chapter 3
Girl
FOR AS LONG as she could remember, it had been just the two of
them: Mama and Suraya, rattling around together in the old wooden
house that swayed gently in the slightest breeze. It had taken her a
while to figure out that this wasn't typical; that the families peopling
her picture books and the brightly colored cartoons on TV usually
had more than just two people in them.
"Where's my daddy?" she'd asked her mother once. She was
almost four years old then, still tripping over her words, fidgeting
impatiently while her mother combed the tangles out of her hair and
wrestled the unruly tresses into sedate twin braids. "Everybody else
has a daddy. Mariam's daddy drives a big truck. Adam's daddy has a
'stache. Kiran's daddy buyed her a new baby doll with real hair you
can brush." Her lower lip stuck out as she thought sorrowful thoughts
about the injustice of not having someone who could take you for
rides in a big truck and buy you toys (she was less sure about the
desirability of a 'stache).
She felt Mama's hands still for just a moment, hovering
uncertainly near her neck. "He's dead," she said finally. "Your daddy
is dead."
"What's dead mean?"Suraya couldn't see Mama's face, but when she responded, her
voice was as dry and sharp as the snapping of an old twig. "It's when
people go away and never come back, and you never get to see
them again."
Suraya mulled this over quietly, wincing as Mama's nimble fingers
pulled at her hair, sending tiny needles of pain shooting into her
scalp.
The next day at her preschool, Mrs. Chow, whose stomach had
been swelling gently for many months, was not there. The nine little
ones under her care, Suraya among them, were told she would be
away for a while, and that they would have a different teacher to
mind them.
"Yes, Suraya?" Cik Aminah asked, seeing her little hand raised
high in the air.
"If she doesn't come back, she's probably dead," Suraya said
matter-of-factly.
There had been a call to her home, and a discussion with her
mother. It had not been the first time she had made such unsettling
pronouncements in class; it made the other children uncomfortable,
the teacher had said politely.
Mama had not been pleased.
By the time she was five years old, Suraya understood that she was
different. Nobody ever said it aloud—at least not to her face—but the
difference was easy enough to measure. It was in the inches
between her and the other kids when they sat on the colorful
benches for breaktime snack; in the seconds that dragged by when
the teacher told everyone to pick partners, her heart pounding so
hard it felt like her whole body shook when nobody reached for her
hand; in the twenty extra minutes she waited on her own after
everyone else's parents or grandparents or babysitters or maids had
picked them up in a riot of cheerful chatter, because her mother had
work to finish in the primary school where she taught; in the number
of baju kurungs that filled her closet, the matching long tops and
bottoms sewn by her mother from the cheap cotton she bought in
bulk in the big town, so different from the other girls' colorful skirts
and dresses and T-shirts with cartoon characters on them.Suraya tried her best not to mind this. It was, she told herself, a
case of durians. Some people, like her mother, loved the creamy
yellow insides of the spiky green fruit with a passion; some people,
like Suraya herself, thought it both smelled and tasted like stinky
feet. "It's an acquired taste," Mama had shrugged at her as Suraya
wrinkled her little nose against the overpowering odor. "You'll learn to
like it one day."
Maybe that was what she was. The durian of friends. Maybe
people would learn to like her one day. Maybe she just had to meet
the right ones.
So until they came around, Suraya kept herself busy. There was
plenty to do: the letters in her books were starting to come together,
forming delightful stories she could discover over and over again; the
scenes and characters she conjured up in her head took shape in
technicolor crayon on the pages and pages of old notebook paper
Mama brought home for her use; and when she was done with
those, there were trees to climb, paddy fields to splash through, bugs
to investigate, fruit to pick off trees, and mud pies to make.
So when Pink came along, bursting out of his tiny grasshopper
body to show her his true self, she looked at him with the same frank
curiosity she looked at everything, and she smiled. When he offered
her the seed of friendship, loneliness provided a soil so fertile that
she buried it deep in her heart and let it grow and grow until it filled
her and patched over the broken bits and made her whole.
"Tell me about my grandma, Mama," Suraya said one evening, while
she sat drawing a picture at the kitchen table, picking through
markers and trying to choose the perfect colors for her unicorn as
Mama made dinner.
She'd been puzzling over this in her head for what felt like ages
now, like the mathematics she struggled with in school (Suraya was
currently learning to subtract, and was not terribly pleased about it).
If she had a grandma once, as Pink had told her, why had Mama
never mentioned it? Why were there no stories, no pictures of her
anywhere? The only way to find out, she figured, was to ask.
As the words left her lips, she saw her mother and felt Pink in her
pocket both go perfectly still at exactly the same time."You don't have one," Mama said finally, her back to Suraya, then
her knife resumed moving once more, a steady clack, clack, clack
against the wooden chopping block as she decimated onions and
carrots for the daging masak kicap.
Suraya frowned. "That's im-poss-ible," she said. It was a freshly
acquired word, and she took a great deal of care in pronouncing it
ever so carefully and with a great deal of relish. "Everyone has a
grandma. You can't not have a mama."
"I did have one," Mama said. "But not anymore. Not for a long
time now."
"Did she die?" Suraya understood death now that she was a
whole five years old; she wasn't a baby anymore, not like when she
was four.
"Yes."
"But what was she like when she was alive?" Suraya leaned
forward eagerly, her drawing forgotten, the uncapped markers drying
gently on the table. "What did she look like? What was it like when
you were growing up? Did you—"
She had to stop then, because Mama had smacked the knife
down on the counter and whirled around to face her, and in that
moment she reminded Suraya of the sky right before rain begins to
fall on the paddy fields, dark and heavy with a storm of epic
proportions. But when Mama spoke, her voice was calm and even,
each word slicing through the air like the knife she had just been
wielding.
"We do not talk about your grandmother," she said.
And they never did again.