Leila Chudori - Home

“Come on, trust me. Just last night you had an acupuncture treatment, and you felt all right after that, didn’t you?”

Lintang tiptoed towards her father’s room, not wanting to interrupt the developing drama. She could guess what was happening: Om Nug was trying to treat her father with acupuncture and her father was loudly and staunchly refusing. She smiled; her big strong daddy was strangely afraid of needles.

Lintang peeked inside to see Nugroho opening a small bag of acupuncture needles. Her father blinked madly at their sight, as if he’d seen a witch. With what strength he had, he pulled himself up and then stumbled hurriedly towards the bathroom. Once inside, he slammed and locked the door behind him.

“Come on, Dimas…” Nugroho entreated.

“No! No!” her father shouted from behind the bathroom door.

Nugroho rose from the chair beside Dimas’s desk and softly knocked on the bathroom door. “Please, Dimas. If we don’t do it now, it will be too late.”

“No! I’ll sleep in here if I have to. I’m not coming out as long as you have that needle in your hand!”

Nugroho looked exasperated and ready to give up. Sitting down, he suddenly noticed that Lintang was now present in the room, watching him with a covert smile. Seeing her, he immediately gave a sigh of relief and jumped up to give her a warm hug.

“Lintang, Lintang, my girl… Why has it been so long since you’ve come to the restaurant? How are you?”

“I’m fine,” she said, “just busy.”

Nugroho looked at Lintang who so very much resembled her mother Vivienne, except for her hair and eyes which obviously came to her from Dimas.

Nugroho shot a glance at the bathroom door. “That father of yours… Yo wis, wong ditambani kok wegah . I’m just trying to help, but he won’t let me.”

Lintang smiled again and patted Nugroho on the shoulder. He had already begun to repack his set of needles.

“I’ll try to talk to him,” she said.

“Please do. Maybe if you talk to him, he’ll listen.” Now ready to go, Nugroho picked up his bag. “I have to get back to the restaurant. I hope we can catch up soon.”

Lintang gave her kind uncle a peck on the cheek and then walked with him to the door. After Nugroho had gone, Lintang returned to the bedroom and rapped softly on the bathroom door. “Ayah…”

She heard her father angrily clear his throat and was surprised by the vehemence of its sound. He must have known the voice was hers.

“Ayah, it’s me, Lintang…”

She heard the inside latch on the door release. The door cracked open and she saw her father’s head appear. The stress in his features immediately vanished and his eyes glowed with happiness at the sight of his daughter. But wary that Nugroho and his needles might still be there, he hesitated before opening the door wider, first sticking his head further out and looking around.

“Is Om Nug still here?”

Lintang giggled, “He’s gone, Ayah. Come out of there!”

Dimas emerged cautiously from the bathroom, his eyes still bright with suspicion, not trusting that Nugroho wasn’t there, ready to attack again with his needles. Lintang shook her head in silent agreement with the view that over time the role of parent and child reverses itself, with the child acting as the parent when the parent is older.

Finally sure that Nugroho was no longer on the premises, Dimas breathed a sigh of relief. “Did you see the size of those needles?” he said, spreading his arms to the length of a broomstick.

“Yeah, yeah,” Lintang muttered dismissively. Then noticing her father’s unkempt bed, she immediately began to strip the sheets and take off the pillowcases.

Dimas observed the focused look on his daughter’s face.

Throwing the used linen into a pile on the floor, Lintang looked up to see her father staring at her. She went to him and kissed him on the cheek.

“ Ça va? ”

“ Ça va bien. ” Dimas smiled and straightened his posture, then began to help Lintang, who had taken a clean set of sheets and pillowcases from the chest of drawers and was now putting the sheets on his bed.

“Your mother and Om Nug are making the problem bigger than it is,” he said, then immediately changed the subject: “How are you and your studies?”

“My coursework is fine; all I have left is my final,” she said. Then she brought the subject back to the matter at hand: “I was told you collapsed at the Metro station.”

With her arms on her chest, Lintang looked like a mother speaking to her five-year-old son.

Dimas scratched his head and turned his attention to the pillowcases that Lintang had just changed. “Yes, yes… Je suis fatigué. ” Dimas glanced at Lintang and again tried to change the topic of conversation: “You’re looking thin. How long has it been since you’ve been here? Four months, five…?”

Lintang didn’t answer the question. She was not going to feel guilty or take offense at her father’s comments. Besides, he looked thinner too. And all those pills on the bookshelf? There were far too many of them.

“Did you pick up the results of the tests?” she asked.

“Om Nug said he’d pick them up for me tomorrow. But, you know, he’s extra busy now at the restaurant now, covering for me.”

Lintang began to straighten her father’s bedside table, which was littered with ash. On it was an ashtray piled high with cigarette butts and matchsticks. At that moment, her father removed a cigarette from the pack in his shirt pocket and put it to his lips, but when he opened a matchbox and put a light to the cigarette, Lintang immediately yanked it from his mouth and stubbed it in the ash tray.

Dimas shrugged in surrender, not willing to risk an argument with his daughter, who had been boycotting his presence in her life for so long. He watched her as she slammed the contents of the ashtray into the wastebasket beside the bathroom door.

Lintang then began to check her father’s medicine bottles, one by one, reading their instructions. “These pills, the ones that you’re supposed to take in the morning and the afternoon, have you taken them?” she asked.

“This morning, I did. Haven’t taken the ones for the afternoon.”

Lintang went to the kitchen, filled a glass of water from the faucet in the sink and returned to her father’s side with two kinds of pills in her other hand. “It says on the bottle: ‘Take regularly until finished.’”

Her father downed the tablets obediently. As he looked on, Lintang went back to straightening his room After the bedroom was in reasonable order, Lintang shifted her attention to the living room. The sofa cover was rumpled and its upright cushions on the floor because Nugroho had slept there the night before; the books in their cases needed to be sorted and re-shelved; the dining table was a mess, and the wooden floor looked as if it hadn’t been touched by a vacuum cleaner in at least a week.

“Come over here, Lintang. Sit with me. We can straighten up later.”

“No, I’m not comfortable like this. It’s like a pigsty in here!”

Just like your mother, Dimas muttered to himself, eyes closed. He stretched out on the sofa as he watched his daughter straighten the living room.

“Stop, Lintang. We can do that later. I want to know what’s happening with you. What’s your final assignment?”

Lintang turned off the vacuum cleaner and set it aside. She knew it was time for her to stop this pretense. She had to drop the bomb and then convince her father that what she was doing was right, without getting into an argument. She sat down beside her father on the couch, then turned and looked at him directly in the face.

“I might have to go to Indonesia…” she began.