Rahim Laut // A Sea Womb

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Words by Khairani Barokka

Khairani Barokka visited us through Tulisan Nusantara, our writers’ residency program. Each year, published writers from across the region are invited to spend time on the island, drawing inspiration from the natural world and the stories of the Riau Islands.​ During their stay, residents explore ideas connected to place, identity, and culture. Guests may spot them working in quiet corners of the island or join open readings and informal discussions when held. Each residency leaves behind a piece of writing, which will be gathered into an anthology over time.

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Dusk over a fishing village on small island off Bintan. Photo by Joshua Irwandi.

Dari dulu, ia merasakan bahwa laut memanggilnya, dan ia ingin melahirkan di dalam rahim asinnya. Tentu saja ia takut bahwa anaknya akan menelan air yang tak sudi menjadi rasa yang pertama kali ditemui oleh lidah kecil itu. Tentu saja ia tahu bahwa dukun beranak terakhir di desa ini telah hilang ditelan keinginan untuk pergi dari pulau, maka proses kelahiran akan jauh lebih sulit. Emak sakit dan kakak-kakaknya merantau. Di manakah dia akan berdarah dan merasakan kepuasan itu?

Berdiri di pantai, ia mengamati laut yang telah ditatap manusia selama begitu banyak ribuan tahun dan merasa sepi dan sendiri, walau di dalam perut besarnya ada jiwa baru. Tiga lumba-lumba tiba-tiba meloncat bersamaan dan menghilang. Eh, maaf—

My apologies, I forgot that you’re still quite a beginner at Indonesian... I’m so happy you’re learning the language, in any case, isn’t it melodious? As I was telling you, this happened one hundred and twelve years ago.

For a long time, she’d felt that the ocean had been calling to her, and she now wanted to deliver her child in its salty womb. Of course she was afraid that the newborn would swallow unfit water as the first taste to hit its little tongue. Of course she knew that the last doula in the village had gone, swallowed by the need to leave the island, and that therefore her birth would have to be much more grit-ridden. Emak was ill, and her younger siblings had moved away for work. Where would she bleed, where would she feel the satisfaction of deliverance?

Standing on the shore, she glanced at the sea that humans had stared at for so many thousands of years, and felt loneliness, despite the new soul in her enlarged belly. Three dolphins emerged to make shallow leaps in the water, out of the right-hand corner of her eye, and disappeared just as quickly.

She turned around and saw in the distance the barbed-wire fence, the large signs saying "Property of PT Batumax", and the two middle-aged men with broad shoulders, one with a holster, in uniform, sitting in front of the gate. The frenetic rainforest before and after that boundary, and behind the barrier to entry, the vast plot of land and two yellow diggers delivered just the day before.

They had yet to break ground.

She not only recalled but felt, then, the prophecy passed down through blood and voice, and she knew that she must crack open that earth before those machines could touch it.

Dread seeped into her pulse. From the forest brimming over onto the coast, the hornbills sang uninhibitedly. She sat her sarung-ed body in the sand, toes in the water, and turned her gaze back to the sea, soaking in the knowledge that tonight she would have to risk both of the lives she carried.

As a child, her favourite movement in nature to stumble upon was baby squid swimming round her feet. Changing colour, from chartreuse to a violent ink of black, and back again, propelling themselves in elegant little bursts through the heavy waves. How did they do it, face the enormity of the Natuna Sea each day, as her parents had done in their fishing boats?

Many years ago, her ancestors had travelled here from other islands, as far away as Java and Sumatra, and seafaring was as natural as blood is liquid ease. Surely, however, navigational success relied on abject fear of, and respect for, the sea—being mindful of its vicious moods, its wrinkles coalescing into cauldrons—as much as on falling in love with its glorious blues, abundant gifts, and invitation into expanse. Approaching the ocean was an exercise in navigating a potential killer, facing a deep terror of an element and thrusting your whole body upon it regardless.

This was not unlike her approach to the man who'd pursued, convinced, then wed her. He spent just a week resolutely not listening to a word about her wants, in the bedroom or otherwise, touched her in a way that induced fear rather than pleasure. Soon after, he left somewhat mercifully for a job on a ship in abrupt fashion and, through a trickle of money that stopped being sent, unread messages and missed calls, he slowly disappeared from view.

She lied too easily to everyone else on the island, that he was busy with work but fine, as her mother furrowed her brow but nodded. She kept her wedding ring on as she taught at the elementary school, and laughed with the other women about their own husbands' silly goings-on. One day they might have their suspicions, but she would just say he insisted on meeting elsewhere, and time a solo trip or two a year for a supposed marital reunion. Married "old" at thirty-seven, pregnant "old"—her inner self could not be further from these labels as intrusive thoughts, and she could not further fuel the fire of wagging tongues. After the initial nausea of heartbreak and shame, she found herself grateful for the absence of someone who ultimately looked down on her, who had frightened her with the way he saw her as a symbol, a conquest, who might as well have been stone.

