Finches Read online

  Finches

  Copyright 2021 by A.M. Muffaz

  All rights reserved

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or any electronic or mechanical means, including information and retrieval storage systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Cover art © 2021 by I. L. Vinkur

  Design and interior by ElfElm Publishing

  Quote Attribution:

  Quran, The Holy Qu-ran, Text, Translation & Commentary by Abdullah Yusuf Ali. Published by Khalil Al-Rawaf 1946: https://quranyusufali.com/about-quranyusufali-com/

  The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin, online version here. Original publication info:

  https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_the_Origin_of_Species_(1859)#Contents

  Available as a trade paperback and eBook from Vernacular Books.

  ISBN: 978-1-952283-16-1

  Visit us online at VernacularBooks.com

  For Seth, Kris and everyone who believed that I could.

  Introduction

  I originally began writing Finches 15 years ago partly to process, emotionally, how Muslim polygamy affected ­families—mine and the people around us. It is legal in Malaysia, where I was born and raised, for Muslim men to take up to four simultaneous wives. And while only a very small fraction of Muslims practice plural marriage, it seems like everybody knows someone whose life was touched by this issue. In my experience, polygamy only brings grief to every person it touches. There is all the betrayal of adultery, for wives and their children, with the added dagger of it being a religious duty they must swallow.

  This is why I knew when I started writing, one of the conceits I wanted to include was to name the women after the most important women in Muhammad’s, the prophet of Islam’s, life. It was important to explore how the dynamics of the Islam’s first family has tainted the marriage of every Muslim thereafter. Thus, Grandmother Jah (a diminutive of Khatijah) is named after Muhammad’s first wife, Khadijah, a woman it is said he respected so highly, he did not take any other wife during her lifetime.

  Fatimah was the name of Muhammad’s sole surviving child with Khadijah, and the only child to survive his death. Like her mother, he cherished Fatimah so highly he forbade her husband from marrying anyone else while she lived. Finally, there is Aisya, named after Aisha, Muhammad’s youngest wife and the only virgin he married. His undisputed favourite, she was the second of his plural wives, living her whole life born into and in the service of Islam.

  Then and now, marriage among Muslims is regarded as a pillar of Islamic life. This is reflected by Ghani’s aspirations for his son, Rahim—whose name is also the Malaysian language word for “womb”. Incidentally, Habib means “beloved”, a hint as to his true position within the story.

  Power between Muslim men and women are inevitably skewed towards patriarchy. Imagine for a moment a husband promising to love and honour his wife for their entire lives together, but with the caveat that if the husband chooses to do so, he may take further partners for himself. Consent is a fraught concept in this situation. In Malaysia, when a man takes a second wife or divorces a wife, people blame the first wife for not being good enough. This is a cultural landscape where the appearance of harmony is more important than its reality. The shame of being inadequate was something I wanted each member of Ghani’s family to experience differently. Whether they take it to the chin or fight it utterly, transmute that disappointment into a bitterness—each person’s reaction forms a story within a story, my reason for shaping the book as vignettes.

  In Finches, it is Grandmother Jah who chooses to stay married but separated from Ghani. Her insistence is predicated on leaving her children an inheritance, rather than losing it all with a divorce. It is no coincidence that Fatimah’s daughter is named after her mother—I used it to solidify Grandmother Jah’s position as the “correct” relationship and Aisya’s role as that of an outsider, an aberration that shouldn’t be there. What was the real relationship between the original Fatimah and her husband’s youngest wife—probably younger than herself when they married? Interpretations vary, but I would imagine it never stops feeling unnatural to treat someone your own age as your mother.

