themselves wide, and swear, hand on Quran, that they had been sodomized by Anwar, thus giving the government another excuse to throw Anwar in jail. It would never end! They had found the perfect “crime,” one that could never be conclusively proven but that could be used to jail someone on the weight of false testimony alone, time and again.
Isa heaved an oily sigh. Even that hurt, air sanding down her windpipe. She refreshed the news page, wanting the distraction of new outrage. The page loaded in fits, and before it was even done she’d caught two words that made her feel like her heart was making a run for it through her bowels. What was this? “Isa Sin,” her name. Why was she a top featured article? Frantic flashbacks to the day of the protest brought no answers—she had not done anything to draw attention to herself; as far as protesters went she had been average, even subpar, needing the help of others to escape the tear gas trucks. She had not incited anyone. The only sounds she had made were gasps for air. She hadn’t been one of those leading charges against fences of policemen either. What could it be?
“Poems.” “Inflammatory.” “Pornographic.” Even during the protest she had not felt such fear. It bloated her brain, pushing it against her skull. How did they know she used to write poetry?
Under a picture of Anwar’s care-lined face were two poems:
Let’s Talk About Sodomy
By Isa Sin
How it always starts:
something goes in,
something else comes out.
Jail, I mean.
A change of clothes,
a change of goals,
a change of souls.
Would you?
If you could self
-inflict a white eye.
Wide-eyed, we learn how
bellies belie
anus’ onus,
how
semen in seams of men,
of mattress, matters
in court, of course.
The evidence, strained,
not as if through a sieve,
but meaning tough to conceive.
We case a building
where they are
building a building
because we are
building our case.
Let’s talk. Just
Yes or No,
Please.
Let’s Talk About Sodomy II
By Isa Sin
There is always a sequel;
truth lies in repetition.
Re-dig ridic relics.
Those who do not learn from the lessons of
history are condemned to repeat its mistakes, ha haha.
What century are we in anyway?
Your Lordship has lied.
Seriously, can’t you control your own lordship a little
better?
It’s bad enough we have to take seriously
the application of the penal code
toward penile penetration.
It’s almost as bad as arguing that
“anal canal” rhymes.
Let’s talk, I go.
You can can it, you say.
“Can I fuck you today?” the nation is asked.
But
there was still light filtering through the curtains.
Already there were over a thousand comments, most of them simple “likes” and thumbs-up icons accompanied by digital laughter. Interspersed were expressions of disgust and speeches about declining morals. Isa’s hand slipped off her mouse. Her palm was wet. Half-consciously she lifted it to cover her mouth, then grimaced as the film of sweat stuck, transferred to her face.
An arrhythmic pounding startled her. She jerked up. Some part of her cracked, maybe a shoulder. The door handle rattled violently. The overlapping knocks and the energetic vibrations of the handle told her there was more than one person beyond. It wasn’t a friend, and it wasn’t anyone next door. It must be—
“Polis!”
She wanted to shout above the din that she was here, so that they would stop the assault on her door. But even the banging had a forceful authority of its own, and it muted her. She hurried across the living room, noticing on her way that one of the prints hanging on the wall was crooked. As soon as the door swung open they stomped into her apartment. She had barely time to scuttle aside and avoid contact. Dimly she congratulated herself also on her perspicacity, for it was the police, standing around her space in heavy boots—she knew it—and scanning rooms to find—what? Whom? Her heart roiled.
“You are detained under the Internal Security Act.”
She registered that the shortest man seemed to be in charge. He seemed gentle enough as he put a guiding hand between her shoulder blades and steered her deeper into the apartment. She made out that she was supposed to pack one change of clothes. As she walked out of the living area, she saw from the corner of her eye that the other taller policemen were rifling through the printouts near her computer, all of which were about some form or another of the government’s wrongdoing.
“What am I being arrested for?” she asked, though she knew.
