No one uttered a word of complaint to Ma Rabiah, but she could read what she saw in her tenants’ eyes. She had always enjoyed surveying her empire, walking from shack to shack and communing with her people. But now she was alarmed by the actions of eight ungrateful brats. She rebuked them for their arrogance in evicting people without telling her, but they were more obstinate than the devil himself, worse than she had ever imagined. Not only did they refuse to apologize, they retaliated with even more evictions.
Hurt by her children, she would say to various people: “Find me a way to write them out of my will.”
One day the plan arrived in a moment of inspiration. She’d been going from one house to the next, sitting with the men and women, telling them she was going to sell her land, that they would have to pay for the plots they occupied. Every one of her tenants, including Komar, wished they could call the land their own, but not many had the money. At some point in her travels through the neighborhood, Ma Rabiah arrived at one obvious, simple solution.
“I’ll sell it as cheaply as possible.”
For Komar, cheaply meant he had to shave as many as one hundred and twenty heads pay for the land where his house stood and for the small front garden. It was their eighth year here, and Komar had been saving money to recover the wedding ring he had pawned, although until the day he died he never managed to retrieve it. The other neighbors withdrew their modest savings, borrowed money from Makojah, the town’s moneylender, or sold their motorbikes and necklaces, so that in a year the plots of land quickly changed hands.
Transfer deeds were written up, signed, marked with the old woman’s thumbprint, and sealed with revenue stamps. People’s worries faded away. The day when they would have to fold their houses into sacks would never come. Their deeds were framed and hung in their living rooms, like degree certificates, their most valuable possessions. Their love for Ma Rabiah grew, even if a tin of unwanted biscuits was its only expression.
The sums paid were small, but cumulatively the deeds marked with Ma Rabiah’s thumbprint added up to real wealth. She had never thought she would be truly rich, but the money was now literally piled under her bed. Even if she wanted to hide it somewhere safe, she would have no idea where. She worried her eight children would learn about the money scattered around her home, and then she found a solution. What she did would cause a sensation among the townsfolk for years to come, and would evolve into a tale passed between generations along with the town’s other legends.
In the few remaining days of her old age, Ma Rabiah splashed out on a pair of horses, so gentle the children played with them, which she let loose by the seashore. She also bought a bus because, as people said, ever since her childhood she’d always loved riding on buses. But because she couldn’t drive it, the vehicle just sat behind her house and became a chicken coop. One day she went to the cinema belonging to one of her sons without telling him, and bought up all the tickets to watch the film alone. Everyone still remembers that film, Puteri Giok, because she then bought up more tickets so that people could go see it free of charge for the next two days. Not quite done with her splurge, she went to a clothes shop and bought five wedding gowns she would never wear, except for one she slept in that very night and another for when she died. She bought a sack of bread and shared the contents with some little kids, and finished the remnants while riding a tricycle, on which she pedaled home in gales of laughter.
Her children only found out what was going on after a series of unsuccessful attempts to dismantle several houses. The newly titled owners stopped the evictions in their tracks by holding up the framed transfer deeds. It was only then they saw the horses cantering in the wild and with horror noticed the bus full of chicken shit. To top it all, the cinema manager ratted on their mother. Infuriated, the children plotted together to grab whatever was left, drew up a long letter saying she would bequeath them what remained, and tried to force Ma Rabiah to impress her thumbprint upon it. Dismayed, the old woman shook her head, refusing to give in.
As would be remembered forever, that morning Ma Rabiah wore one of her wedding gowns for the last time, having rejected her children’s rough entreaties. She sat on a small bench before her house, eating the soil in her frontyard lump by lump. Some people tried to stop her, but she insisted she was better off eating the land, rather than letting it fall into the hands of her damned children, who cared more for their mother’s wealth than for her. All the while she kept on scooping soil into her mouth. Someone reported all this to the children, as well as to the police and the officers at the military base. But by the time they arrived she was sprawled out in her beautiful satin and lace wedding dress, cold and lifeless. Somebody said she had choked on a handful of gravel. Ma Rabiah’s stubbornness in guarding the land to her death became legendary.
That’s how Komar bin Syueb came to own his house and the land it stood on. He never ceased to be surprised by this good fortune. Though still unquestionably poor, he had reached a level of affluence he always thought beyond him. Now he no longer gave haircuts on the terrace, but at the market instead, waiting with his bike under a tropical almond tree, next to a chicken and noodle stall, before handing the spot to a bajigur vendor who sold hot, sweet coconut milk at night.
Despite this good luck, Margio and Nuraeni never forgot their initial disappointment at finding House 131 no better than a lair for evil spirits, and as a young girl the family’s deed of ownership brought Mameh no happiness. In reality not much had changed in the eight years they had been living there, except that Margio and Mameh had grown, and Nuraeni become more shrunken and disheveled.
Those who had known her since her childhood could see how far she had deteriorated. You only had to glance at her long-expired identity card, printed early in her marriage, and the beautiful woman pictured there, all curly hair and plump cheeks, radiant round eyes glowing. Compare that to her appearance now, a faded beauty, her eyes grey and dim, her cheeks hollow, and her fair skin no longer radiant but chalky. Nothing expressed her discontent more eloquently than her wasted looks. Komar bin Syueb knew it very well. The day he told Nuraeni the land was theirs she was no more thrilled than she would have been had he returned home with three kilos of rice.
“At least now you can plant it with flowers and no one will ever cut them down,” said Komar, trying to arouse her enthusiasm.
The enthusiasm never came. Nuraeni simply hid away in the kitchen, as she often did these days to avoid her husband. She sat on a small stool in front of the stove. Komar had registered her new habit and understood what it meant. He watched her talking to the stove and pan. At first he thought she was just moaning inarticulately, muttering noises not intended to be understood, but as the days passed it became clear that Nuraeni was actually conversing with these inanimate objects, engaged in conversations no one else could understand.
This was when he decided his wife had lost her wits. But perhaps she was just pretending to be crazy, since she behaved normally most of the time and could be coaxed into conversation. She still complained about this and that, told the kids to do their chores, berated Mameh for forgetting to sweep the house, or called Margio to shoo a gecko away. But quite often she would become unbalanced and recognize no one but herself. Komar saw this as lunacy, and her craziness seemed to be getting worse, as both Mameh and Margio would later discover.