Ma died at the Singapore General Hospital. Pa said, We’re moving back to Indonesia. Translation: I’ll grow up a jungle woman. Don’t even think about becoming a copywriter for Louis Vuitton. Pa said, We’ll bury Ma the Torajan way. Translation: he’ll mummify Ma, and we’ll live with her for who knows how long till Pa scrapes together five hundred million rupiahs to sacrifice an albino buffalo for her Rambu Solo’. That is more expensive than a car. How can we get that kind of money? Pa said, Diah, you’re almost grown up, old enough to help your Ambe, meaning none of the other Indonesian groundkeepers and maids at the hotel, not even Kemela’s parents, will lend him any more money. They can’t even get back what Pa already borrowed for Ma’s chemo. Pa hugged his bottle and cried himself to sleep. I wished I could cry, but I only felt angry. Ma, I’m sorry, but why can’t we burn you like they did with Kemela’s grandma? Or bury you like normal people? You said you wouldn’t die until after my junior prom. Don’t make promises you can’t keep is all.

In the middle of the night, after everyone at the hotel dormitory had fallen asleep, Pa woke me up, and we sneaked out of our unit. His face and eyes were red, and he smelled like men who wouldn’t leave the hotel bar. He had stolen the industrial icebox from the catering kitchen where the hotel kept dry ice sculptures for weddings. I helped him wheel the icebox to the back gate with our luggage piled on top, the few things we could take with us. Pa cried when he closed the groundkeeper’s tool shed and said goodbye to all his gardening tools, but he kept the hori hori knife, the gift from his horticulture teacher in Bali, and the mini bottles he stole. The Coca-Cola deliveryman drove us in his van to the hospital, where the men at the morgue put Ma between ice swans, ice diamonds, and little ice brides and grooms inside frozen hearts. Ma looked the same, not the same like six months ago, when the doctor said something that was not a baby was growing in her womb, but the same like two days ago, when she looked so thin and small, but she sat up on the hospital bed and gave me a home perm, and we watched Bollywood music videos on my phone and laughed whenever the actress swooned into her man. Ma said we should laugh at everything. What else can you do, ha ha.

Pa drank and wept the whole two-day trip. Always we were in the cheapest cargo section, where they kept chickens and stinky durians. First a ferry, then a ship, then a bus, which took us to the last town before Pa’s village in the jungle mountains. Every time I thought we would have to leave without Ma, four or five men would leave their luggage and dirty children to help us. It was so hot that strangers’ chickens slept on top of Ma’s icebox. Pa said we couldn’t take a plane to Jakarta because the government would charge a corpse tax, but Pa said a lot of things.

It was dark when Pa’s cousin, Joko, showed up in his mining truck. Everyone in Indonesia is a cousin, and so who knows? He looked older than Pa but his arms were thick, and one of his hands had only one finger, a thumb. “Diah, you pretty,” he said and licked his gold teeth. I puked a little inside. In his cab that smelled of rust and rain, he jabbed at the radio buttons with his one thumb. For many kilometers, the truck gave the only light, the jungle fog obscuring the moon. Shrieks burst from the darkness all around, animals fighting or getting raped.

I pretended to sleep while Joko talked nonstop, his hand giving a thumbs-up to everything his mouth was objecting to.

“You cannot, cannot, not sell your father’s land… There is nothing to be ashamed of. The situation is like an egg on the tip of a horn.”

“I don’t want to talk about the land,” Pa said.

“You think your Pa wouldn’t agree? Papa Tangke is lost! Like a blind whale on the street! Like an elephant with turkey brain!”

“Maybe you get me a job at the gold mine.”

“Mining gold is not talking to flowers and tending bees!”

“Maybe I lease land from your Pa, and grow rice.”

“The rice has become porridge! The soil is dead from all the fertilizers. Sell that land. Maybe someone will pay you for the mining right.”

Finally, Pa’s village rose up in front of the hazy moon, seven tongkonans with roofs in large arcs, like ghost ships capsized on a mountaintop. Joko honked, and dark shapes flew out of the bamboo jungle and hovered overhead, squawking. Then a whole village of relatives I had never met came out of their tongkonans and surrounded Pa.

I took a selfie with those sinister-looking roofs behind me, my face all scared like in the Blair Witch Project, and tried to text it to Kemala, but the wheel just spun and spun and finally gave up. Position not found, said Google Earth. Even the largest evil empire couldn’t find me. It was official. I no longer existed.

Pa said everything would be ok now that we are with our people. I didn’t say that when the ferry was leaving the port of Singapore, I ran up to the deck and already said goodbye to my people. Goodbye, crystal palace of Louis Vuitton. Goodbye, Metro. Goodbye, Anderson Middle School, even if you gave me a scholarship not because I really was gifted but because you want a servant-class girl on your roster. Goodbye, Dutch boy at trigonometry; goodbye to your neck freckles. Goodbye, civilization.

The day after we arrived in Pa’s village, I watched a whole room of aunties I didn’t know existed turn Ma into a mummy…

(Continued…in upcoming short story collection “Someone Dies in Every Story”)