Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The Restoration

2023; University of Hawaii Press; Volume: 35; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/man.2023.a917295

1527-943X

Diana Rahim,

Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies

The Restoration Diana Rahim (bio) Zubaidah knew, as anyone who has ever tried to bury a body, how hard it is to break through soil. Two years ago, she carried and laid the body of her deceased cat, Lontong, gently on the grass before attempting to dig up a chosen plot of soil. She did so, absurdly, with a steel spatula. Perhaps it was something about the soil here. Repeatedly, her steel spatula hit the hard surface uselessly. The ground remained determinedly unbreached. Her heart, already so ravaged by the specific grief of losing a pet, felt itself fully undone. A soft thing, a sandcastle dissolved unthinkingly by the banal hand of an ocean. People walked past, seemingly cold, but in truth they too felt themselves helplessly mournful at the sight of Zubaidah, with her one hand stroking Lontong's already stiffening body and the other holding up the edges of her hijab to her eyes as she cried. They clutched their packed dinners, laptop bags, and the hands of their children a little tighter as they turned their eyes away from the disarmingly intimate sight of her grief and walked home in a waning evening. It made sense why there were tractors at the Muslim graveyards scooping up massive mounds of soil. She had found their presence loathsome and vulgar at her daughter's burial six years ago, but understood then that even the earth struggles to accept the death of its children. Zubaidah knew better now. When she decided that she wanted to plant trees, she immediately identified the open field behind the clump of neighborhoods she lived in as the best place. The field had been cleared many decades ago, and the other half of the forest it once belonged to remained untouched and feral. All she would have to do was plant trees furtively along their naked edge, and she was confident that nobody would notice. The first tree she wanted to plant was a rain tree. Pukul Lima. Five o'clock. That's what the tree was called in her tongue. Named after the time at which the tree's leaves would fold up at the sunset hour. Of course, sunset was no longer at five o'clock. Not since the 80s, when the land's standard time was moved forward. Now they no longer shared the same time as Batam, which was just about an hour away by boat, but shared the same time as Hong Kong, Beijing, and Perth. How mutable time seemed. [End Page 64] How deceptive the human's seeming power. They changed these things and left the trees alienated from the meaning of their names. Zubaidah knew she had to wait for the yellow pods to turn brown, signaling the ripening of the seeds inside. She waited patiently. Throughout the island, they followed a seemingly singular rhythm. The day she finally could get the seeds was the day she visited her daughter's grave. She had bid her daughter her customary farewell first. Mak go home first ok Syimah, I'll visit you again next week. She noticed on the walk away from the graveyard the difference in the rain trees by the path of the road. She gathered the brown pods on the soft ground of the earth, wondering, as she gathered them, whether unmarked bodies rested and gave themself to the growth of the tree. When she arrived home, she split open the pods to gather the seeds. Was it wise to plant a rain tree in a field? She did not know. She never really had a green thumb, nor had she tended to more than a few plants in her life. All of them had died under her care, not out of negligence but due to varying reasons of overabundance. Shifting one plant to where the sun shone brightest, it would eventually shrivel from direct heat. Another would die from too much watering. Zubaidah did not know how to moderate her giving. She did not know that there could be such a thing as too much love. ________ She would cook their meals, and they would eat separately. That is the way it has been the...