Strangely though, after all these years, she remarked with a glance in my direction, he had yet to bring a girlfriend home. Of her three children, Tante Surti said with a smile as she placed water glasses on the table, he was the only one who seemed to have no obvious intention of establishing a permanent relationship with anyone.
I didn’t know how I was supposed to react to this information. Wasn’t it normal not to be married at the age of thirty-three? Or was it that in Indonesia the age of thirty or thereabouts was a demarcation line of sorts, past which one should not wait to get married? I was twenty-three and I didn’t know whether I wanted to get married or not.
I was answering one of Tante Surti’s questions when a lithe young woman who greatly resembled Tante Surti rushed breathlessly into the house holding a pot in her left arm, a tiffin in her right, and a plastic container beneath her chin. I quickly moved to assist and took the large and hot pot from her.
“You must be Kenanga,” I said. “Here, let me help.” I extracted the plastic container of fried shallots that was wedged between her chin and neck and then took the tiffin from her hand.
“Thank you,” she said, breathing a sigh of relief. “And you must be Lintang. My God, you’re beautiful!” she remarked point blank, causing me to blush straightaway. Tante Surti began to remove the food from the tiffin containers and put the various dishes in serving dishes. She shook her head and tisked. “My word, Kenanga, you cooked an entire meal!”
“No extra work, Ibu,” Kenanga replied. “It’s what we’re having at home for dinner tonight.” Saying that, she again looked at me, up and down, assessing my features. “I’m not surprised that Alam invited you here,” she said to me, then turned to look at her mother: “but I’m guessing that it wasn’t just for an interview!”
“I was thinking the same thing,” her mother replied. “Earlier, I told Lintang that Alam had never introduced any of his women friends to me. This is the first time.”
“You’re forgetting Rianti,” Kenanga said.
“Oh, Rianti…” Tante Surti said with a flap of her hands. “She only came here because Alam had suddenly vanished like a ghost and she knew that he usually visits me on weekends.”
I was strongly tempted to imitate the way Andini said “Ohmygod, ohmygod” whenever she found something to be funny or absurd, but secretly I didn’t object to this dialogue between mother and daughter since they had, at that instant, crowned me in my position as “the only girl Alam had ever invited to his mother’s home.” I didn’t know whether to scratch my head or to laugh, the situation was so absurd.
“I came to interview you,” I said to Tante Surti, “not because Alam suggested it.”
Tante Surti looked me in the eye, gently touched my cheek with her smooth fingers, and turned to Kenanga. “Look how she blushes!”
“It’s called the ‘Alam effect,’” Kenanga said with a laugh, as she came to the table with a pitcher of water.
Alam was right: when two women were talking, it was always best to listen and to not interrupt — especially when the two were as harmoniously paired as Tante Surti and Kenanga. He was also right that in his home, just as in mine, the family meal occupied an important position in daily life.
The three of us conversed while enjoying our plates of steamed white rice surrounded by tempeh cubes grilled in chili sauce, and stir-fried green beans with shrimp, and portions of milkfish from the soup that Kenanga prepared.
Kenanga seemed surprised to witness my dexterity in using the fingers of my right hand to eat the food she had prepared. When she pushed the bowl of rice towards me, a signal to help myself to a second serving, she asked, “Who taught you to eat with your fingers?”
“My father, of course,” I answered. “This pindang serani is extraordinary, Kenanga. The milkfish melts in your mouth. My father is the best cook at the Tanah Air Restaurant, and this is one of his favorite dishes.”
Kenanga glanced at her mother who was now enjoying the meal in silence.
“The recipe is from your father,” Kenanga said.
“Really?”
“Did you know that your father and my mother were once a hot couple?” Kenanga said.
I was glad she’d said that, as it indicated that she and her siblings could look on our parents’ former relationship with good humor.
“It’s a good thing they never married. If they had, you never would have met Alam!” Kenanga declared as she picked up some of the dishes and began carrying them to the kitchen.
Tante Surti smiled to see her daughter continue to tease me. I brushed off Kenanga’s remark.
“Is Alam going to be busy all day?” Tante Surti asked me.
“I think so.”
Kenanga quickly cleared the rest of the table and then prepared to leave. She apologized, saying that she had to attend a parent-teachers meeting at the school of her youngest daughter. Kenanga gave her mother a kiss, and then I walked her to the door. Noticing the plastic container of jasmine flowers on the table in the living room, she paused and said, “For most people jasmine is a flower of death, but for my mother…” She pointed at Tante Surti who was preparing coffee for the two of us in the kitchen, “…jasmine is a flower of life.”
Her remark implied that she and her mother were so close that she was confidant to her mother’s past life. Kenanga leaned towards me, speaking in a lower voice: “I suppose that it’s because I came to know of death at a very early age, I am now very short-tempered with people who do not appreciate life. That’s also the reason I get angry at Alam when he puts himself close to danger. It was enough that we had to grow up without our father and without a normal social life.”
I put my hand on Kenanga’s arm. “I hope that you will let me interview you one day.”
“Take care of Ibu first. She’s the linchpin in our lives. We’ll find a chance to speak again,” she said, “but now I have to go.” She kissed my cheek, then left the house.
We drank our coffee on the back terrace of the house. Tante Surti now seemed to be ready to give her testimony. She positioned herself on a chair facing the camera, a sign that we could begin.
Before starting, I told Tante Surti that if at any point she began to feel uncomfortable, she was to tell me so, and I would stop the camera. But with only one question from me to start, she began speaking to the camera as if it were a long lost friend, someone she had waited for years to meet again…
“I decided to marry Hananto Prawiro in Jakarta in 1953 for reasons of love and conviction. Hananto was a responsible man and I knew that he would love and take care of his family. I knew little about his political aspirations or activities. He worked as a journalist at the Nusantara News Agency where he ran the foreign desk. I knew that, of course, but I knew little of his activities outside office hours. In the numerous times that I was interrogated during the three years that Hananto was on the run, it was always that information my interrogators wanted: what it is that Mas Hananto did, whether he was a member of LEKRA, what meetings he had ever attended, who was present at the meetings, and so on and so forth. These questions were asked repeatedly by different interrogators, and with different tones of voice…”
Tante Surti paused for a moment to take a breath and a sip of coffee.
“Perhaps you could tell me why they detained the entire family…” I said to her.
“It’s not true that they detained our entire family — or at least that hadn’t been their original intent. It was my fault that happened. It was just that, with Mas Hananto gone, the kids and I were all so afraid of being separated from each other. But let me go back a bit…