  Given how long it took me to finish this book, that first exploration of polygamy’s effects eventually became a way for me to process a different trauma, the realisation that the flawed, beautiful, colourful and diverse country I remember from my childhood has only grown more alien to me the older I get. Coming from a place where the politics are poisonous should be familiar to many of my readers here in America. The difference is that people here are more willing to loudly fight against the insidious puritanism and bombastic religiosity, to say something about institutional racism. It’s not nice to think critically in my culture. Gentleness—the state of being quietly accepting and only quietly changing the world around you—is the ideal where I come from. So here is a book that is quietly being loud.

  The relationship between Loong and Khatijah, a Chinese person and Malay one, reflects a more modern perspective of how things can be. There is a personal reason too why I would include this. As a child of a mixed-race marriage myself, I have seen first-hand the deep racial mistrust underneath my country’s obsession with harmony. Growing up, the question I got most was whether I was Malay or Chinese. When I was little, I relished in seeing the shock on people’s faces at my answer. As I grew older, it began to irk me people would even ask. Eventually, my answer to their question was always just, “I’m Malaysian.” I see normalising mixed-race relationships as one of the most important tools we have for normalising cultural understanding. No government dicta is as powerful as a mixed-race family’s lived reality.

  Living authentically is, unfortunately, a distant dream for anyone Malaysian culture labels an “other”. Rahim’s relationship in my story is one of these “others”. Malaysian law, secular and religious, criminalises sodomy and oral sex as jailable offences. The subtlety of Rahim and Habib’s interactions are underscored by the idea that what they are doing is illegal. My goal with writing Rahim’s POV was primarily to depict a normal man experiencing the loss of his father, whom like many children the world over, loves and disappoints his parents. These are people, who like you and I, struggle with work, experience romance, deal with grief and have siblings they get along or spar with. Who they love should not be criminal. Finding the right person who supports you, cares for you and willingly shares all of life’s experiences together with you is hard enough as it is. We should always treat it as a rare blessing.

  As for why I named this book Finches: When Charles Darwin set out on his famous visit to the Galapagos Islands in 1835, he collected finch specimens that showed unusual variations in beak structure across different islands. He eventually realised each different beak was adapted to the specific conditions of each island, which critically informed his theory of natural selection. Variation and adaptation are things that haunt, even horrify, many of the key characters in my book. Put differently, their fear of change was worse than the change itself. It’s a lesson worth remembering.

  Darwin originally aspired to be a parson when he boarded the HMS Beagle, as closed and content an existence as could be. At the end of it, the life-changing revelations he came to would challenge generations of people to see change as beautiful. Perhaps to some extent, Finches will help you see that too.

  Jah

  “And be not like the woman who breaks into untwisted strands, the yarn she has spun after it has become strong.”

  —Surah Al Nahl, Ayat 92

  When Grandmother Jah crossed the threshold of the house, the very timbers creaked in obeisance. She could feel the cold in t
he tiles waft up through her feet, igniting every joint in her body.

  She’d draped a shawl over her head, which over the course of the day had fallen completely to her shoulders. She picked it off to wipe the sweat around her neck. The sheer gauze quickly soaked through.

  Khatijah had her hands in a firm grip around her arm. As she helped her grandmother to the sofa, she mumbled encouraging words, like, “Just a little more,” and “We’re getting closer.”

  Grandmother Jah waved her away with folds of her sweat-stained, perfume-scented shawl. “I’m not an invalid. Go see if you can get me some water.”

  She flattened her feet against the tiles, which seemed to have grown increasingly cold. The floor tiles were chipped. The scuffs scratched her soles. They had been green when she married Ghani. Now they were the colour of faded mould.

  From the open doorway, she could also see the garden, which had been wholly her husband’s effort. When she’d seen it last, it was a thriving vegetable garden, set beneath a mango orchard as tall as her son was old. Rahim had the mango trees chopped down, so across a meadow of moss and ant trails there were only stumps, like seats for trolls. Worn pavers traced old paths between the beds. From her view, they were like grave markers. She remembered a time when her children practised writing their names on them with sticks and water.

