Shadow Play
Authors: Barbara Ismail
For Jerushah and Arielle
Contents
Foreword
For most Westerners, Malaysia is an unknown. When it's mentioned, it's famed for its lush tropical landscape and grimly puritan Islam. In the 1970s, when this story takes place, Malaysia was still an overwhelmingly rural society, before globalization ignited the economy and brought toll roads and fiber optic cable.
Then, Malaysia was remote to much of the world outside of Asia, and Kelantan was remote to most of Malaysia. The “Land of Lightning” in peninsular Malaysia's northeast corner, Kelantan was isolated from the West Coast by untouched mountains, served by an inconvenient train, an even more inconvenient two-lane coastal road, and an e
Expensive weekly flight. During the northeast monsoon, it was entirely cut off by floods.
Kelantan's coast was a patchwork of fertile rice fields clustered around the sluggish Kelantan River winding from the central jungle to the South China Sea. Kelantan was hot, humid, poor and isolated, with a unique culture, dialect, cuisine and attitude.
Kelantan was, and remains, the most Malay area in Malaysia. Other areas of the country had far more mixed populations of Malays, Chinese and Indians, while Kelantan was a proud bastion of Malay culture and tradition. Arts, theater and tradition long lost on the west coast still thrived there. Historically, it was closer to Thailand than to the Malay States on the peninsula, and had a wholly different outlook
than the cosmopolitan urban centers of Kuala Lumpur and Penang. Its people stubbornly supported minority Islamic parties, true to their vision as a Malay and Muslim stronghold.
Mak Cik
, older women, dominated the economics of the area with assurance and pride. The main market, or
Pasar Besar
, was the hub of commercial activity in Kota Bharu, Kelantan's major city, and the domain of mercantile
Mak Cik.
Food vendors took the outside ring of the main market: fruit and vegetables on one side, fishmongers â primarily men â on the other. Inside the building cloth sellers were on the ground floor; food stalls, from coffee and tea with cakes to full takeout meals were upstairs. Local specialties were on display at the market, and also sold on the street as dinnertime arrived, providing home-cooked takeout for working women.
Unlike more retiring Malay women in other states,
Mak Cik
often smoked hand-rolled cigarettes and talked to men as their equals, or maybe not quite; as it was well known they didn't have the same head for business that women did. Kelantanese women were famous for their looks and their proclivity for magic, a reputation jealously stoked by those less spirited, less assertive, less active in business than Kelantan's daughters.
This story is about Kelantan's finest: market women with enormous sense, courage and confidence. Though it is completely fiction, and none of the characters are actual people, I have tried to give a sense of Kelantan and the Kelantanese throughout.
Chapter I
Ghani's second wife had recently appeared at the home of his first, so no one was completely surprised when he was found dead. There were risks to this kind of announcement, and though no one actually accused his first wife of killing him, sympathy for her had she done so ran high, especially among women.
Ghani played drums in the orchestra of a
Wayang Siam
, or shadow play, backing Kelantan's most popular
dalang.
Only a few weeks earlier, to the amusement of his fellow musicians, he had begun an affair with a woman in far off Kuala Krai, where his troupe performed. She peeped into the stage while they were playing, catching Ghani's eye as he had caught hers while taking a quick cigarette and coffee break at her tiny stall set up near the stage.
He was a handsome man, and it got him into a lot of trouble. Women liked his looks: high cheekbones and full lips, almond-shaped eyes and thick black hair. He was tall and rangy for Malay, and muscled, too, spending each rainy season in Singapore working on construction for extra cash.
She was forward, even when compared to the other women who often appeared at the ladder leading to the stage.
Dalang
were well known to be as catnip to a certain kind of woman, and sometimes their accompanists basked in reflected glory. She flirted with Ghani, who
then disappeared with her after their performance was over. When the troupe returned to their home base near Kota Bharu a few days later, he'd taken himself a second wife.
He knew he was in trouble, but he hoped it would disappear if he ignored it. After all, he'd be in Singapore for about six months when neither wife would see him, and he hoped that during this time a solution would present itself. It would only upset his first wife, the mother of his two children, to tell her what happened, and so, he reasoned, it would be best to simply not mention it. Besides, Kuala Krai was a long way off in the jungles of central Kelantan, so his new wife really couldn't expect to see him too often. He cheered up considerably after reaching this conclusion, and believed it unlikely he'd be found out.
