The groom rose early

Leon Agusta

The sound of gunfire had faded long hence. Now, the days in this village by the mountain lake were quiet and calm. Every morning the women bathed and laundered their worn-out clothes with tandikie on the large, flat, black stones.

This was their time for chatting, for discussing just anything that came to mind. Not just to fill the time, but to fill their gloomy, lonely, care-worn lives. If their words were caught in a poem, it would go like this:

"Where have all our young bachelors gone -- who brightened even the darkest days?"

"With the dust of the civil war, they have blown away."

"They have been swallowed by the forest, those who have failed to return."

" 'The wide world is calling, dear mother', said my son..."

Yet, unlike previously, the men, especially the younger ones, no longer set out on adventurous paths that ultimately led home again. Now, since the war, they left because they no longer felt safe at home. In the transition toward peace, they seemed to just disappear, leaving their birthplace to seek protection with relatives, or with friends who had already gone out into the world.

Those whose luck was good were able to continue their studies, the others looked for any kind of work they could get just to survive.

They were challenged to prove their ability to succeed. Some found their roads to success, but most were engulfed by chaos and confusion.

However, that time passed swiftly enough. They were the sons of a sturdy people known for their tenacity as adventurers. The prayers of their village, so they believed, would guide them toward success. Almost every family there lived on gifts sent home from the wide world. The living to be made in the village was a modest one.

Within a few brief years, the wounds and the pain of the civil war began to heal. The village returned to being a nice place to live on the shores of the lake. Religion and tradition protected the community as if they lived beneath the shelter of an umbrella and were guided gently along the ways of their lives. Yet these villagers were not ones to be left behind or to fail to comprehend the need for knowledge.

Among them were those who had achieved university educations abroad.

Then, as the moon of Ramadhan rose one year, the village began to long for their wanderers to come home. Among those returning for the holidays, were men planning to take a wife from the village while they were home. These marriages usually took place a week or so before Idul Fitri. They were simply part of an old story, a tradition.

The rumored wedding of Roslaini was an exception; the news spread rapidly that she might be pledged to marry Sutan Maulana, a wealthy man from Jakarta. No fewer than five young men had asked for her hand in marriage, and as many as seven of the village women, including widows and divorcees, were still hopeful that Sutan Maulana would be their husband instead.

Even though he already had four children by his first wife, who remained in Jakarta, these village women exhibited a rabid enthusiasm for the fierce competition to win his attention. Sutan Maulana's riches, earned as an agent for the bemo that had just emerged in Jakarta, and the fact that he was still arrestingly handsome as he neared the age of forty, were reasons enough for him to be perceived as prince charming come from his kingdom to seek a bride.

Halimasni even went so far as to dig up excuses to divorce her husband because she dreamed of becoming Sutan Maulana's wife. After all, her husband was far from handsome and earned only a meager income as a tailor. Besides, she felt she had every reason to be confident of victory because: Hadn't Sutan Maulana been her suitor as a teenager?

Yet, there was the matter of Roslaini. She was beautiful, indeed, like a single blossom blooming in the midst of a garden; like a single star in the morning sky; a mermaid beckoning at the edge of the lake. After graduating from the Finishing School for Girls in Bukittinggi, she had gone to live in Padang by the sea. She desired to build her own business even though she was at an age when everyone thought she should be married.

What recourse did the beautiful young Roslaini have in the face of pressure from the village elders once they had decided she should become engaged to Sutan Maulana who would travel back home by airplane for the event. The will of the mamak and the clan chiefs could not be rejected; any refusal would be flying in the face of custom -- it could not be done. Roslaini's becoming the second wife of Sutan Maulana was viewed as an extraordinary victory for the village community. Preparations for the wedding party, which would be the most festive since the end of the civil war, had already begun. It was as if a new golden age had dawned in the village by the lake.

"This is being forced upon me. I accept it only as a fate I cannot avoid; my acquiescence is a kind of pseudo obedience. It is as if something has been thrown into the lake and sunk to irretrievable depths, or as if the dust of the forest has been consumed in sudden flame; all because of this decision. My destiny is no longer in my hands, as if I were not the one with the right to make such a choice."

This was written in the letter Roslaini sent to her mother from Padang in the middle of the fasting month, just three weeks before the planned wedding and her forced marriage. The letter was torn to shreds and burned at a gathering of her clan.

