The next day, Haji Ahmad acted as if nothing had happened. Salimah felt disappointed, though she wasn’t sure why. To be more precise, she didn’t want to know why. For several years after that, she was conscious of Haji Ahmad staring at her from afar while she pretended to look down. Salimah tried to guess what might have happened if the muezzin hadn’t appeared. Each time she did, anger rose within her. Her cheeks flushed and her heart beat fast. Maybe Haji Ahmad had gone senile. But even now, after tormenting several pairs of eyes with her body and her own glances, Salimah never forgot that he was the one who had taught her how dangerous the gaze can be.

—

After the Independence Day incident, Salimah, dangdut queen who aroused the village men, never received another invitation to perform. The fans who had revered her didn’t defend her in the least, though they still ogled her and whistled when she passed.

‘Hey, Sal, when do I get my dance?’

‘Salimah, Salimah, Salome has a hole where all of us can play!’

Salimah stopped and glared. Furious, she scooped up a handful of gravel, ready to pelt the shameless mouths before her.

‘You dog!’ she retorted. ‘All you’ll ever get hold of is your own dick!’

One day, Salimah left the village without so much as a word of goodbye. Asep, her son, stayed behind, looking after a neighbour’s roadside stall. Whenever he was asked about his mother, he simply replied that she was working elsewhere. Her name came up occasionally, when the villagers reminisced about her seductive swaying and how it had obsessed the men.

Two years later, a woman with a hijab and a haggard face appeared in the village one quiet night. Almost nobody recognised her. Salimah. A dull white headscarf framed a face caked in cheap, chalky powder and blotchy red lipstick. The villagers were unsure whether her lips were smiling or grimacing in pain.

People began to concoct their own versions of how Salimah came to be the way she was now. Some said she had been whoring in the village before she left, had contracted a filthy disease and had then looked for a job in the city so she could treat it. Other rumours told of how she had been a migrant worker in Malaysia until her employer beat her. Whatever the reason, she had changed. With that headscarf in place, Salimah looked more subdued. But she didn’t seem to be going through rebirth as a pious Muslim. She had returned in a state of ruin. She glowered at everyone around her.

She was no longer a shapely dangdut queen but a terrifying, strange woman. None of her former fans dared approach her, except one.