Abirul's wives

In the white Nissan, we had already spent several miles discussing women's jealousy, the all-consuming jealousy that turns them into paranoid morbid furies and vixens for men here in Southeast Asia. Meanwhile the wheels turned down the route.

Abirul picked me up in front of the Nadias Hotel.
Your driver: Abirul Anuar Bin Manaf, Langkawi, Malaysia Grab pushed me up on the screen.
Has it ever happened to you that a boiling liquid wants to break you in all directions, your eyes drown in feverish blood, your ears keep ringing with heated veins and your thoughts race around like rabid?
You can recognize such symptoms in these women.
It comes unexpectedly. Suddenly rats, pats, chatter, bang! Just like that.
They are locked in a ring that suffocates their thoughts like a tormenting delusion. The slightest glance, the slightest word, a hesitation, will arouse their suspicion. Squeezing their brains. Their eyes are cameras that register you a thousandfold. Check everything. Rewind, review, still image, magnify… They become angry.
Rudderless vengeance goddesses.
We understood each other so easily, Abirul and I. As if we seemed kindred spirits who had shared similar vicissitudes in a past life, such a suspicion came over me when we talked about our experience.
Anyone who takes a Grab car in Malaysia always talks. It turns in all directions. You only keep your mouth shut about two things, about government policy and about religion. Abirul was very open, chatty.
I was on my way to my hotel in Kuah, on the southern coast of Langkawi Island. The driver had picked me up on Pantai Cenang Road, the popular western beach. I stood in front of the Nadias. He drove carefully on the dark road, pitch dark. Rows of palm and rubber trees formed a numbing tunnel of light and it was hard to tell whether another bend was coming up. He had a round and soft face.
In the middle of our conversation after a moment of silence, which passed emphatically: "But I'm very lucky they're not at each other's throats!"
Dixit Abirul to me. He was forty-five.
An undisguised grin spread across his weak face, his head tilted slightly, the way roosters do when you pass them too slowly in a Malay village near a wooden farmhouse.
His glasses gleamed green in the lights of the oncoming cars coming around a bend. It was XNUMX:XNUMX PM. His hands on top of the steering wheel. Firm fingers.
On the beach of Pantai Cenang I had enjoyed dinner by myself. Young, red-burnt Western women around me with bare legs in tight cotton shorts acted breezy, ate their fried rice dish with mouse bites and lusted after the handsome Malay bartender. They were blatantly bombarding him with their mobile number. A competitive race that they played openly. He was really handsome, a retro like you saw in sixties movies, with long wavy hair and an unbridled look in his eyes. He was hard to impress.
Not a single Malay woman was left on the beach.
I could imagine how that one Frankish princess who would soon make it would squirm over him and put her cheek in those curls before she was completely lost under his hands. Cliché luck! But dragging the trophy away from those nine other blond Frankish pretenders to the throne in the bar is a boost of unadulterated real hard reality!
My chair sank into the sand. The mosquitoes ate me. The wind was fickle, sometimes rushing brutally from across the sea, whipping the grains of sand. My ears were filled with the sound of the loud lapping of the waves in the surf. You always miscalculate the power that the sea can have. It drowned everything out and then it was gone again, like the pains of a woman going into childbirth.
But the Tiger cost barely five ringgit, a reason to stay longer.
Langkawi is about the first island below Thailand and there are plenty of ferries that call at Langkawi – Koh Lipe or vice versa. The travel agencies offer it as an alternative trip to another country. The Immigration Offices on both sides are not difficult.
Back in the car. The driver checked a lot of things. He had held the post of captain on a smaller ferry route for twenty years, but suddenly, greedy as they were, the local shipowners began to drive down their prices, fighting for the passengers. Then they went bankrupt. Then a Singaporean company appeared on the battlefield, bought them all up, reorganized, cut wages, and the crewmen no longer even got a meal for free. "Put your bag of rice in before you got on the ship," he said. "I was done."
He resigned, and oh, surprise, after he left he was able to work as a freelance captain on the assembly line. They constantly harassed him with calls to help them out, filling in for sick colleagues. 'Now I declare everything,' he said, 'including my food, my travel to the roadstead, my clothes, telephones, doubles on Sundays, even things that don't exist… and they are happy to pay! I do not get it.'
'Do you do the Grab in between?' I noticed.
We also talked about family, children, grandchildren and I then participate in the conversation. He had four children, he said. 'That's a lot,' I said, 'then you're still with your first wife?' And then he told me. With a resonance in that voice of his, vibrating there in the car like a man especially chosen.
