Tulungagung, 1970s
I was born in the spring, at dusk, on a sugar plantation. The sugar plantation was one among many that packed into the breast of Southeast Java like kittens suckling for milk. But the milk was rain and workers and immunity to blights that would cripple the yields, inshallah. The first story my mother ever told me was about the reddish pink sky the evening I was born, how it was the color of washing a freshly butchered hen. When I told her I wanted to see the color, she took me to my first butchering.
Because of my family, I grew up comfortably. My father managed the plantation, and money flocked around its ripe sugarcane. My mother tended a garden behind the house where she grew shallots, spinach, coriander, cassava, chilis, and a tree of half-sour mangoes. Underneath the mango tree, there was a trove of jasmine that my mother had planted and let run wild. My father scoffed at it like a weed, but my mother always said that the flowers’ aroma made the mangoes taste sweeter.
Although I was my parents’ only child, there were other kids my age in the neighborhood. The soles of their shoes gaped open, and the pit of bone between their ribs pushed out like a bisected plum. Behind the garden, a mane of rainforest fringed the Brantas River. Mahogany and palm trees stood tall like giants with scarred bellies of distended trunks. I would meet there with some of the neighborhood kids, getting muddy while we played tag and monkey-in-the-middle.
The day that I witnessed the butchering, my mother brought me into the garden, cradling a hen in her arms. It was a gift from one of her friends, and it had a note tied around its neck with twine when it arrived. “Mashallah,” the note said.
In the garden, the vegetables were in bloom. My father stood among them, accompanied by a stump of wood and an axe in hand. My mother passed him the hen, and my father pressed its squirming body down upon the stump. Before the ax swung, I heard the seductive chirps and ominous drone of insects, smelled the lemongrass on my mother’s hand as it reached out to comb my hair, and felt the sun pouring into the pockets of my body like hot tea. As the ax sliced down, it made a shlick! sound, almost like the air was dense and wet—a body of its own. Then, the blade cracked through vertebrae and wood, squeaking through the hen’s last breath. The sound buried under my skin like an army of ants, and I wished so suddenly that I could sew the hen back together. It would wake up after surgery and wiggle and trill at me, the same as before but with a few extra stitches. I would hold its face like how my mother always held mine, and I would say, “Mashallah.”
When my father picked up the body of the hen, its beaked skull was left behind on the stump, trailed with ruby feathers, twine syrupy with blood, and ribbons of guts like a kite. The world kept moving and conversing behind it. A feeling stretched in my chest: a tiny clot of bloody bird dragging itself up and out.
My father cleaned the headless hen with the garden hose, and the water flushed with blood. I was presented with the crimson swatch of my birth, and a rainbow spilled from it. I was sure that the colors of the hen’s soul were washing away. My father’s checkered sarong was splattered red and pink, and the air smelled like the bathroom sometimes did after my mother used it. I stood as still as a sugarcane stalk as my father slit the hen’s feet and cut shallowly through the axis of its body to peel off its feathered flesh. When he finished stripping the hen and hung its raw body on a hook on the side of our house, he told my mother, “Perhaps gutting is too much for a little girl.”
“Probably,” she agreed.
Then it was over. My mother ushered me inside.
“Why did the hen have to die?” I asked.
“You know that tigers must kill boars so that they may eat,” my mother explained.
“Yes.” I was swallowing air instead of breathing it, but it was the best I could do.
“And that’s not so bad, right?”
“It makes me a little sad still,” I told her, but it was more than that.
My mother’s face warmed. When she was a child, her father likely had his own blood-stained stump of wood. There was surely a day that arrived when she, too, witnessed her first butchering. And with all of the blood shed on her father’s stump when she was a child and her husband’s stump afterward, I wondered if it created lakes inside of her.
“That makes sense,” my mother said gratefully. “As long as you know that it’s not bad.”
There was a closure in her eyes then, like an open wound had been sutured. The day of my first butchering, all of the lakes of wet blood my mother had ever carried with her scabbed over.
That night, my mother made soto ayam from the hen my father had butchered. Soto ayam was a comforting meal, and maybe my mother chose to make it for that reason. It was bright yellow broth over rice and glass noodles, with rubbery puddles of fried egg, crunchy shallots, and wedges of lime on top. At first, I was reluctant to eat because I understood irrevocably that food was often carved from body. I saw the clear noodles tangling into the fibers of shredded chicken meat and felt my stomach turn the way it did when I saw two bugs connected by their backsides. When my mother gave me a look of conviction, I brought the first spoonful of soup to my mouth.
