“Last time he take me here,” Kala said.
“Your boyfriend?” Rosminah asked.
“Don’t call him that. I don’t know where he is now. Nobody pick up the phone anymore. Except three nights ago. That time was the last time.”
“Why you bring me here?”
“He bring me here last time,” Kala said. “We sit here.”
Rosminah tried to lean forward to peer into the water, but a sudden burst of light momentarily blinded her. She realised that the light came from the fluorescent tubes that lit up the bridge at night, such that from afar it seemed to possess a cold ivory glow.
“He put his hand on my leg,” Kala said, and Rosminah wondered if it was the river or herself that was pulling out words from Kala’s lips. “I push his hand away, I laugh. He said I laugh like a little girl.”
“What did he say?” Rosminah asked. “What did he tell you over the phone?”
Kala was about to sigh, but turned it into a smile. “He said he already has a wife. In India.”
“Oh.”
“He didn’t want to tell me her name. He said, not important. I asked if I was important. He said, yes, of course. If not why I buy you things?”
Kala showed her ring to Rosminah. It was on her ring finger, a simple band, with a dull gleam.
“I ask him if he want the ring back. He said no, you keep it. He said, I’m not that sort of person. I want you to keep the ring.”
“Kala.”
“I’m a dirty woman, Rosminah. I feel like a dirty woman. In all my life, I never let someone get so close to me. This kind of things only girls do. I’m a woman.”
“Kala. Men are like that.”
“Last time at the Home, the Ma’am always said, this Kala here, eyes so big, very hard to close. That’s why so hard to cry. You can do anything to Kala, but very hard for this girl to cry. But when someone do this kind of thing to you, how to hold everything inside?”
Rosminah let Kala lean on her shoulder. She had watched people on TV doing it, offering their shoulders to one another. She was not sure how she felt with Kala’s body so close to her own, such that as Kala spoke in that low voice she could feel her own body resonate.
“Men are like that.”
“Ros, when I saw you that day, first time, with your stomach so big, I think, I also want something like that. One day. Have my own children. I don’t have parents, but who say cannot have children? I also think, this woman can be the godmother. Can teach me how to fold the napkin. Teach me how to burp the baby.”
Kala started laughing.
“Ros, last time I dream so much! I want the baby to hold my finger in his hand. I want to bathe it like see on TV, hold the head very carefully. But now, I got already, I don’t want anymore, Ros. I don’t want. I feel empty. How can something grow inside me?”
Kala sighed. She then carefully eased the ring off her finger and held it up between her forefinger and thumb.
“It’s my name,” Kala said. “My name means what in Malay? Lose. I always lose. I don’t know who give me this name.”
Rosminah couldn’t find anything to say. She looked around her and saw three bare-bodied men lowering fishing lines into the water. They were sweating and she could see their bodies gleam. The bridge that they were standing on was called Cavenagh Bridge. There were huge beams that stretched behind them, studded with gigantic rivets. Rosminah was reminded how on the first day at the factory a woman had told her that they were assembling a rocket. She looked up and saw a full moon. It struck her that the moon should not belong only to men in rockets.
“Kala,” Rosminah asked, “Kala, you have to know what you want. What do you want?”
Kala removed her weight from her friend’s shoulder. She smiled at Rosminah, and then removed the pressure of her fingers from her ring. As it dropped in front of a fluorescent tube, it flashed for a moment, before being swallowed up by the darkness and the river whose depth neither of them knew or understood.
“I want nothing.”
Rosminah asked her, “You don’t want anything?”
Kala said, “I want nothing.”* * *In an hour’s time, it will be dawn. The children will have to be woken up, and Siti Nuraini will ask Rosminah if she should wash her hair, and Rosminah will remind her that she had washed it the night before. Mohd Rosli will have to be woken up at the breakfast table where he will fall asleep. His mouth will be hanging open, with a piece of bread dangling from its edge, squeezed into the shape of his palate. If he isn’t woken up in time, it will fall out of his mouth, sending his little sister into fits of giggling.
Rosminah opens the cupboard in the children’s room and takes out a box of mosquito coils. She drags out the plastic and realises that three of the four coils are broken. Rosminah then starts cracking them up into even smaller pieces before realising that the rustle of plastic could wake her children. She stops herself firmly and thinks: I am not well. She looks at the broken fragments of mosquito coils in the plastic and tells herself: there is no happiness in this world. Even if there is, none of it is mine.
Rosminah then walks into her bedroom. Her husband is snoring. She realises that she has not
