Yogyakarta, Java, 1808
“Before you say who it is you want me to curse,” the shaman said, “I must warn you: I cannot curse someone I do not know.”
He was a spindly man with long black hair, black bushy eyebrows and mustache and wrinkles, though there were no wrinkles on his forehead—he looked perfectly relaxed and matter-of-fact.
“Why not?” Ni Darti said—then added hastily, “If Rama is willing to explain, of course.”
Rama Surya, that was what he was called. She had climbed up the mountain in search of his hut, bearing baked cassava and a batch of eggs as gifts—a hopeful offering. She couldn’t tell if he styled himself Rama or if that was the title people gave him, but for the chance that he had the black magic she needed, she’d convince him to help her.
“I cannot spin a curse out of thin air,” Rama Surya explained. He puffed on a cigarette and blew the smoke across his porch to the yard, which was barren but for a yellowing papaya tree and bushes of herbs. “For me to shape the curse, I need to know the contours of the person’s soul. Do you know this person you want dead? You haven’t even brought his likeness.”
“He is a terrible man.”
“Many men are terrible. I cannot curse everyone.”
“He is a powerful man.”
“Many men are powerful as well. But whoever yours is, I’ll tell you this right now: I will not try and curse the Sultan, for he is much more powerful than me, and I have no interest in suicide.”
“It is not the Sultan.”
“Then who?”
Ni Darti had thought long about who was to blame for her son’s death. She had wanted to scream at the young man who delivered the news, but she knew it wasn’t his fault. She had also visited the house of the foreman who conscripted Sundoro, but that house had only the foreman’s wife and two children, all staring at her with empty eyes: the foreman was also dead.
All of this, Ni Darti believed, started a few months ago when Batavia saw the arrival of another ship from far away. At its bow: Herman Willem Daendels, the new governor general of the Dutch East Indies. Ni Darti wouldn’t have known anything about this new londho, wouldn’t have cared at all, had he not ordered the construction of the road that killed her son.
The Great Post Road, the white giants called it, Daendels’ road. A thousand kilometers of slave-built monstrosity, spanning the west end of the island to the east. They took native sons and fathers to labor over it. Few ever returned. Perhaps it was overwork, or accidents, or punishments, Ni Darti couldn’t even imagine. How exactly did Sundoro die? She could not entertain the thought. What she could entertain, however, was vengeance.
“I wish a curse be levied on Herman Willem Daendels, in Batavia.”
Rama Surya’s bushy eyebrow quirked up. “A Dutchman? You would like me to curse a Dutchman?”
“Yes.”
“And you have never even met this Dutchman, I presume?”
“No, I haven’t.”
“And he is a powerful man, which means he is reachable by neither you nor me.”
“Rama, aren’t you powerful yourself?”
“I cannot curse people I don’t know,” he repeated, in a tone that sounded even more final.
“But I want him dead.”
“I cannot curse people I don’t know. You either find out about him—more than just his name, mind you—and tell me about his soul, or we are having no curses at all.”
Ni Darti gritted her teeth. “But he is all the way in Batavia, and he is an important and powerful man. I am but a laundress and a cleaner.”
“Have you considered letting go of your grudge?”
No. That wasn’t an option.
And so it became Ni Darti’s mission to learn the contours of the governor general’s soul.
• • •
Every morning Ni Darti woke up to the clucking of chickens, incessant and demanding, punctuated by screams: coo-coo-coo-coo-CAAACK! In her half-awake state, she would wonder why they sounded so desperate, as if they hadn’t been fed for a while—had Sundoro missed the morning feed? And then she’d jerk awake as she remembered Sundoro was no longer in the house; he’d gone to the north coast for a job a while ago; it was now her responsibility to feed the chickens.
The morning after she heard news of Sundoro’s death, the confusion she felt at the chickens’ clucking quickly shifted into a dark weight. The chickens would forever be hungry come early morning, now that their most faithful attendant would never return. She sympathized with their high-pitched screaming, felt the emptiness in their bellies—all as she skirted around the void that had started to bloom within herself.
It was hard to mourn a death she had not witnessed. On the surface there was no difference between Sundoro being away and Sundoro being dead; their bamboo hut was of the same quietness, his cot the same neat vacancy. If she closed her eyes, she could still pretend he would show up the next morning, a sack slung over his shoulders and a grin on his face, a handful of coins on his palm: Ma, let’s buy ourselves a meal.