I looked up at the sky at night and saw something pressing through the dark, glittery fabric—a dimple that would outlast everything.
As I grew up, my mother would read the Qur’an to me. It was full of stories that swam in circles above my head: a wreath of apples, flowers, swords, breadcrumbs, spiderwebs, laughing fire, hammered nails, and every one of Allah’s creatures smearing together. Sometimes my mother would close the book and begin speaking to me from either her memory or her imagination—I never knew which. When I started going to school, I was taught to write and add numbers, but I was also taught the Qur’an. At some point, I wondered if this book had an end or if people would ever stop reading it to me. When I questioned my mother about it, she looked alarmed.
“There is no end to the Qur’an. It exceeds time,” she said.
“But the Qur’an started because Allah made the world, right?” I asked.
“Yes. It all began with one colossal mass, and Allah exploded it into the heavens and the Earth. He broke apart and delegated all parts of the universe—planets, stars—from a larger whole. When you look into the night sky, that was Allah’s doing. The Qur’an was written because of this, and everything that has existed afterward has been added to it as testimony. Everyone you know is part of the Qur’an. You are part of the Qur’an. When you die, the Qur’an will continue.”
This was a puzzling notion for me as a child. I knew that life ended; that fact was branded into me from the butchering. I knew that it began, too. I understood that I was once not alive, and then I was pushed and ripped into the world. In my small mind, all that anything was was a beginning and an end. Trees sprouted; trees were cut down. Hens were hatched, and hens were butchered. Everything was just a span, existing in its own bracket. In this way, I always thought that everything was the same. Hens and people were both measured by the amount of time they spent in existence. The idea that something would never end was not something I had stopped to consider, but it was surely true. I looked up at the sky at night and saw something pressing through the dark, glittery fabric—a dimple that would outlast everything.
Thinking about eternity began to weigh me down, leaking into one side of me or the other. I felt lopsided. I would center myself by helping my mother peel ginger with a spoon while she cooked dinner or by accompanying my father to the sugar mills or the port, where workers would place vats of juice in evaporators or stack crates of sugar on massive ships while I sucked on my own cane to get the juice out.
From these habits, I soon learned that I loved to cook and I loved to eat. After work on Mondays, my father would bring home a bunch of bananas from the store. I would cut a few of the bananas into coins, and then my mother would leave them on a tray in the sun to dry into chips. Every weekend, the whole family would meet in the kitchen to make a big batch of donat jawa using sugar from the plantation and cassava from the garden. Sometimes my mother would trade a basket of ripe mangoes and a jar of homemade sambal for a hen from her friend’s ranch. My mother would bring the hen home, my father would butcher it, and then my mother would fashion the chicken into bakso—my father’s favorite dish. It was a fascinating system.
Because of my father’s position as a manager of the plantation, he was given a car by his company so that he could drive from the plantation to the port, the mills, or the city. Sometimes he would take my mother and me with him. If we went to the port, we would buy fresh shrimp and sweet red snapper from the coastal market. If we went to the mills, my father would show my mother and me off to the workers like a set of fancy watches, and we would leave smelling like machinery and molasses. If we went to the city, we would eat chicken satay from street vendors, and sometimes we would see a movie. Once, when I was nine years old, we went to the city and saw a rerun of The Jungle Book.
“Why would Mowgli go to the Man-Village if his mom and dad and siblings are wolves, he grew up in the forest, and all of his friends are animals?” I asked my parents after the movie while we were driving home.
“His mom and dad were human. He was just left in the forest,” my father explained plainly.
My gaze drifted curiously to my mother in the passenger seat, checking for agreement. But all I saw was the back of her tangerine hijab, her face fixed straight ahead. When my father was present, he would answer all of my questions on his own, for both him and my mother.
“But he doesn’t even know his real mom and dad. Does he not love his wolf mom and wolf dad?” I asked.
“He’s a man. He belongs with other men,” my father answered. “Allah pulled all life from water, but He shaped humans from wet clay with His own two hands.”
