Brought up short on the Haig corner by a bell-ringer's challenge; sailor's tug for the spinnaker needing to be raised quick-smart. Ahoy! Look lively lads. Chop-chop. Queue were the woman Chinese.
This instance attached to a late-20s/early-30s Indo with the usual fine, mature manner far older than her years.
Stopped dead in the tracks.
A large group of people on the Sunday waiting in the morning sun, raven black cord like the whip of a lash at a circus, thunderously cracking.
Pause. Restraint. Caution.
Will I? Won't I?... Itching all along the length of the line.
Knowing this people, there really was no need of hesitation. Generous, forthcoming, direct orang, ready for the encounter. The stranger was nonesuch to them; little danger in pulling their chain.
The earlier young woman a month or so back had never left the mind—an indelible imprint. Observed from twenty meters distance in her passage across the road opposite Al Wadi, walking against the hoarding for the mall that was supposed to be a focal point for the Malay community.
Tall, robust Amazon; beautiful virago of her particular kind.
Statuesque. Prime force of nature. Dear god & the angels, the explosions that woman set off with each footfall as she passed on toward the market. Pounding, hammering the pavement; shrapnel assailing the naked brain a short distance off. Detonations that made one want to run for cover and hide.
In Central Java especially one had witnessed the remarkable gait. One of the older students of the Javanese had suggested at the time it was the dance the young girls were taught in childhood that gave that particular carriage.
It was possible this authority—who had written a book on pre-Islamic Javanese culture—had been referring to the fluid glide/slide one sometimes saw in Central & Eastern Javanese women. This other, this piling prance—in the works behind the hoarding the construction noise included the machine walloping the soil—this was something else again.
One could only think of the flooded padi, women making their way through the mud perfectly balanced. This was not a cultured gait from any kind of stage, not even one improvised on the village threshing floors. (The Javanese equivalent, at least.)
There was no question of the woman at the Haig crossing being confused with her compatriot of the month before. This one was thin, not as tall. Even the slight slouch waiting for the green, even from the rear before the encounter, ruled her out.
Hair not abundant. The Amazon had worn hers clasped high somewhere over her shoulder; perhaps another, second tie on her back. The Amazon's long fall was loose and splayed at a number of points along the line. (Haig was tightest knotting that almost made an observer blanch.) In motion, passing on strong pins along the path, the mane of the first had thudded twice along its length, once at her midriff and then the second undulation down below her knees. (The Haig woman cast down beyond the crook of the leg.)
Thudding & knocking. Almost audible over the road noise and construction.
The old stories of the mythic heroes could be better understood with such reference. Odysseus detained by...what was her name? Anthony & Cleo. Who gave a royal rat's about empire, possessions, wife, children and kin far off over the seas, bundled up in the coils/toils of that kinda affair. Man oh man!
Excuse me. Selamat pagi.
Yes. Hello. Selamat siang.
(A rare over-sleeping after the first early wake. Some Chin jerk in a room a few doors down the corridor had taken a call at 5AM.)
Ah, ya. Siang ready... Sorry to stop you asking.
The girls were contemporary slaves of course, of the usual sort in domestic service, paid a pittance, starved often, beaten, subjected to all sorts of indignities. One's heart always went out to them.
These people could be confidently engaged. Good souls; fine men and women. Respectfully always to be sure.
Sorry. Must ask you. I am such-and-such, doing so-and-so. Sorry. Ahmmm. Little hard question?...
No problem of any sort, sir. By all means. Be my guest.
The answer was eleven years.
Not since 2005 when this woman may have still been a girl in her father's house had she performed such an operation. Of course she needs must have known the precise date, as well as the year of the occasion.
Gal liked to keep her hair long, she explained. It must have been troublesome, but that was how she liked it.
Entering into the spirit of the investigation, the woman elaborated, saying some hair grew fast; some very fast.
However that may be, one would have wagered back in 2005 the scissors had not shorn too high among those tresses. Lass hesitating… In the lore the cutting of a woman’s hair…was never done lightly.
Wondrous. Rapunzel. Goldilocks... Samson was something else. Usually risen energised from the bedchamber, once betrayed by Delilah, a mere mortal again.
Magnificent.
Perhaps beneath their scarves one or two women over these five years whose head-cover rose into a pillar up top might have vied with these two Indo Sultanas. Doubtful they could have exceeded them.
An aunt by marriage, Strina Andje, had once hidden herself under the stairwell in the house on the coast bought by her father-in-law Pavle just after the turn of the previous century. Hidden herself in order to comb out her long, steel-grey tresses. Disturbed at her toilette, the old woman had allowed herself to be observed pulling her comb through two meter long strands curled on her lap. Almost blind, Aunt did not need her sight in order to perform her task. All these many years later the closest approach to these ancestors has been only on the Equator, and little other possibility, one feared.
Geylang Serai, Singapore
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