Just one of the words you need to live by to know the true meaning of what it means: Redha.

There is a word in Malay that means to accept everything that happens wholeheartedly and sincerely: Redha.

Colloquially, the word has been used in many different ways. Some use it to mean they are giving in to God’s choices for them, they are relinquishing their free will. Some use it as an excuse not to have to do anything about their circumstances, it is their destiny, a divine intervention that they cannot and should not interfere with.

When I was in primary school, my mother had a best friend with whom she would talk to all the time. Her friend had too, at the time, three young children around the same age as the three of us then, so easy it was to become family with them. When her friend got pregnant with her fourth, my mother was too, and her child, born a few months before my youngest brother, had a cleft palate. He was the most beautiful and gentle baby I had seen before I met you.

The baby’s father, a religious man who wore chequered turbans and had a forehead lined with a bruise that showed off his piety from prostrating during his five-a-day-prayers blamed the baby’s mother for giving him a deformed child, her sins (to him) manifested into that split in the roof of their baby’s mouth. I still remember the words he had said to her while his eldest daughter and I were sipping from plastic teacups, our heads bowed down by the weight of the pink candy necklaces we were wearing. His wife was a sinner, and his redha-ness of her meant that he could now leave his family without guilt.

When your father left us and we left him, I needed to ask his mother to coax him into giving me a divorce. This, in itself, was just another of the cultural standard imposed on a wife to her mother-in-law, an obligation to extend the communication through the elders, because they know best. And so I bore, all the stories of mental and physical abuse and exhaustion to her from ten years past, hoping that being a mother, a woman, she would understand. Repeated until I was (thank goodness, only metaphorically) bleeding from my ears that this was the opportunity for me to be redha with what God has given us, she refused to talk to him, and to acknowledge divorce as a means of a solution to the dissolution. She knows best.

I thought of a friend, whose husband had took on a second wife, brought her home, and expected the two women to bond over breakfast of the morning after he consummated his new marriage. I thought of another, who ran around like a headless domestic fowl to manage three children and a restaurant, while her husband went to Thailand. Her crackly voice over the phone to me, defending her husband’s promiscuities with lady-men as nature’s defence. What can I do but stay with the man? Everyone I thought who’d understand retreated their fist-bumps from the one who dared do something about it all.

To be redha with the way we live now, the way we lived then, just so we could live later?

Redha, redha, redha, redha, redha. A word continuously poured onto me by family, strangers and friends I can no longer see anything else, far easier to be drowned by it because it has been slathered on by well-intention. An excuse so I could get away with doing nothing to change our circumstances. A reason to only be pitied, the lack of empathy making a circle around being pitied again. One could say it means letting go, letting God take over, leaving your worries behind but it still wouldn’t be accurate. There is no exact equivalent to this word in English simply because there is no exact equivalent of its sentiments for anyone other than the Malays. The definitive accuracy lies in the lives lived, the stories made and told when the word first came about.

When I go into the shower, I tell the water to cleanse me.

I turn my head to face the shower head, deluging my skin so I could dissipate. With every drop that falls on my head, my body, take away my pain, my anxiety, my worries, my anger, my sadness, my loneliness. With every drop that falls onto me, give me patience and understanding, let me be able to recognise love, and courage so I can show you and your sister what it looks like.