I pressed my fingers into my arm, and it didn’t feel like any clay I had ever touched, but I didn’t ask any more questions. I knew when my father didn’t want me to talk anymore.
When we got home, it was late, so I was immediately sent to bed. In the morning, my mother and I cooked kupat tahu for breakfast. My mother fried triangles of tofu in a pan until they were golden, while I stood on a stool and blanched bean sprouts on the burner next to her. The earthiness of the boiling sprouts cut through the air, fat with peanut oil and fish sauce, and made it smell leaner. Still, my mind was unsatisfied with the answers my father had given me the previous night, so I tried to see if my mother had a different answer.
“He probably does love his wolf mom and wolf dad,” my mother said. “He probably loves his whole wolf family and all of his animal friends. But humans were created to live among their own, to serve Allah, and to help each other. Compassion and charity between people are what make us special. We must be surrounded by other people so that we may practice compassion and charity the way we were meant to.”
“How will he know what to do if he doesn’t have human parents to teach him in the Man-Village?” I asked.
“He won’t,” my mother said. “That’s where compassion and charity come in. Nice people will give him clothes since he doesn’t have any. They’ll give him food since he doesn’t have a job. He didn’t know how to make a fire when he was living in the forest, remember? People will teach him to do that. They’ll teach him how to read and cook. Cooking is important, right?
Wouldn’t you be sad if you couldn’t cook?”
“Yes,” I agreed, but it was more of an agreement with the world. From ant to human to elephant, we must all pursue our purpose on the same land. Yes, I’m ready to join.
When my father came to eat breakfast, there was no more talk of The Jungle Book.
On the way to school that day, I was brightened by life’s sunny, lemony tang in a way I hadn’t been before. The children on the school bus had downy faces and eyelashes like cows. I looked out of the window of my classroom and saw ants in the top corner of the window pane caressing their heads with their twiggy arms like cats did when they cleaned themselves. I noticed everything, and I could breathe deeply again, as if my lungs were being moved by the sheer force of passion. I finally understood the nature of human beings, but I was only nine years old.
I began my tour of compassion. If one of my mother’s friends were sick and my mother cooked them bubur ayam, I offered to deliver it in her stead. When I arrived at the home of my mother’s sick friend, I set up their bowl of soup and blew on it so it wouldn’t burn their tongue. I asked if they wanted me to fetch them a glass of water, and whether or not they wanted it, I grabbed it for them.
While we ate, I hoped they could not somehow feel the tight pulse of my burn in the air or taste the metal of a boiled spoon in their salad.
One afternoon, when I returned home from school, I discovered that both of my parents were gone. For the first time, I turned on the stove by myself and giddily resolved to cook my parents gado-gado for dinner. Most of the process went smoothly. I was well-trained, resourceful, and creative. We didn’t have potatoes, but we had radishes, which I thought was a fine replacement. My mother loved seafood, so I stirred a spoonful of tiny dried shrimp into the peanut sauce. I watched their eyes melt away like salt. I hard-boiled the eggs in the same water that I blanched the spinach and the cabbage to save time. My only miscalculation was the distance between the rim of the pot and my arm when I reached over with a spoon to remove the eggs.
I yelped as my skin was seared, and I dropped the spoon into the boiling water. The splash of it sizzled on the stove. I quickly ran my arm under cold water, changed into a long-sleeved shirt, carefully fished out the spoon and both eggs from the pot, and finished preparing the gado-gado. When my parents returned, I set the table for them.
“Did you use the stove all by yourself?” my mother asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“And everything was okay?”
“Yes,” I lied.
“Well,” she said gingerly, “try to let someone know next time you want to cook alone. Just in case.”
“I will,” I promised.
She held my face in her hands. “I’m proud of you,” she said.
While we ate, I hoped they could not somehow feel the tight pulse of my burn in the air or taste the metal of a boiled spoon in their salad.
Over the course of the next few weeks, I hid leftovers from my plate at dinner in pieces of paper towel and brought them—grease-stained—to the skinny neighborhood kids on the way to the school bus the next morning. Every day, I packed two pieces of toast with chocolate sprinkles in my lunchbox and gave them both away indiscriminately to strangers and friends in my classes. I held the door open at school whenever I could, and my boy classmates hated it.
“Girls aren’t supposed to hold the door open,” they scolded me.
“Why not? Allah made all people to be compassionate and charitable,” I explained.
