By Susialine Adilea
Jamal hitched up his sarong and left the bedroom; he picked up the flashlight on the table, opened the back door, and disappeared into darkness, leaving his wife, Imah, shivering feverishly in their small, close bedroom. Whenever Imah’s illness flared up, all Jamal could do was to fetch Mus.
Mus opened the door, already knowing who the caller would be. Only Jamal would come knocking on her door at this time of night, two or three hours before the drum in the mosque announced morning prayer. As usual, the two of them hurried across the dike that separated their two fields, towards Jamal’s house five hundred meters away.
“I told them to take care of themselves,” Mus was saying to Imah as she rubbed hot balsam into the older woman’s back, in preparation for scraping her back with coins to release the fever. “They’re not guests. It’s their house, after all.”
Imah’s reply was an indecipherable mumble—probably the same answer she would have muttered in previous years: that the children came home only once a year and shouldn’t have to take care of everything themselves. So Mus said nothing more.
In earlier times, when Mus lived at Imah and Jamal’s, it was she who had taken care of the housework, overseen work in the rice fields, and even managed the milling of the family’s harvest. She had been raised to be both a housekeeper and a farmer.
Mus’s mother had once worked for the Jamal family but that was when Jamal still owned a quarter of all the rice acreage in the village. It was Jamal who had arranged the marriage between Mus’s mother and father, a mill worker. It was Jamal who had constructed a small home for the couple and had given them a plot of land in the southern section to help cover their own needs. Even so, poverty had befallen the couple and forced them to turn to Imah for Mus’s care. Ever since that time, Mus had been part of Imah’s family.
Imah winced with pain each time Mus’s hand scraped the coin down her wrinkled back. Her thoughts were still on her children who had come home yesterday and now, just one day later, had already gone. It was true what people said: there’s no difference between having one child or many. When the time comes, children leave their parents to seek lives of their own. That’s what Imah felt, anyway. She had given birth to and raised nine children, yet now, in her old age, she was alone with only Jamal, her husband, to fill her days.
Neighbors remarked that it must be nice to be in her position, a parent with many children, all of whom were now independent. All she had to do was to sit and wait for their largesse to arrive. Imah had just one word for an answer and that was, “Amen.” Maybe that is the way things should be, she thought, but a moment later she had chased the idea from her mind. Her religion taught her that parents must educate their children with no expectations for themselves. Parenting was an obligation, undertaken to fulfill His will because all children are His and only temporarily entrusted to their parents for safekeeping.
To have raised and schooled nine children until they could stand on their own as she had done was a sign of God’s favor. Nine children! In all those years had she ever had any time for herself? Admittedly, years ago, when she had met her husband, he had been the son of the largest landholder in the village, and while they were raising their family they had dozens of workers in their employ. There were those who tended to the rice fields, those who took care of the children, and those who managed the house. But, even so, being pregnant with, giving birth to, and suckling nine children had taken all her energy. In all those years she had almost no respite from the task of reproduction. By the time one child was weaned, she was pregnant with the next—and so on until nine children had been born of her womb. And now that she was old, with little strength left, not one of her children was there beside her.
Living in an isolated area as they did had forced the children to leave the village to continue their studies. Some had gone to the closest town; others had gone to the larger cities in the area—Pati and Rembang—or, even farther away, to Jombang. Cities were the place to seek knowledge of both the world and the afterlife.
After finishing their studies, some of the children had returned to the village but only to stay briefly before going back to the city to find work. Others—those who had found employment immediately—hadn’t lived at home again at all. And generally, whenever any of the children came home, it was with a prospective bride or groom in tow. That’s how it always went—from first to the last, their children had married and gone. Since then the only time they returned to the village to see their parents was once a year, for the Idul Fitri holidays at the end of Ramadan—and even then, it wasn’t for long. At most two nights. Some didn’t even stay overnight.
Often, Imah consoled herself. In her role as a parent, she had finished her task of raising and educating her children until they themselves were settled down. And even though she and Jamal could no longer employ many field workers because they no longer had so much land, the people in the area still respected them because they had succeeded in raising their children well. Imah took pride in this, especially around the holidays when the nine children would reunite, some of them coming home together, others showing up one after another, in different shapes and sizes of automobiles. For the people in their village, an automobile was a symbol of success. Not surprisingly, then, most neighbors imagined the only thing Imah now had to do was rest her legs. After all, with that many successful children, all of her needs must surely be taken care of.
The fact was, however, that after their children had grown, Imah and Jamal still had to wrack their brittle bones just to get by. It was not their way to seek handouts from their children. They did not expect to be paid back for raising them. Still, what were they to do? The state of their health would not permit otherwise. Imah’s diabetes, a condition she had inherited from her own parents, was sapping her remaining strength. And Jamal, who had always looked much more hale and hearty than other men his age, was now often suffering from aches and ailments. The old couple had no choice but to turn over ownership of their land to their nine children. But because none of the children lived there, the options were to rent out the land or sell the harvest from it to their neighbors.