She couldn’t find her duffle bag. Impatient, the short policeman shook out a Giant supermarket plastic bag from the kitchen and ordered her to put her clothes into the bag. She blushed, trying her best to sandwich her bra and panties in between a T-shirt and a pair of artificially distressed black jeans. A different policeman stood nearby, shaking his head, his face mournful. Isa did not understand what was intended by his emotive gesture. She looked at him inquiringly, pleadingly. He produced a pair of handcuffs.
Meanwhile, over a hundred miles away in Taiping, residents were locking their gates and staying indoors. A tiger had escaped from the zoo, which was located smack in the heart of town. Visitors had been ordered to evacuate the zoo, and no one knew where the tiger was. The animal had cleared nearly six feet of wall in a single bound, because the commotion of a citizen’s protest nearby drove it mad, and it could bear the cacophony no more.
Isa’s throat burned more than ever. She had not been given water for hours—how many she didn’t know because they had left her alone in the back of a truck. At least they had uncuffed her. With no windows, it had been impossible to follow the turns and pauses she had felt the truck make on its journey. They could be one, two, three states away by now, for all she knew. But it seemed clear that she had not been brought to a police station, for there was one just a few streets away from her apartment, and it would not have taken nearly as long to get there. If she had to guess, she would say that it was one of the silent hours just before sunrise.
There had been a female officer in uniform waiting in the back of the truck when they herded her in. Twice during the dark journey, Isa tried to engage this woman, but Isa’s voice was still weak and easy to ignore. After the second attempt, Isa started crying. That was when the short policeman had leaned over and uncuffed her, so she could swipe at her face.
She suddenly yearned for the Giant plastic bag that contained her clothes. She felt around for it with her hands and feet. No. No. Emptiness. Air. Her heart roiled again. They had taken it away.
The double doors of the truck swung outward. Isa made no move to get up until her eyes had adjusted. She peered. Four men and a woman materialized, waiting for her. The woman was the same one who had made the journey with Isa. There was a giant mole on the officer’s right cheek, a mound of matte on an otherwise porous surface. Isa hadn’t noticed it back in the truck’s blindfold of boxy darkness.
She duckwalked to the rim of the truck and extended one leg, but the woman with the mole shooed her back in, punching her fists aggressively forward.
“Please,” Isa begged. “No need to cuff me. Tak payahlah, puan, tuan. I’m not going to run away.”
The woman clucked her tongue and grabbed Isa’s hands. Behind her, an officer Isa had not seen before met her eyes. She turned away, scared.
The truck was parked only a few feet away from a building entrance, which opened up into a room with lights that were too bright for her. She blinked her scrunched-up eyes as they flanked her forward.
“Where is this?”
“Police Remand Center.” Isa wished she didn’t have to cough so badly. What was a “remand”?
“Please, water.”
This time no one seemed to have heard her. She lifted her head and realized that it had been bowed all this while, and all she had seen of the room was its blank cement floor. She chastised herself and made a mental note to be observant. She should be scrutinizing any and all details. It seemed like an important thing to do in her situation.
The room was fluorescent ceiling lights, yellow once-white walls, one single small window, and uniformed bodies occupying spaces where furniture should be. She was estimating the room’s dimensions when the female officer came up, tapped her arm, and then was propelling her by her elbow down a hallway that branched from the main space they were just in.
Doors appeared on both sides of the hallway. Immediately, Isa saw the lone open door waiting for her near the end, before the hallway became part of a T-junction. Fear that had been numbed to a pause now came back in a strong burst, like yet another wave of fireworks when a lull had seemed to signal the end.
She must have slowed because the woman was wrenching her elbow forward. Isa listed and involuntarily remembered the protest, when she had also been lopsided, hauled along by her armpit. She shook.
Staring at her, waiting in the room, were one tall man and two other women. There was a single wooden chair, but no one sat on it. The tall man had a plain, nondescript face forming the backdrop for an impressive mustache. He spoke first, telling the woman with the mole to uncuff Isa.
