Short Story: Mbak Siri

By Wombat | August 15th, 2006 | No Comments

I found this fabulous story by another emerging Indonesian writer, Elan Mufti.

‘Mbak’ Sri
By Elan Mufti

“You have to have real pictures for this project, Eko.” Mbak Sri said without an ounce of empathy. The illustrated story project was full of near-perfect drawings for its illustration. It was as if the drawings were drawn by a modern-day Leonardo Da Vinci. But still, Mbak Sri was unsatisfied.

“But…,” Eko tried to negotiate. “I have been looking everywhere for the right pictures, from borrowing some old magazines from the neighbors to Pasar Senen, but I haven’t been able to find the right pictures. That’s why I decided to draw them on my own.”

Mbak Sri’s eyes began to get very sharp, like an eagle ready to strike its prey. She felt that this shouldn’t be happening; when she wanted her students to do something, she expected them to do as she wanted them to.

In the eyes of most of her students, Mbak Sri wasn’t a nice English teacher per se. There was nothing wrong with her methods, except that her methods were strictly by the book.

Thus, there was no empathy, no compassion.

Mbak Sri had been an English teacher for 15 years, and she was in the comfortable position of being one of the top brasses in the English department. There were people who were one or two years her senior, yet even they were still not in the ranks of the upper echelon.

“Why does she always give us so much homework?” the students once asked each other. “Does she think that we don’t have other things to do from school?”

There was always silent resentment among the students. It was not a matter of the way she taught in class. Who could ever complain about Mbak Sri’s methods of teaching?

It was more a question of caring for the students, something that her methods had not taught her to nurture.

“Ma’am,” asked one of her students with a frown. “I always get to class early and get either a C+ or a B- on the tests. I even do all the homework, and sometimes get B’s and A’s. Could you please tell me why my final grade is a C-?”

Mbak Sri smiled a thin smile, as if she was going to play a cruel prank.

“Well,” Mbak Sri answered. “It’s your attitude, Rini. You always make comments about almost everything I say or about what other students say in class. You also daydream in class.”

It was as though daydreaming was part of the course’s grading policy, a demerit that would subtract points.

“But you said that we should be proactive in class,” the student argued. “There are even students who haven’t been making a single sound at all this term.”

Mbak Sri was always prepared with an ammunition of excuses, reasons and answers to every question or criticism that came from her students. It was one of the things she had learned aside from creating effective teaching methods.

She also had her own book of “blacklisted” students somewhere in her heart. It was not difficult to record them there. The book was meant for students who dared question her teaching methods, or those who had merely said the wrong words at the wrong time.

This list played significantly in calculating the final grades.

Although she always denied that she was subjective in her grading, her students could clearly see what was going on. Especially when a previously straight-A student became a C student or below quite suddenly.

Despite this hidden defensive measure, Mbak Sri could be rather gentle in her manners. She was never stingy about smiling, and she often threw jokes around with her students, although her jokes were considered dull by many of them.

Still, it seemed that her methods worked.

Her teaching methods were not new, actually. She had been working in the same job for almost 15 years. She showed that the English teaching methods she had acquired could be expanded on with a distinct subjective approach to control her classes. This had made a good impression on the management.

Mbak Sri never let her students relax, because she worried that such a sense of comfort could hinder them in the real world they would all be facing soon. So she always assigned homework — which would be compiled into a book at the end of the term.

Even on this issue, Mbak Sri had tried hard to be objective and fair in handling her students. But there were always one or two rotten apples.

“I bet nobody could accept rotten apples,” she said to herself.

The students had always known that Mbak Sri was subjective. This was manifest in her obvious method of playing favorites, even in class.

The students grumbled but couldn’t do anything; doing something could affect their grades, and that could raise issues with their parents.

***
As was usual in her daily routine, Mbak Sri was already dressed for work. She had a breakfast of fried plantains and hot tea. After breakfast, she went on her way to Pancoran, where her office was. She took a 12-passenger public transportation vehicle called an angkot from her house in Pondok Kelapa that went directly to Pasar Minggu.

As usual, the angkot was so packed with passengers that it felt like an oven. This was added to by external
“seasoning” such as the noise of various vehicles, from motorcycles that sounded like the humming of gigantic mosquitoes, an occasional rain of horns from all means of road transportation.

These noises would cause a weariness among passengers even before they reached their offices.

During this rush hour, a young man in a neat petal-green sleeved shirt and dark blue trousers stopped the angkot and became one of the passengers. His hair, which was trimmed neatly, reminded Mbak Sri of the Hong Kong actor, Chow Yun Fat.

The aroma of Davidoff Cool Water that followed him somehow hypnotized Mbak Sri into imagining mountains, lakes and dim-lit skies.

