Whipped Senseless

Brought up short on the Haig corner by a bell-ringer's challenge, sailor's tug for the spinnaker that needed to be raised quick-smart Captain's orders. Ahoy mateys! Look lively! Chop-chop. 

         Queue were the woman Chinese. This instance attached to a late twenties/early thirties Indon with the usual fine, mature manner that suggested double that age by some measures. 

         Stopped in the tracks no way round. 

         Large group of people on the Sunday waiting in the unshaded morning sun, raven black cord like the whip of a lash at a circus thunderously cracking. 

         Pause. Restraint. Caution. Will I? Won't I? in brief contest.... Itching all along the length of the line.
         Knowing this people now there really was no need for hesitation. Generous, forthcoming, direct orang ready for the encounter with the stranger. The stranger was nonesuch really to them; little danger in pulling their chain.
         The young woman a month or so back had never left the mind—an indelible imprint. Observed from twenty metres distance in her passage across the road opposite Al Wadi walking against the hoarding for the mall being built that was supposed to be a focal point for the Malay community.
         Tall, robust mini-Amazon; beautiful virago of her particular kind. Statuesque could be used for the prime force of nature embodied. Dear god and the angels all, the grenades that woman set off with each footfall as she passed on toward the market that afternoon. Pounding, hammering the pavement, shrapnel assailing the naked brain a short distance away; detonations that made one want to run for cover and hide would the shell-shock allow.
         In Central Java in particular one had witnessed the remarkable gait. One of the older students of the Javanese and their ways had suggested at the time it was the dance the young girls had been taught in childhood that shaped the 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 and Eastern Javanese women. This other, this piling prance—in the works behind the hoarding the construction noise included the demonic machine walloping the soil—something else again.

         One could only think of the flooded padi field, the women making their way through the mud untroubled in perfectly balanced prance. This was not a cultured gait from any kind of stage, not even one improvised on the threshing floors of villages. (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 that out.
         Hair was 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 of hair was loose and splayed out at a number of points along its 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 expanse. Once at her midriff and then the second answering rhythmic undulation was down below her knees. (The Haig woman at the traffic lights cast down beyond the crook of the leg.)
         Thudding and knocking. Almost audible over the road noise and that of the construction.

         The old stories of the heroes in the myths could be better understood with such reference. Odysseus detained by..... what was her name? Anthony and 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 kind of affair. Man oh man.
         Excuse me. Selamat pagi.
         Yes. Hello. Selamat siang.
         A rare over-sleeping after the first early wake. (Some Chin turd jerk in a room a few doors down the corridor had taken a call around 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—heart mixed with other bodily organs active sometimes.

         One could engage these people confidently. Good souls; fine men and women. Respectfully always and forever to be sure.
         Sorry, I must ask you. I am such-and-such, doing so-and-so. Sorry, ask you, ahmmm. Little hard question?...
         Not a 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 know the precise date as well as year of the signal occasion.
         She liked to keep her hair long, she explained. It must be 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 might be, one would have wagered back in 2005 the scissors had not shorn too high among those tresses. The lass had hesitated, overcome by an understandable wave of self-pity, shears stayed and the cut taken at some appreciably lower level.
         Wondrous. Rapunzel. Goldilocks. Samson was something else—he usually rose energised from the bedchamber; once betrayed by Delilah 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 Indon Sultanas. Doubtful they could have exceeded them—not within a kerbau’s roar.

         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 century before last. 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 metre long strands curled in her lap. Almost totally 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 provided only on the equator here among these peoples and little other possibility one feared.