The news came just as the teacher had finished helping me with my tooth. It was abscessed and swollen and I was almost screaming with the pain when he called me into his room and ordered me to sit on a plastic stool. The room was neat and bare, like the dormitory that I slept in at night with the other boys. A plaque bearing the one hundred names of Allah hung sternly on the wall above his bed, and there was a washbasin and a number of books were lined up on a shelf.
The room was not right for his large body and kind face. I wondered if this man, whose name was Dedi, would not like a wife and perhaps a young son, and why he did not have a television. He washed his hands at the basin and then shocked me by putting one fat hairy finger right inside my mouth.
Bite, he ordered.
Against my beliefs regarding the biting of a teacher but in accordance with the laws of obedience, I bit down on his finger as hard as I could. A rush of warm, foul-tasting fluid gushed into my mouth and I spat it out into a big handkerchief.
Bite again.
After that he tied a piece of thread to my tooth and the other end to the handle of the door of his room. I felt the blood drain quickly from my face and I began to tell him that I would ask my family to send money for the dentist, but his arm moved swiftly to the door and it was over. I took some medicine for the pain and then he was showing me out of the room with my jaw still throbbing when the headmaster found us.
Your father has gone to Allah, Fajar.
The two men looked at each other and then turned their eyes on me, thoughtfully, as if they were weighing up all of the consequences of that one piece of news - the way that each difficulty would now line up against the next and crash down on my small frame.
A short time later, teacher Dedi walked with me down the road to the bus stop. His large hand rested heavily on my shoulder for a moment before I got on and paid the driver and found my seat. I turned to wave, but there was only a square white back bobbing along the road in a cloud of bus smoke.
As I watched, my tongue sought out the place where the rotted tooth had been so cleverly removed, leaving a satisfying new gap. Then I turned my attention to a rooster that was staring at me from its seat on the lap of a young woman. Rain began to strike at the windows of the bus but then stopped as if changing its mind. I looked at the chicken and pretended not notice the woman, who had a large birthmark on her face and sat looking inwards, not out at the threatening sky. I was trying to think, although the medicine had given me a fuzzy, sleepy feeling.
My father has gone to Allah. But how? Is he in Paradise already? Doesn’t he know that he is urgently needed at home?
The concept of death had not taken a definite shape in my mind, although I had seen it before in the form of a motionless doll-like figure that had once been the next-door neighbour’s baby. But I couldn’t see that my father had anything to do with that. A small voice crept in to offer some advice.
It might be a mistake, it said.
The journey passed slowly with many stops, and I watched the people getting on and off the bus with their children and animals and packages.
As we neared the centre of the city, the buildings grew taller and the sky looked dirty and grey with smoke from the traffic. I got off the bus on a side road. There were scraps of rubbish blowing around in the street as the wind was picking up for a storm. My eyes began to sting with grittiness and heat.
I crossed the high bridge over the motorway that was swarming with beeping cars and motorbikes and people heaving carts through the murky air. I was home. I could hear the praying coming from our house as I went along the back alleys until I saw that the relatives of ours that live near the Monas building were standing in the front yard. Some lightning gave them a strange yellow glow for a moment and then their skin returned to normal colour and the youngest boy began smiling and shouting to me. My father should be greeting them, I thought stupidly, and my mother, and they should not be standing there in the heat and wind with the storm coming.
The truth is our house is very small and inside was full of other relatives. I could not find my mother but my eldest sister came forward when she saw me. I saw that she had been crying - but my own eyes stayed dry. Even when I saw my father’s body stretched out and pale in his coffin – he seemed far too small and his face was that of a sleeping stranger - even when the thunder and rain came shouting, banging and smashing on the tin roof, when we took him to be buried the next day, and I watched my grown-up brothers carry him without stumbling from the car. Even now, so many years after, as I am telling the story, it feels like it felt then. Inch by inch I turned to very cold stone. The feet first, followed by the hands and chest. It crept along the veins in my arms and ran like ice down into my fingertips. I became very quiet and still. I went through all of the prayers and rituals with the spice of incense burning at my nostrils. I did not want the green and pink cakes that my sister offered to the neighbours.
More than anything, I was disappointed to find that this is what happens in spite of everything, even to men like my father - who had a reputation for being very lucky and was able to steer his large family away from trouble and into prosperity - to change colour and shrink and to be wrapped in white cloth, to be put in a box like some terrible gift for the earth to receive.
After most of the people had left, my mother made me a place to sleep on the floor by the window, next to my small cousin. I lay looking out through a gap in the curtains at the darkness, listening to the clattering of cups and plates being washed and stacked. The big rain turned into smaller rain and finally disappeared. We would take him very early, at first light, and then come back and continue to receive visitors and to observe the three days mourning. I wondered who would now catch and tend the caged doves that my father used to sell at the markets and who would raise the rabbits and chickens and go around buying and selling all kinds of useful things in order for us to live.
For the next days it seemed that everything in our house had changed, but around us the streets continued their song as if nothing had happened. Children rose like ragged birds in the mornings and chirped and screamed and laughed in the heat of the day on the roadside where they always played. Women carried baskets of cakes through the neighbourhood and men pushed their breakfast carts selling bubur ayam and coffee and goreng. The ojek drivers watched the street and smoked and gossiped and waited for customers.
I wanted to stay there amongst the cheerful noises and the shadows of our small house, where my father’s presence could still be felt in the corners and around the windowsills. But my lessons had already been paid for two years and my mother was anxious to begin honouring my father’s wishes straight away, so a week after the funeral she packed my things and I took the trip back.
It was early morning and this time I looked out of the window, not at the other people riding on the bus. I watched the sky change from dirty brown to pale blue and the buildings disappear to be replaced with houses and farms. Nobody was waiting for me at the bus stop, so I walked down the laneway alone and found the latch on the gate at the back of the school grounds. I returned to my classes without any fuss - a cold stone boy, but nobody seemed to notice any difference.