Song Banyu Lake

Chapter 1

Jakarta, 2007.

The young woman was awakened from her restless sleep. The light in the bedroom had gone out and the white curtain obstructed the moonlight from penetrating in. The only source of light in the room was from the TV that had been left switched on.

It's still 1 a.m., Gayatri said, taking a breath in upon looking at the clock on the wall. She tried to close down her eyes, but she could not. Her mind kept on wandering and running around, just like a child with an endless energy in a playground.

Gayatri had woken up many times, checking the time. She was quite afflicted by it. She only wanted to rest before going for work. Outside, the sky was accompanied by a gold yellowish moon.

Three hours of broken sleep had gone by. It was four o'clock when Gayatri decided to turn the TV off. A classic music was played to calm her wandering mind, and she tried to concentrate on her breathing. Then, she fell asleep.

When the alarm clock went off at six, she woke up gasping, and then rubbed her face with her hands. She had a bad dream. As she moved her hands away from her face, she noticed on her right palm two stretching lines whose ends were not connected. Upon seeing that, the words of a female fortune teller she once saw at a bazaar revisited her mind.

"Sadness, young lady. Bottomless sadness," the fortune teller said. "You will have two worlds that are not aligned with one another. Your mind and your heart. Your past and your future. Your inner self and your outer self. Your own voice and your loved ones' voices. Each of them walks with a different compass. Just be careful with the way you live your life."

Jakarta, 2010. A cemetery.

One week had passed since her mother died. But the image of her mother and Mbok Ati bathed her mother's body in their big and empty house kept playing in her head. There were only the two of them back then. Mbok Ati had served at her mother's house for years.

Meanwhile Leo, the guy that she met during her field job at Song Banyu, went to the airport to pick up his mother, Mbak Purwanti and her daughter Babu, and Subarkah. These people travelled all the way from Song Banyu. Back when Leo heard the news about the death of Gayatri's mother, he immediately flew to Jakarta and accompanied her to get through the funeral procession until it was completed.

On Saturday, when they buried her mother, Gayatri did not shed a single tear at all. She only felt exhausted and it was as if her eyelids were heavy and just wanted to close down. She had spent two weeks just crying, especially after the doctors sent her mother to the intensive care unit (ICU).

Gayatri put on her sunglasses to block the light of the stinging afternoon sun. She walked slowly on the small path that separated the cemetery area. She saw two gravediggers squatted close to a pile of the earth they had just dug. They were wearing short-sleeved shirts covered with mud stains. Their bodies were skinny, covered with dark brown complexion. One of them sat on a tombstone and was intermittently wiping his sweat off. Another guy repeatedly spat and every now and then smoked.

Gayatri smiled at one of the guys. This was the fifth time she went to the cemetery. She recognized their faces. When she first went there, she ignored them because she cried all the time. Her mind went blank. But after several visits, she managed to control her emotion and began to notice people's presence in the cemetery area. The only faces that had never changed were those of the gravediggers.

She always went to the cemetery by herself and wore the same outfit. Round-collared white top with golden buttons embedded at the front and a yellowish green blazer with a pink brooch. The blazer was a gift from her mother. As for the bottom, she wore a pair of pastel brown pants. She put on her head a big round hat adorned with ribbon.