Sacred Sin

The first time I let a man who wasn't my husband touch me, it was raining so hard the gutters outside the warung were choking on leaves, and I remember thinking about the laundry.

That's the thing nobody tells you about becoming a woman who does this. Your mind doesn't go blank and holy like in the films, all violins and slow motion. It stays practical. It counts. It worries about the rice still soaking in the pot at home and whether Pak Hasan remembered to bring in the shirts from the line before the afternoon storm rolled in off the hills.

His name was Reza. He was thirty-one, ten years younger than me, with a motorbike that sounded like it was dying every time he kicked it to life, and hands that had no business being that gentle when he handed me my change. I'd known him for four months. He sold phone credit and cold tea from a kiosk near the market where I bought vegetables every Tuesday and Friday. That's all he was supposed to be. A boy behind a counter. A face I nodded at.

My husband, Hasan, is a good man. I need you to understand that before anything else, because if you think this is a story about a bad marriage, you've already got it wrong. He prays five times a day. He fixes the roof himself instead of paying someone. He brings me pisang goreng on Fridays because he knows I like the ones from the stall near the mosque, the ones with the crispy edges. Twenty-two years we've been married. He has never once raised his voice at me.

He has also not looked at me, truly looked, in maybe six of those years.

I'm not sure when it started. You don't notice a thing like that happening. It's like the paint fading on the front gate. One day it's green, and then one day it's just a color that used to be green, and you can't remember the exact afternoon it changed. He kisses my forehead when he leaves for work. He eats what I cook. He falls asleep with the television on, and I lie beside him in the dark, listening to the tin roof tick as it cools, and I feel like a piece of furniture that's been in the house so long nobody sees it anymore.

I was forty-one. I wore a jilbab to the market. I taught mengaji to the neighborhood children on Thursday nights. I was, by every measure anyone in our kampung would use, a good woman. A pious woman. The kind of woman other wives pointed to when they wanted to shame their husbands into behaving.

And I was so lonely I could taste it, like metal on my tongue.

Reza started it, if we're being honest about who started what. He asked me one Tuesday, in that lazy way of his, why I always bought the same vegetables. The same spinach, the same long beans, the same three shallots. Every time. Like a machine.

"Because I know what my family eats," I said.

"That's not the same as knowing what you want to eat," he said, and he smiled, and I felt something turn over in my chest like a fish in a bucket.

I told him he was too young to be so clever. He told me I was too young to be so tired. I laughed. I actually laughed, out loud, in the middle of the market with the flies buzzing and the smell of fish and the sun pressing down on the plastic awning, and I couldn't remember the last time I'd done that.

That was the beginning. Not the rain, not the touching. The laugh.

For weeks after that, nothing happened. I want to be clear. I went home and cooked the spinach and the long beans and the shallots, and I served them to my husband, and I washed the dishes, and I lay in the dark and thought about a boy in a kiosk who thought I was too young to be so tired. I didn't touch myself. I didn't even let myself finish the thought. I'd catch it starting and I'd push it down like a lid on a pot.

But I started wearing a different jilbab on Tuesdays. A lighter one. And I started putting on the lipstick my sister gave me two Lebarans ago, just a little, just enough that you'd have to be looking to notice.

He noticed.

"You look nice today, Bu," he said, and the way he said Bu, the honorific, the word that means mother, that word that should have made me feel old and respectable and safe, the way he said it made it sound like a secret.

I should have stopped going to that market. I could have. There's another market fifteen minutes further, a bigger one, cheaper prices. I told myself I was just being practical about the fare. I told myself a lot of things.

The rain started around two o'clock on the day it happened. I was at Reza's kiosk, waiting out the worst of it under the tin awning, and the water was coming down in sheets so thick you couldn't see the mosque across the road. There was nobody else around. The other stalls had all pulled their shutters down. Just the two of us and the drumming of the rain on the roof and the smell of wet dust rising off the ground.

"You'll get sick walking home in this," he said.

"I'll wait."

"It could rain till dark."

"Then I'll wait till dark."

He looked at me for a long moment. And I knew, in that moment, that he knew. Everything I'd been telling myself I wasn't doing, every Tuesday lipstick, every extra minute I lingered at his counter, he'd been reading it the whole time like a book left open on a table.

"I could take you somewhere dry," he said. "My cousin's shop is closed. He's away in Bandung."

I said no. I want that on the record. I said no, thank you, I'll wait. And then I stood there for another ten minutes, listening to the rain, feeling the cold spray on my ankles, and I thought about the laundry on the line at home, and I thought about Hasan asleep in front of the television, and I thought about the six years of being a piece of furniture, and I thought, what if I just did one thing. One small thing. Nobody would ever know. Not Hasan. Not the neighbors. Not the children at mengaji. Not even God, maybe, if I was quick and sorry enough afterward.

"Okay," I said. Just that. One word. My voice didn't even shake.

We ran through the rain to his cousin's shop, two streets over, and I was soaked by the time we got there, my jilbab plastered to my head, my sandals full of water, laughing again, laughing like a girl, and he unlocked the door and we stepped inside and he closed it behind us and the rain went quiet, muffled, like the whole world had been turned down.

The shop was small and dark and smelled of cardboard and cloves. There was a mattress in the back corner, a thin one, the kind the men use when they sleep at the shop during Ramadan. He didn't say anything. He just stood there, dripping, looking at me with those hands of his hanging at his sides, waiting for me to decide.

I thought about the laundry. I really did. I thought, if I don't go home soon, the shirts will be ruined, and Hasan will ask, and I'll have to lie, and that lie will be the first brick in a wall I'll spend the rest of my life building.

Then I reached up and pulled the wet jilbab off my head.

I won't tell you what his face did. I'll tell you what mine did. It didn't smile. It didn't cry. It just went still, the way a face goes still when you finally stop pretending to be someone.

He crossed the room. He put one hand on my waist, over the wet cotton of my dress, and his palm was so warm it felt like a brand. And I let him. I let him pull me against him, and I let him press his mouth to the side of my neck, right where the pulse was jumping, and I let out a sound I hadn't made in years, a small, broken sound, like something being unlatched.

That's the moment. Not the rain. Not the mattress. That sound.

Because the second I heard it, I knew I wasn't going to stop. Not today. Not ever. The alim woman, the pious one, the one they all pointed to, she was gone, and in her place was somebody who wanted things, who was going to take them, and who was already, in the back of her mind, calculating how long she had before she had to go home and hang the wet laundry on the line.