Then there were three
My mother lost her first sibling almost forty years ago, when she was half her age now. They still miss him, the only boy amongst five sisters.
Sometimes I imagine the sisters, all a few years apart, navigating their teenage years up in the emerald highlands of West Sumatra, active volcanoes lurking in the distance. My mother, a crooner who often broke into song at gatherings, would have been the gregarious one. She doesn’t defy expectations on purpose. I assume she knows no other way of being.
This wilful matriarch - the Minangkabau of West Sumatra are matrilineal - lost her eldest sister today, the one who never left the highlands.
The quiet one who married the schoolteacher. The patient one who cared for the family rice fields while her other siblings ventured down the verdant hills. The stalwart who survived Dutch colonialism, war-time occupancy by Japan, and what we would like to think is modernisation.
My aunt had enough children to fill a soccer team. Many of her children, and their children too, lived with us at one time or another. I was never short of cousins - first, second, or otherwise. A woman of few words, this sister may have been the natural matriarch, endowed with bounteous offspring.
A contrast to my mother, who became Matriarch (capital letter intentional) through sheer will.
The third youngest, my mother was closest to her family’s other middle child, whose nickname literally means ‘middle’. They speak on the phone daily, at times in bursts and other times seemingly interminably. I imagine that the sisters grew up huddled in small rooms, relying on each other’s proximities for warmth. It gets cold at night up in those hills.
Economists may have characterised my mother’s family as poor. But poverty is what we see. In their minds, the sisters were rich with love.
My mother rarely cries. Matriarchs don’t cry. They issue orders, organise lives, and on occasion grant approval. Plus my mother laughs easily, which makes her influence so devastating. In her prime, she was irresistible.
When I approached the guest room earlier, the room was dark. I heard light sobbing.
We last visited my mother’s village - the one whose roads she paved - a few years ago. Few will be surprised that the more Indonesia’s cities develop, the more its villages remain the same. Chickens roam the yard shared by three houses. One of the houses - the one from the 1940s - has not seen a broom in decades. The rumah gadang from the turn of the century is in even worse shape. The last ‘uncle’ who lived there died many years ago. Throw something into the darkness and you will hear a meow.
My mother made all the arrangements for our visit. A cousin greeted us at every stop. Maybe she even arranged for the perfect canopy of blue sky throughout our journey. She’s magical that way.
But she cannot control the passing of time. Her remaining sisters - the six siblings are now three - are not well enough to join her on this bittersweet homecoming. The devoted nephew who usually drives her to her village, two hours deep in the highlands, also passed away, just a few months ago. He died suddenly, failing to disclose his illness even to the Matriarch. We miss him.
Does a matriarch remain one even when her clan shrinks?
There is no digital economy up in the hills. Only chickens. Goats. Buffaloes. Dowry. The rooms in which my mother and her sisters once huddled and giggled, dreaming of bright lights in big cities - they are falling dim. You can still hear children laughing, but as they pass their teenage years, they leave. Chickens scurry past silent rooms.
A few valleys away in Bukittinggi, my father’s childhood home, or what remains of it, is now another’s home. Tenants.
When people ask me which part of Indonesia I am from, I usually answer Jakarta. But sometimes, wistfully, proudly, I say: My family - my parents and extended family - is from the highlands of West Sumatra.
I hope I will still be able to say that for some time yet. Rest in peace, mak’tuo.
Note: I wrote this last week. My mother is back in Jakarta.
