Ramadan Sky. Nichola Hunter
daydreaming about her wedding day and smiling a knowing smile as she promised to be a bridesmaid at mine.
First of all, I told her, I wouldn’t have that kind of wedding, even if I did get married, which I never would.
I thought having bridesmaids was a stupid idea and a crappy word, even. It sounded like some weird cow-milking virgin from times of yore. If I did get married it would be in jeans, and not in a church and not with all of the hideous frosting, the flouncy dresses, the bows and ribbons, the men standing around in powder-blue tuxedos, hands folded awkwardly over their balls for the photographs.
And that’s just the wedding. Then there’s the children. I have six aunts with an average of 7.4 children each. Curly-headed balloon women with cotton tent dresses. Hello now pet, how are ye? High, tense Irish voices. Pulling up in the driveway in Holden station wagons loaded up with bouncinettes and bassinets, big tubs of talc for the chafing, and each year another one in the oven, all respect and thanks to the great Holy Father, divinely inspired leader of the Catholic Church.
When I was young, I divided my many cousins into ‘reds’, ‘dark reds’ and ‘oranges’ – referring to their hair, of course. I’m a dark red, which made me a commoner in my family growing up. There was one blonde, who might as well have been the Queen of Sheba, and a few smug browns and blacks. The lowest of the low were the lemony-oranges, with their big square freckles that piled up on top of each other, and their inability to go to the beach. When I was seven, my mother had my dark-red curly hair cut into a boy’s crew cut ‘for the convenience of it’. I looked like a boy, and instead of ‘Victoria’, my brothers started calling me ‘Victor’, which eventually became ‘Vic’. There’s nothing else to say about that, except that my freckles disappeared in adolescence and, these days, my hair comes down to my waist.
Now that I’m writing this down, I can see that it’s possible that I have overreacted. Not to the haircut but to the other things. I ran away from two men who tried to marry me, and no matter how careless I was with my life, which was pretty careless, I never made the mistake of falling pregnant. When I was thirty-five, I started to panic a little, but told myself there was still time to seize the bull by the horns (so to speak) and have a baby. I was a bit averse to sharing it with anybody who might scratch his arse on his way to the kitchen, growing less and less attractive to me as the weeks rolled into months and into years. On the other hand, I could see the steep, narrow road of the older, childless woman stretching out in front of me and it didn’t look all that enticing. But I’m only thirty-five, I thought. No need to rush into anything.
One thing I’ve done is travelled a lot. I’ve lived in a lot of places, but strangely, I’ve never been to Indonesia, even though (or maybe because) Australians flock to Bali the way the British overrun Spain. But I’ve found a job that looks pretty good on the internet. So, finally, in my thirty-ninth year of not yet being married, I’m going to Jakarta, the capital city of Indonesia, to work for twelve weeks.
The first glimpse of the city is a shock, even at ten thousand feet. We are descending into a filthy grey haze with the light falling flat on a brown ocean that is choked with ships and prawn farms. It is a sunny day, but nothing shimmers or sparkles.
The plane doesn’t quite make it to a gate, but comes to a stop in the middle of the tarmac, and we pile on to a bus that crawls off towards the terminal. Outside, the buildings struggle up through the stifling air. Bougainvillea droops dejectedly over the gateway as the taxi leaves the airport. Welcome to Indonesia. Jesus Christ.
Something happens when you arrive in a place like this. It’s like meeting an old interesting friend that you haven’t seen for a long time and realising they are dying. You want to cry out: My God, what’s happened! Who did this to you? But everyone around is you acting as if the situation is perfectly ordinary and acceptable. The strange thing is, you can feel it even when you have never even set eyes on a place before. It has happened to me in Saigon, Delhi, Guangzhou, and here it is again. On arrival, the filthy sky and the sad trees tell the same terrible story.
A taxi driver takes me on some crazy rampage through the traffic, past depressed people sitting by dead rivers. When we stop for a red light, children rap at the windows trying to sell small toys and newspapers and foam aeroplanes.
I get to the hotel at sunset – the burnished light has softened the initial shock of smoke and I am in a tree-lined street. The call to prayer is ringing out across the city – it’s the first time I’ve heard it and I am enchanted. The hotel is a modest, three star affair – far superior to the noisy kost the company will shift me into the next day.
I get the money mixed up and tip the doorman and the man who brings me a coffee and some clean towels about twenty dollars each. This brings a string of smiling hotel staff knocking at the door at fifteen-minute intervals to ask if I need anything. Gado gado is the only Indonesian meal I know, so I order that and, after double-checking my calculator, tip a severely disappointed maid a couple of dollars.
The call to prayer comes back again at about eight o’clock. Next morning I am woken at five by the same call. I have never lived in a Muslim country and, before I even step out onto the streets, I have been reminded three times. After a few weeks, the call will be etched into my mind like a tattoo – the male voice proclaiming the greatness of Allah. The Arabic prayer ringing out over the Asian city, seeming to claim dominion over everything. I walk to the breakfast room where about fifty men are smoking clove cigarettes, and decide to go outside and find breakfast somewhere that I can breathe.
The first thing I notice is that the streets are dotted with clusters of shabby men, who stare at me as I walk by. I’ve been travelling a long time, but I still get a rush of fear and embarrassment when people are staring at me en masse, especially a group of men. I wonder what they see. Once, in Saigon, a man who had been watching me said:
You are quite nice, but not as beautiful as some Hollywood movie stars.
Is that what they are doing here? Comparing me to a movie star? Or are they just looking at my breasts, large by Western standards, bazookas over here in this country?
The only way for me to feel better is to walk up really close and smile and say hello. The men transform from a belligerent mob into some people that live nearby and are curious to find me walking through their streets. Handshakes all round. Contact.
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