“Pray that the baby will be ugly.”
Dewi Ayu turned to her and replied, “It’s been years since I believed in prayer.”
“Well, it depends on who you’re praying to,” Rosinah said and smiled. “Indeed some gods have proven to be quite stingy.”
Tentatively, Dewi Ayu began to pray. She would pray whenever it crossed her mind; in the bathroom, in the kitchen, on the street, or even if an obese man was swimming on top of her body and she suddenly remembered, she would immediately say, whoever is listening to my prayer, god or demon, angel or Genie Iprit, make my child ugly. She even began to imagine all kinds of ugly things. She thought of a horned devil, with fangs sticking out like a boar, and how very pleasing it would be to have a baby like that. One day she saw an electrical outlet and imagined that as the baby’s nose. She also imagined its ears as the handles of a pot, and its mouth as the mouth of a piggy-bank slot, and its hair that would look like the straw from a broom. She even jumped for joy when she found some truly disgusting shit sitting in the toilet and asked, couldn’t she please have a baby like that; with skin like a komodo and legs like a turtle. Dewi Ayu ran with her imagination that grew wilder every day, and all the while the baby in her womb kept growing.
The height of it came on the night of the seventh full moon of her pregnancy when, accompanied by Rosinah, she bathed in flower water. This is the night when you make a wish for how your baby will be and draw their face on a coconut rind. Most mothers would have drawn the face of Drupadi, Shinta, or Kunti, or whichever wayang character was the prettiest, or if they were hoping for a boy they would have drawn Yudistira, Arjuna, or Bima. But Dewi Ayu — perhaps the first person in the world to do so, and because of that even up until the day she died she could not be sure of the outcome — used a piece of black charcoal to draw a hideous baby. She was hoping that her baby would not be like anyone or anything she had ever seen, except maybe a wild pig, or a monkey. So she drew the figure of a frightening monster such as she had never seen nor would ever see before the people buried her dead body.
But then finally she did see her, after those twenty-one years, on the day she rose again.
At that time, day was turning into night, and rain poured down in the cyclone storms that signaled the season was about to change. The wild ajak dogs howled in the hills with shrill voices that drowned out the muadzin who was calling people to Maghrib prayer at the mosque, and who was apparently failing, because people didn’t like to go out when it was raining heavily at twilight and they could hear the sound of howling dogs, and especially not when there was a ghost in a burial shroud walking along the roads in a bedraggled condition and whimpering.
The distance from the public cemetery to her house wasn’t a short distance, but ojek drivers preferred to crash their motorcycles into a ditch and run away as fast as they could rather than give Dewi Ayu a ride. No minibuses would stop. Even the food stalls and stores along the road chose to close down for the day, locking their doors and windows up tight. There was no one in the street, not even any homeless or crazy people, no one except this old woman who had risen from the dead. There were only the bats who flew with all their might, slamming against the storm, moving in the sky, and the curtains that occasionally parted to reveal faces pale with fright.
She shivered from the cold, and was hungry too. A few times she tried to knock on the doors of people who she thought might still remember her, but the inhabitants preferred to stay quiet, if they hadn’t already fainted dead away. So she was overjoyed when from a distance she recognized her own house, which still looked just as it had before the people had laid her in the grave. Bougainvillea blossoms lined the length of the fence, with chrysanthemums along the perimeter looking peaceful under the sheets of rain, and there was a warm light coming from the veranda lamp. She missed Rosinah terribly and fervently hoped a plate of dinner was waiting for her. The image made her hurry a little, like people in train stations and bus terminals, which in turn made her burial shroud come loose as it was tossed by the storm, revealing her naked body, but her hand quickly grabbed the calico cloth and wrapped it back around herself like a young girl in a towel after a bath. She missed her child, the fourth one, and hoped to see what she was like. It’s true what people say, a good deep sleep can bring a change of heart, especially if it lasts for twenty-one years.
A young girl was sitting on a chair on the veranda alone underneath the ghostly halo of light, right where Dewi Ayu and Rosinah used to spend the afternoon hunting lice in each other’s hair. She was sitting as if expecting someone. At first Dewi Ayu thought it was Rosinah, but as soon as she stood in front of her, she realized that the girl was unfamiliar. She almost shrieked when she saw the horrifying figure, who looked as if she had suffered severe burns, and a malicious voice inside her head said that she had not returned to earth, but was instead wandering through hell. But she was sensible enough to quickly realize that the hideous monster was nothing more than a wretched young girl; she even gave thanks that she had finally met someone who did not run away at the sight of an old woman wrapped in a burial shroud passing by in the middle of a downpour. Of course she didn’t yet realize that it was her daughter, since she didn’t yet realize that twenty-one years had passed, and so to clear up all of the confusion, Dewi Ayu tried to greet the girl.
“This is my house,” she said in explanation. “What is your name?”
“Beauty.”
Dewi Ayu erupted into a truly impolite laugh, before quickly stopping herself and understanding everything. She sat in another chair, separated by a table covered with a yellow tablecloth and a cup of coffee belonging to the girl.
“Like a cow who sees that her glazed calf already knows how to run,” she said mystified, and then politely asked for the coffee on the table, which she drank. “I’m your mother,” she added, full of pride that her daughter was exactly what she had hoped for. If the rain hadn’t been coming down, and she hadn’t been starving, and the moon had been shining brightly, she would have loved to run and climb up to the rooftop and dance in celebration.
The girl did not look at her and didn’t even say anything.
“What are you doing out here on the veranda in the middle of the night?” Dewi Ayu asked her.
“I’m waiting for my prince to come,” the girl said finally, even though she still did not turn her head. “To free me from the curse of this hideous face.”
She had been obsessed with that handsome prince ever since she realized that other people were not as ugly as she was. Rosinah had tried to bring her to neighbors’ houses back when she was only a babe in arms, but not one person received them, because their children would scream and cry for the rest of the afternoon and the old folks would instantly come down with fever and die two days later. They rejected her everywhere, and it was that way too when it was time to for her attend school; not one school accepted Beauty. Rosinah had even tried begging a principal, but he seemed more interested in the mute young woman than in the ugly young girl and had boorishly fondled her in the office once the door was closed. Wise Rosinah thought, where there’s a will there’s a way, and if she had to lose her virginity to get Beauty into school, she would give it up in any way possible. So that morning she found herself naked on the principal’s swiveling office chair and they made love under the drone of the fan for twenty-three minutes, but it turned out that, even so, Beauty was still barred from admission, because if she attended the other children would refuse to enroll.