She rubbed her wrists together and looked from one strange face to the next, her subconscious inventing hope by having her pick out the person most likely to help her. Perhaps the petite woman in a tudung, whose lips looked soft and sympathetic? She looked out of place here, more like a kindergarten teacher.
“Please, water,” Isa repeated. Her stomach flared when the woman with soft lips was indeed the one who moved, walking out of her field of vision, then returning with a bottle of Spritzer.
The water was oddly warm, like it had been sitting out in the sun, but of course it was still night, dumb and dark.
“Take off your clothes,” the tall man ordered while the bottle of water was still tilted, sloping into her mouth. Isa choked and sputtered water down her shirt and jeans.
The tall man sneered.
“Please,” she begged.
“Please what? Oh, don’t worry, I’m not interested in your body, I like pretty women only, not ugly ones like you,” he laughed.
Isa trained her eyes in turn on the women in the room, but none of them had any expression on their faces. When the woman with the mole advanced a step, Isa knew that the reason they were present was to help strip her. She grabbed hold of the hem of her shirt.
“I want a lawyer, a lawyer.”
The man laughed again.
“Lawyer-lawyer semua still sleeping lah, ah moi. Come on ah moi, don’t be shy, I already said you are too ugly for me. Look at you! Everything flat. Eyes dirty color. Macam mongrel. You want me to close my eyes? Okay I close my eyes.” He shut his eyes, but immediately opened them again. “See? I close my eyes when you take off your clothes.”
“Why?” she cried, nonsensical.
A hand touched the skin of her arm. She shrieked.
“I’ll do it myself!” she sobbed.
“Good girl,” said the man.
She pulled her shirt upward, moving as slowly as possible, and then suddenly yanked the whole thing off in one move, afraid somehow that by undressing slowly it would look like a striptease. She held her shirt in a fist by her side until the woman with soft lips came and took it from her.
The man’s eyes were not closed, but he was making a show of staring at a corner of the ceiling. Isa looked up. In that corner was a water stain and, nearby, a black arrow pointing to Mecca.
She stepped out of her jeans and looked helplessly at the woman with soft lips. From behind her, she sensed the woman with the mole coming.
The man started up again: “Rilek lah ah moi. You must have shown your body to lots and lots of guys, right? I know you enjoy different-different men. You look like that kind of woman. So this is nothing special, right?”
“Please,” she begged, this time looking at no one, at the wall in front of her. “Let me keep my underwear.”
The woman with the mole stepped behind Isa and unclasped her bra, but pinched the two halves together until Isa surrendered, raising her own hands to take over. “It’s okay,” the woman whispered, very softly. Her voice was unexpectedly high and childlike.
The women half pulled, half nudged Isa out the door, naked. Then she lost control, howling and struggling with them as they marched her down a different hallway, feeling it harder and harder to breathe as her sobs became hiccups, ignoring remonstrations that if she did not stop making so much noise she would wake the male inmates and then they would see her buck naked; did she really want that?
After a while, they were in front of what was obviously a jail cell of some kind. The fight had gone out of her for the last hundred feet or so, and she could barely hold herself upright when suddenly, in synchrony, the women’s hands and arms left her body. They retreated out of sight, and Isa was left tottering in front of the open cell. What did they want her to do? Did they mean to complete her humiliation by having her walk, tame and docile, into her own cage? She was about to turn around and face her abusers when she was kicked in the buttocks with great force. She fell forward and her left cheek hit the hard floor first, followed by her sprawled arms and then the rest of her body, the impact vibrating through her gut, her bare ass laid out on view.
She braced, but no one laughed.
When day broke, she could see enough to distinguish a tiny barred opening high off the ground. It did not deserve the name of “window.” Her hand shuffled forward, and she worried the sharp edge of the cement platform on which she lay. It was obviously meant to be slept on, this cold dais, for they had placed on it a thin cotton blanket and a pillow that felt like it was stuffed with plastic straws. She could choose between sleeping on the blanket to counteract some of the cement’s harshness and hiding her naked body under the thing.