"I have two wives!"
'Phew,' I said in a daze, And thought: Then I finally meet a man who has more than one official wife… A true polygamist! And then exuberantly: 'Congratulations! Then you must be twice as happy that way.' I smiled profusely.
His round face shone, and so did his glasses. It seemed like he was funny. The dashboard was bathed in a muted choppy red light, some car brands have that.
"You can't do that in your country," he said. “Officially married to more than one woman. Only Muslims can do that.'
'I can't even do that in all of Europe,' I replied. 'Besides, I don't want to sulk in a cramped Belgian cell for ten years.'
"And more," he said, "the god has been very gracious to me." 'The lord,' he said, but he certainly meant Allah. "I have two children with each woman, a son and then a daughter, in that order."
"That's the king's wish," I said. 'You must be the lucky man. That is also with us. Admirable, man! A boy and a girl, and in that order.'
And I aloud: 'I haven't done very well, I have two sons.'
It was apparently a genetic tradition throughout his family. His parents had six children, son, daughter, and again. Also the uncles.
'And how does that work with two women? I asked in turn. 'Surely you are a good man. It must cost you a handful of money. How can you be married and live with two women? Does that work?'
I knew that a Muslim man could afford up to four wives if he could support them all well. Otherwise not.
He proudly accepted the compliment about his financial well-being, I could see that it made him very happy. His soft chin glowed.
“I have two houses and every woman lives in a house. I mean, it's two houses that are one house, complicated. It is two houses built against each other. In the beginning my wives quarreled a lot, tore each other's hair from the top of their head, rolled on the street or in the garden in front of the houses and sometimes they came to fights in bitter earnest, as if one wanted to kill the other.'
I pictured him, with his soft, chubby face and hesitant eyes and shorter stature. A general on a battlefield – disarmed, his badges ripped off, his saber snapped. He stands between two extremely aggressive colonels who respect neither authority nor order and want to usurp supreme command and power to themselves to death.
'The jealousy between women, we can't imagine it, so intense and immense,' I suggested to myself a little.
'But the worst storms have passed for a few years now,' he said, 'Fortunately they are no longer at each other's throats. The jealousy has subsided, the confrontations stopped. In the last year they even found each other, they go shopping together, they cook together, eat together, the children play together, the doors are open, the days run together. They have now realized that it is not an individual property, but a common property to be cherished.'
I looked surprised.
"That's me," and he bent the fingers of his right hand toward himself. "I am the guarantee of their mutual well-being." His glasses gleamed with a greenish glow as an oncoming vehicle passed. His chin became a shadow.
"Okay," I said, "I understand."
Coughing, he made a guttural sound.
'And a threesome, will that be possible?'
He pulled his head back a little, looked a little displeased. "We are tired-si-lim!" he affirmed firmly.
And yet one more thing that made me curious: 'When it is evening, which of the two do you crawl into bed with? Do you decide that – and only you – or do they?
'Without discussion!' he said firmly. “I, and I alone, have the freedom of that choice. That's up to me. And we don't waste words on that.'
I wanted to go into it, suggest whether it had anything to do with à l'improviste du jour. Whether volatile signals were exchanged. Whether he kept a calendar and ticked it off so as not to lose count. Was he working digitally with his smartphone in the meantime? How did you keep everything in balance? It had to be quite complicated! All sorts of questions raced through my head.
It wasn't for me, I was way too sentimental and chaotic.
He looked at me from behind the wheel, tilted his head slightly to observe me better, the way a cockerel in a Malaysian rice farmer's yard does when he wants to assess something.
I didn't make a sound, kept my gaze unmoving, just smiled a little to myself. I knew he wanted to see in my eyes how credible his words had sounded. How effectively they had convinced me of his special status.
I kept my mouth shut now.
We, as men, always miscalculate the power that women can hold in their heads. Strong as the tides of oceans. From man to man, we'll never admit it, how they toss us around like straw dolls. At the same time, we delicately leave the illusion of power.
He continued to stare. I wouldn't admit that I took him at his word. Men don't do that to each other! Then, at that moment, as I stared blankly at Abirul, all I could really see was images from history books, colorful paintings of weak, weak-chinned French kings, portrayed as another revolution began to shake, the cock rising in defiance. a yard began to crow. They too have been overtaken by reality.

Langkawi, Malaysia – December 2019