Monsoon Tiger and Other Stories by Rain Chudori
Monsoon Tiger and Other Stories (2015) by Rain Chudori contains eight short stories – or nine, if you manage to get your hands on the Indonesian translation – painted in colours of melancholia, the shades blurring the lines between reality and fantasy, anger and resignation, as well as actual geographical borders.
These stories are hardly short of emotionally unavailable male characters: unabashedly manipulative, they evaporate away from the grasp of their wives, daughters and lovers.
From the story ‘The Dollhouse’:
“Love is a repertoire of our childhood. I was born in a white house with a roof that touched the sky, to a father who destroyed and a mother who slept. “
And in ‘Beneath The Bougainvilleas’:
“‘What if you were loved properly?’ He spoke with the same thoughtfulness of the wind asking permission to caress the trees past midnight: gentle, but altogether inconsequential.
‘This is not a place to love properly,’ I told him.
‘There is no place for you to be loved properly.’”
The only exception to this theme is a story titled ‘Taman Gajah,’ which is about four childhood friends from different backgrounds finding each other in a neighbourhood park and then separating due to political calamities. Nevertheless, ‘Taman Gajah’ still features lonely families in stifling houses like the other eight (or nine) stories.
Facing these evasive male characters head on, however, are wistful women at crossroads.
These female protagonists are witnesses to the aching loneliness felt by other women, or they experience that loneliness firsthand. In both cases, they are left with the choice of staying in unfulfilling relationships or prying themselves away.
While these may seem like pitiful scenarios, the protagonists are hardly so. They are thoughtful, brazen and at times petulant, such as the protagonist in ‘Beneath the Bougainvilleas.’
“There is a certain kind of honesty that can only be found in deceit. It is only through deceit that we can discover how and to what extent we can be unfaithful to the promises we keep for ourselves and for others.”
As a journalist, I was trained to obsess about the five W’s: who, what, where, when and why. The ‘where’ of Monsoon Tiger proved to be the most challenging to let go of during my reading experience, because I know that Chudori and I share a birthplace: Indonesia’s capital, Jakarta.
Every once in a while the stories offer glimpses of the city – from the bougainvillaea clusters on polluted streets to poorly planned subsidised apartments – but the next paragraph will quickly jerk me back to the disclaimer written on the back sleeve: these stories are “set in nowhere.”
Again, the only exception would be ‘Taman Gajah’, because the story has clear parallels with the 1998 rallies that succeeded in bringing down a corrupt dictatorial regime, yet at the same time was tainted with racial hatred-fueled riots that caused great harm to Chinese Indonesians living in Jakarta.
“We stayed at home, with the lights turned off, the curtains closed and the windows and doors closed and locked tightly. We pretended that we had fled when we were right there, silently sleeping, eating and drinking and going through our day by day routines without making sound.”
Monsoon Tiger was first published in 2015, and at that time Chudori would have been around 21 years old. As a matter of fact, one of the stories titled ‘Smoking With God’ was first published in The Jakarta Post when she was 15.
I concur with a number of online reviews pointing out that Chudori’s writing style had yet to mature in this book, given the use of adjectives that, at times, seemed to be chosen the way one picks out a new piece of jewellery: in a slightly haphazard, experimental manner.
Monsoon Tiger was originally written in English and then translated to Indonesian under the title Biru dan Kisah-Kisah Lainnya.
Being bilingual, I had the privilege of reading both versions. While the English version contained several grammatical errors I could easily disregard, the Indonesian version did not do it justice in many instances – at times, the translation lacked accuracy and weakened, even distorted, sentences that were powerful in English.
A case in point:
“And so, disquieting as the prospect may be, love became an entity I knew I could never experience if it was less than a force that grabbed me by the knees and made me pray.”
This sentence from ‘The Sandcastle’ loses its ardency and even coherence in the Indonesian translation:
“Maka, meskipun kemungkinan itu terasa menggelisahkan, cinta adalah sebuah entitas yang tidak akan pernah kualami jika dia adalah kekuatan yang begitu besar hingga mampu membuatku bertekuk lutut dan berdoa.”
The translation omits the ‘less than’ element in the English sentence. Hence, in Indonesian, the part of the paragraph reads as “…love was an entity that I would not experience if it was a force that was so powerful that it would be able to grab me by the knees and made me pray.”
Despite the grammatical errors and somewhat unripened writing style, Monsoon Tiger is still successful due to its emotive ponderings and delicate observations.
The stories are meditations on sadness and slow, painful wake-up calls, often emitting the sense that they were written in a haze – a mixture of genuine emotion and efforts to ameliorate the pain.
“I showed father how the world looked different between our fingers. It was softer, more fragile, subtler and you could only see through little beautiful glimpses.”
Embellishments also take the form of surrealist elements such as an impossibly domesticated tiger living in a couple’s bathroom or a cigarette that remains alight for years.
Because, of course, the longing for an absent man has yet to be extinguished.
Dina Indrasafitri is a Jakarta-born writer and a musician living in Naarm. She worked as a journalist for over a decade in Indonesia and Australia before deciding to pursue a more creative path. Her website is https://dinacommunications.weebly.com