"Mum, I have a girlfriend. She's from Venus"
"Huh?"
"I was just checking if you're actually listening', grinned Adam.

I don't blame him for thinking that I'm totally spaced out. We have been in Jakarta for the past three days, which means it has been three days since we left my maid, Ti, at Sukarno Hatta, where she boarded a domestic flight home to Solo. I heard her mother shed tears upon her return.

There's tears in my family, too.

"Nak Kak Ti!!", you can hear the nightly cry."Nak Kak Tiiiiiiiiii!"

My kids are doing fine without Kak Ti, actually. They're too busy having a great time : splashing in the pool, eating lots of chocolate eclairs and open faced sandwiches, meandering through the hotel lobby in their Power Puff Girls wooly robes, wrecking the room, taking baths every two hours while leaving a debris of wet clothes, toilet paper and empty shampoo bottles, punctuating evening gamelan performances with embarrasingly loud guffaws, scrawling out oil pastel pictures on every piece of paper in sight, quarelling with each other in public, gorging themselves at the breakfast buffet, and monopolising the TV's remote, to care about Kak Ti's absence.

It's me who's doing the bawling.

It's just been three days, and I'm ready to eat my own children.

Yesterday, I brought my children for tea at one of the hotel's eating places, where business people meet to have small pastries and finger sandwiches, a nice place with large windows overlooking verdant gardens.

We sat down, and one guest promptly collapsed and had a heart attack.

A waiter tried to revive him, a doctor gave him CPR, but he remained erm, dead.

"When you die", said Adam, "it's your feet that would die first. They'll go cold".

We saw the unfortunate guest as they wheeled him out. His feet had turned blue.

My children were solemn for about five minutes."We can't order yet", Aiysha whispered."His spirit is still hanging around this place".

Then a waitress came and smiled brightly. Among the three, they had about seven sandwiches, five eclairs, six brownies and two chocolate muffins, two pots of tea and three hot chocolates. So much for respecting the dead.









"

mokciknab muttered at 8:27 pm ~ ~