And then, just as she thought herself strong enough to go on like this, alone but dignified, she found that her erratic menstrual cycle had stopped completely for far too many months. She felt it in all the aching points in her body, and was gladdened by the baby. Here was more company on its way. Though she would try to remind herself that it was a life, not to be lived for her, but for itself, she could not help but see this child coming as a future friend and confidante. Someone to pass things on to.

Six months after she told her mother and they'd hugged in joy, her student came to class with a uniform shirt already drenched with tears. In the middle of washing dishes the night before, the girl's mother had looked straight ahead, stopped responding to anyone, to any of her children's embraces or her husband's frantic calling of her name, and had taken a boat, grey-eyed, out to sea with nothing but the clothes on her back. And she had not returned.

In a matter of three weeks, nine families on the island had been stricken in a similar manner:

an uncle, in the middle of shalat dzuhur, suddenly abandoning his prayers and turning to the beach;

an older brother, mid-football game, his eyes gone stormy, his feet scrambling for the coast as both teams tried in vain to wrest him back;

a grandmother, walking with uncharacteristic strength, off in the night as her family slept, only her daughter waking and rushing to the beach to see the old lady, her back ramrod-straight, taking off on a speedboat.

All left in boats, alone, bringing nothing with them. All had been held back, at times by up to ten people, some trying to tie them to their family's bodies. In a show of inhuman strength, all the afflicted had broken free. Ropes and knots had been shredded as though they were paper. When oars had been hidden from them, they'd taken their neighbours'. Most, however, had left on speedboats, their backs to a beach smothered in wails.

As the schoolhouse turned into a shelter for the bewildered and grieving, for viciously agitated children and teachers, she felt her heart rate soar with the others—and remembered. Some realisations sneak up on you like high tide against the reef, steadily rising yet suddenly engulfing, seemingly a permanent state. It was a childhood rhyme. It was quite possibly a ludicrous notion. Yet if there was the smallest chance she could change things, before anything befell her own small house, her home of two women and a life-to-be...

It was clear that a curse had befallen them. No one even doubted this, especially after the third family was left aggrieved. A fellow teacher began telling everyone he'd seen a telu, a ball of coloured fire travelling in the air, just before the first victim had left the island. Sign of a curse sent by someone to harm them.

As the islanders prayed together, as the mosque filled every night, all night, with prayer, she rubbed her large belly and prayed sitting up the whole time, at mosque and at home, to spare her aching body from standing, and remembered. A vehement memory, and a fear that she—her clumsy self, who had grown to know well neuroticism and impulsiveness, who simply wanted to teach children as young as she wanted to still feel inside, to raise her own, to have all of them see themselves as more than comparisons to others' lives, the way she wanted to see herself and often failed, to love her mother and far-flung siblings (both of whom had been as engulfed in the shock of the island's news as anyone, as though they had never left), to enjoy life's simplest moments—there was the fear that it was she who was the key to an urgently needed salvation.

Buried in soil not far from sand's edge is the mouth of a secret. One so profoundly important to everything she loved that it was built like a fairytale in her mind. A simple recitation from her childhood. One that could change the broken minds of people who turn into a tide that never returns, a squall of never returning.

// Di pusat pohon ara, digali sampai titik batu, diangkat batunya dan dibuka, kembalilah pulaumu. // "What will you do when the tide of people turns away from the forest and the shore, and those they love? What will you do when they don't look back, when their eyes look like those of dead fish?"

Her great-aunt would be shelling tamarind with her just outside their door and suddenly clap her hands to make sure the child was paying attention. When she'd looked away from swift or monitor lizard or butterfly and up at the old woman, she'd be met by eyes ringed with both wrinkles and what looked like fear, tinged with a watchful hope.

"Takut apa?" the little girl asked, and the only reply would be, time and again, "I'm afraid you'll forget these instructions. They seem simple and silly, but you mustn't forget. Do you hear me? Do you understand?" the lady's old chin swaying and shaking, "You need to pass it on, pass it on to someone young. Not to every small person, just someone in our family, who'll come along. And if our family stops growing, pass it on to someone small you think you can teach. One who seems like they can fight."