  Bougainvilleas were halted at their embankments, the crudely cut branches stark against the otherwise thriving foliage. Among their thorns she saw the borders of her home, and within their bounds, an immediate distance from all other things.

  Inside, Ghani hadn’t changed so much as a nail, not even the plywood thresholds that had stood against all twenty-seven years of floods and children. The plasticine used to stop the gaps between the door frame and the walls was dark with dirt. If the next monsoon rose above the drains, the splintered plywood would be of little help.

  Khatijah returned with water in a teacup.

  Grandmother Jah recognised the teacup: stoneware from her aunt on the occasion of her marriage, the lacquer etched with fine cracks and the bottom ringed with stains. Jah’s skin was as yellow as the handle around which she hooked her finger. Her palms, worn from years of squeezing tamarind fruits, were tarnished like month-old henna. She said, “I wonder if I’ll live long enough to see your hand coloured in henna. It probably won’t be long.”

  Khatijah laughed and put her sunburnt hand in hers. “Don’t say things like that. You’ll outlive us all.”

  “Don’t let the devils hear you. I’m old. I’ll live to see my grandchildren grow up.”

  “And I have college to finish, and work to do. It’ll be a long time before I think of anything else.” Khatijah glanced at the men in the driveway. “I’ll go see if they need help.”

  Grandmother Jah sipped her water and smiled.

  She watched her son, his boyfriend and her granddaughter’s boyfriend unload her things from the car. The front doors were bordered with iron grilles that safeguarded the home like a jail. The wood on the doors was cracked in three layers: green, orange and a kind of muddy brown she hadn’t seen since Rahim was five. With the doors thrown open, they could see clear across the driveway to the street and the brush beyond. It was still a small village, even with the city creeping up around it on all sides. The familiarity chafed.

  A house lizard crawled out of its hole in the wall.

  Outside, sunspots lit the concrete behind Rahim’s feet. Rahim had pale soles and coffee-coloured skin up to his ankles. They were like his father’s feet, about the size of his father’s shoes. Whenever the light shivered behind his legs, she saw an identical set of feet, like a mirror image caused by her wavering eyesight—an image that lacked a body. But wherever her son walked, his heels would brush this other man’s toes.

  The house lizard cackled.

  “I’ll call you when I reach Perth.” Rahim leaned in to peck her on the cheek.

  Grandmother Jah wrapped her thick arms around her son’s shoulders. He had a boy’s shoulders, bony and square. “Take care.”

  With his breath still warm on her face, he pulled away. It made her heart break, but she opened her eyes to watch him go. Habib, her son’s companion, grasped her fingertips weakly, like a gentleman to a stranger. She reached around to grasp his fingers firmly in her hands. He had a nice smile.

  “You take care too,” said Loong. The boy Khatijah had chosen was swarthy and short, with hair shaved far too close to his head, but his hands were warm, readily enclosing hers. He kissed her knuckles with cracked lips, even though he didn’t have to, even though this mark of respect was notably un-Chinese. Grandmother Jah considered him a sweet boy.

  Khatijah kissed her knuckles and gave her a hug. Grandmother Jah patted her granddaughter’s head, full of hair like short ripples packed tight against her scalp, much like her own. Her eyes were large and clear, dancing with life above her dimpled cheeks. No trace of Ghani existed on this child’s face. Further down the line, she knew, he would cease to be remembered completely.

  “If you need anything, give us a call.” Khatijah withdrew in a whisper of polyester. “If you want me to pick up some groceries after school, just let me know.”

  “I know how to use a taxi.”

  “Just in case.” Khatijah chuckled. “You know my number.”

  “I do.”

  They left, Habib and Khatijah waving from the back seat, with Rahim smiling from the front.

  Grandmother Jah put on the evening news and went to put the kettle to boil. She peeked into the fridge for the dinner Khatijah left behind. There were fresh groceries too. Basic greens in the crisper and cuts of chicken in the freezer. Some rice and soy sauce were left over from the previous occupants. Grandmother Jah would have thrown them away, but it was a sin to throw away food.