“Is this seat taken?” the young man suddenly asked, breaking her revelry.

“Oh no,” Mbak Sri smiled. “It’s empty.”

Mbak Sri moved toward her left and eventually the man sat beside her. At the same time, Mbak Sri felt her heart start to pound differently, and send a vibration all through her body.

The young man was about a year or two younger than Mbak Sri.

“I couldn’t be in love,” Mbak Sri said to herself.

However, she felt a different kind of sensation in her mind. A sensation that rose from the scent of Davidoff Cool
Water mixed with Chow Yun Fat’s hair style.

“Are you on your way to office, Mbak?” asked the young man.

“Yes,” Sri answered shyly, with eyes that were rather glowing. “I suppose you also?”

Later, Mbak Sri and the young man got caught up in a conversation and became acquainted with each other, both talking about their jobs.

“Are you paid a lot for being an English teacher?” the young man suddenly asked.

“Excuse me?” Mbak Sri said with a little frown.

The man’s inquiry had somehow altered Sri’s sensation altogether. It had made the conversation shift abruptly from one of comfort into one of strangeness.

“What do you mean?” Mbak Sri asked.

The young man grinned. “How much do they pay you?”

Apparently, Sri had discovered some odd current in the oven-atmosphere of the angkot.

“How come a neat, decent man asks questions about how much I earn?” she wondered. Sri felt that it was unusual for people who had only just met to ask or imply about the money they made.

She felt insecure all of a sudden.

“Driver!” Sri suddenly called out, “Stop at the bottom of the bridge, please?”

The angkot was just a few blocks away from Pasar Minggu terminal.

“You get off here?” the young man asked nonchalantly.

“Yes,” Sri answered in a rather curt tone, and stepped down from the vehicle.

Actually, Sri had wanted to exchange addresses with the young man about an hour ago. She thought that they could meet at another time and place and continue getting to know each other. But the man’s recent behavior wiped out the thought.

“I thought you got off at Pasar Minggu,” the young man said as he stuck his head out of the angkot’s door.

“Yes,” Sri exclaimed with eyes so sharp that the young man got the hint that he shouldn’t try to probe any further. “I have to go somewhere first.”

She turned away and hastened her steps, crossing the street toward the ANTAM building to hail a taxi to Pancoran.

She glanced once or twice to her left and right to make sure that nobody was following her.

But then she noticed that the people on the street were staring at her.

“What are they looking at?”

For the first time in her daily journey of going to her office, she felt afraid. She even began presuming that some of these people had been her students before.

“Ma’am!” a voice called out, and she sensed that it was directed at her.

Sri turned around. She saw a boy in his late teens with long hair in a black T-shirt with a skeleton on stage holding a microphone with words that said, “Can you say anything when you become me?”

Mbak Sri tried to be calm, even though there was a little stutter in her voice. “What do you want?”

“Nothing, ma’am,” The boy replied. “I just want to tell you that your handbag looks as if it had recently been cut with a razor.”

Shocked, Sri quickly checked the contents of her handbag like an angry ape ripping apart a jackfruit.

“My credit card!!!”

Her exclamation made some passersby glance at her. They frowned, wondering what was happening.

Without further ado, and ignoring the boy, Sri went straight to the nearest branch of the bank that had issued her credit card.

Once inside, the customer service officer checked her cash credit limit and said, “You have taken out Rp 6,750,000.”

“What!” Sri was near hysterical. “I want to close that account!”

“Yes, ma’am,” the customer service officer replied. “But you’ll have to pay the amount anyway.”

“The last amount I spent was Rp 195,000!”

The bank wasn’t impressed by her statement, so she had to repay her debt. Even if she were the CEO of a bankrupt company, the bank would expect her to pay the dues of her debt, no matter what.

There was nothing else that Mbak Sri could do, except to accept the terms of the bank.

Later, she reported the incident to the police, but the effect was like pouring a glass of water into a fish pond.

Suddenly, Sri looked back at how she had acted toward her students. Somehow, she realized that all this time she had given them monkeys to carry on their backs. Monkeys like an insurmountable amount of homework, of which she checked only a quarter, for they were too many.

Now, Sri got a monkey on her back. She had to pay the debt of some thief who had spent Rp 6,750,000 of her plastic money, with interest added.

Sri felt the heaviness of her steps as she walked out of the bank. She stopped and paused for awhile, looking around as if she had thought of something she had forgotten.

“Could it be that the young man was … aagh, it couldn’t be,” Sri thought.

She took out her mobile phone to call her office and tell them that she would be late for work — a first in all her 15 years.

After two to three minutes, she continued her heavy steps again.

* Mbak: term of address to a (Javanese) woman