“Who said I’m not happy?”
“You just stay in the hotel room the whole day.”
“I’m an old woman.”
“Why don’t you follow us for some shopping? Things here are quite cheap. We saw some crystal bowls yesterday.”
“There’s nothing that I want.”
“Mak, we wanted to have this holiday because we wanted to get away for a while. I don’t know lah Mak. At home, you’re not happy, bring you here, you’re still not happy. Tonight dinner… come with us, Mak.”
“Who said I wasn’t happy at home? You all go to work whole day never see me in the house.”
“We’re so scared leaving you alone at home, Mak. With that kind of neighbour.”
“They never do anything.”
“Mak follow us to dinner.”
“I don’t like to eat at restaurant.”
“Mak…”
“Okay. Just for tonight.”* * *The body was found at about 5.30 a.m., and by the time the police came there was something of a crowd around it. I’m not sure if Lydia was one of the people, but I can imagine there was the Indian man and his wife. The Indian man is a marathon runner, and if you pass by his house you can see through the window all these cups and trophies and medals in the living room. I once saw him in the newspapers and I asked my daughter, “Isn’t this our neighbour?” and at first she said no, but later she said, “Oh, I didn’t know he could run.” She said no wonder she saw him jogging all the time, but she thought he was just some army kind of person. I wanted to tell her it’s because you never pass by his house. Our house is the second one from the staircase, and you have to walk deeper into the corridor to pass by the Indian man’s house. But I know my daughter will tell me, we only need to walk to the staircase to get to where we want, walking the other way is no business of ours.
His wife also looks like a runner, skinny, all elbows and knees, but you can imagine her on the track. She shaves her legs and I can understand because she wears shorts all the time, even when she goes to the shops. She also wears an anklet, and I don’t think she works; most of the time she stays in the house. But she does look like a new wife, like they’ve just been married, and the type who will still walk around the house with a house decoration book, testing out new recipes, still trying to arrange the wedding photos in the best sequence for guests to look at. At the most they have been married for one year, which is how long we have been staying in our new house.
So I see the Indian man and his wife looking at the body, and the questions the wife will ask her man, in his arms, are, “Who would do this to him. Why do this to him. What were we doing when this happened. Were we both sleeping. Was one of us asleep and one of us awake. Why are the houses here empty. Didn’t they hear anything. Why didn’t we hear anything.”
But the only question she will actually ask her husband, as the body is sheeted and taken away is, “Who’s this man?”* * *Jakarta is a big city, the traffic is bad, people are just honking everywhere, dashing across roads. The hotel I stayed at sent us newspapers every morning which I tried to read, but I realised that the Malay and Indonesian languages have some words in common and many words not in common, so I gave up after a while and watched TV. It was strange to see the programmes we got at home which were usually snowy suddenly look so clear. At home we could get some Indonesian channels, but they always looked like there was a swarm of ants on the inside of the screen, crawling all over but not disturbing the studio host, the newscaster with the big earrings, or the soap opera star with the giant hair bun.
Sometimes I try looking back and I wonder what I was doing when the man got murdered in our common corridor. Maybe at that time I was opening the mini-bar and wondering if it was all right to throw out the beer cans; I didn’t want to sleep in a room that had alcohol in it. Or when I was trying to figure out how to open and close the vertical blinds. Or when I wondered where my daughter had packed my bra and panties, in which bag and which compartment. Or maybe it was in that exact moment when I thought about home, that I wanted to be back, at Changi Airport, the white tiles, the cleaners, most of them at my age, how I might have ended up like them. Then the drive back on the expressway, my son-inlaw speeding, maybe we could wind down the windows, the children opening their mouths to the wind, tasting air, feeling the roofs of their mouths turning dry. That man might have been killed at the exact moment when I was sitting in that hotel room with the silly piped music I didn’t know how to turn off, feeling homesick. Which also means to say that the man could have been killed any time at all.* * *It is also not a surprise to me that our neighbours weren’t in. I’m sure that there was a meaning to it, the two families who hate each other not being in when something
