'My Rupi' - A Very Short Story

My Rupi
Ibiene Bidiaque

My Rupi was a smallish woman with dark hair that she never let grow past her shoulders, small hips and brown eyes. She had yellowing teeth and she always smelled of Pond's Powder. Rupi spoke quietly in the house, but when she was in her bedroom in the evenings, in the boys quarters at the back of our compound, she laughed loud as she spoke on the phone, or watched Filipino soap operas on the small laptop she had saved up to buy from LG.

Rupi was Filipino, and after my mother had had to leave her marriage, and had left behind a four-year-old me with my father who was still struggling to make sense of life after a divorce he had fought for, Rupi became the closest thing I had to a mother.

Rupi was Muslim, like us, but she did not cover her hair and my father did not make her, like he did me, or my half-sisters when they came along. Rupi called me Sa-Sa and my step mother, Aunty Maya, hated it. She would say, “Your name is Samira. Can she not pronounce Samira? Why does she call you that?” The more Aunty Maya complained, the more it was obvious she did not want anyone calling me a pet name, obvious she was envious I had bonded with our Filipino housemaid whom she did not speak to unless she was barking orders at, whom she could barely look in the eye for extended seconds.

In the fourteen years Rupi worked with us, she went back to the Philippines only twice; and both times – one long December and for two weeks one April – I nearly died of lonesomeness. There was nobody standing in the kitchen when I woke up, making falafel or toasting pita bread in the oven; there was no quiet knock on my door in the evenings when I was doing homework, no one coming in intermittently to place folded laundry in my closet or clear up the abandoned half-drank cup of ginger tea at the foot of my bed; no one to tease me about the boys at school or ask what I wanted for dinner.

Instead the weeks dragged out and I was left alone in that huge house by myself and to my vices; in the weeks that Rupi was away, I realized how alone I was in my father’s house, how my half-sisters could play for hours on end, their shrill voices bouncing off the walls as though I was not even there, how my father would never ask where I was when he was back home in the evenings, how Aunty Maya never searched for me, never knocked on my door, never asked what I wanted for dinner.

My Rupi left us a few months after I had gone to university. It was obvious Aunty Maya had something to do with it, but Rupi told me she had been away from her family for so long and that it was time to return to Manila. She told me that she loved me, that I had become a daughter to her and that she hoped one day I would come to visit her in the Philippines. She told me all this via email, and I could see her small, slender fingers typing away on that LG laptop in her quiet bedroom one evening, one word per minute.

After I read the email, I climbed into bed, put the blanket over my head and cried for another mother, another friend that I had lost.