The Line

After my shotgun wedding to a Javanese fisherman, his family of eleven invited me to share their bamboo house with its palm-thatched roof and carefully swept dirt floor, its water drawn from a communal well, and evening conversations lit by tiny kerosene lanterns. Samino and I had spent most of our brief courtship in this house, trading bits of each other’s languages while his family splashed me with confused laughter. And yet I hesitated. It was not so much the spare lodgings as the lack of privacy and solitude. Privacy here stayed mostly symbolic: a batik cloth hung over a