Cousin Juli was a target for my relatives. She was sweet and enigmatic (or should I say that she was enigmatic because she was sweet?). They talked about her at recitations when she didn’t show, debating whether she really could read Arabic script. She would only mumble incoherently when we all read the Sūrah Yā’ Sīn of the Qur’an. If we held an arisan, she would always go home early instead of lingering to chat. ‘She thinks she’s too clever for us,’ Aunt Yati concluded. My aunts commented on her reluctance to help in the kitchen. ‘Look at her smooth fingers and those long, pink nails of hers. No housewife has fingers like that.’ When she arrived at a wedding wearing a tight beige kebaya that left her shoulders bare, the gossip gathered momentum. Her hair was swept up in a high chignon and her long earrings grazed her sleek neck. Her skin was visible beneath a transparent brocade. ‘See, Eva,’ Cousin Aziz’s younger sister, Rina, whispered in my ear. ‘That’s how married women use style to seduce men.’

People kept talking about her and she kept showing up at family gatherings often enough. In the eyes of my relatives, she remained a conundrum that refused to be simplified.

Then came the uproar. After talking for two hours on the phone with Aunt Yati, my mother delivered astonishing news: Cousin Juli was divorcing Aziz. Word had it that she was caught messing with a young boarder at their house. His name was Yusuf.

As the eldest son, Cousin Aziz had inherited his father’s large home. Previously it belonged to my grandfather, a respected native Jakarta landowner. It consisted of seven rooms but, as usual for a mansion that had survived in the capital, its yard was so small as to look out of proportion with the house. The two rooms furthest from the family’s private quarters were rented out to students or office workers. Yusuf had been there six months. He was twenty-three. After studying at a university in Padang, he had come to the capital in search of work. None of us had seen him in person yet, but we heard that he’d helped out with Cousin Aziz’s vegetable distribution business and had even repaired a leak in their roof.

‘It’s a lesson, Eva,’ my mother advised me. ‘Don’t let schooling ruin your morals.’

For over a month the phone rang off the hook. My aunts came to visit almost every day. They never let my mother know in advance but she inevitably welcomed them in. They would chatter in the living room while watching TV or at the table as they helped chop fruit and vegetables for the rujak. They had never been closer. Cousin Juli gave them a sense of shared destiny. They gossiped about her more freely at social gatherings and recitations because she never showed again.