Nobody was surprised at the straightforward way in which Roslaini expressed her feelings because they all knew her very well. From the time she was a little girl she had spurted sentences that annoyed her elders.

"Where in the world did she ever learn to talk like that?" they asked one another. Even so, that was really no problem now. The decision had been made. No matter what, the contents of the letter required no further thought.

The choice was sealed. All that remained was to hold a festive wedding reception, the grandest party ever seen since the village had come to exist on the face of the planet.

Upon hearing the news that it was definite that Sutan Maulana would marry Roslaini, Halimasni, who already had her divorce papers in hand, immediately packed her bags and went out into the wide world to the home of a distant relative in Takengon.

She simply could not stand the thought of the insinuations heard at bathing time at the edge of the lake, or the allusions being whispered in the market and the orchards and fields. "Because she has no children yet, she thinks she can become a virgin again." The derogatory remarks wounded her heart sorely. Late one night, she crossed the lake, accompanied by her younger brother, heading for a land she had never longed for.

The celebration of the wedding was approached in an entirely new manner. It was customary for the groom to be escorted by a procession of people dressed in traditional garb walking slowly from his home to the house of the bride. The sound of gendang, tambur and tansa would accompany them from behind, accented by occasional boisterous cheers and joyful shouts. But the procession for the nuptials of Sutan Maulana and Roslaini was different. It took place on the lake itself.

No fewer than twenty canoes were tied up to form the five festively decorated rafts that escorted the groom to the bride's house that morning. People from the neighboring villages along the shores joined in the fun. Drums sounded all around the lake and up into the distant hills. It seemed that every soul alive knew about the wedding and was acknowledging the event. On into the afternoon and far into the night, the party on the water continued. Martial art performances turned the rafts into floating stages, and if, by chance, one of the combatants was flung into the water, the party was all the merrier for it.

The festivities at the bride's house finished at 9 p.m.. Everything was going as expected. Sutan Maulana entered the bridal chamber where Roslaini was waiting just a few moments after her grandmother formally bid him goodnight. "It is time to rest", she said. The guests withdrew politely in order to allow the bridal pair the opportunity to embark upon their first night together.

And the house fell silent as the last of them exited with great decorum, leaving the parlor adjacent to the room housing the conjugal bed empty.

Even before dawn had touched the sky, the young women of the village had begun to gather at the bathing place beside the lake. They were waiting; all anticipating the vicarious delight of watching the bride take her first bath as a wife. No one wished to miss witnessing this sacral event.

They had no idea where Sutan Maulana was as they waited in the early morning darkness at the side of the lake. Neither did they know what Roslaini was doing in the predawn moments.

But Sutan Maulana's parents knew, and they were shocked to hear their son open the door of his mother's house and enter without a word of explanation.

Indeed, there was no need to explain the obvious. His presence in their home told his parents all they needed to know. He threw the two suitcases full of gifts he had prepared for Roslaini onto their floor. Sutan Maulana had deliberately left nothing behind at Roslaini's ancestral home except a torn and empty cigarette package, the sight of which caused the bride's grandmother to scream hysterically and fall into a faint.

About the time most villagers were heading for their orchards and fields, they noticed two furtive figures hurrying along a path toward the mountaintop in the slowly receding darkness. Each was carrying a torch to light the way.

They were Roslaini and her mother. They forged ahead without pausing, swiftly, without exchanging a single word. Roslaini carried only a small parcel. Upon reaching the peak, they stopped -- just for a moment -- two stiff, dark shadows against the pale dawn sky.

The two women parted. The mother returned to her home in the village by the lake along the shortest path possible, her head down, half running, while Roslaini vanished silently along the path to the sea through the forest on the other side of the mountain.

Glossary:

* Pengantin Kepagian, the Indonesian language title for this story, refers to the West Sumatran custom of annulment in which the groom has the right to reject the bride if she is discovered to be no longer a virgin on their wedding night * tandikie - a fruit with thumbnail-sized seeds that when submerged in water emit a cleansing foam * bemo - small urban public transport vehicle * mamak - maternal uncles * gendang - large, bass drums * tambur - double headed drums * tansa - small traditional drums played with rattan sticks.

Translated by Margaret Agusta