“Yeah, but Allah also made boys and girls different. Boys and girls have different jobs in the world. Boys hold the door open.”
“Then what do girls do?”
The boys didn’t answer. Maybe they didn’t know, but it just made me more confident in what I knew.
But in the way that ideals often progress, I was tested. It was a Wednesday morning before school when I heard my parents arguing in their room. It was rare for them to blatantly disagree, so I was unsettled. After I had changed into my school uniform, I went to the kitchen to put my socks on. As I passed my parents’ room, I heard my mother say, “Then you talk to her about it!”
I flinched when the door flew open and my mother looked down upon me.
“Are you eavesdropping?” she asked. She sounded tired.
“No, I’m not,” I said.
She looked at me with grief, like she was consigning me to a fate that she had tried to carry me away from—a shadow of talons that caught up with both of us.
“Go talk to your father,” she told me.
So I did.
My father was standing in front of his bed, hands behind his back.
“You play a lot with the neighborhood kids,” was the first thing he said.
“Yes.”
“Most of them are boys, correct?”
“Yes.” Almost all of them.
“Did you know that boys and girls are different?”
“Yes.” Somehow.
“In the Qur’an, men and women are instructed to occupy somewhat different positions in society.”
“Okay.” When did we start talking about men and women? I thought we were talking about boys and girls.
“Men provide for their families and the weak. They work hard and protect things that require protection—their country, their comrades, their children, their wives. Women are the pillars upon which men stand. They make sure that there is food on the table and that children are taken care of while the men are working hard. Both men and women are guardians in their own spheres, but they are different.”
“Okay.” But I didn’t understand. Were the boys at school right all along?
“Do you understand?”
“Yes.” But I didn’t understand. “Why, though?”
My father gave me a disapproving look. “Allah does not have to justify His creations.”
Ever since I was very young, I always wanted there to be some semblance of equality as I looked upon the world. It had started with the belief that everything had a beginning and an end, but that wasn’t true because the Qur’an existed. Then, I learned that life was separated into animals and humans; water and wet clay. And somewhere in that wet clay, people had been endowed with divine kindness. In that way, I thought that at least people were equal among themselves. But divisions kept being taught to me. No, people were not inherently equal because of divine kindness. People were also split into unequal roles depending on whether they were men or women, neither of which I was yet.
My father’s two front teeth and the apples of his cheeks poked out when his scolding posture deflated into a grin of amusement. His eyes crinkled shut, a laugh huffed out of his nose, and he gently tousled the top of my head.
“You’re a smart kid,” he told me, voice kinder than before—maybe kinder than it had ever been.
After school the next day, I saw a cat walking down the road. She was a spine, a tail, and four thin legs with grey tabby fur stretched around. There was a limp mackerel pinned in her little jaw. It looked like she had probably stolen it from the coastal market; there was no blood on her muzzle. I waited for her to begin eating, but she didn’t. She just kept walking.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
She didn’t answer.
After a curious moment, I followed her. It was a smothering day. The dishwater-grey sky was like a wool blanket over the island, trapping breath inside and making it stink. The press of the humidity wilted the grass, and the gravel road was squishy with mud. Fog winded slowly over the mountains like a snake after eating a meal twice its size, and the trees were bloated with thick, tropical air. Ravenous flies picked at the cat’s mackerel, and hoards of mosquitoes tried to feast on both of us. The cat didn’t seem to mind that she was being followed. She was walking purposefully, and somehow, it felt like I was being herded.
Eventually, we arrived at a wooden board that served as a makeshift bridge over a muddy stream that peeled off the river. Atop the board, to my surprise, lounged another cat. This one was perhaps even skinnier than the one I had followed. He had a chapped black coat that was slightly browned from the sun. As we approached, he lifted his head to watch us. There was a familiarity in his low-cast turmeric eyes when he saw the grey tabby in front of me. He showed no fear, but I stopped walking forward anyway.
As the tabby joined the black cat on the wooden board, she placed the mackerel at his paws. From what I knew about animals, they were territorial about food, especially if they were hungry. One fish was not enough for both of them, but they crouched on either side of their meal, mouths tearing into the mackerel’s svelte body at the same pace, to ensure fairness.