She had not slept, not really. The “bed” grew out of the wall like a rigid tumor. Lying down, she had found it was too short for her, even though she was only five four. She curled up. Some time ago she had almost drifted off, exhausted, when she thought she heard a knock come from the wall right next to her. She jolted, banging her shin hard against the platform. Was it a friend, a fellow inmate unfairly detained without trial? Or more likely than not it was a trick they must be playing on her, preventing her from getting sleep, trying to confuse her or get her hopes up. Oh god, she thought. Who would miss her? Surely someone would do something for her, out there? Think, think on the bright side. Maybe her mother was getting help at that very moment.
And that was enough to bring back a memory she had suppressed for years.
When she was nine, her mother had caught her with fruit stolen from their neighbor’s tree. Young Isa defended herself, explaining that although the guava tree had roots stemming from the neighbor’s compound, its branches stuck their way over the fence into what was technically their house, so it wasn’t really stealing, right?
For this bit of talking back, her mother had made her wait in the living room while she went off to fetch a rattan cane. When she came back, she instructed Isa to display her right palm, holding it outstretched and faceup. Then her mother showed her how to steady the upturned palm by encircling her left fingers in a tight grip around her right wrist, and even helpfully demonstrated this offering of the right palm by the left to prevent the diving board effect. The diving board effect, her mother went on to explain, happened when the cane came whipping down on the palm and the palm could not withstand the force, thus drooping to an angle that made it cumbersome to deliver the next strike, and the next, and the one after that, without unnecessary delay. It was more efficient if Isa used both hands to support the target palm and keep it horizontal. Then it would be over quicker.
It began. After about ten strokes, both hands started their descent toward the ground anyway, and her mother, impatient, clucked for her to turn around. As soon as Isa’s back was to her mother, the tears flowed. Before Isa had time to feel a smidgen of pride at keeping them unseen, she was wailing hysterically against her will. But she did what she was told well enough despite the crying, lifting up her pinafore and holding hands out at her sides, a fistful of fabric in each. The hem pressed into her right palm and it burned.
Now the cane came down again and again, and she could not see its arc to brace herself. Her knees quaked. There was a horrible crunching sound, and her first thought was that her mother had broken her bones. But it was only the rattan cane snapping in half.
Breakfast slid through a slot was two pieces of toast with a pat of margarine. One of them was an endpiece, something she used to despise and always tossed into the trash when she was living free. There was also lukewarm Milo in a deformed tin mug that looked like it had been used to bash someone’s head in. No spoon.
Rallying after food, she reminded herself to be observant. She got up and wrapped the thin blanket around herself, as if she were on her way to a relaxing hot tub. The material had long ceased to be scratchy, sometime shortly after dawn.
She paced. Her cell was tiny, about twelve Isa feet by fifteen Isa feet, although her feet were not very large, so maybe the actual measurements were closer to—nine by twelve? The cement dais was maybe five by four real feet, but it loomed, looking like it took up most of the cell’s space. No, she would not think about human sacrifices.
“My name is Isabella Sin,” she murmured. She had read that prisoners kept in isolation often lost their minds. “I am twenty-eight. I thought I was a writer, then I thought I wasn’t, but now I know I am.”
“Take off the blanket. Squat.”—were the orders.
She started to plead again, but remembered from a few hours ago that it just made them crueler. She did as told. Her labia parted and it felt cold, down there. She tried to draw her knees closer together and almost toppled over. She hadn’t realized that she felt dizzy.
A man in uniform stood just outside her cell. The door was open, but she knew he counted on her nudity to keep her in place. Unfamiliar. A different man. How did they all possess the same grim coldness?
“Get up. Follow me.”
“Why?” she asked. She meant the pointlessness of making her squat.
“You’re leaving” was the reply.
