Map of the Invisible World. Tash Aw
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said as she flicked aimlessly through the day’s edition of Harian Rakyat before letting it fall limply on her desk. Even with the louvred windows open, the room was hot and still; the ceiling fan raised just enough wind to ruffle the pages of the newspaper. The headline read, ‘STUDENTS REVOLTING IN CLASSROOMS.’
‘They’re always revolting,’ she added. She had hardly bothered to read the paper. It was too hot and the news was always the same.
Din put a can of Coke on her desk. ‘I didn’t know there were still any students in the classrooms.’ He picked up the newspaper and sat at his desk. ‘Have you read this? There was a fire in the Science block on Thursday. Arson, they think. Did you see anything? I didn’t, and I was here all day. Look, they caught the culprit – he looks like one of your students, though it’s difficult to tell. These mug shots all look the same to me. They’re always nice clean-looking boys from the provinces with glossy hair and pressed shirts.’
‘Either that or they’re dead and lying face down in a pool of their own blood surrounded by policemen, in which case they could be anyone. The police can kill anyone nowadays and we just say, “Hey, there’s a dead body,” without really knowing, or caring, who it was. It could have been one of mine. I’m surprised I haven’t lost any yet. One of them told me the other day that they were making Molotov cocktails in the labs, for chrissake. And you know what really got to me? Not that they were making bombs on campus, but that they thought I wouldn’t care, that I would sympathise. What on earth are we doing in this place? It’s just too depressing for words.’
But in fact Margaret was not depressed. She had never been depressed in her life, a fact with which she consoled herself now and then, whenever life seemed particularly unbearable. ‘Tribes in New Guinea do not suffer from depression, therefore I do not suffer from depression’ was what she repeated to herself whenever she felt she was collapsing under the hopelessness of the world. True, she did not often feel like this, but just sometimes she would feel weighed down by a profound lassitude, something that seized her and drained her of all energy and hope and desire. This usually happened in those dead hours between coming home and going out again for the evening, and on the few times she felt it coming on she thought, ‘Uh-oh, I have to do something about this.’ And lately these dips in morale were accompanied by a funny tightening of the chest that made it difficult to breathe – just for a few minutes, but long enough for her to have to sit down and catch her breath. Maybe it was the humidity, maybe she was turning into yet another pudgy old white woman who couldn’t take the heat; maybe it was age, god forbid. But eventually she would haul herself to the shower, and, feeling better, she would step out into the still-warm evening. No: what she felt now was not depression but something akin to boredom, though she was not bored either. She didn’t really know how she felt.
‘You’re always saying that,’ Din replied, not looking up from his paper. ‘So why don’t you get out of here? You at least have a choice.’
‘You mean, admit defeat? You know me better than that.’
‘I don’t really know you very well at all. And I’m serious: why don’t you leave?’ Din didn’t look up from the newspaper but continued to hold it up before him so that it shielded his face. The back page bore a picture of a badminton player, his thick black hair slicked back in imitation of American movie stars, his smile reflected on the swell of a polished trophy. The headline trumpeted: PRAISE GOD FOR THE THOMAS CUP. Margaret could not tell from his placid, monotonous voice what he truly meant. Only by watching for small signs like the faint narrowing at the very edges of his eyes (pleasure) or the slight indentation of his dimples (sarcasm or contempt) could she read what he meant.
‘For the same reason as you,’ she said. ‘The job here’s not finished. I can’t just abandon these kids.’
‘So you do sympathise with them.’
‘If that’s your way of asking if I’m a communist, you know what my answer is.’
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t intend any offence, and you know that I don’t care about politics. I’m just interested to know why you stay here instead of going home.’
‘The States? Boy, you know how to annoy me. I was conceived on one continent, born on another and raised on four – five if you count Australia. I lived in America for less than ten years, not even twenty-five per cent of my life. Would you call that home? Why don’t you go home? I’ve heard Medan isn’t so bad. Or you could go to Holland – again. They educated you, after all.’
Din lowered his newspaper and Margaret studied his face for clues. There was nothing for a while, and then a completely blank, unreadable smile. It was something she’d begun to notice only recently and it made her feel uncomfortable. Her ability to discern moods in other people was something else she was proud of. She had been doing it – and doing it well – ever since she could remember, before she could talk, even. She thought of the opening line of her (unfinished) doctoral thesis ‘Tchambuli: Kinship and Understanding in Northern Papua New Guinea’, which lay in a locked drawer just below her left knee. That line read, ‘It is the nonverbal communication between human beings that forms the basis of all society.’ She had always believed that people (well, she) could read things that remained unsaid, just like tribes in the jungle who had little need for sophisticated language. She had never before come across someone like Din. Sometimes she found him completely Western, other times utterly Indonesian, sometimes primitive. She thought again of her thesis, locked away together with her passport at the foot of her desk. She had not looked at either in such a long time.
‘I have no family left in Sumatra and my Dutch was never very good,’ he said at last.
Margaret stood up and made a cursory attempt to tidy her desk. ‘Hey, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. I don’t know why I’m so crabby these days. It’s just so frustrating.’
‘What is?’
Margaret lifted her arms to gesture out of the windows, but then just shrugged, sighing. ‘Everything. You know what I mean.’
Din nodded. ‘I think I do.’
Margaret turned away from him and looked out the window across the low sprawl of grey buildings. Everything looked grey to her now in Jakarta. The new squat concrete shops, the flimsy wooden shanties, the six-lane highways, the dead water in the canals, the banners that were strung up everywhere across the city, whose whiteness dulled quickly from the dust and smoke and the exhaust fumes that choked the air. She did not know when she’d stopped noticing the colours and the details of Jakarta, or when this greyness had begun to form like cataracts that clouded her appreciation of the city. On the building across the concrete square hung painted banners that urged NO IMPERIALISM CRUSH MALAYSIA or FRIENDSHIP TO AFRICA or EVER ONWARD NO RETREAT IN THE NAME OF ALLAH. She felt a sudden surge of irritation: Why was it that everything in this city was written in capitals? Whenever she went to dinner at the Hotel Java the entire menu was in bold upper case, every item screaming its existence at her, insisting that she choose it and not something else, every dish jostling with its neighbour in a cacophony of advertisement. NORTH SUMATRAN FAVOURITE FROM BANDUNG EVER POPULAR DISH OF TORAJA KINGS. As if this assault were not enough, the prices too were announced in oversized numbers, though it wasn’t clear to Margaret if this was an advertisement of how low they were or yet another mild form of extortion, the like of which Margaret experienced every day. Maybe she could no longer deal with the noise and the crowds and the bullying and the corruption, and had, therefore, stopped wanting to see the city in detail; maybe this was why she had begun to see everything in terms of greyness. She mulled over the possibility of this sometimes when she picked unenthusiastically at a TYPICAL EAST JAVA DELICACY in the lavish black marble surroundings of the Hotel Java. Was Margaret Bates becoming soft? In the end she decided that it was the city that had changed. Margaret Bates had not softened with age. And that was the problem, she knew that. Adaptation is the key to human existence, she used to tell her students. The Ability to Adapt: that was another of her strengths, along with her Resistance to Emotional Instability and her Reading of Moods. Yet here she was, frozen in time, waiting for the city to change back into something she recognised. It would not happen. She had known a different country, a