What Do Women Want (Part 4)

Loyalty and Sacrifice
“Apa yang kau cari, Palupi?”*
(What are you searching for, Palupi?)
BABY remembered this Indonesian movie by Asrul Sani deep in the recesses of her morbid mind - an Indo version of Nora from Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll House, leaving her unfulfilling marriage in search of ‘herself’. She herself had married young – she met him at that impressionable age of 19, a tail beam of a turbulent adolescence and childhood. In retrospect, he was the exact opposite of her urbane, cosmopolitan and upper class background. But of course, her father had squandered all of his share of the family fortune on misguided ventures and her mother had to rely on her culinary and other domestic skills to raise and feed them.
But she was her mother’s Baby – the spoilt and petulant last born child, the apple of her eye, the jewel of her life - in short, her ‘precious’. That her second brother was her ‘blue-eyed boy’ did not pose a problem to her until later in life. At that point in time, she was the little sister that her two older brothers and sisters had to be responsible for.
She didn’t disappoint her mother then – she was quiet (unless provoked), well-behaved and diligent at home and an excellent student in school. She was 12 when Abang and Kakak returned from the UK, had their first born, and Mak began to devote most of her time for their family in Batu Gajah, and left her in Yat’s and Kamal’s care. Yat was very enterprising, making her own money from catering food for university students, developing a varied social circle and taking her little sister under her wings. Kamal withdrew into his own world of music and hurt.
Then Yat moved out to live with her friends in downtown KL, so it was just she and Kamal, and sometimes Mak. Kamal had been her protector, mentor and hero but the role reversal occurred when she was about 15. She became the nurturer, literally propping him up when he was down and dejected.
So when she met AI at 19, and he helped Kamal to recover from his malaise, she and Mak felt indebted to him. He was nine years older, a self-taught journalist and creative writer from a remote village in a Northeastern state. He opened up a whole new world of Malay rural and underclass psyche that she, as a cub reporter from an urban and middle class background, found so intriguing. Besides, he was the darling of Malay mainstream media and literary circle then. Yat had disapproved of this mismatch right from the start, but he would get down on his knees and begged her to stay every time she wanted to leave. She felt needed and secure – the much younger, more attractive, more intelligent and more capable partner in an unequal relationship. What she was not aware then that it was an “unhealthy attachment” or a co-dependency, to use a popular psychiatric parlance.
And the flip side of the needy significant other can be very cruel indeed. Post wedding was like the other side of midnight. Once her first pregnancy was in its third trimester, he would head to the club house after work and she had to walk home from the office. It was just a 5-10 minutes walk in the evening but she had expected to be fetched from work like other wives in her condition. Not to let herself into an empty house, wash and iron his clothes, cook dinner and wait for him to come home at midnight. The constant rows over his ‘extracurricular activities’ was causing a strain in the marriage but one look into her newborn’s eyes’ momentarily dispelled all thoughts of leaving. However, the discovery of explicit photos of a cover girl in his briefcase was the straw that broke the camel’s back. She moved back to her mother’s, he begged her to come home, she conceived again, they went abroad and had a second child; they returned and pretended to be happy like many other married couples until she could not keep up with the facade any longer. A study leave was the answer to her prayers for liberation.
Fast forward to about five years ago - an unexpected turn of events, an on-again, off-again friendship that alternate between affection and angst; and almost three years ago – bumping into HIM after running away from “high drama”. Will she slam on the brakes and surrender to fate? To be continued.

*The phrase 'Apa yang Kau Cari' later became a classic idiom in Indonesia.
*A Doll´s House (1879) was a social drama, which caused a sensation and toured Europe and America. In the play a woman refuses to obey her husband and walks out from her apparently perfect marriage, her life in the "doll's house". At the the turn-of-the-century physicians used Nora, whose mood changes from joy to depression in short cycles of time, as an example of "female hysteria". Later Havelock Ellis, inspired by Nora's character, saw in her "the promise of a new social order."