When I turned around and walked back home, I felt my pulse lifting out of and dipping back into my skin for the first time without pressing my fingers behind my ear to find it. And I didn’t even need a burn to bring it to the surface.
With all of the food in the lunchbox—soiled grapes and krupuk laid out next to a tenderized girl on the dirt—they still had an appetite to attack.
As I drew near my neighborhood, small figures began to crest into my vision. I heard children’s voices shouting.
“Help!” I heard.
I started running.
There were two boys kicking a girl on the scorching gravel road. She was one of the poor, skinny kids I was always giving leftover food to in the morning. I didn’t even know her name. The skin of her arms where she was guarding her head was soaked through with bruises, and her eyebrow was split like one of the fallen mangoes that sprawled underneath the tree in my backyard. There was so much blood. Her legs were folded in, but I could imagine that all of the tender parts of her abdomen were squashed. She was clothed in a thin exoskeleton of t-shirt, bright green like a baby banana, and splotched with dirt. As I looked upon her, I saw a grasshopper that had been stomped on and cracked open.
“Hey! Stop!” I yelled, but I was also afraid.
The boys were wearing nice shoes that were clean aside from the red blossoming on the toes. The only bones visible in their whole bodies were their elbows and knees, and even those were padded with fat and flesh. They clearly weren’t hungry.
“Don’t be so nosy, little girl,” one of the boys said.
“Yeah, she deserved it,” the other boy agreed.
“Why? What has she ever done to you?” I asked, but I didn’t look her in the eye.
“She was being a beggar, and when I told her to leave us alone, she tried to snatch my lunchbox. Thieving rat.”
“You couldn’t have afforded to give her one thing from your lunchbox? Not even a scrap?” I asked, standing taller just so that they could continue to glare down at me.
The boys seemed to forget the girl and shift all of their aggression to me in an instant, wicked eyes like two sets of viper fangs. With all of the food in the lunchbox—soiled grapes and krupuk laid out next to a tenderized girl on the dirt—they still had an appetite to attack.
“Are you a beggar, too? Or are you just playing hero?” they taunted.
As soon as the first bloody shoe stepped toward me, I took off.
I wasn’t that brave after all. I saw the battered girl again after a few days, and I brought her a piece of fried fish wrapped in a paper towel to apologize. She spit at my feet.
When I got home the evening of the assault, I felt my soul hemorrhaging somewhere inside or outside my body—wherever Allah had put it.
My parents asked me why I was home late from school. I told them as much of the truth as I could handle. I saw a cat and a fight.
“You were with those friends again—boys!” my father reprimanded, but this time he was wrong.
I helped my mother cook sayur asem for dinner. She was making a quick beef stock from the discarded pieces of rear leg we used to prepare last night’s rendang. It used to be my favorite activity, but the feeling of the young jackfruit underneath my fingers felt like bruised skin. The flesh groaned as I dug my fingernails into it and ripped it open. Somewhere in the kitchen, the smell of tamarind pulp flowed out, bitter-salty like blood. There was once an instance when soto ayam tasted like carnage. It lasted for one bite, and then I learned to understand the natural order of things and to be grateful. This wasn’t the same. This wasn’t as easy as coming to terms with something.
There was a sense of violence that had seeped into my ability to cut, to taste, to feel stems and sinew snap from the hinge of my mandible, to savor juices of lamb meat and orange vesicles oozing in my jowls. The smell of blood and the feeling of bruised skin welled up and dribbled over. I tried to pray the sensations into something uninjured.
Wouldn’t you be sad if you couldn’t cook? my mother had once asked me as a way to explain humanity.
I ran out of the kitchen and through the back door. In my core, I felt a cosmic fragility trembling, as if all of the parts of the universe that Allah had broken apart and delegated could be un-created at any moment. Everything would snap back together like rubber. Then the Earth would end. Stray cats, neighborhood children, hens, cows, my mother, my father, and I would all be crushed. All of the blood and bruises that could have and would have been would happen at once, and they would never happen again. There would be an ending, and everything would be equal. Outside, I saw a reddish pink sky like the day I was born, and I threw up in the garden.
Hana Wisnuardi is a writer from Dallas, Texas. Her creative work has been published in Literary Veganism and the tiny journal. She has a cat named Squid, a Giant Microbe collection, and a yearning to go tidepooling.
Header photo by POP-THAILAND, courtesy Shutterstock.