She was stuck in this emotional limbo for a week or two. Then one morning she went out to feed the chickens and found a man speaking to the woman living next door. Nyi Winarni had a son, Joko, who was Sundoro’s best friend, always by his side from childhood to slavery.
The man spoke to Winarni. Ni Darti couldn’t hear his words, but she heard Narni’s keening and saw her open-mouthed scream.
That was when something inside her finally cracked—and with it came an earth-quaking, a volcanic rumbling, the clap of lightning sharp and grievous.
Joko was gone. Which meant so was Sundoro. It was real.
Someone had to pay.
• • •
She started lingering at warung near colonial administration buildings, hoping to catch errand boys and glean from them some information about the new power in Batavia. But they didn’t know about Daendels. She supposed she shouldn’t have expected much: why should they worry about a man five hundred kilometers away, when the purses in their hands were too empty for the rice they’d come here to buy? So she took a job as a dishwasher at a restaurant where higher-ranked staffers often lunched. Maybe they would have whispers about the elusive governor general.
It was four months before she heard anything notable. At her dishwashing station she had kept the tap open just a trickle, quiet so she could hear the waiters’ chatter: some customers had talked in wondrous fear about a new big boss in Batavia, who was sending current officers to the gallows for corruption, replacing them with new ones. The newcomers wore uniforms just like the army’s, high-collared and stiff with a neat row of brass buttons.
Everyone is a soldier now, the inlanders whispered. Be very afraid.
No one had ever actually seen the governor general, though. Daendels was fully entrenched in Batavia—built himself a new fortress, she heard—and they were here in Yogyakarta, practically a world away.
She developed a ringing in her ears, the kind she used to get when she strained her hearing. These days she was straining all the time, listening too carefully for gossip—or for a voice she knew would never be heard again, but that her heart still longed for. The slightest whisper of a male voice on the street and she’d spin around and have to catch her heart before it fell and splattered on the ground. It was never Sundoro.
He had such a gentle voice, gentlest when he called the mother hens to roost, and gentler still—almost fragile—when he counted the coins he got from the market, where he’d said goodbye to a chicken or two. She never did say goodbye to him; there were no remains to weep over. But she really ought to. Perhaps that would help her understand what it was that had taken him.
There were only several mountains between her and the north coast, where the Great Post Road was—unlike Batavia, it wasn’t impossibly far. With every step she took, she imagined laying her feet onto Sundoro’s footprints, the way he would lay his little palm against hers when he was still a baby. She was finally making her way back to him.
She wasn’t expecting to see Daendels on the Great Road—only honest men built with their own hands, and he wasn’t one. But maybe this would bring her closer to the man. Maybe there was a figment of his soul on the dirt-and-stone miscreation that bore his name. If the road was rough and potholed, would that mean he was a coarse man missing parts of his soul? If it was as grand as its name suggested, would that mean he was a keen, capable master, albeit one who’d work his men to death? As she walked, she ran a hundred possibilities in her mind, wondering what she would find and what it could tell her.
But when she reached the next village, she was stopped by a vaguely familiar face: another one of Sundoro’s friends, Kartono. He was slumped at the back of a farmer’s cart, face pale and sweaty, pants bloody and empty from the knee down.
“I can’t walk anymore, you see,” he said. “A boulder fell on me when I was working.”
But he chanced a twitchy smile nonetheless. He was lucky, he said, because his officer had actually wanted to shoot him dead—legless men had no use for the construction project. But a kinder soul had convinced him to send Kartono home—so here he was, not one but two centimeters away from death.
“Yes, how very fortunate,” Ni Darti said, empty as an echo.
She asked him if he’d seen Sundoro. His eyes widened, lips trembled. She asked him the exact way Sundoro had died. He shook his head, clamped his mouth shut. She said she wanted to go see the road. He told her no, please no.
The Great Road was a hell with a legion of demons, he said, all possessing eyes at the front and back of their heads. Soldiers—soldiers all over. Thirsty for blood and the other vices that fed their war. They’d see her and take her. She’d be a bed warmer for her son’s slavers. His ghost would hate to see that.
“He was brave because he wanted to go home and see you happy,” he reasoned. “He can no longer go home, but can’t you live and be happy? Won’t you honor him?”
It felt like losing him all over again, when she turned around and undid her steps.
