Duyung

By Sofia Mariah Ma

At the break of dawn, Zahra — the grand dame of the Marican family — feels the dampness of the morning dew softening the cracked wax of her skin and thinks she should no longer cook for the rest of her life. She has just finished her morning ablutions when she cemented her resolve to see through her act of defiance. All the familiar trappings of a life spent in front of the stove are ash-lit in the sunlight streaming in from her back garden. All the ingredients she needs to cook the dishes for Eid al-Fitr are in the same places she has always left them.

Yet she stands fiercely still.

There must have been moments in her life when she had needed to get something done and ignored them, she thinks. Such as last Sunday when she tracked down a sour effervescence in the air and found the fermented cassava dessert that she had left underneath the sink rotting for months. Or three Sundays before that when she had stood in her garden and watched a pulsating horde of snails ravage her daughter’s white spotted orchid. Her neglect of the potted flower had blossomed into defoliation and death — and her daughter’s distrust towards her. Or last year, when she delayed in her claiming of her late mother’s remains from the Bidadari Cemetery redevelopment committee — whatever that was — only to be told that the monsoon had swept away everything; all the tiles, the grass, the headstones, including her mother.

Compared to these acts, this latest seed of rebellion has the purest of intentions: she desires change.

Sometime in the mid-morning, it is her daughter, Sarah, who first finds her in the middle of her garden, dressed in her well-worn abaya robe, alabaster cap covering her head, squat-sitting on a tiny stub of a stool. She is grabbing at worms and weeds instead of cooking. 

“What’s happened, Mum? Did you just get back from the mosque?” asks her daughter, coming in from her run and heading straight for the fridge. 

She takes out her sports bottle and takes several swigs from it. Cold water dribbles down the side of her mouth. She wipes it away with the back of her hand. Where she should have been surrounded by the aromatic scents of charring meats in a bed of chilli and spices, fish and vegetables stewing in a broth of turmeric and curry, there was only the smell of desiccated dirt and the inevitability of rain. “It’s half-past-nine but you haven’t started cooking,” says Sarah, matter-of-factly. “Did something happen?”

Zahra continues to sit enveloped in her silence. Garden tools and powdery leaves are scattered everywhere. Melodious voices fade in and out of the kitchen from an old clock radio — her late mother’s — that has never been switched off. On special days like Eid, she relies on it to mark the start of the day’s festivities with the queen of Malay pop, Rahimah Rahim, belting out her well-wishes. On other days, she depends on it to take her back to a time when the silver-screen artiste, P. Ramlee, would never have thought that he could die destitute. Or when as a child, Zahra could have almost died at sea.

“Mum,” says her daughter. “If you want help with cooking, I think I can somewhat help.”

“Sayang,” says Zahra, using her usual term of endearment for her daughter. In the morning light, her daughter’s athleisure clothes are shimmering like black volcanic sand. Inside her, her resolve is hardening like a stiffened muscle. “I just think I shouldn’t cook anymore.”

Sarah frowns. Pushing past her initial hesitation, she uses the silky voice reserved for her clients whenever she loses their money but wants even more and says, “Mum, you know what today is — Haris and I have already told everyone they could visit. All our friends and family. All your old neighbours from the kampung. You won’t want to disappoint them, right?”

Zahra remains barbed in silence. Tearing off fleshy green caterpillars chewing through her kaffir lime leaves, she suddenly determines that the whole plant is beyond saving. One by one, she twists off all its leaves, snaps off its stem, its branches, gouges out its roots. She lays them all out by their constituent parts as if she were carrying out a postmortem for a murdered plant. There is nothing she craves about the sounds of sizzling oils, the fragrance of garlic and shallots fried to a crisp; only the smell of parched earth calling for rain seems to speak to her amidst a susurration of swaying trees. “Mum?” she hears Sarah ask after a few long seconds. “This isn’t about me coming home, right?”

“Sayang,” says Zahra, firmly focused on dismantling her garden. “You should know, like you, my heart is elsewhere.”

