Read by Rhik Samadder
As I was a bit short on cash this spring I got a crappy job with the Department of Islamic Development. Every Valentine’s Day they advertise for ridiculous stooges to flood the streets of Kuala Lumpur preaching abstinence and handing out flyers; but it turned out that, for 100 Ringgit an hour, I was a stooge too.
A fat Jakim man waddled in and said: “Welcome to the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice. You are here because you are respectable Malay citizens and you want to protect your culture. Please take an information pack detailing your allocated area and a list of the seedy hotels we are monitoring for corrupted youths . . ."
I did as I was told, and left for the Malaya University campus with my pack, as well as two-thousand “Boycott Valentine’s Day” leaflets and a megaphone. I walked along the banks of Klang River where the waters were infested with delivery-boats laden with roses, novelty chocolates and contraceptives.
The scenario didn’t feel strange to me, for I was a man of halves—or maybe that just made me wholly a boy? See, I’ve studied in America but I am not a ‘liberal young man’; I practice Salah but I am not an Islamist: I use the strongest arms of my manifold beliefs to carry me through each circumstance. Take day one at the campus where I set up my stall. First a biologist waved away a flyer frigidly, saying: “My imam has talked to me already.” I came over all tolerant, wondering aloud if sometimes we must obey our animal selves against tradition. Then my girlfriend Priya found me after her lectures, we kissed and she skimmed a leaflet asking if she was going to have to find another boyfriend this Thursday.
I smiled and said: “No, celibacy’s just good money. I’ll finish at five.” Then we walked into town for lamb kebabs and – at my request – to watch the condom ferries unloading. I told Priya that in one packet in one box in all of those containers was the skin that would come between us in our first time.
But then the next day I was smooching the megaphone saying “The purpose of existence is to love and serve God, not one another”. A trainee doctor came over and called me a Jakim stooge; asked wasn’t I embarrassed selling mouldy ideals to people my own age? Suddenly I became a traditionalist: asked how many teenagers he saw with STIs or unwanted embryos. I said: “Well, so there’s a silver lining to your frigid Jakim.” Then Priya finished, kissed me, and we went for grilled fish and a film.
Day three, I felt delirious with boredom, as always when you do a repetitive menial task for hours and days on end—and that applies even if it is God’s task, seemingly. My leaflet pile was empty and all the same students and staff must’ve been bored of me too, so I just watched as the day wound on. I thought: here I am selling another week of my youth for a dead-end job which I half believe in, for half a salary which I’ll spend on half-enjoyable things. I looked curiously at the people who went past with such ease and decisiveness; they were clocking off for the day, getting rowdier, more physical, playing loud pop from iPod docks, and eventually kissing and stealing away. I recalled what Priya and I would do. I wondered how guilty I should feel, and which part was worst: buying the Americana, inserting my penis, or theoretically upsetting my father.
“Hey Charlie,” Priya said huskily. I felt my bones melt away, as always when she talks, and my skin tightened as if in exquisite pain.
I said “Hey, you look nice” and noted that she has the prettiest brown legs. “I got you a peppermint mocha,” I said, which was true, so I handed it to her with a chocolate heart. We began into town, talking casually about not much at all. Priya was happy I’d got her a couple of little gifts so she was full of energy, but I felt down for some reason, and gradually and accidentally I brought her down too. When Priya told me with a hint of irritation in her voice that I should cheer up, I said that I just didn’t know what to think anymore, didn’t know where I was, where I was going, why.
This riled her. What she said next stuck with me: “I think you’ve been doing that job too long. I know it was only three days, but that’s how poisonous it is, Charlie. You can’t let people buy you that easily. And now you’re done with them, look what they’ve done to you: you’re moping along like a wet sponge.”
Now I saw that it was a reasonable demand, and I’d been caught in a moment of self-pity. If I was going to compromise my whole day to other people’s opinions, the least I could do was hold my own ones in the evening. Just as I decided on conjuring up some passion to bring Priya round, there was a stealthy cold breeze and the sky broke into fat wet droplets.
“Come on!” I said, and we ran through the street-market laughing as our bodies got blotted wet. I whisked her into a coffee shop where we sat by windows dripping with condensation. Priya was still giggling while she twisted the wet ribbons of her hair into a rope and laid it in front of a shoulder. I watched her in her now-translucent dress.
I dared myself to commit to something, to do something new and all mine. I leaned in, and said, “I’ve got something else to give you.”
When she offered me her hands I smiled and said, “no, it doesn’t fit into two hands. And no, it’s not that either. Priya, tonight I’ll give you my body and my soul.”
She was amused by me, and asked coyly: “But won’t we go to hell, Mr Jakim?”
Here came my greatest performance to date, for this time I found that I really believed what I said. I slammed my fist on the table as I spoke, and with every word I saw Priya become more and more 'invigorated'. I said: “Well I won’t just lie in the earth; I’d rather be consumed in flame. I’ll not ask for forgiveness from my family. I’ll leave this place as the man who has taken the perfect lover for his body, with the smell of your sex still on me.”
People were squinting judgmentally at us through the misty air.
Coyly, Priya fluttered her hand at her cheek: “The smell of my what?”
“Priya, how can I explain this to you?” I took her eyes in mine. “I am not a rebel, nor a stooge: I am a lover.”
Her chest was heaving; she was wearing a lace bra. At that time I had only one thought: I wanted her. It was a beautiful urge.
She said: “But, what will we do?”
Outside shouts and fights punctuated the humid monsoon air, and Jakim officials marched to and fro. I recalled a poor-quality photograph of a room with scarlet carpets, Paisley-print walls and grandiose arched windows, and I imagined Priya centred in the four-poster bed.
I removed an information pack from my bag and said, “I know a seedy hotel.”
© Jonny Aldridge, 2013
Jonny Aldridge is a 23 year old writer from London and Cambridge. He works as a press officer and lives with his girlfriend and cat. His debut novel Banes Of Boys And Girls is currently available on Kindle for 77p. Feel free to get in touch with him @JonnyAldridge.
Rhik Samadder’s first job was the title role in The Indian Boy (Royal Shakespeare Company). Recent credits include Romeo in Romeo and Juliet Unzipped (Salisbury Playhouse). Film work includes Chemical Wedding (Warner Bros, Cannes '08), and radio includes Urban Scrawl for Theatre 503. Rhik is also a writer and works at the Guardian.
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