• • •
1809
The governor general is coming to visit the Sultan!
The glass Ni Darti was washing slipped and shattered on the tile floor. It had been a long, hopeless year; she had grown numb, but now she felt jolted awake.
Herman Willem Daendels, here in Yogyakarta. This was her chance—perhaps her only chance—to see the man she wanted to curse.
The town was abuzz. In the weeks leading up to Daendels’ arrival, the townsfolk talked of him and Sri Sultan Hamengkubuwono II with the same mythical air. Here were two powerful men, scarcely seen. The commoners could only dream of laying eyes on them, as if sighting them meant sharing a piece of their power.
The day of, Ni Darti abandoned her work at the restaurant. She stood by the road circling the keraton’s northern town square. She had left her house even before the sun rose, but still she found herself jostling fellow onlookers for the best spot.
A carriage appeared in the distance. A hush fell upon the crowd.
The carriage reached the end of the road, near the bend leading to the front gate of the keraton.
Soldiers streamed out of the carriage. One pointed his rifle at the sky and opened fire. Bang. The crowd screamed and scattered, trampling one over the other, trying to get away as soldiers waved bayonets at them.
Ni Darti fought to stay. Her feet grew roots and anchored themselves to the earth, to hope. If she could hold on a little longer she might see another carriage arriving, this one with the person she needed to know.
A soldier approached, pointing his bayonet at the crowd pressing around her. His face scrunched up in a fierce shout, white skin sweating under the sun that wasn’t his. He stank. Ni Darti gagged—partly in disgust, partly in queasiness as she stared down a possible death.
Can’t you live and be happy? Kartono’s voice echoed.
But here was her chance at happiness. Herman Willem Daendels, here in Yogyakarta.
Her legs moved of their own accord, wriggling through the crowd and past the soldier, onto the road. She would run down that road until she met Daendels’ carriage, and then she would—
The soldier fired a warning shot. The sound of it blew her ears, but she kept moving. He yelled and chased her; she pulled her jarik up higher and ran faster.
But he caught up. He thrusted his bayonet at her. He would’ve pierced her heart, but a hand pulled her aside, and the bayonet glanced past her shoulder. It left a bloody tear on her kebaya.
She fought the stranger who saved her, but he had strong arms and determination. She rebelled all the way to the narrow alley he dragged her to, and, when he let her go, she screamed at him:
“You’ve never lost a son. I just want a piece of what killed him.”
• • •
Rama Surya stared at her over two cups of steaming jasmine tea, through air heavy with the smell and mist of burnt incense. Little pinpricks of moonlight shone down from gaps between the roof tiles of his hut.
“I’m surprised you came here,” he said. “I know you don’t have what I told you to get.”
Ni Darti looked down at her lap, tracing the edges of a tear on her jarik. “He was just around the corner,” she whispered. “If I had stayed a little longer, I might have seen him, might have known him.”
“And yet, you didn’t,” Rama Surya said. “Why are you here?”
She took a deep breath. In the long nights she’d spent regretting her missed chance, she’d been rendered to tears, grieving her failure as much as she was grieving Sundoro. She’d been hopeful for a second, and having it dashed when she was so close felt almost as cruel as death.
But in other moments, her tears weren’t tears of grief or desperation; they were tears of anger. Anger at her bleeding bayonet wound. Anger that a man she had never seen could make such a mark on her.
And that was when she came to understand everything.
“I realized, Rama,” she said, “that a man like him causes ripples wherever he goes. I felt it—I felt him—even though I didn’t reach his carriage. Look, I have a wound to show for it.” The gash on her shoulder had closed, but it stung nonetheless, bleeding invisibly. “I never would’ve gotten this wound if he hadn’t been there. And that made me realize: he has always been close. You can feel him around you.”
He was the emptiness in her chest, the dead slaves buried god-knew-where, the pebbles on a thousand-kilometer bloody road, the rice in warung unbought because no one could afford it, the bullet fired to put blank space between him and the people he gutted dry. He was all around them, all this time.
Rama Surya shook his head. “There is no knowing people like him. They are not for our lowly eyes.”
“But you’re wrong, Rama. Maybe we’ll never share his table or talk with him the way we do with our neighbors. But that doesn’t mean we’ll never know him, does it? We’ve seen the worst of him. We’ve felt it. Maybe I’ll never get to know what kind of person he is—I’ll never even see his face—but I’ve gathered pieces of him others have felt. And I think I know his soul, even if only secondhand.”