She was led to a bathroom. It had a small mirror clouded unevenly at the edges with dirt and hung too high off the ground for her. While washing her hands, the tears came again. After some indecision, she pushed herself up on tiptoes. The glass was too dirty for a good look, but she knew—the eye bags were there, and the fucked-up hair, and the scratches on the cheek that had made contact with cell floor. Her nose itched. She sneezed, then realized she had not bothered to close her mouth, a behavior she had condemned in others—like peasants and rural folk. Fear came again like a gust to blow off the leaves of her sanity one by one. My name is Isabella Sin!
After the bathroom, she was led back to the room from yesterday. She drew a few ragged breaths and tried to brace herself for more humiliation. But the man did not follow her into the room. When she turned to look, she saw he had closed the door on her. She was alone again.
There was that same lone wooden chair. Her clothes were in a pile on the floor. She bent over, picked her clothes up, and shook them out. They were the ones she had taken off in this room. The change of clothes she had been told to pack was nowhere to be seen. Who knew what they were holding it for?
After dressing, she stood next to the chair, waiting, until the door opened and the woman with soft lips came in, looking haggard. She sighed when she saw Isa.
“Follow me,” the woman said.
There was a brief brilliance of sunshine, bright shadows patterning the ground, before Isa was put in the back of another Black Maria. She saw that there was the same number of guards with her. Someone shut the door, and it was darkness once more. The engine started and rumbled, then quieted as they coasted away. The people with her were silent bodies moving only when swayed by the truck’s journey.
Some period of time later, she looked at nothing in particular and said, “I didn’t write those poems.” She did not expect a response. But one came, from the shadowy figure sitting closest to the driver’s seat: “You’re just like the boy before you. Brave to act but chicken to admit. Why call yourself activist if you don’t dare accept the consequences?”
She thought about the face of the movement. So he had recanted, or somehow given in. Pantomine. No. Palindrome? Wrong. She worried at her memory until it came to her, the word she had learned so many years ago: Palinode. She closed her eyes, doubling the darkness, tripling the night. That was what she felt to be outside, beyond the truck: night.
My name is Isabella. This is my country. Its name is Malaysia.
She should have thought of it earlier. She didn’t know why she hadn’t. Yet another leaf lost, blown into space and then abandoned to the ground.
Not too long before the Black Maria came to an idle, she had smelled familiar rain. Foolishly, she had been comforted by this proof that she retained her “skills” yet.
“It’s going to rain,” she said out loud. This time no one responded.
Soon, pattering could be heard against the vehicle’s roof. An occasional ping sounded against the sides as well, drops angled by wind.
Now, stumbling out onto gray earth, she knew that she had been brought to the infamous Kamunting Detention Centre, where most of the Internal Security Act detainees were held. She had recognized the rain even in darkness because it was her rain. Kamunting was a short ten-minute drive from Taiping—in fact, they must have driven through her town to get here—perhaps they had even rumbled right past her own house!
Cruel, cruel! She shook her head vigorously. When a hand touched her she sprang her head upward and saw, written overhead at the entrance of the prison camp, the words NEGARA KITA TANGGUNGJAWAB KITA.
“Our country, our responsibility.” The pronoun, kita, was inclusive of addressees, referencing a burden shared. She wondered why they had not used the exclusive pronoun instead: NEGARA KAMI TANGGUNGJAWAB KAMI.
“Our country (not yours), our responsibility (not yours).” We’ve got this. Stay out of our way.
She lost consciousness for a microsecond, then regained reality and remained standing, handcuffed, her jeans sticking to her from pooled sweat.
The nation was in an uproar over the midnight raid and arrest of Isabella Sin, coming so soon on the heels of a massive demonstration that had felt like a victory for the people. But already the news had engendered plans for further protests, this time calling for her release.
Reporters were told that Ms. Sin had been detained without trial for good reasons: for sedition and for disrupting racial harmony—that delicate, neurotic thing only the government had expertise to feed and grow. After being disappeared, Isabella Sin was not heard from again for what felt like a very long time.