“Your heart is elsewhere?” asks Sarah, hesitating again. The last time that she had stepped into this part of the house was three weeks ago. The orchid that she had brought home with her had died, along with her dream of a life in Brisbane, having the perfect job, falling in perfect love. Starting to feel suffocatingly small in her mother’s barren kitchen, she asks, “What do you mean, Mum, and why are you speaking in riddles? Are you in pain? Did you misplace your medication?”

Zahra shakes her head. From the corner of her eye, she sees her daughter gather her shoulders together, turn around, and disappear into the rest of the house, the weight of the day on her shoulders. A pity, thinks Zahra. She had wanted to explain to Sarah that this was no spur-of-the-moment decision. No bolt of lightning striking her sea of calm, which has hardly been disturbed from the time she was a young girl taking care of her younger brothers, or a young wife taking care of her husband and children. Maybe, it could be easier for some of their visitors later to understand; at least, those of them who had witnessed her fill out that shell of a child running hollow and free in the kampung, to be made into a mother just like her mother, then, a grandmother, a paper doll chain folding into place.

Her daughter should have understood that if it had been any other Eid, Zahra would have plied her time-honed culinary arts to conjure her usual riot of scents and flavours in the kitchen: of rice cakes wrapped in palm leaves fragrant with the warmth of the sun; of vegetables steamed in coconut milk and fermented tempeh for added acidity; of the Marican family beef rendang made with the Marican family spice mix which, if it was ever lost or forgotten through the generations of her husband’s lineage, would never be found again. To Zahra, her decision to resist, to renounce all this, was weeks, months — years — in the making, so surely, her own daughter could understand that.

*

The next to find her in her garden is her son, Haris.

So little is going on in the kitchen — neither cooking nor gossiping — that this pregnant silence is enough to make him feel shut out. Looking past the kitchen island into the garden, he thinks he sees his mother bend so close to the ground she’s kissing the earth. The old clock radio he’s never seen dislodged from its spot on the kitchen counter is resting on a mound of dirt; its shrivelled electric cord snakes across the kitchen floor. Festive classics rasp out of its tiny, yellowed speakers as if across time. “What do you think we should do, Ris?” asks Sarah, still in her running clothes, following close behind him into the kitchen. “What can we do?”

“What can I do about it, Sis?” he asks, trademark raffish grin on his coffee-tanned face. “Do you really think I can convince Mum to cook when she’s already made up her mind against it? Besides, it’s half past ten — much too late to start any cooking.”

“Fine,” says Sarah. “Then, what should we do now? Visitors will arrive soon.”

“We should cancel,” says Haris, a shade too quickly, glancing down at his gem-studded watch that he could take deep-sea diving if he so desired. “What else can we do?”

“Should we really?” asks Sarah. “Is that really what we want — what Mum wants?”

“It’s obvious what Mum wants,” says Haris. “She doesn’t want to be a part of this mess we’ve created for ourselves.”

“But it’s all so sudden. Do you think she’s doing it on purpose?” 

“Please, Sis, let’s not start,” says Haris, waving his sister off and letting his gaze rest on their mother’s stooped frame. On this day, Zahra appears to him resolute in her will to unravel everything she has ever planted in the garden. To the musical beats of the festive music and proclamations of happiness alongside misery, fullness amidst loss, she rips apart the planks of wood holding the garden beds together. Plants and shrubs are stripped down to their bare stalks. Herbs and vegetables are prematurely cut and roughly bundled together into small clumps. Somewhere in the world outside their lives, thunder is rolling and fetching rain. “Besides, it was our idea to invite everyone to the house for Eid,” he says. “It’s only been a year since Dad passed but we said we would host everyone — just as we used to do when Dad was alive. Since we’ve failed to provide an authentic, homemade meal for everyone, shouldn’t cancelling be our only option?” 

“It’s almost eleven, Ris. Isn’t it too late to cancel too?” 

