“Here’s the house,” said Komar, with a pride that met no response from his family.
The house was bigger than their old godown, measuring perhaps forty feet a side, so there had to be a bedroom, a kitchen, and a bathroom. But Margio reckoned one wicked storm would be more than enough to blow it away. A falling coconut could flatten it. At a glance you could see it was tilting to one side, on the verge of collapse. It looked somber and smelled of death, damp, and misery. The roof was made of faded red clay tiles, blackened by the sun-baked moss. Margio bet the water came slithering down right into the heart of the house when it rained. The walls, made of bamboo wickerwork, were warped and moved in the wind. The old lime coating had flaked off, baring the cut sections of each piece of bamboo.
Komar opened the padlock hanging on the front door while his family stood behind him, dumbfounded with disappointment. Swelled by the summer humidity, the door didn’t open easily. One they had opened it, the damn thing wouldn’t close properly. Inside it was dark and reeked of rotten garbage, neglected for eighteen months, hosting spider webs and feeding the rats, who scurried away at the sound of their footsteps. A startled bat flapped around the room before escaping. The pervading smell of bat and gecko shit faded a little with the breeze once the windows were open.
The floor was nothing but dank dirt, gritty against the soles of their feet. Margio had been right about the rainwater dripping into the house. They couldn’t possibly unroll the wicker mat and the mattress on the floor as in the previous house. They would have to get two bedframes.
“Is there anything more battered than this?” Nuraeni said, opening her mouth for the first time.
“Oh, shut up. Battered as it may be, it’s our own home,” Komar replied.
Nuraeni should have known how little they would get for a six-carat wedding ring. The house was theirs, although the land it stood on was not.
For a whole week they cleaned up, brushing away spider webs and catching rats that teemed inside nests that they swiftly plugged up. Komar borrowed a hoe to level the floor and to clear it of various animal droppings. He climbed onto the roof with Margio to fix the tiles disturbed by the wind and the pigeons. Margio’s resentment deepened. Yet there wasn’t much he could do other than follow his father’s instructions, else he would have to face the rattan cane a second time. They also had to cut away the ferns and fungi, and chop down the coral tree by the well at the back.
They were lucky to get a well, although they had to clean that too before a rope-and-bucket system was installed. The bathroom was the most luxurious thing in the house, made of a cement base mixed with fragments of ceramic tiles, with a clogged toilet that took a month to fix. Until then they had to shit in the cacao plantation or a small ditch behind the brick factory. The house had two bedrooms, for which Komar brought two wooden beds one morning, one for himself, Nuraeni, and little Mameh, and the other for Margio. Later on this changed. One room belonged to Nuraeni and Mameh, and the other to Komar bin Syueb. Margio was relegated to the divan in the living room, the nightwatch hut, the surau, or Agus Sofyan’s stall.
The land itself belonged to an old woman named Ma Rabiah who, like Anwar Sadat’s wife Kasia, owned land that stretched past the borders of several villages. The houses along the side of the big road had been built on lots successfully acquired from the previous owner. That had happened back when families would come and go, bringing frameworks for their houses, which looked as if they could all be folded and packed into sacks. Some of the newcomers on the narrow road never told Ma Rabiah what they were doing until she saw for herself the white houses stood there, the front yards adorned by beautiful jasmine trees. Should any squatters decide to move on, they would dislodge the bamboo walls, roll them up, and carry them away along with the house’s wooden framework, and then someone would come to take their place.
“Here we are, waiting until Ma Rabiah kicks us out, when we’ll have to roll all this stuff up again,” said Nuraeni, once they had made the house livable.
In her whole life, Ma Rabiah had never evicted a soul. The settlers came and went as they pleased. The old granny never even collected rent or came to ask for help with the taxes. She liked to talk about other matters and to pass the hours chortling away with other women before going home. She was the kind, old widow of an army veteran, and the only compensation the squatters gave their landlady was the tins of biscuits sent to her home every Eid ul-Fitr. She never asked for them, nor were her decaying teeth up to eating them.
Many years before, when the area was nothing but a jungle of shrubs except for where the fishermen lived along the shore, those plots of land had no owners at all. The first settlers were a band of nomads from the east who divided the land among themselves with boundary stakes. These people, said to be twelve men who arrived on donkeys, valiantly chased away the boars and the ajaks, set up houses and farms for the first time, and became owners of land that spread out past boundaries unseen. They awed the fishermen who congregated along the banks of the rivers. They cut down the bushes, cultivated rice, and came to be remembered as the founders of the township.
They brought in beautiful women, from the fishing villages and elsewhere, married them and their children inherited the land: the farms, rice fields, and coconut plantations. One of these founder families produced Ma Rabiah, and another spawned Kasia. Kasia came from the fourth generation of the boundary stakes people, while Ma Rabiah was said to come from the third, even though what she owned almost couldn’t be calculated or charted, even after she divided the land among her cousins. When Komar bin Syueb came to reside there, the stakes were said still to stand where they were first planted.
As a girl Ma Rabiah married a soldier during the fledgling years of the Republic, and they lived quite prosperously without having to rely on her land, supporting themselves through open smuggling activities controlled by the local military. This lasted right through the revolution years and beyond. Mayor Sadrah could confirm all this as true. Thus the myriad pieces of land went to seed in the hands of two people who probably forgot even owning them. The lands reverted to a jungle of shrubs where cogongrass and reeds flourished wildly — until the day people began to arrive as the town took shape, regarding with wonder the endless parcels of neglected land. They came to Ma Rabiah’s house, hoping to rent or buy, but since she didn’t need money, she told them to live there for free. But some owners of the houses along the big road insisted on paying, because they didn’t want to be disturbed or evicted, and because they could afford it.
Ma Rabiah and her husband had eight children, all of them well known among the townsfolk for their ruthless entrepreneurship. One of them was the first to build a cinema with screenings three times a day, every day of the week. Another opened a donut shop, advertising the number-one donuts in the world. Still another set up a shrimp factory, or rather bought up shrimp and fish from all the fishermen along half the southern coast, to be resold to shrimp-eating nations. People referred to his giant tanks and freezers as a factory. All these children traveled around in shiny cars and became the town’s celebrities, as well as nightmares to those squatting on their mother’s property.
Not long after their father’s death, the siblings began to wrangle over land inheritance, not caring in the least that these plots belonged to their living mother. The eldest kicked out a family that had resided there for eighteen years. Indifferent to their pleas, he was going to build an ice factory. The family had to disassemble their home and move. Envious of the actions of the eldest, the younger siblings evicted several other families, making way for shops, factories, and fishponds, or simply letting some plots deteriorate into lairs for evil spirits. They set up new boundary stakes, dividing the land among themselves without consulting their mother.