The Question of Red

by Laksmi Pamuntjak

Either your life does your name justice or you might as well not have been born at all. The elders have a phrase for this: keberatan nama. It means a state of being burdened by a name too great, or too portentous.

Yes, Samuel thinks. In Buru feelings change in a mere hour. Sometimes it doesn’t even take that long.

To this man, a sense of duty was nothing to be overly impressed by; it was merely something one had to live with. Something akin to fate.

“Don’t be jealous. I mean it. That was what did me in with Bhisma. I didn’t look for him hard enough when I had the chance because deep down I was insecure. I thought he was too good for me, that his love for me must have been a mistake, a momentary aberration, and that our separation was the gods’ way of knocking some sense into him. Then came all the false pride, the woman warrior thing, thinking I didn’t need his love. But I was always jealous of him. That’s the sad, shattering truth. And jealous people are insecure people.”

She always knew that beauty is more a curse than a blessing. It exalts and entraps.

And darling, he told Amba privately, you know that no woman should accept the conventions of her name, much less be trapped by it.

They understood instinctively that telling is always retelling, casting the old anew.