“Then, what do you suggest we do?” asks Haris, a little confused by his older sister’s indecisiveness. Having arrived in Singapore so late last night, tired and jet-lagged, any connection he feels towards the Marican family is beginning to feel like nothing more than a routine. He’s spent so many years away from his family, studying overseas at first and then marrying against his father’s wishes to an Englishwoman, that all he has retained of his esteemed parents is an after-image; of his mother in perpetual motion in this house cleaning, cooking, shadowing his father’s every step as if they were trapped inside the reels of a black-and-white film and set on loop until today. “Couldn’t we just order in some food to celebrate Eid, Sis?” he goes on, taking out his phone and checking through his notifications. “Or better yet, do a drive-by of every shop, every restaurant that’s open on Eid, and buy up everything. If anybody asks, just tell them that every dish we’ve bought is a dish we made ourselves, we swear to God, what do you say?”

“Look here, Haris…” says Sarah, folding her arms, but an orchestra of chimes resounding through their mother’s house disrupts her response and signals the arrival of their guests. 

*

Reaching past his sister, Haris presses down on a button next to the intercom to unlock the front gate. He instructs their visitors to walk straight to the kitchen, telling them that all their plans for Eid have changed. That if they wished to pay their respects to the current head of the Marican family — Zahra, not him — they could see her in her garden; however, on her behalf, he apologises for her failure to deliver a traditional Eid meal even as she has always done so, every year, for the last half century or so of her life. There will be no beef rendang. No coconut-steamed vegetables to sate their cravings. Or densely rich and sickly-sweet tea, even as offering something sweet is the simplest way of showing their Javanese hospitality.

Sweetness is, after all, overrated, he says. It marks the Dutch colonial encounter with their motherland when rice fields were converted to grow sugarcane, coffee, rubber. Today, glasses of water will be waiting for them instead.

Customary greetings of ‘Eid Mubarak’ and ‘Selamat Hari Raya’ echo from the kitchen through to the garden where Zahra sits as her third and fourth visitors appeared. Her younger brother, Salim, and his wife, bedecked in gold and lustrous red, pile into her garden and touch her grime-encrusted hand to their foreheads before they walk back into the kitchen to wash off the dirt. The couple’s twin teenage boys, Ziq and Zub, are calling out from elsewhere in the house, threatening to order in McDonald’s, until Salim’s wife steps in. She promises them something better than fast food at the next house they are to visit — something traditional, at least.

“Everything’s quite last minute this year, isn’t it? Did the two of you really think you could plan Eid on the very day it’s happening?” asks Salim’s wife, her tone expertly balanced between sounding like she knew from the start that this would happen and only arbitrarily hoping that she’d be wrong. “I don’t see your children at all, Haris. Aren’t they celebrating Eid with us as a family?”

“And what about you, Sarah?” asks Salim next, sniffing into his glass of water. “Your mother says that she simply changed her mind about cooking. What’s your excuse for not dressing up this year?”

“Hold on.” This is the fifth and last guest to enter and leave Zahra’s garden: her older brother, Senin, accompanied by a stream of family members including his wife, their daughter, and their daughter’s husband, who’s fussing over their new-born son in the doorway to the kitchen. Raising his voice over his grandson’s cries just to be heard, Senin asks, “Just what exactly did the two of you do to cause this change of heart in Kak Zahra?”

“Nothing, Uncle Senin.” Haris’ deep voice seems to bounce off the kitchen cabinetry when he speaks. “It’s just that Sis thought I’d spoken to Mum about hosting everyone, and I—”

“What about the house?” asks one of the aunts. “Has anyone else heard that Kak Zahra’s selling this house?”

“What?” says Sarah at the same time that Haris says, “No, Aunt Aisha. Mum won’t sell Dad’s house. She can’t. Dad worked his whole life just to buy her this house with a garden. She doesn’t have the right to sell it.”