He was mistaken. His new wife, Faouda, took the bus for a six-hour ride to Kota Bharu, determined to join her new husband and maybe even fight off the first wife. She had novelty on her side, and hadn't Ghani seemed passionately attached to her? Kuala Krai was far from the bright lights of Kota Bharu, and as she understood it, Ghani's village of Tawang wasn't too far from the capital, and near the ocean; in other words, altogether preferable to life in Kuala Krai.
She arrived in Tawang after dark, when the evening's dishes had been cleared away, tired after her trip and hungry, expecting if not a joyous reunion, at least a mildly affectionate one. Ghani's wife greeted her at the door of the small wooden house, clearly having no idea who she was, puzzled to find a slightly disheveled woman trying to put her bags down in the cramped living room.
“I'm Faouda,” she announced unbidden, smiling her brightest smile. “I'm sure Ghani's told you.” One look made it clear he had not. “We just got married! In Kuala Krai and, of course, he asked me to
come up and stay here. Kuala Krai's so far away,” she chattered away as her hostess stared at her with her mouth agape. “I knew he was married, but you know how it is.” Faouda began to feel uncomfortable. Ghani's first wife, Aisha, was her age, and the children were still quite small. “Well, where is he? Maybe he can clear it up.”
Aisha very much doubted he'd be able to do that. At the present moment at least, she had a strange woman sitting on her bags in the living room, and two tired children both frightened and fascinated by her. Aisha's first impulse was to throw this woman, and her bags, down the steps of her house and onto the dirt in the yard. It was probably the best plan, but she was unable to do so. The exacting codes of Malay hospitality were too deeply ingrained in her. Tightening her lips and casting the nastiest look she could muster, she began to make tea and assemble some fruit and cakes.
Both his wives were sitting silently on the porch when Ghani came home, and he had to overcome his immediate instinct to flee. “I didn't want to tell you this way,” he began.
“How did you want to tell me?” Aisha hissed at him. With a nervous eye toward the neighbor's houses, he tried to usher both women inside, but Aisha refused to move. “What have you done to me?”
It was hard to explain it in front of Faouda, whom he wanted to throttle. How could she just show up like that? No warning at all! Ghani tried to comfort Aisha without completely alienating Faouda and was therefore a failure on both counts.
“Aisha, you must believe me,” he began, unsure of what it was she ought to believe. “I never meant to hurt you.”
“Alamak
, Ghani, how could you not hurt me by taking a second wife? What are you saying?”
“I don't really know,” he confessed, “I just think maybe I made ⦠a mistake.”
It was now Faouda's turn to become infuriated. “Are you saying marrying me was a mistake? Now you regret it?” She burst into sobs, which made Ghani want to strangle her even more.
“Do you want a divorce?” Aisha demanded. “You'd better choose one or the other, right now. You can't have both.”
Faouda's sobs became considerably louder and more grating.
“Get her out of here,” shouted Aisha, collapsing on her sleeping mat in a flood of tears and frustration. “I can't stand it any longer. Shut up!”
Ghani tried hard to think of a place he could put Faouda for a few days until he could convince her to return to Kuala Krai. For the first time, he seriously wondered whether he'd made a mistake in taking a second wife. And five days later, he was dead.
Wayang Siam
was performed all over Kelantan during the dry season, when the rice fields are bare and hard and make perfect outdoor theaters. The troupe played for five nights in any one place, and slept in the
panggung
, a raised and closed stage. Dollah Baju Hijau's troupe, to which Ghani belonged, was in their third day in Kampong Penambang outside Kota Bharu, the center for weaving
kain songket
, a silk-and-gold fabric used throughout Malaysia for weddings and special occasions. The village lay along the main road to Kota Bharu, which followed the Kelantan River to its end. It was crowded with papaya, mango and banana trees and towered over by coconut palms: the trees made the air seem fresher with their thick leaves and dense shade, so different from the slight fetid air of the city, where trash bins baked all day under the burning sun. Several enormous brick
songket
emporiums
flanking the road dwarfed all the other buildings tucked back among the greenery.
Ghani climbed down from the stage shortly before dawn to relieve himself near the fence and never came back. The next morning, his yawning colleagues stumbled over his splayed body close to the ladder, taking in his torn
sarong
and gaping chest wound, and the puddle of congealing blood pooling next to him.
“Alamak!”
The other drummer cried out, unwilling or unable to really process what he saw. “Ghani!” The troupe crowded around the body, murmuring and exclaiming, pointing to the
parang
stuck up to its hilt in the ground, and the blood-soaked towel thrown down beside it. They waited for Dollah, their
dalang
and leader, to step down and comment on the scene. He did so deliberately, being no more familiar with violent death than the rest of the men.