Life Stream
By Diani Savitri
The city sky had never been clearer. Yet, there were only three, or four, or five stars -- she lost count of even that small number -- glimmering. The polluted air and city dust had combined into a cover that did not allow the stars to be seen at night. She sighed, her eyes despairingly reaching for any object to seize upon.
"Do you want to go home now?" his voice was not a surprise to her. She was somehow willing him, in her heart, to speak up.
She turned her back against the dark city and denied her inner feelings with a smile on her face. Daniel was still standing very erect. His gaze would not let her escape.
"I'll call a cab. You just go ahead."
He left her then and there. She wished again for something, anything that might cure her aching heart.
It was days after the orientation program and Tiana still could not get things fixed on her PC.
"This is stupid software that will cause our clients to lose millions," she said a few beats away from being angry. One time the system crashed after she played up several features to test.
"A software that feeds you, and many of us," joked Bambang, who had no way of cheering up his coworker. Both of them were assigned to market the software. The marketing consulting company they worked at had specifically designed some software for brand performance tracking. The drive came from company headquarters.
So she took the initiative and turned to Daniel. In his early 30s, Daniel was already an associate director with intelligence and much talked about ambition. The man was a great help to both of them. But he also was anxious to make the project a success.
She did not know she would like him so much. At first she liked the way he explained the software's downside, turning each problem into an acceptable excuse -- an upside.
She liked the way he always met her eyes when she protested and asked the stupidest question; she liked the way he smiled and proffered so many reasonable explanations.
She remembered how she felt her throat suddenly choking over after hearing management's announcement that Daniel was to be the project head of software. She smiled coyly at him when congratulating him, apprehensive that her true feelings might emerge on her face, making them readable to Daniel.
She had always argued with herself that this feeling could not be sustained. But the feeling stayed on. She felt sick feeling it. She longed for him to sense her affection, and when he unexpectedly did, she blamed herself unmercifully for not burying her feelings deep enough.
He insisted that they were always meant to be. She smiled at the remark. Even the first time he held her hands, their rings made a faint sound, urging them to subconsciously retract their hands from each other. Meant to be? Meant to be in trouble, she had always added in her heart.
One time he told her about his other name: "Mine was Tiong San," he said.
"And what does that mean?" she asked, as if to his fingers, the light-colored and soft fingers she had become used to playing with when they sat there in his car after work.
"What does yours?"
"Dunno. Tiana was grandma's choice, but Mili is a verb, I think."
"You think?"
"Uh-hm. It means something flowing, no -- something drifting along the running water, not drowned, but going with it. They wish I have a nice ride on life,"
"Would you drift in life to me?"
"No. I would run to you, I would not drift in life."
"Such a rebel." He pulled her close with his one hand, rested her cheek on his shoulder. She still held his right hand fingers, toying with them. They had always wondered if life could take a different course; they did not have to rebel at all.
When she broke off the engagement and took off her ring, she did not expect things would change so drastically.
"You fought so relentlessly against the stream, you don't mili."
"I fought for what needed to be fought for." She was so defiant that her never hidden feelings touched his heart.
Cencen was informally promised to his family when they were just infants. So old was the custom that only a very few Chinese families still retained the tradition.
Nevertheless, his life was a very modern one; his father having sent his two sons to Australia to study. Had he not liked her the first time they met in Brisbane, he wondered if the two clans could have easily forgotten the arrangement and stayed business partners.
He could not bare thinking about how Cencen would feel had she learnt of his subsided feelings toward her. Giving up the engagement the way Tiana did was out of the question, giving up to his heart would be the day his parents banished him from the family.
Yet, this woman whose presence he had always lovingly savored pointed out that a fight would be needed.
Daniel approached her cubicle when -- apart from the EDP staff working in the different area of the floor -- they were all alone in the office. He asked her to come to his office.
"Did Unilever finally sign up for the tracking study?" She was ahead of him, entering his room. Her voice was jovial as was her usual attitude.
How could he tell her? Her eyes were shimmering when they met his, eyes that so many times filled up with stars and tears, sometime alternately, sometime altogether. Stars he delightfully shared and tears he painfully shed.
"I'm going back to Brisbane. I just have to,"
The pause between them should have been soundless, but it instead brought many voices into his hearing, so highly pitched that they hurt. He felt himself floating too lightly, and amid the pitched voices he could hear himself saying other things.
He heard him say he would be leaving for Brisbane next month with his permanent residence documents already arranged. He said he had asked the company to locate him at the Brisbane office, but that he did not really care if they could find a post for him there, he would go anyway. He said Cencen would come with him, said that it was only filial of him to be married to her. Cencen was worried the country would be torn apart with riots against minority races again, before or after the general election.
What lies he had arranged, he thought, listening to his own unsteady voice. Tiana, I would die for you! His chest suffered from swallowing the words so hard, fearing they would be uttered from the heart. But these he could not tell. Many he could not.
He could not possibly tell her his family objected to a mixed marriage. Not to add to a Malay, a Javanese to her bones, like Tiana. You don't mix your blood, his father said. It would be downgrading, he insinuated. You have such a different life, said his mother, softening all the comments. She spoke sadly, caring for her son's feelings. He had never believed them. Yet he would not anger them by saying he did not.
Their family had stood together, generation after generation, in the country they had never lost their love for. Yet many times they saw the remote look they had to endure form neighbors or friends, the same people whose sons were born in the same land as theirs, whose house was built on the same ground as theirs.
He blurted out many words -- none of them true, now he feared they were meaningless. How could they have meaning if he did not have his mind set when saying them?
She now faced the wall-sized glass window overlooking the Jl. Thamrin. Her reflection created a twin figure, facing him. It looked so troubled that he wanted to take back his words and embrace her, soothing her feelings. Of course, no words said could be undone.
Tiana still stood there in silence, and suddenly noticed that when he left her he did not even take his bag. She blinked only once and from each eye dropped one warm tear.
She left the room, closed the door and locked it; he always did so if he had left personal things in his work space. She would give him the key tomorrow, indifferently.
A parched bit of her heart was filled with relief. She did not have to say those parting words.
It would have hurt her so much, she who valued honesty above all else, to lie. She would have had to hide the fact that her family was outraged. If the breaking off of the engagement created a tiny drop of rain, her being with Daniel resulted in a thunderstorm. Her father would have to find "one decent Javanese man" to outdo "dozens of his kind", referring to not less than his daughter's source of happiness. Her parents came close to cursing her. She could not understand the misunderstanding, if not hatred, she sensed toward Daniel -- or his kind, as he was referred to.
Her eyes brimmed with tears. Packing her belongings in preparation for going home, she felt as if she was drifting in running water, hands frantically searching for a helping hand that once was Daniel's, at last letting herself go. She could not fight against the current, she thought. She knew the water was running somehow in a wrong direction, yet she was supposed to flow with it unable to resist it.
Glossary:
mili: to flow (a Javanese word)