Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage International) (77 page)

Nadezha said, “Actually, this is quite rude. Because you should do what the girl’s side wants, and vice versa. Everybody has to be gracious. You don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings before you get married. As customs go, that is the Malay way: you give in, you have to be gracious.”

But Nadezha knew, from the experience of her friends, that there was nearly always in-law trouble at weddings. The trouble came from the rivalry between the families, and Nadezha preferred to see the awkwardness about the gold coins as part of that rivalry. Her mother was more brutal. She thought it was bad manners and a sign of low breeding.

Nadezha went to her husband’s kampung six or seven times after they were married. She never really got to like it. Kampung life wasn’t simple and idyllic, as some people said. It was competitive. The second or third time Nadezha was there the talk was all about the neighbor’s new car or jeep: the cost, the color that wasn’t nice, and “I bet it wasn’t his own money.” The two unmarried aunts who were looking after the grandmother didn’t like each other. There were few single men in the kampung, and the aunts had almost no chance now of getting married. One was resigned; Nadezha liked her. The other was malicious, embittered by the way things had turned out for her.

There were no cultural interests in the kampung. Life was shallow. There was only religion. It was important; the five-times-a-day praying marked the passage of each day. The mosque was the only kind of social center.

Nadezha thought that it was because there was so much complaining and grumbling and comparing in the village that her husband had become so ambitious—in order to break out. It puzzled her that her husband didn’t notice the pettiness as much as she did. He didn’t lend himself to it, didn’t sink into the gossip; but he accepted it. It was part of his kampung, which was part of him. And, after all, the whole business side of his life (though Nadezha didn’t say this) was in his stockbroking firm in Kuala Lumpur.

They lived after their marriage with Nadezha’s parents. Nadezha later thought it was a great error. Her husband, who was ambitious, and rather spoilt by his own family, felt oppressed, not in control of his own life. Very soon all the rage began coming out on both sides. Nadezha’s mother never criticized her son-in-law personally; he never criticized Nadezha’s parents personally. He just attacked their way of life, the things they did, the people they liked. He didn’t like seeing Nadezha reading
Vogue.
He would say, “Why do you read this rubbish?” He himself—Malay of the new model—read books about management:
Money Options, Fun Management,
things about the stock market.

“He went out with clients one day. He was drinking. Again I can’t remember the argument. By this time we just didn’t get on with each other. He hit me. I hit him back. I told him to get out. He did. And that was when we started talking about divorce. It was all done through lawyers. He never came back.”

At the time Nadezha was pregnant. So they couldn’t get divorced right away. In Islam divorce is not permitted if the wife is pregnant: a baby has to be born legitimate. Still, they arrived at some kind of arrangement; but three weeks later he went back on that, and said he wasn’t going to divorce Nadezha. She thought he might have been influenced by his family. They had their pride, as Nadezha knew, and they might have wanted Nadezha to have a hard time. She did. For three years she lived in an in-between way, neither married nor divorced. And it was hard for her to get custody of the child.

She thought now that she had expected too much from marriage. She had been hoping, more than she knew, to find a replacement for what she had lost. Her mother’s family had been gamblers; when her mother’s father died all the family money finally went. A whole way of living, everything she had taken for granted, was lost. She had told this in the beginning as half a joke. But for her it was really a calamity. And after that there were further blows. Her younger brother died; her father’s business began to fail; her father and mother had marital problems.

She, the daughter of an imperious, well-born mother, began to feel a great emptiness before she was twenty. And when, later, she went to London, she found that other Malay girls there were like her. Certain girls she knew, whom she thought were well off and happy, had joined a sect; they had a great, hidden need. The leader of the sect made them give him money; the girls treated him like a god-like figure with special powers.

Nadezha said, “Malays like these people with special powers because they believe that things don’t happen because of your own actions. They think that by engaging one
bomoh
or shaman they will put everything right. Everyone I know is religious. They have a strong faith. They believe that as born Muslims they are secure. If you are born without religion you question your place, your role. If you are Muslim you are told from the start that you are part of a big group. In school when you have religious classes, the Malay girls would go off to their religious classes, and the Chinese girls had free time or play time. In that way you are already differentiating people.

