Amba and Bhishma, sweet and lethal, like nightshade
An excerpt from Laksmi Pamuntjak’s novel Amba, a work which explores the links between Indonesian history, mythology and the experience of being a woman in the contemporary world.
By Laksmi Pamuntjak Publisher: Speaking Tiger Pages: 412 Price: Rs. 499
Beyond Buru Island, the sea is deep and motherly. It knows how to wait. In the morning, in the green fields farther inland, dewdrops rest on the tips of grass like glass fans, and the breeze hovers a fraction longer, as if to chance upon a secret, or to find what rises to the surface after the rain. Yet the fields are silent. It is the night that will reveal what is obscured by daylight.
But every so often something happens on this island that is so singular, and so irreducible, that folks don’t know how to talk about it other than in whispers.
Such is the story of Amba and Bhisma. Sweet and lethal, like nightshade. Three days ago, two women were brought to Waeapo Hospital. The first was a woman from Jakarta; the ID card in her wallet said her name was Amba Kinanti Eilers. It seemed that she had married a foreign man and adopted his family name. The ID card also said she was 62 years of age. She had been attacked by the other woman and was unconscious.
The other woman turned out to be Mukaburung, the adopted daughter of the chieftain of Kepala Air, in the headwater area of the River Waeapo. There were claims that Mukaburung had also hurt herself, but the details were hazier here. At any rate she was kept in the same hospital for a few days before she returned to her village. There was no denying that the two women were a spectacle, one that simultaneously displaced and fed the general stupor.
But in Buru, people are used to asking questions without receiving answers. And turning the other way.
It appeared that a code of silence had been forged between hospital management and the local leaders. During the staff meeting that followed the women’s arrival, the eagerly awaited statement from the head of the hospital contained only three sentences: Both women need tending. Everything is under control. Don’t ask too many questions.
Nothing was known of the woman from Jakarta. She was in all probability Javanese, yet something about her was also not wholly of Java.
She had an interesting face, hard edged and dignified, and could certainly pass for fifteen years younger than the stated 62. She also had startling eyes, tender yet exacting, undeniably a mother’s eyes. But there was something about her mouth, the stern yet sensuous curve of her lips, that suggested something guarded yet vulnerable, as though long trained to keep secrets. More vexing still was her behaviour when she finally came back to consciousness. She kept insisting on visiting her husband in the ward at the other end of the corridor.
“He’s there,” she said repeatedly. “I swear. I’ve come all this way to see him.”
No man in that ward fit the description she gave.
“We’d love to help,” the head of the hospital told her, “but the only patients here are a few locals with minor injuries. Everyone knows each other around here.”
“All this time, I’ve been married to a dead man,” she said.
And then she slid into total silence, a kind of waking coma.
Twenty-four hours later, a few details started to surface. The woman named Amba had been brought to the hospital after she’d been found in the pouring rain, covered in blood, hugging a grave on a hilly patch in the middle of the woods. Mukaburung was found not very far away. She was on her knees facing the same grave, as though in supplication, holding a bloodied knife in her hand. Not that there was anything unusual about these circumstances, apart from the knife and the blood, for the natives of Waeapo were used to coddling the dead as though they were the living.
When asked why she did what she did, Mukaburung said, “That stupid woman had no right to hug that grave.”
The sight had made my blood boil, she later told others. Didn’t she know that the man in the grave was my husband, wedded to me by my adopted father, the chieftain himself?
There is a man sitting in the administration office. No one has ever seen him before. Once again, the hospital is aflutter.
Like Amba, he too seems to have fallen from the sky. What’s more, he has come to claim her. The task of telling him what has happened, and of ensuring that he is who he claims to be, has fallen on the shoulders of Dr Wasis, the most senior doctor in the hospital.
Dr Wasis, a man most flat in all his aspects, which is to say his face, his comportment, even his voice, has been told by his staff that the visitor has “policemen friends”. It goes without saying that these “policemen friends” must have been responsible for directing the stranger to the hospital. So everyone leaves it at that. On this island, you don’t mess around with the police or with the military. Anyone already claimed by one of the two is best left alone.
What everyone in the hospital can and does gossip about, however, is who this visitor could be to the woman from Jakarta. He looks to be in his midforties… Her son? A friend or an associate? A younger lover? Nothing in the visitor’s features suggests he is even remotely related to her. He is about as pin-downable as a bead from an ancient world, his skin a glossy caramel, his features vaguely Melanesian, his eyes a disconcerting milky greengold. Then there is also that wiry, well-muscled frame, and the not- so- ordinary matter of his height. All of six foot, by local standards a giant. Listen to the nurses rustling in the background like bitches in heat. There was once a time when only seafarers made their way to Buru, and some eventually settled down here. They were the people of Buton and Bugis: sturdy, direct, happiest at sea. But these days folks have stopped asking where other people come from. Even Buru, for all its slough and bile and resistance, is now a land of many colors.
The doctor is presently telling the visitor that it had taken two men and a woman to wrest Amba away from the grave. In addition to hugging the rain-soaked mound as if for dear life, she had also planted a rectangular object on the mound, something that, someone reported, had looked like a picture frame. It was from this she had strenuously resisted being parted.
“But you told me,” says the visitor, visibly shaken, “that she was stabbed several times.”
“Oh yes, she was. But I wouldn’t say they were, you know, serious wounds,” says the doctor. “Still. She was…glued to this object. Her hands were torn when they finally yanked it from her grip. It turned out to be a photo of a child. They told me the woman looked heartbroken when it was taken from her.”
“Do you — do you know where it is now, that photo?”
“With the police, I would think. Taken as evidence, I mean.”
“I see,” the visitor says. “Thank you.” He hesitates. “My name is Samuel, by the way.” “Ah.” “It’s…Samuel Lawerissa.” “Ah.” Then, after a sheepish silence: “Well, thank you, Samuel, for coming to help us with this matter.” Silence again, before the doctor says, his own nervousness barely concealed, “So, I take it you are Ibu Amba’s relative?” “No. A friend.” “A friend?” “Yes.” “Perhaps you can tell me a little about her?”
The man named Samuel nods, his eyes polite, but he says nothing.
“What was he to her, the man whose grave she, er, clung to?”
Again, nothing. Of all the deep, difficult emotions, silent possessiveness isn’t exactly the worst they’ve seen in Buru. The doctor is Javanese; he knows something about the many shades of wordlessness. Yet his brows are furrowed for a second.
“You let me know how I can help, yes?” he finally says to Samuel. “Come. I will walk you to her room.”
She had an interesting face, hard edged and dignified, and could certainly pass for fifteen years younger than the stated 62. She also had startling eyes, tender yet exacting, undeniably a mother’s eyes. The e-publishing market has been powered by a series of technological advancements, recently. The use of handheld devices and personalised machines, alongside augmentation of interface with high-speed connectivity, has grown exponentially with the passage of time.
Excerpted with permission from Amba: The Question of Red, published by Speaking Tiger