Teng Mangansakan
THE mid-morning sunlight crept through the tall arched windows of the villa in Al-Malqa, casting long, pale ribbons across the floor where the imported Italian marble met the dark weave of the Persian rugs, a dust-less expanse that Judy had kept polished to a mirror shine through twenty-three long years in the kingdom.
She stood by the mahogany sideboard in the formal dining room, holding a damp microfiber cloth infused with a drop of mineral oil, her fingers moving in slow, practiced circles over the carved edges of the wood while Rahima, newly arrived from the town of Pagagawan, watched her hands with the hyper-vigilant, terrified deference of someone who had only stepped off a long-haul flight seventy-two hours prior.
“You do not press hard against the grain,” Judy said, her voice dropping into the low, measured register. “If you press too hard, the dust turns into grit, and Mrs. Salma will see the microscopic scratches under the chandelier lights when the trade ministry delegates come for dinner, and she will be disappointed.”
Rahima nodded quickly, her small hands clutching her own dry rag against the front of her freshly ironed blue uniform, her knuckles white, her dark eyes reflecting the unexpressed panic of a twenty-five-year-old who had left behind a life suspended in the fragile, waiting space of a post-war transition. Judy looked at the girl’s stiff posture, noting the guarded quietness in her expression, and saw a reflection of her own early years, yet shaped by an entirely different kind of survival.
In those early years, before the ring road was expanded and before the great glass towers began to shoot up along King Fahd Road like gleaming needles piercing the blue desert sky, Judy had measured her life by the sheer volume of water it took to keep a Saudi household immaculate.
They moved together now into the primary ensuite, where the porcelain tub sat like a smooth white basin surrounded by brass fixtures that required a specific lemon-scented paste imported from London.
“The water here is hard,” Judy explained, kneeling on the cushioned mat she had bought with her own money years ago to protect her aching knees, demonstrating how to rub the paste over the tarnished spout until the metal gleamed with a warm, golden luster. “It leaves a film if you do not dry it immediately with the flannel cloth. Do not leave a single drop, Rahima, because a single dried water spot tells the mistress that you hurried, and in this house, hurrying is considered a form of disrespect, that you do not care enough.”
As her hands worked the brass, Judy’s mind drifted across the ocean to the dusty roads of General Santos, where the water from the deep well behind her daughter Lorraine’s kitchen was sweet and cold, carrying the faint metallic taste of the southern earth.
Twelve years ago, with the first substantial sum she had managed to save after clearing her old debts, Judy had bought a narrow parcel of land near the old airport in Buayan, and she had begun the slow, piecemeal construction of a concrete house. Every few months, whenever Mrs. Salma granted her an extra allowance or a festival bonus after Ramadan, Judy would send instructions to the local carpenter—four more bags of cement for the porch, two dozen hollow blocks for the wall, a tin roof painted bright blue so it could be seen from the window of the tricycles rattling down the main road.
Yet the house remained unfinished, a hollow shell of gray stone and exposed rebar, standing like a monument to an absent matriarch, while inside its open frames, Lorraine raised her boy alone.
“What did your husband do back home, Rahima?” Judy asked softly, not looking up from the rim of the bathtub.
Rahima paused, her rag hovering just above the gold-plated handle, her eyes focusing on the smooth tiles beneath them. “He was a combatant, Ate Judy. For the MILF. For years he stayed in the camps carrying his rifle, fighting for the homeland. But when the Bangsamoro government was formed, they promised peace. They told the men to lay down their arms and register for decommissioning.”
She wiped a streak of tarnish from the spout, her voice dropping into a flat, steady tone that carried the weight of prolonged waiting. “His name is on a list in a government office somewhere, but the vetting is slow, and the livelihood assistance they promised to help former fighters start small businesses or farms has not come yet. You cannot feed two children with promises printed on some paper. The land does not yield enough corn when the floods come. So he waits for his name to be called for the turnover of his firearm, while I had to take this flight to make sure our children do not go hungry.”
Judy stopped her hand, looking at the younger woman with a sudden, sharp clarity. Where Judy had chosen exile to shield her grandson from the chaotic criminality of a drug war’s aftermath, Rahima was here because of a peace process that was taking too long to deliver on its quiet promises.
“So he is waiting for peace to pay him,” Judy murmured softly, her calloused thumb brushing a spot of dried brass cleaner off the side of the basin.
“He is waiting for peace to let him be a father who can provide,” Rahima replied quietly. “And until that day comes, I am the one who must provide the peace for our home from three thousand miles away.”
The daily rhythm of the Hamad household was a slow, deliberate liturgy, a sequence of silent actions designed to maintain an illusion of effortless abundance for Mr. Tariq, a senior trade official whose days were spent in long, air-conditioned negotiations on petroleum exports, and Mrs. Salma, whose life revolved around charity committees, family luncheons, and the meticulous upbringing of her three children.
Judy had watched those children grow from loud, demanding toddlers who spilled cherry juice on white silk upholstery into soft-spoken, educated young people who spoke fluent English with American accents picked up from international schools.