Care for Imah and Jamal was now completely in their children’s hands—or such was the decision the children had reached at the family reunion the year before. So it was that Jamal’s days as a man of property were ended.
“You have to stop thinking about it,” Mus advised, packing up her coining implements.
Imah turned her frail body to lie on her back. She looked at Mus in the room’s dim light. “It’s good that you’re here, Mus,” she whispered, as teardrops gathered in the corners of her eyes.
“Well, I should get going now,” Mus replied. “I’ll stop in again in the morning.” She stood, watching Imah, waiting for a nod of her head as a signal that she could go.
The young woman left Jamal’s home, alone. She walked slowly, her mind full of burdensome thoughts. Imah had married her off two years ago and, until five months ago, she, her husband, and the baby had lived with Imah and Jamal. That had been until one of the in-laws had begun to raise a fuss about their presence in the large house. That was the reason she had decided to borrow the money to build a home of their own. There had been no other choice. Her parents’ house was too small for the young family to share and the home of her parents-in-law, who lived in the same village, was much the same.
The previous evening, the man who had lent her the money to build their house had come back to collect. But her husband’s motorcycle, their most valuable possession, still hadn’t found a buyer. And who was going to buy a motorcycle when its papers were in someone else’s hands as a guarantee of payment? This was why the offer proffered by Pak Muslih, who was a scout for overseas workers, kept going back and forth through her mind.
Six months after all this had happened, the family gathered again, this time for the wedding of Ussi, Imah and Jamal’s granddaughter from their second child, Fikri. In celebration of the event, Fikri had sponsored a mass prayer meeting in the village. A good time to hold a family meeting as well, he said. And so, after the friends and neighbors who participated in the mass prayer had dispersed, Imah and Jamal’s nine children gathered in the large central sitting room. It was unavoidably late because some of the siblings intended to return to their own homes first thing in the morning, and there was no other time.
Fikri, whose idea it was to hold the meeting, began. “We have to settle everything tonight. As we have all agreed, Father and Mother are our responsibility now.”
Ilham, another son, who lived in a city only seven kilometers away, immediately interrupted. “But what’s this really about? Even before we ever started talking about it, I was already doing it. Who’s been looking after Mother’s medical needs all this time? Who’s been paying the electricity bills?”
Arif, the youngest child spoke more calmly: “We know that, but it’s not only you who has been helping out.”
Rosyad, the sixth child, who lived in the same city as Ilham, interjected: “How many times have I said to open up a separate bank account for them? That would simplify matters.”
Alfan then jumped in: “But whose name would the account be in, and who would handle it? It would be a nuisance for Mother and Father to do it themselves.”
And so it went, with the children’s voices growing louder, as they tried to discuss the management of funds for their parents’ needs. An hour later no decision had been reached. For some of the children, it was out of the question to hand over their share of the funds directly to their parents. Even the practical suggestion of opening a separate bank account raised certain problems. Who would manage the account? Rosyad was willing, but some of the siblings did not trust his wife. Fikri had also offered to handle the matter but because he lived quite far away some of the siblings rejected this alternative as well.
Tension mounted. Each of the siblings seem to have his or her own opinion and was unable to countenance an alternative. It was nearly two in the morning. Imah and Jamal were nodding off when the situation flared. Fikri accused Ilham of showing off, only helping their parents to put himself in a better light. Ilham then accused Rosyad of not understanding the situation. Arif commented that Fikri wasn’t giving sufficient consideration to his suggestions.
Suddenly, Imah screamed, “Stop!” She was trying not to cry. “If you’re going to fight, then you need not come home! Your father and I are old. All we want is the see the nine of you living in peace. But every time there’s a reunion, all you do is gripe. Enough! I don’t want to hear any more.”
Fikri tried to calm her: “Please, Mother. We’re trying to talk about what’s best for the two of you.”
“Listening to you fight is not what’s best for me!” Imah’s sobbed. “I’ve finished doing what I have to do—taking care of you, putting you through school, making sure you’ve gotten married. All that’s left for your father and I is to live in peace until we die. If you object to helping us, then we can make it on our own.” Imah clutched her chest. “I come from a poor family. I’m not afraid to be poor again.”
Arif stood. “Mother, please, don’t talk like that.”
But Imah could no longer control herself. She muttered to herself between sobs until her body was so weakened that she collapsed into Rosyad’s arms. All the in-laws, who had been sitting silently in the back, now gathered round the unconscious woman.
“Take her to her room,” one of them said.
“Call Mus,” Arif’s wife screamed.
“Mus is in Saudi Arabia!” Ilham’s wife answered.
All were confused; no one knew how to bring Imah back to her senses. Fikri called out in panic, “Take her to the hospital!”
Alfan brought his car around out front and, with some of his other siblings, escorted Imah to the hospital in the city. But some time thereafter, the old woman did not regain her senses.
Translated by John H. McGlynn