Man Tiger by Eka Kurniawan Page A

coral-paved roads, where a market was held every Monday. Once a week, it would be teeming with vendors setting out their baskets at the roadside or on terraces or filling up empty lots. They sold coconuts, bananas, papayas and cassava, and some spread out beautiful clothes over wooden frames mounted on their bicycles. An old woman sold flowers in trays, and there were people leading cows, water buffaloes, and sheep they hoped to sell. There were chickens tied by their feet to ducks, and buckets of fish and eels. Women came here to shop, and small trucks were sometimes loaded up with produce, leaving almost nothing behind. If there was anyone outside on his terrace on days other than Monday, it was Komar bin Syueb the barber, set up with a large mirror leant against a table, a shaving kit, and a chair, with towels and cotton cutting capes hung from a few well-placed nails.
    Home hadn’t been a real house. It was nothing more than a coconut godown. Beside it stood a grand mansion, with large glass windows and a floor of glistening ivory tiles, scrubbed clean by the housemaid every day. Around it were orchards of rose-apple, orange, and mango trees, and a yard where two trucks were often parked overnight. One day the owner of the mansion had built a bigger godown behind his cooking-oil factory, and then mysteriously abandoned his wife and children. The original godown was left vacant until Komar and Nuraeni settled there—Margio still crouched in his mother’s belly—renting it for the price of twelve heads on the shaving chair every month and with the obligation to look after the mansion together with the occupants.
    Their home was a single concrete square a few feet on each side. The parents unrolled a mattress in this space— which had first to be purged of coconut fibers, scorpions, insects, and mice—and then crammed their bedding next to a bicycle, a closet, and a wicker mat to sit on. There was no kitchen. Nuraeni put the stove, the plate rack, and buckets beneath a melinjo tree behind their home. She had to surround her stove with a moldy little plywood fence to stop malevolent winds from blowing out the fire. After cooking, she would carry food containers, vegetable bowls, and a rice basket into the house, placing them next to the mattress, and they would eat there. There was no bathroom, obviously. Every morning and late afternoon they would go to the mansion, where they were lucky enough to be lent a bathroom and a toilet, separate from those used by the owner’s wife and children. Margio and Mameh were born there, lived in such a fashion, and life seemed pretty good.
    In their last few years at the godown, Margio’s jobs were to fill the bathtub and to carry three buckets of water to the back terrace kitchen. He did this before going to school, and then again in the afternoon before heading to the beach to fly his kite. He made a lot of friends in the neighborhood, including the son of an ice vendor who was kind enough to supply him with popsicles. Then they moved to House 131.
    The mansion’s owner returned without warning, just as he had left. He sold the house, the orchards and, of course, the coconut godown, and moved his family away. Komar explored nearby areas, until he got lost near a soccer field, not far from the military base and the town market, and found that number 131 hadn’t been occupied for eighteen months. He asked around to track down the owner and, when he found him, didn’t have much trouble getting permission to live there, for the old owner thought the house was going to collapse. He returned to the godown with the news, but first had to persuade Nuraeni to hock her wedding ring to pay for the new house.
    It wasn’t easy to convince the kids to relocate, and even Nuraeni seemed unwilling, despite her years living without a kitchen or bathroom. Margio was the most stubborn. He pleaded to stay behind, and refused to understand that the mansion’s