This last sentence was what her younger self would always fish for, the ego-feeding reason she ended up memorising the pantun of sorts. Hardly anyone said that about her, that it seemed like she could fight. That she was strong, worthy of being taught a secret, an obtuse curative for fantastical future catastrophe. Her brothers had teased her mercilessly, calling out her constant scars and bruises from playing in the forest, calling her ugly, setting her up for humiliating pranks. She had grown up resenting them, a resentment adulthood allowed her to forget, as though all three of them had decided, particularly as parental death and fragility were thrust upon them, to be different people entirely, more loving towards each other. It had taken time and, even in her thirties, sometimes the memory of those long childhood days still felt like bruises. What they left was a keen sense of her inner monologue being her true voice, and a quietude that only let itself be loud in the presence of her students, her mother and, eventually, just a few trusted fellow schoolteachers. What it left was a sense of being comfortable with aloneness, while feeling its aching edges, just her and a joint in her twenties, staring up at the moon and off at the sea.

Her parents hadn't wanted her doing anything that could hurt her, but at age seven, she would sneakily watch the silat lessons her neighbour taught his children, hiding her delighted face and small limbs practising along under cover of leafy trees. Her great-aunt would be mending clothes nearby with shaking fingers on the needle, chuckling as she saw her girl quietly kick and slice through the air with the palms of her hands.

"What is that old woman telling you now? Don't let her tell you old ghost stories!" her mother would laugh, when she saw her daughter and her auntie taking each other into their confidence. Now, she remembered, her mother's laughter was unsteady and failed to mask darting, unsettled eyes that worried and worried. This great-aunt had raised her mother with a harsh hand and words that belied a fear about how gentle her mother insisted on being in such a cruel world. But there was, thankfully, no changing that.

As the days of mass abandonment continued in the village, her mother watched her face, she thought, closer and closer with those same eyes. They said nothing to each other that was not tender, and fearful, and filled with dzikir and prayer. Between them was the memory and spirit of her great-aunt.

One night, as her mother slept, several days after the ninth family had been taken by the sea, she sat up in bed after now-repetitive mental thorns and, with her nerves frayed, realised something: of all the PT Batumax employees who had moved to the island in the past nine months—a slow influx of a few dozen men and several women, a couple of whom eventually brought their families—none of them had been affected by this curse of open waters. It was a fact that gnawed at her.

Had she noticed any Batumax people at the mosque, praying with them? Had any of them come to pay respects at the homes of any of the nine families whose kin had been kidnapped by the sea, bringing food and prayers like the rest of the islanders? She knew only that a company representative had met quite belatedly with their beloved and bewildered village chief, chain-smoking his way through the sudden departures, to convey official condolences.

On the heels of this fact came another: there was only one pohon ara that her great-aunt's rhyme could ever have referred to, one banyan tree on the island so large and imposing, so terrifying and awe-inspiring, with its branches and roots like huge twists of hair, a thick tower of a tree, that it was a particular magnet for housing spirits and legend. And it was now fenced off by the barbed-wire barrier, the security guards, the lights and the CCTV that she knew were also there. Nobody knew for sure what Batumax was up to when it came to "scout the island for potential business", but from the moment they set up a perimeter around such a large area, sectioning off the forest that everyone used to collect from, wander through, play in, the rumours began to surface, and then to harden. An uprooting was imminent. An industrial facility. A mine.

Somewhere in the back of her mind, just as the seed of life had begun to take root inside her, she must have thought, "The tree of Great-Aunt's rhyme will be razed to the ground," and added this to the general cloud of pre-emptive mourning that all the villagers had felt growing, ever since the ships bearing the Batumax logo had docked on their shores.

They'd had no qualms about asking for clarity from Batumax employees about what might happen to their island, to their homes, to themselves. Adults and even children had not been afraid, from the very start, to go up to the Batumax people with their uniforms and ask what they were doing here, what their designs were on the village. True to their employer's name, their faces were stony and their responses noncommittal, though some betrayed a pity in their eyes as they made flat jokes in response to being questioned. The Batumax newcomers all had families to support. But so did the village.

And now, in the dead of night, she felt panic bursting out of her every cell, holding the wild kind of hope that desperation brings. She got up and dressed in black elastic pants, a grey long-sleeved shirt, black socks, black hiking boots and the only oversized black windbreaker she'd found to cover her widening frame. At the last minute, she remembered to stuff a flashlight and a small shovel in the inner pockets of her windbreaker. The moon was covered by clouds; she would have to go by sense memory, and she would be given some cover. "Bismillah." She looked once more at her mother's soft sleeping, and left.

For nearly forty years, she had roamed this forest like a lizard, jumping amid the tree branches from rock to mossy rock, feeling the presence of birds and slithering friends as protective clouds around her, as well as the whisper and draw of non-human spirits, whether jinn or other possibly plasmic beings. She had always sensed them watching her, sometimes slowly turning her head, shifting her eyes to where they were and smiling at them. She wondered if one of them had been responsible for sea flights en masse, and whether they'd been waiting, for at least as long as her great-aunt had been alive, for this betrayal.