“You know, the house is one thing,” interjects the first aunt again, “but if every Eid is going to be a disaster, then—”

“That’s not fair, is it, Aunt Hanna? I’ve only arrived in Singapore after midnight last night, and Sarah’s been back from Brisbane only a few days—”

“Sarah’s been back almost a month, no?” chips in their cousin from the doorway, looking straight at Sarah. The young, dewy-skinned parents in their matching festive clothes would have looked like a celebrity couple on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar Asia save for the rosy-faced baby crying a fever between them. The husband adds: “I only know because Sarah texted me earlier in the month to ask about a job opening at my sister’s company. She told me she’s thinking of coming home.”

“Is this true, Sarah? What happened to your so-called dream of moving to Brisbane?” asks the uncles, one after another: “Kak Zahra supported your decision to move, didn’t she? Why turn back now?” 

“It’s only the thought of coming home, Uncle Salim — nothing more,” replies Sarah, shrugging off any incidental concern she thought she might’ve heard in the voices around her. Between the sounds of the baby’s desperate cries and thunder rumbling overhead, she hears her brother ask: “And what about Mum, Sis? What did she say?”

“She said, like me, her heart is elsewhere.” Her breath snagging in her throat, her eyes turning away from her brother, Sarah looks outside to their mother in the garden, if it could still be called one, and says, “Like her home.”

At the first appearance of rain, Sarah begins to walk out towards their mother and asks, as if pondering out loud to herself, if it was time for her to come back inside now that she’s made her point, now that she’s waited her whole life to reach this moment. Perhaps she feels that the world outside the house is swelling with possibilities resisting the conditions of her birth, reminding her of the use of her legs, but why not just forget about the what-mores, the what-could-have-beens for now and come back inside? No matter what anyone says, this house is hers. It’s always been hers to keep or dispose as is her decision to never have to cook again.

Still the matriarch of the Marican family doesn’t reply.

Which makes Sarah wonder, whether her mother’s silence has brought about something poignant and ambiguous inside her as well, like finding a nest of dead ants curled up in the dust at the bottom of a rice container. It makes her wonder about the time she has spent back home these past weeks, hardly remembering the things that have happened — the words that are exchanged — between her mother’s routines of cooking, cleaning and praying, and her own of exercising, job-hunting and feeling sorry for herself. Somewhere between Zahra’s and her own worlds of pain and disappointment, they must have grown as far apart as they fell deep within themselves, cutting off their wounded internal worlds from each other.

Then, today happened, and those worlds changed, taking everyone with them.

*

Outside, wispy tendrils of rain have begun to anoint the cups of Zahra’s palms facing the sky and feeling for rain. When she sees her daughter walking back and forth from the kitchen to the garden, again and again, as if on a sort of strange pilgrimage, she understands that Sarah is trying to save her mud-plastered produce from the imminent storm. A trail of torn roots and loose dirt forms in her wake. Modest heaps of lemongrass, chilli and pandan leaves left across the kitchen counter appear like the tired display of a downtrodden market stall owner.

When Sarah offers to refill everyone’s drinking glasses, nobody accepts. One by one, the Marican family members take their leave. The young family with their baby. Zahra’s younger brothers with their families. Haris, who retreats with the others into the rest of the house, repeats the same chorus of salaams and salutations as he leaves behind the expanding well of silence between Zahra and the rest of the family — the silence that’s pushing everyone away.

In Zahra’s mind, she has already begun to recall the day that she was almost claimed by the sea.

Earthy scents have always been able to transport her to a time when she was a young girl living in a village beside the sea and always finding ways to run away from her responsibilities. After school, most children her age would be free to swim in the large, open canal outside their village, but it was often her own mother, Bu Mulya, who would be pacing up and down the banks of the canal, a crying baby on her hip, a steaming hot ladle in her hand, and chasing everyone home. 

Every few days, Bu Mulya would send her over to a neighbouring village to help her grandmother, Oma Ratna, with her chores. Oma Ratna spoke, sang and criticised purely in Javanese, especially when commenting on the quality of her washing and sweeping. The slipshod way she pounded the rice grains to remove their husks was enough to cause their dead ancestors back in Java to turn in their graves, she used to say. That was, until Zahra figured out that these chores were a ploy to keep her away from her favourite swimming haunt, the Siglap Canal. 

