A Faint Sound in the Dead of the Night

One thirty a. m. in the morning, I was still awake, couldn’t seem to find a way to close my eyes and catch some Zz. Roald Dahl page 258, I had been reading, or to be exact; gazing, the very same page for the last a half an hour. Definitely I would not be able to go to the next page, because no words seemed to make any sense for my head that night. I was tired, really tired. A splitting neuralgia, it’s killing me. My two roommates were sleeping, and the night was so hushed.
Pretty soon, I knew, in an hour or so, the mosque’s speaker near my cramped rented cubicle would utter the distinct sounds of the Koran verses, a call for the people to Sahur.
I remembered that I had a class on eight thirty in the morning and it made me nearly puke. I had only an hour left to force myself to go to sleep before the Sahur time came, after that people would wake up and rushed for their Sahur, boys would cheer and shout during their ways to the Mosque. It’s going to be really noisy, no question it would be hopeless for me to even try to sleep.
It’s a despondent situation, indeed. I could almost predict what would exactly was going to happen. I would definitely end up sleeping at five, and then could not be able to wake up for my morning class. I would wake up cursing because I missed the class once again and would start wondering how many quota for absences I had left before I finally guaranteed failed for the class. Typical. I started blaming myself for my disorganized schedule and ruined biological clock.
Sometimes I wonder if I would definitely end up feeling like a total loser. Because it’s starting now. Everything’s ruined, everything’s not in the right place. The chronicle of the wasted time. I felt pathetic and the dead of night worsen the frustration. I felt terribly alone and foolish.
Suddenly, a faint sound of a bicycle bell interrupted the silence. It’s started indistinctly and it grew more and more distinct as the bicycle got closer and closer to my rented cubicle. I recognized that sound. It was the sound of the siomai seller’s bicycle. I knew it because everyday he passes my place selling the siomai using that sound as a signal. And as the bicycle went closer, I could hear his faint voice constantly murmuring the word siomai. There’s something terribly gloomy about his voice.
I looked at the clock, it’s almost two now and he’s still out in the street, selling siomai? Who’s going to buy? Everybody else must be sleeping tightly at that time. I remembered that the rain was heavily falling two hours ago. It had stopped, but I could guarantee that the air must be really chilling out there. I felt really sorry for him. He’s all alone out there cycling around selling his siomai. In an hour people would have their Sahur, I doubted that they would prefer to have siomai instead of heavy food. So what were you doing there siomai seller? Why weren’t you home with your wife and kids? Why weren’t you sleep and waited for your wife to wake you up to eat your Sahur?
I remembered that life has been fucked up really hard recently. I mean, of course everybody knows that the government had raised the price for oil and it had made other prices insanely high too. I had to be extra careful using money sent by my mother or else I would not be able to support my own life for the rest of the month. For instance, since the cost for an ojek ride from stasiun UI to Sastra had become 3000 rupiahs, I prefer walking even if I had already late for my class. I mean, with 3000 rupiahs I could buy food for my lunch or at least a half an hour at the warnet. So as a result, I definitely use the ojek service less often these days. Same thing also happen with food, if usually I could get pretty lose spending my money for food, like buying chocolates or stopping every single food sellers that passes in front of my house, just for the sake of the chewing and nibbling fixation, lord mercy, I began to be a bit strict about my food. I took heavy meal and no longer bought food from the sellers that pass in front of my house, because I realized that it would be a form of wasting money.
I’m sure that a lot of people also do the kind of things that I do. A form of adjustment. a cost-cut for something that is not so necessary. We have to do that to cope with the insane prices and the stagnant income.
But what about the people whose life is highly depend on my cost-cut? The tukang ojek, for instance, or the food sellers. When I, and many other people too, decided to stop buying their goods, it would definitely mean a shrinking earnings for them. Meanwhile, they also have to deal with the high prices of living as anyone of us. Can you imagine that? How fucked up life can be?
Maybe that’s why the siomai seller still out there cycling around selling his siomai that night at two o clock in the morning. Maybe he had not be able to sell out his siomai, maybe there were still many siomai left, maybe he still had not got enough money for his wife and kids. So he really had to be there outside at two o clock in the morning in the cold wind.
I heard the sound of his bicycle bell grew more and more faintly, meanwhile the first Koran verses was beginning to be chanted on the Mosque’s speaker.

-sie-