It had not been the most difficult of tasks to go along the beach and finally reach the small, narrow cave—just enough for one and a half large men to be inside—in the giant rock by the far northwest corner of the island. Far enough from the nearest house that it was rarely in the presence of human voices, that no other child ever wanted to even go near for fear of the dark and what lay in it. It wasn't the devil's dead end they'd thought it was. When she'd first been brave enough to enter at twelve with her father's lighter to guide the way, she found herself, to her great surprise, at the very end of a straight, long tunnel in the rock.

At the end of the tunnel was the ara tree.

At the entrance, twenty-six years after she became the first and only child to brave this darkness, she pointed her flashlight beam out, held her breath and tried in vain to suck in her bulging sides, panicking that her stomach would trap her in there forever. Lengthening her breaths to avoid complete claustrophobia, she stepped slowly but surely into the void, left hand on the cold, rocky wall.

Just as she began to worry about not being able to sit or lie down for such a long distance, her joints crying out for help, she heard it—an ethereal voice, almost feminine, behind her: // Ayo. Maju. Sebentar lagi. // A great push of wind swelled behind her (from where?), spiking her heartbeat until she continued onwards, onwards, onwards, and there it was, suddenly, the dark forest in her small column of light. She emerged past the bushes and branches that obscured the cave opening, onto the ground, and under the sky again, sitting down on a tree branch to catch her breath, shutting her eyes tight.

When she opened them again, she found that she was sitting on the ara tree. She looked around, and the fence's perimeter could be seen ten metres away, between the foliage. She was inside the Batumax compound. Now she was a criminal, she smiled to herself.

There was a curvature to the way the tree trunk grafted itself to the ground, creating its own miniature amphitheatre of dirt. There was nowhere else. As the clouds shifted across the moon just slightly enough for its rays to hit that patch of soil, she began to dig down into it, tired out from the journey, but spading, spading the ground away, for what seemed like hours, eternity. Then her spade hit metal with a clang! and she covered her mouth, gasping. Digging hurriedly around the spot, she found the object's sides and lifted it up: an ancient, ornate box made of stone, confusingly lightweight.

// Ayo. Buka. //

She opened the lid, and her whole universe filled with the whitest smoke—

// Hebat. You did it. You came for me.

I've been watching our family grow. So long, my comfort in seeing you all change in shape, in mind, as you passed on to our realm, as I was forgotten.

Many, many years ago, when I was your great-aunt's great-great-great-great-grandmother in the flesh, I was a woman forsaken and left for dead by one of the men who'd taken hold of this island. Before that, his kind had held me in captivity for many moons. I held on long enough to escape with my broken nails, to deliver the baby, and seeing her in my sister's arms with great relief, I found myself turning, turning into this form you see, so large above you. Instead of death, my body simply disappeared from the world of the living. They could not find a corpse. My sister only saw that I was there one moment and vanished the next.

I was turned into spirit. I could see all the cities and villages, for I travelled far to explore this new world, teeming with all the beings that lived beside humans, day in, day out. I also discovered myself. The powers I could not always control at the beginning. The power to scar humans' minds with the sight of me. The power to eat the spirits of those I found deserving. I hope I was right about my choice of victims; I raged so. My fury had not dissipated, and my grief at leaving the human world, at what I'd endured, stayed centuries.

One day, an old man on this island, my great-great-grandson, an orang pintar, came and found me, and told me I'd been given a mission. I was to stay with the ara tree, to stay away from showing my form, too terrible for most to endure seeing, and in time, I'd be released, my powers used to bring back the island.

I would stay with the microbes and the dirt, and the other spirits underground. Perhaps I grew calm. I was dormant.

Yes, he told me all about you, with your quiet mind, lincah dan diam, before he buried me under the ara tree, sealed me with utterances in the rock -

Child, I see them! I see them! They're coming, with their flashlights, get behind me, your waters are breaking - //

She woke up, first feeling completely wet, and exhausted to the marrow. Blinking, she saw she was still in the same clothes as the night before, now soaked in her red, that she was in her own bed, and that she also smelled... of saltwater. Vaguely, she sensed the old woman in the other room moving sleepily to look in through the bedroom doorway, and suddenly gasping with joy. Beyond that, she sensed a stirring in the village, people's voices on the beach, louder and more of them, screaming and crying, "Alhamdulillah" and "Puji Tuhan" and names, names she'd thought they'd lost. She sensed her arms, most tired, heaviest of all. She looked at what they held, and into the eyes of her baby, whose eyes twinkled back, who began to cry, drenched in ocean and life.