It was the eldest, Faisal, whose graduation from the king’s university had become the final boundary marker of Judy’s long exile.
Three years ago, when Judy informed Mrs. Salma that her body was growing tired and her heart was pulling her back to Mindanao, the mistress begged her to stay just a little longer, just until Faisal finished his degree in international law, offering a raise that Judy, thinking of her grandson’s future, simply could not afford to refuse.
For her grandson, Ethan, was growing up in the long, dark shadow of a tragedy that Judy still could not speak of without feeling a cold weight in her chest. His father—Lorraine’s husband, a handsome, reckless boy from the neighboring barangay who could never keep a steady job at the fish port—had been gunned down four years ago on a muddy alleyway during a midnight police buy-bust operation, leaving behind a cloud of shame, a stack of unpaid debts, and a seven-year-old boy whose eyes carried the exact same volatile spark as his father’s.
Every peso Judy had earned during these extra three years of servitude had been wired straight to a locked savings account in General Santos, earmarked strictly for Ethan’s tuition at the private school ran by Marist brothers, away from the street corners where the older boys gathered to sell small plastic sachets of white dust under the yellow streetlights.
By mid-afternoon, the heat outside the villa was a shimmering, kinetic force that flattened the pale green leaves of the bougainvillea bushes growing along the courtyard walls.
Inside, the central air cooling system hummed with a low, continuous vibration that Judy barely heard anymore, a sound that had replaced the rustle of coconut fronds and the distant crowing of roosters that had filled the nights of her girlhood.
They were in the pantry now, a room lined with floor-to-ceiling shelves holding heavy silver serving platters, crystal water goblets, and delicate porcelain teacups trimmed with real gold leaf that had been brought back from family vacations in Istanbul and Dubai.
“This silver platter,” Judy said, lifting a heavy oval dish that bore the intricate filigree of Ottoman craft, “must be polished with the red powder paste once every two months, but only after Mr. Tariq returns from his trips to Turkey, because he likes to use it when his colleagues come to drink cardamom coffee. You must use the softest horsehair brush for the small grooves here, around the leaves. If you use a nylon brush, the silver will lose its depth.”
Rahima took the platter, holding it with a steady, careful grip. “Do you think about what it will be like when you step off the plane on Saturday, Ate?”
“Every hour of the day,” Judy said, a distant, dreamy look settling over her weathered features. “My roof is finished. Lorraine sent me a photograph on the phone last month. The walls are painted a light yellow, just like the living room here. There is a porch in the front where I can sit in a rocking chair and watch Ethan walk home from school in his white uniform. But twenty-three years is a long time. The last time I went home, about four years ago, the road to our village was still made of dirt and gravel. But what worries is that the house I built might be full of people who have learned to live completely fine without me.”
Rahima set the silver platter down gently on the velvet-lined shelf, her dark eyes reflecting the soft ambient lighting of the pantry.
“For you, Ate Judy, the waiting is finally ending,” Rahima said softly, her voice carrying a calm, stark maturity that belied her young age. “You built a house out of your years here. But for me, the waiting is just beginning. You are going home to a finished wall, while I am standing here to keep our roof from falling in.”
Judy looked down at her own reflection in the polished surface of the silver platter—a woman in her late fifties whose sacrifice was reaching its natural, bittersweet conclusion—and then at Rahima, whose life as an overseas worker was just embarking on its long, uncertain trajectory.
They were two women positioned on opposite ends of the same endless migrant cycle: one who had spent her youth to purchase safety from the destructive violence of the streets, and the other who was surrendering her youth to bridge the gap left by a fragile, incomplete peace.
At five o’clock, the main gates of the villa slid open with a low metallic groan, and the sleek black sedan carrying Mrs. Salma and her eldest son, Faisal, pulled into the shaded driveway.
Judy immediately straightened her apron, checked Rahima’s collar with a quick, maternal flick of her wrist, and walked to the front door to greet them, her posture automatically aligning with the silent protocol she had maintained for nearly a quarter of a century.
Faisal stepped into the foyer first, a tall, handsome young man dressed in a crisp white thobe, his arms carrying a leather briefcase and a heavy cardboard cylinder containing his university diploma.
When he saw Judy standing there, his face broke into a broad, genuine smile that instantly erased the formal distance of the household.
“Auntie Judy,” he said in his clear, confident voice, using the English term of endearment he had adopted as a child when she used to cut his apples into small, skinless wedges. He set his briefcase on the hall table and wrapped his arms around her in a brief, respectful embrace that smelled of an expensive mix of French cologne and the dark, resinous scent of high-grade agarwood smoke. “It is finally official. The degree is signed.”
“Mabrook, Faisal,” Judy said, her eyes warm with a pride that was both deeply genuine and intensely complicated, knowing that this boy’s achievement was the final key that unlocked her own long-delayed liberation. “Your mother must be very proud.”