The canal’s jade-green seawaters and luminescent seagrass bottom was as the hidden entrance to the land of the duyung; after school, Zahra and her friends could spend the whole afternoon just taking a dip or playing a game of spot the duyung — and no-one seemed to mind that none of them had ever seen such mythical merfolk before. Always there were rumours, Zahra thought; always it was an ethereal mermaid selflessly holding back the waters in a thunderstorm. Or secretly rescuing fishermen during a flash flood brought about by the monsoon. Each time that Zahra swam in the canal, however, she didn’t wish to see the duyung at all but to witness their world; she wanted to see the liquid cosmos of their underwater universe that stretched far across the ocean and plummeted deep into the pits of the planet where no-one had ever been. 

On that fateful afternoon, Zahra had returned home much later than usual. Her tardiness had incurred her mother’s worry more than her wrath which was infinitely worse. Trying to sneak into their kampung house by tiptoeing up the stairs, she was stopped by her mother’s footfalls reverberating through the wooden floorboards right into her heart.

“Don’t you dare come inside, Zahra,” demanded her mother. “I have just the thing for you to do.”

“W-what is it, Ibu?” asked Zahra, staring at the growing puddle of water mapping the invisible contours of her drenched feet.

Standing at the top of the stairs with the disembodied cries of her other children behind her, Bu Mulya looked like the last person to be trifled with in the village. Her thick, tightly spun hair was the colour of a crow’s beak at midnight. In the shifting shadows of twilight, her wrinkled face was so contorted in anger that it appeared as a wayang mask with bloodshot eyes and red lips.

“Zahra, I’ve told you a hundred times not to swim in the canal — just how many fishermen and children must be taken by the sea before you listen to me?” asked Bu Mulya without expecting a reply. “But since I’ve also told your father not to fish and to return home at once after his work is done, then it must mean I’m to be ignored.”

“N-no, Ibu.”

“I want you to wait for your father on the beach and make sure he gets this tiffin from you. Here, take it.” 

“Y-yes, Ibu.”

Zahra could feel the scorched edge of her mother’s gaze on her back as she grabbed the cloth bag with the tiffin box and ran towards the darkening line of trees by the beach. She didn’t stop running even as rain broke open the skies, piercing steel arrows into her back. For the rest of her life, her mother’s parting words would play on her mind: If home is so terrible for the two of you, then neither of you deserve one.

No golden sunset or carnival of beachgoers greeted her when she arrived on the beach; only bruised skies and iron-blistered clouds sit in the belly of a gun. Worse, the longer she waited for her father to return, the more starved she felt of any sign or hope that either of them could ever return home. 

*

When Zahra at last found the courage to tear her gaze away from the slate-blue horizon, twilight had descended. Freezing, black waters as if from some bottomless, primordial ooze were squelching about her ankles, sending shivers up her spine. Between clenched jaws, her teeth were chattering. In her ears, the sound of clanging metal coming from inside her mother’s cloth bag dampened the drum beat of the villagers searching for her and shouting her name, begging her to come home.

At first, Zahra thought that their kerosene lamps were fiery spectral orbs dancing eerily in the dark as they circled closer and closer around her.

Gradually, the sour stench of rotting leaves and stagnant seawater told her that she hadn’t been standing on the beach at all but deep inside the mangrove forest beside it. She couldn’t even remember how or when she’d been pulled out to sea, and ended up washed up, here, among the mangrove trees.

“Zahra, sayang, is that you?” Somehow, the dark figure standing in front of her had her father’s voice and his smell of the sea. “Are you hurt?”

“Ayah,” croaked out Zahra, offering him the cloth bag with both her hands. “Ayah, t-this is for you… from Ibu…”

Her father hooked the handle of his kerosene lamp over his arm, before taking the cloth bag from her and opening it. Zahra could feel his eyes studying her closely; her muddied face, her neck and hands covered in scratches, her naked, blood-stained feet. He handed the tiffin box back to her and asked, “Do you remember what happened to you?”

