The Water That Never Returned

The labourers from the subdistrict office had been mixing cement for two days when I returned home. The smell of limestone mixed with the mud of the fishponds, two scents that never usually met in the same air.

“The water never receded,” said Pak Har, stirring the mix and occasionally spitting on the ground. “Eight months of drought, and it’s still full. The subdistrict office says it’s dangerous.”

People crowded the embankment. Bu Sum, her hair now completely white but her voice as sharp as ever, spoke to the woman beside her, loud enough for me to hear. “Lucky someone saw it happen. Si Rojak. He’s a strange man, but thank goodness he was there.”

I stood at a distance, clutching an old spool of thread I had brought from the house without knowing why. The word “lucky” stuck in my ears for a long time.

That well was never a place anyone feared. We used to bathe there when the pond water was murky after heavy rain, racing to see who could draw a bucket first, who could hold their breath longest under the dipper. Mothers washed clothes on its edge while gossiping about who hadn’t paid their tab at Haji Muslim’s shop, whose child had eloped to Bangkalan, whose pond was hit by disease that week. Children threw tamarind seeds into it, counting the seconds before the splash, as if the well’s depth could be measured by sound, though no adult had ever actually measured it.

Those afternoons always ended with the maghrib call to prayer from the wooden prayer house at the edge of the village, its sound slightly hoarse because the loudspeaker was old. Once the call echoed, every child had to go home; anyone still outside would be considered insolent by whoever saw them, not just their own parents. Bu Sum herself was usually the quickest to scold, standing in front of her house counting the children passing one by one, like a teacher taking attendance for students she never taught.

I was nine years old then. Sohib, Bu Sum’s son whose voice was always the loudest during any commotion, just like his mother, and I were making a kite from clothesline bamboo and stolen wax paper. For three days we had been sharpening our string with crushed glass so it could saw through an opponent’s kite during a duel, and our fingers were full of fine cuts that stung when hit by the saltwater spray always present in our village’s air, clinging to clothes, to hair, sometimes to the tongue if you forgot to close your mouth when the wind blew hard from the ponds.

My father once scolded me about the glass. “You’ll cut a tendon,” he said, taking the shard from my hand and replacing it with a piece of raffia string that, for some reason, was always in his trouser pocket. I sulked, slamming the spool of thread to the ground. He didn’t respond to my sulking with a lecture. He just sat beside me, gathered the scattered thread, and rolled it up slowly until maghrib without saying a single word, while in the distance I heard the mothers calling their children home one by one, name after name, until only my name and Sohib’s remained uncalled. My father never took out that raffia string again after that night, but his trouser pocket remained slightly bulging, as if something was still kept there, just in case.

That afternoon, my mother left Rian, my two-year-old brother, on a mat near the goat pen. “Don’t go far from him,” she said, balancing a basket of fish on her head, walking to the auction with a stride memorised by her body over twenty years of selling there. The fishy smell from the basket lingered in the air, mixing with the scent of goats and freshly watered earth, a combination that, even now, can instantly make me feel nine years old again if I catch it unexpectedly somewhere else.

I said yes. But my eyes were already on the sky, on Sohib’s kite that was beginning to lock onto my string, the two sawing at each other in the air while the other children cheered from the embankment. We were at the most tense moment, our strings grinding together, whoever’s broke first would lose, and the five marbles at stake were already clutched by Sohib in his pocket, glinting in the sun.

There was a small splashing sound amidst the cheers. I thought it was a pond fish jumping, as usual in the late afternoon.

The mat was empty.

Mat Rojak was already waist-deep in the well before I could run over, his sarong tangled around his own legs, awkwardly lifting Rian with one hand like someone who rarely held any baby. He patted Rian’s back until he coughed, cried, then fell silent. I stood there holding the spool of thread still connected to the sky, to the kite that was slowly wobbling because no one was pulling it anymore.

The villagers came quickly. Mat Rojak was still sitting on the ground, breathing heavily, his eyes staring too long at a single spot, a habit that had long made people stop waiting for his answers.

“Why were you there?” It wasn’t really a question. More like a spark on something that had been dry for a long time, just waiting.

My mother came running, hugged Rian, counted his fingers as if searching for a missing one. She glanced at me briefly, then looked down, wringing the wet edge of Rian’s shirt. Her fingers stopped moving for a second, just a second, then she continued wringing as if nothing had happened.

My father stood a little way from the crowd, hands in his pockets, staring at the well longer than he stared at anyone speaking. He didn’t join in asking why Mat Rojak was there. He didn’t defend him either. That night he ate without saying a single word, the only night I remember my father not commenting on the food at all, even though he always had something to say about the salted fish being too salty or too bland.

My mother didn’t ask why I hadn’t stayed near Rian. That night, while hanging out fishing nets that were already dry since the afternoon, she only said, “Tomorrow you’ll help your father at the pond. No more playing with kites for a while.” Nothing more.

I stayed silent too. The first silence, and the one I remember the longest, because it was the silence that never really ended.