Mrs. Salma stepped through the door behind her son, removing her sheer black abaya with a fluid, graceful gesture that Judy caught mid-air, hanging it carefully on the carved wooden coat rack near the entrance.
The mistress was a woman of fifty, her face smooth and carefully maintained, but her eyes today carried a soft, melancholic stillness as she looked at Judy, then past her to Rahima, who was standing nervously near the archway of the living room, holding a tray with two crystal glasses of cold rosewater.
“She has been learning well today?” Mrs. Salma asked Judy in Arabic, her voice gentle, lacking any of the sharp efficiency she usually employed when managing the domestic staff.
“She is very quiet, ma’am, but her hands are precise,” Judy replied in the same language, which she now spoke with an effortless, local fluency that had taken her a decade to master. “She respects the house. She will take good care of you.”
Mrs. Salma took a slow breath, stepping closer to Judy and placing a hand on the sleeve of her blue uniform. “The car will come for you at four o’clock tomorrow morning to take you to the airport, Judy. I have put your final settlement in an envelope on the desk in my study, along with an extra month’s salary and a gold bracelet for your daughter. I do not know how this house will run without you. My children know your voice better than they know the voices of their own aunts.”
“The house will be fine, ma’am,” Judy said, keeping her head slightly bowed, though her heart was pounding against her ribs like a trapped bird.
Mrs. Salma looked at her for a long moment, a subtle, unspoken understanding passing between the two women—one who had bought her family’s comfort with the wealth of an oil-rich kingdom, and the other who had bought her family’s survival with the currency of her own youth, her own presence, her own unrepeatable years.
“Go and finish packing your things,” Mrs. Salma said softly, turning away toward the stairs. “Let the new girl prepare the evening tea.”
The small room off the kitchen was quiet as the twilight settled over Riyadh, turning the sky outside the high barred window into a deep, velvety indigo. Judy sat on the edge of her narrow bed, her heavy brown suitcase open before her like an altar of a life reduced to its barest essentials. On one side lay the gifts she had accumulated over the last few weeks—a bottle of expensive perfume for Lorraine, three pairs of branded sneakers for Ethan, two of which she had bought during her final trip to the grand mall near the kingdom tower and another one a gift from Faisal, a silk scarf for her sister, and a small, heavy box containing the gold chain Mrs. Salma had given her on her twentieth year of service.
There was a soft knock at the door, and Rahima stepped into the room, carrying a small metal tray with a cup of hot chamomile tea and biscuits.
“Ate Judy,” the girl said quietly, setting the tray down on the small wooden nightstand beside the plastic-framed photo of Ethan. “I brought you some tea. You have not eaten anything since lunch.”
“Thank you,” Judy said, shifting over on the mattress to make room for the younger woman to sit down.
Rahima sat on the very edge of the bed, her eyes wandering around the sparse room, taking in the neatness, the solitary discipline that had defined Judy’s existence for many years.
“Are you afraid to go back, Ate?” Rahima asked, her voice barely above a whisper, as if asking a question that she herself was terrified to confront in her own far-off future.
Judy reached out and picked up the photograph of her grandson, her thumb smoothing over the glass where the seven-year-old boy smiled back at her, a child who was now a teenager, whose voice had deepened into a baritone she had only heard through choppy, static-filled phone calls, whose shoulder she had never held for many years, whose tears over his father’s violent death she had only been able to soothe with distant, helpless words sent across six thousand miles of air and water.
“I am terrified, Rahima,” Judy admitted, the truth hanging in the small room like a delicate thread of glass. “When you stay away for as long as I have, you become a ghost to the people you love. They love you, yes, because you send the boxes every Christmas, because you pay the tuition fees, because you built the house. But they have learned how to live their daily lives without you. They have their own routines, their own jokes that you do not understand, their own sorrows that happened while you were wiping marble floors in a foreign land.”
She looked at Rahima, seeing the girl’s quiet, determined face, shaped by the patience of a community waiting for a peace that arrived only in slow, bureaucratized installments.
“When I land in General Santos two days from now,” Judy said, her long, evocative sentence unfolding like a slow prayer, “I will realize that the hardest work of my life is not the twenty-three years I spent serving this family in Riyadh, but the work of learning how to belong to my own family again.”
Rahima reached out and took Judy’s hand, her small fingers wrapping around the dry, calloused palm of the elder woman. “They will love you, Ate. You gave them a future.”
“Gave them a future,” Judy repeated softly, turning the phrase over in her mind like a polished marble stone. “Yes. But to give a future sometimes means you leave your own present behind.”
Rahima remained silent.
“Remember everything that I taught you,” Judy said, her voice steady and clear as she looked at the young woman who was stepping into the long, lonely path she had just finished walking.
“I will remember, Ate,” Rahima said.
Judy closed her eyes imagining the city receding behind her, shrinking into a cluster of bright white lights, a place that had held her youth, her strength, and her endless, silent labor, a place that would, by the next morning, forget her name entirely as Rahima picked up the microfiber cloth and began her first solitary sweep of the Italian marble floor.