“My father’s friend is floating his company. They are involved in plastics. They began making plastic wrappers. Now they’re molding plastic chairs, and they are suddenly very rich. They’ve come from being comfortable to being rich beyond belief. And every year they do the
umra
”—the little pilgrimage—“without fail, to give thanks to God. They think: ‘It must be luck. I am no different from the other guy. It’s God who must be helping me.’ I am sure he realizes he’s not doing something substantial. That’s why he can’t believe his luck. In the past ten years things have been built out of air.”

This was the need she took to her own marriage; this was her faith in her husband’s new-man energy and ambition. Yet she never talked about religion to her husband. He was not especially spiritually minded. He performed the rites; that was all.

She had been too hard on him; she felt that now. She had looked to him for strength; she had discovered he was insecure in his own way. She said, “That was very frightening. I stress insecurity first, because if he wasn’t insecure he wouldn’t have depended on his family for everything.” He talked about his career with his mother, not with Nadezha. He didn’t talk to Nadezha about his financial problems. He was all right now. He was successful. He was manager of a stockbroking firm, and he had married a girl from his own state of Negri Sembilan. He had made a new life for himself, and Nadezha thought he might still be regretting his foray into something he never knew.

She said, “It must have been a nightmare for him. He’s still under a coconut shell. He moved out of his element and didn’t like what he saw.”

Something like that could be said on both sides.

3
 

T
HE BOMOH
—healer, or shaman, or magic-man—was a year old older than the century. He was of mixed Chinese and Indonesian parentage. His father had left China towards the end of the nineteenth century, part of the spilling out of the poor and unprotected from the collapsing empire; and he had fetched up in one of the islands of the Indonesian archipelago, at that time ruled by the Dutch. There he had found some kind of footing, and he had married (or as good as married) an Indonesian woman. They had nine sons.

They were very poor. They moved at some point to a northern state in what was then British-ruled Malaya. The eighth son hardly had a childhood. He went out to work when he was quite young. When he was thirteen or fourteen he was driving a truck. Life was not easy; and at about this time the mystical, Indonesian side of the boy’s personality began to assert itself. He became aware of his powers, and he began to train as a bomoh. There would have been a teacher or encourager of some sort, but I didn’t ask about the teacher, and wasn’t told.

This training as a bomoh would have begun in 1914–15. (While, far away, Europe was fighting the great war that indirectly weakened the
British and Dutch empires in Asia; and, a little nearer home, Gandhi, after his twenty years in South Africa, was going back to India with his very special political-social-religious ideas.) The boy or young man learned very fast. He became a full bomoh when he was seventeen; and he practiced for nearly seventy years. He had a big following, and he had disciples. There were certain things he couldn’t do when he became physically infirm, but his powers as a bomoh never failed him.

He married twice, to two Malay Chinese sisters, with five years between the marriages. He had seventeen children altogether, and they all lived in the same house.

Rashid was the bomoh’s eighth son. He was born in 1955. He was sent to good local schools from the start; and in his eighteenth year—with every kind of tenderness for his father’s feelings, and every kind of respect for his father’s powers as a bomoh—Rashid began to turn away from his father’s magical practices, and the rituals of the house. With education and self-awareness Rashid had begun to feel the kind of philosophical and spiritual need that Philip, the Chinese Christian convert, felt; and, indeed, for some time, picking up and repeating what he had heard from some friends at school, Rashid talked and behaved as a Christian, even at home.

Then he discovered Islam and the Koran, and he stayed there. He became a Muslim in his own mind, without being formally converted, and he took the Arab name of Rashid. He had started and dropped more than one career since then. Now he was a successful corporate lawyer, close to people with power. He was only forty. He had traveled far and fast, like the country. He had lived in, or had access to, many different spiritual worlds.