Rama Surya sighed. He reached for a bag of tobacco and its rolling paper—tucked behind a statue of the god Semar on the coffee table—and started making a roll. He lit one end. “That so?” he said in a puff of smoke.
“Yes. I can list all the violence he’s left in his wake. You’ll get a contour of his soul.”
“You’re tracing the contours of society, not the man you’re trying to curse.”
“Isn’t society made up of men?”
“You’re mistaking the forest for the tree.”
“No. What I’m really saying is, if a man comes along and burns a tree, and the fire spreads and burns the entire forest, can’t we blame the man for the whole forest fire? And can’t we point at the chars of the forest and say, ‘That was a terrible man who did this’?”
“Maybe it was just an accident,” Rama Surya muttered.
“What the Dutch do to us is not an accident.”
He wrinkled his nose. He tapped his cigarette on a stone ashtray, embers drifting lazily. “Don’t you have dinner to cook?”
“Just make the curse.”
“Go grieve for your son the way other mothers do. Pray, weep for him, share food with the neighbors in his name.”
“I want the curse.”
“I don’t believe your arguments. You don’t have what it takes to curse a soul. I’m not going to waste my effort on this.”
“Just try it. If I’m right, I’ll get my peace, and you’ll get the fame for defeating someone not even the Sultan has.”
That perked him up. He took a drag on his cigarette, puffed it out dramatically. A hand rested on the Semar statue, fingertips tapping on the god’s swollen and bountiful belly. “Fine,” Rama Surya said at last. “But you’ll pay me anyway, whether or not the curse takes off. In fact, pay me twice over. I can’t make a habit out of indulging hopeless causes.”
“Fine.”
She told him all about the pain that Daendels had left in his wake. She spoke of her chickens and the way they called for Sundoro. She spoke of Narni’s midnight sobbing and the little gravestone she had erected in her yard, Joko’s name carved on it with her own kitchen knife and nails. She told him about Kartono’s missing legs and remaining fingers, which trembled without end.
“Make the curse,” she hissed through gritted teeth and stinging eyes.
Rama Surya stood and went to a cupboard in the corner. He muttered to himself as he rummaged in it, bringing to the floor at the center of the hut a miscellany of things: a candle, a stone mortar and pestle, a needle, a huge chili pepper, an egg, half a dozen dried herbs she didn’t recognize, a package wrapped in blotchy paper, and a vial of something that looked like blood.
The candle he lit immediately. She joined him on the floor as he ground the chili pepper and herbs together, releasing a sharp tang and spiciness that made her eyes water. He was muttering a mantra in an ancient tongue she didn’t understand.
Next he picked up the needle, and very carefully punctured one end of the egg until there was a neat hole the size of a fingernail. A rank, rotten stench wafted out.
He picked up the paper package and unwrapped it, releasing another kind of foul stench.
“Tiger teeth and claws,” he said proudly. There were flecks of flesh and blood still attached to them.
He picked them up—white, tiny, putrid things—and plunged them one by one into the egg. They were followed by a few drops from the vial of blood.
“Tiger teeth and claws in the belly of a rotten man,” Rama Surya explained. “A bad way to go, but rather fitting, I think.”
He laid the egg carefully in the middle of the mortar, arranging the ground herbs around it for support so that it stood straight. “Now, do you have his likeness?”
She shook her head.
He sighed. “It has to be the mask, then.”
He went back to the cupboard and took out a plain wooden mask, a brush, and a small jar of white paint. “I take it you have no clue about his facial features? None whatsoever?”
She shook her head again.
“Fine. Just the skin it is.”
He painted the whole mask white, then laid it on the mortar, covering the egg and everything else. The chants of more mantras raised goosebumps on her skin.
He picked up the candle and held its fire against the chin of the mask until it charred. When the fire spread, he bent over it and whispered into it, in the language she understood, “I, Banyutapa Suryasaputra, hereby send this curse to Herman Willem Daendels in Batavia.”
The mask kept burning. The smoke unfurled horizontally at first, covering her face and filling her lungs until she couldn’t breathe. But she stared it down and stayed rooted where she was.
Banyutapa Suryasaputra kept on his litany of chants, eyes squeezed shut, his baritone unwavering.
The smoke that carried the curse took off, up in a spiral, like treacherous hope.
• • •