The Question of Red

by Laksmi Pamuntjak

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.