“I was looking for you, Ayah,” said Zahra. “Then, a storm came, and I wasn’t sure if you’d make it back from the sea. Ibu said… I’m not to come home without you…”

Taking her hand in his, her father supported her as they both plodded through the mud towards the villagers. Then, in a low voice, she heard him say, “Zahra, we’ve been searching for you for two days. Promise me that you won’t run away again. Promise me, sayang.”

Zahra didn’t reply. She tightened her grip on her father’s hand and stared down at her other hand: the tiffin box that she’d been holding was empty. The shoes that she thought she’d lost to the sea were hanging around her neck, their laces tied together, their rubber insoles sticking out like the swollen tongue of a dead animal. For an inexplicable second, Zahra thought about the emerald, underwater plains belonging to the merfolk at the bottom of the canal. She is swimming among the long, swaying grasses and tiny, opaline fish. She feels the strong water currents stroking her hair like a wet comb and imagines looking into their world on the verge of becoming her reality.

Except, in this moment, approaching the tumult of drums and voices celebrating her return, she knew that she had to turn her back on that secret world and return to the safety of her village, her family, for the sake of those she loved.

*

At dusk, it is Sarah who prepares the tea — thick, full-bodied and just a note too sweet, just the way Bu Mulya would have liked it, says Zahra to her daughter. They are sitting on stools around the kitchen island, listening to the mesmeric sounds of the thunderstorm and sipping their tea. Strong winds keep getting caught in the gaps of things, sending shrill whistles down empty corridors. Doors and windows smash into their frames, toppling things. Neither mother nor daughter appears bothered. The small collection of produce from Zahra’s garden — washed and sorted out — sits between them on the kitchen counter.

Zahra assures her daughter that she will give them all away, but Sarah says: “Oh, but Mum, I’m more worried about your heart feeling elsewhere.”

“How about you, sayang?”

“Me?” asks Sarah. Tracing the rim of her cup, she scrutinises the steam rising from her tea and says, “Mum, I think I won’t stay. I wanted to thank you for letting me come home, though I’ve hardly been home… and when you wanted to talk, I…”

“Sayang,” is all Zahra says, reaching over to squeeze her daughter’s hand. It is that inexpressible texture of her mother’s roughened palm on which time has wrought its invisible wounds that makes Sarah’s breath catch in her throat again, her lips purse into a faint smile. She studies the glassy blue arcs of her mother’s eyes and asks, “And you, Mum?”

In that moment, a sudden, explosive sound like the crack of a whip interrupts them, bringing them both to their feet. They look out into the darkness of the garden where nothing should remain except for some loose soil and the fragments of a life waiting to be assembled once more and watch as water — too much water — spills into the kitchen as if the aftermath of a flood. They let out startled gasps when a glut of sludge and discarded plant parts start to gather around their feet, struck by the smell of rain and the flesh of the Earth right inside their home. Seeing Sarah stretch out her arms towards her, Zahra fits herself snugly inside her daughter’s newly assured, sinewy arms. They help each other up to the top of their stools. It was as if they had reverted to being children, finding themselves trapped on a waterlogged playground yet still wanting to play with their friends.

A few shrieks of laughter and cries of incredulity later, they summit the kitchen island and watch hypnotised by the water swirling around the kitchen, feeling safe standing together in the heart of the storm. Somehow, Zahra thinks back to the day her father had found her in the mangrove and the world that she had to leave behind then — only to discover it again without the need of the duyung — the hope for a different life.

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Sofia Mariah Ma is a writer of Javanese descent based in Singapore. She has won awards in the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and the Golden Point Award. She holds an MA in English Literature and is currently working towards her PhD in Creative Writing. Her latest works can be found on Granta, and in the anthology, The Second Link. She is also the co-founder of The Motley Kolektif, a curatorial group promoting the arts and literary appreciation in the Southeast Asian region and beyond. For more, visit: https://sofiamariahma.com/

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