The Question of Red

by Laksmi Pamuntjak

living with a sister was like living with doubts—cranky and torturous things you nonetheless stuck to because they kept you honest.

Amba watched her mother retreat. Nuniek knew only too well when to stop, when to heed her husband’s change of voice. She knew that you had to feel your way through a marriage, not unlike politics. Just when you thought your relationship with your husband was firmly in place, the tables began, ever so slightly and unfathomably, to turn.

“We cooks have the highest intelligence, and we have opinions about everything. Why? Because the qualities we have come to know as ‘taste’ and ‘a deft hand in the kitchen’ are essentially courage, and that is the prerequisite to alchemy: a set of nerves so steely and seasoned, which always know how much garlic, how many chilis, how much salt and pepper to put into each dish, at any second, in any situation, in any city, for every mouth, for every type of hunger.” Your grandmother was also a scientist. She would say, “Cooking is not simply a skill. A cook also needs basic knowledge of physics.” And a philosopher: Cooking is not unlike marriage. Learning to wait, to not put your hand into muddied waters.”

The old books never spoke of love that was patient or undemanding; they spoke of love fueled solely by bodily desires, of the need to be ravished now, now, now. But how could she know how it felt to be kissed on the mouth, let alone ravished now, now, now? How was she to know which was the better love? Perhaps the point of waiting was that once she and Salwa married, that was how it would be, that other love, now, now, now, every hour, every day, until they were eventually replete? But why did he wait so completely? Why not at least let her have a taste of things to come? Isn’t desire something that does not wait for consensus?

When Salwa tried to suggest a remedy, she would shake her head furiously, and say, “Ah, what do you people, the young and beautiful, know of pain? I know what ails me. I know it’s not curable. But do you see me stop working? Do you see me complaining?”

In matters of the heart, however, not a lot actually happened between him and her. Soon she even resigned herself to missing him, sometimes. Eventually she realized that she had gotten what she’d always wished for: that wicked paradox of wanting to see the beloved yet not minding if he wasn’t there, of being irritated by his flaws yet trying at the same to justify them as some kind of underrated virtue. She was, in short, living the lover’s dilemmas.

for the first time in many months she couldn’t sleep. A part of her, she realized, was becoming soft, like a marital bed, too willing to settle. The night was no longer Tartarean. Love was unsexed. Blue was simply blue. Is this what is meant by growing up? Losing the fire? Becoming wise? Or is this what is simply called being a woman? There was a simple enough reason, of course. She wasn’t sufficiently roused to change things because she was not discontented. She didn’t have what people called “problems.” She didn’t agonize about anything, not even how studying literature would be “of service.” It was true that she was not unhappy. In fact she might be happy. She had everything she had wanted from life, except for Salwa to suddenly turn into the God of Sex. Her days on campus were a rich and heady mix of beauty and revelation, of the innocent and the not-so-innocent, of the fast and the faster, of clear-eyed idealism and easily inflamed feelings, of harmless flirting and unexpected friendships, of spontaneous poetry readings and invitations to go hiking in the mountains. She had no right to want more.

All adults liked to warn you about life’s dangers. They did so not because they knew about the world, but quite possibly because they were cowards.

Her first kiss! So long and yet so brief. Why did he have to stop? Why not kiss her forever?

To make amends for her earlier sin of childishness, she made a big production of eating. It was the only way a stranger’s kindness could be acknowledged and a beloved one’s absence endured.

She wanted to drown in the lines she had so loved in one of T. S. Eliot’s poems, “to be conscious is not to be in time” yet “only through time time is conquered.”

Then something even more vivid and urgent than worry washed over her: a certain fatalism about what had to happen. With that came the sadness of realizing she had changed, and part of that change was this sudden, urgent, obsessive complicity in her own destruction.

But really, how can any one person speak for the rest of humanity? I have long stopped, and perhaps rightly so, presuming that we all think alike. Yet in my heart of hearts I believe in this: give humans darkness and most will see the light.

These days I am so easily moved. By the tiniest, darnedest things. A tree, a bird, the river. Things we know as lovely become magnified, almost God-like, as you come close to them. It feels melodramatic writing this, but it’s true. And you know I’ve never been religious; I even used to make a point about not being religious, to avoid being thought of that way by my peers. But I’ve discovered that learning to rest in solitude is in itself a religious experience.