Leila Chudori - Home

I grew tense. My heart withered and I had a strong desire to stop the interview, then and there. Suddenly the cell phone I’d borrowed from Andini began to ring. It was Alam calling. I immediately pushed the off button, because Tante Surti was still telling her story.

“Officer R sat down in front of me. He asked me to unbutton the first two buttons of my blouse. Completely shocked, I had no intention of doing what he asked; but then he smiled, calmly stood, and came over to where I was sitting. When he began to fondle my breasts, I used my feet to push back my chair away from him. It made an awful shrieking sound. Officer R shook his head slowly, waved his index finger at me, and then undid the buttons of my blouse. After that, he went back to his chair. I felt so naked and so exposed, I couldn’t regain my composure.

“At first his questions were the same, the ones I’d never been able to answer. …I tell you, there were times when I was tempted to make up a story about where Mas Hananto was hiding, just to make them stop asking those same questions. But with them holding the three children as a weapon, I didn’t dare to act foolishly. So, as usual, I answered that I didn’t know.

“But then he asked me, ‘What is Hananto like in bed?’ and ‘What do you like to do?’ I was astonished. The man’s questions caught me off guard, and my mouth dropped opened in surprise. He repeated his question, all the while staring at my open blouse. He then unfastened his belt and unzipped his trousers. I was silent, despairing. Then he asked in a firmer voice — not shouting or swearing, but more firmly—‘What do you two do in bed?’—with a smile on his lips.

“When I still said nothing, Office R began to talk about Kenanga, how pretty and innocent she was; how kind she was to massage his shoulders; how she readily obeyed when he asked her to massage his shoulders; and how, with her now beginning to menstruate, she would very soon be a woman. Horrified to hear him speak of these things, I immediately began to answer his questions. I began to speak, making up things, telling him whatever he wanted to hear, just to have this hell end.

“It didn’t stop there or on that day. Thereafter, almost every other day, Officer M would call me into the middle room. Sometimes he just stood there, pointing down at the floor in front of his feet; but more often he sat, leaning back against his chair with his trousers undone, gesturing to tell me what to do. The man had made Kenanga a weapon… Please don’t ever ask me how much I regret ever having brought my children to that awful place.”

Tante Surti stopped speaking but remained sitting, perfectly erect and glaring at the camera, her eyes shining with anger and tears rolling from them down her cheeks. She was like a woman in a nineteenth-century painting, a woman of almost perfect beauty but whose eyes betrayed sadness and suffering.

I pushed the off button on my camera, then went to the table to get the container with the jasmine flowers I had brought for her. I opened the container and removed from it several strings of flower buds. Kneeling before Tante Surti, I slipped the strands into her hand. She leaned towards me, put her arms around me, and hugged me gently. I returned her embrace.

After some time, with neither of us saying a word, Tante Surti released me and sat back up. Obviously not wanting to dwell on the awful experiences of the past for too long, she took a tissue from the box on the end table and quickly wiped her face. The way she rubbed her eyes, she seemed to want to leave no sign of having cried.

“When I die, I do not want to cry,” she said. “I want to die calmly and happily, with my loved ones around me.”

For the rest of the afternoon, my conversation with Tante Surti was more about ordinary, everyday concerns: Bulan was a finicky eater and wouldn’t eat anything fatty or that had a fishy smell whereas Alam devoured anything and everything set before him, and Kenanga acted more like a mother than a sister towards her younger siblings. Kenanga, she said, had become an adult long before her time. It was she who always reminded her siblings to write to my father and to their other “uncles” in Paris who were so kind to them. It was she who also reminded them to show Om Aji the proper level of thanks and respect for being like a father to the three of them.

Tante Surti laughed when she told me how often Kenanga and Bulan would tease Alam, not for the lack of girls who liked him but for his inability to stick to just one. She spoke more slowly when she told me that what made her most upset when Alam was growing up was the number of times she was forced to go to his school — primary, junior high, and high school — because of his fights with other boys. It was not that Alam couldn’t defend himself, especially one on one, she told me, but that they always ganged up on him when he stood up for Bimo, who was a softer target for taunts and harassment.

Alam’s name popped up constantly in our conversation, and I became so intrigued to know more that when he suddenly appeared in the house, standing before us drenched with sweat, it was only then I realized that it was growing dark and almost time for the evening call to prayer.

He looked happy to see me sitting on the sofa with his mother. “Give me a minute; I have to shower,” he said. “Then I can take you home.”

I nodded as he went into the bathroom. When I looked back at Tante Surti, she took my hands in her own. “Thank you for coming and for bringing me these strands of jasmine flowers,” she said. “This is one thing that has always helped me to get by: my children, the scent of jasmine, and pindang serani . I know this sounds melancholic, but I see nothing wrong in leaning on something in the past if that is what makes you stronger.”

I thanked Tante Surti for her willingness to speak to me and apologized for having had her reveal for me the sad times of her past. I hugged her close and long.

“So, how did it go? What was it like?” Alam asked in the back of the taxi. I turned towards him, breathed in his clean, soapy smell, and studied his features, changing with the reflection of light from oncoming cars. “Depressing. You must have guessed that.”

I didn’t quite know what else to say. The subject of our conversation was not some distant respondent or source. He was asking me to talk about his mother and her family’s difficult life story, one whose only silver lining is that it had made them strong and resistant. Unfortunately, it had also instilled in them, or at least in Alam, an anger for forever having to suppress any thought of revenge and any hope of justice.

“I can’t imagine the pain my questions must have caused her,” I said. “And I can’t measure the fortitude your mother must have to be able to revisit that time in her life when her worth as a human had been so degraded. Where did she find the strength? Several times, I offered to stop because I didn’t know if I had the strength to continue.”

Alam made my heart leap when he took my hand and held it tightly in his own. “Ibu would have refused to stop.”

“Yes,” I answered while staring at my hand he was holding.

“You must be hungry,” he said.

“You’re the one who must be hungry,” I said. “Your mother told me you can eat anything and everything at any time of the day. What I feel right now is just the need for a bath.”

Alam inhaled and said, “You smell just fine!” He then spoke to the driver: “Driver, take us to Kampung Melayu, to the seafood food stalls, the ones near the hospital.”

Without even consulting me, Alam had made a decision for the both of us, just like that. And for once, I didn’t object, even though I would have preferred to take a bath and refresh myself after another hot and muggy Jakarta day and the interview I had conducted with his mother.