  Rahim had gotten her a microwave oven, which she used to heat up the biryani her granddaughter had bought. There hadn’t been a matching set of crockery in this house since she married her husband, and there certainly wasn’t one left over after his death. She used the plainest of the lot to warm her food, hoping that a plate that predated coloured television was safe enough for the modern world.

  Coffee jars lined the lowest shelf above the counter, powdered with dust and sealed with grease. Through the glass, she could make out lumps of cabbage, trapped like viscera adrift in yellowed brine. Shaking a jar roused a milky louche that stirred, like a curl of dragon, from the debris at the bottom. A Chinese neighbour had taught her the process: First, the cabbage leaves had to be wilted in the sun for a day. Then they were rubbed with salt before they were packed in jars under a mixture of water and rice flour. The leaves would express their own brine in time, adding a sourness more pleasant than vinegar.

  By two weeks, the whites would wash out, retaining a hint of green at the tips. By two years, the colour would be leached clear off the veins, and the hearts would take on the translucence of matured ivory.

  Unscrewing the lid of a jar released its perfume, sour with a hint of sea water. Grandmother Jah reached for a leaf and bit into it, noting with satisfaction that it was tender and still good. Bringing the remainder to the chopping board, she tested her cleaver on the edge of a stem. The blade bent the fibres without breaking the skin.

  The pickles were as old as the day she’d left her husband, and her cleaver, she knew, was as dull as the brine was sharp. It was a shame to let blades dull, a shame on the woman in whose care the kitchen had fallen. Grandmother Jah nodded to herself as she reached for the sharpener beneath the sink. Spider webs clung in tendrils to her hand as she withdrew it from behind the sponges, the sharpening wheel a comforting weight in her grip.

  Lifting her skirt to slightly below her knees, with only her soles to support her, she collapsed herself into a squat. Her bones ached at the effort, but the first brush of the blade against the whetstone made a sound like the pull of a yo-yo’s string, a pleasure tha
t brought a smile to her lips. As she whirred her wheel upon the floor, the grooves on the outer ring bumped against the floor tiles, tapping a beat. From a crack in the wall came the patter of a house lizard, laughing to its friends in the ceiling. Gristle began to rise across the edge of the blade, exuding its mineral scent, like salt and iron.

  Behind her back, the floorboards in the hallway began to creak, sure, heavy treads spaced a footstep apart. They stopped, she surmised, where the kitchen doorway began. The boards groaned as though the person there shifted his weight, as though he turned to look through the door.

  Grandmother Jah steadied her wrist with her free hand, frowning as she slowed the path of the wheel to match her breathing. She counted a single inhalation for a single roll forward, and a single exhalation for every single roll back. Five breaths passed in this way before the floorboards began their noise once more. The footsteps headed down the hall, pausing, she calculated, at the entrance to the master bedroom. Two more breaths passed, the second halted halfway, before she was able to stop, resting the tip of the cleaver upon the floor.

  She turned to her left, looking directly at the wall beside her, and raised her voice. “This is my house,” she said, with a slight waver, and then, “I live here now,” like the point of the blade she aimed at the ground.

  There were no more footsteps for many more breaths. Her mettle and her confidence in her knees restored, she inched her way upright, the cleaver and the wheel with her. She ran the cleaver under the tap, letting the water slap against the sink. When the water ran clear, she shut it off, shaking the droplets away from the knife even as she brought it back to the board. The cabbage leaf sliced cleanly with a swish.

  The mattress was a thick slab of foam that Rahim, in his enthusiasm, declared the best support for her aging back. It smelled of rubber even through the sheets she’d brought from her daughter’s house. Fatimah had agreed with her brother and added that a bed in this style was less likely to attract bugs. More than that, she’d bought the matching orthopaedic pillow, which for all of its quilted padding was as much foam as Rahim’s bed.