Hamra and the Jungle of Memories

Since Hamra had no idea about the thing that was waiting for her in the jungle, at 6:57 a.m. on Tuesday, she lay in bed after Subuh prayers and counted down the seconds until the big hand of her Minnie Mouse alarm clock moved once more.
5…4…3…2…1… tick.
6:58 a.m. “Happy birthday to me,” Hamra whispered. Minnie only smiled her wide plastic smile in response.
Hamra was an only child, and for this reason, her birthday had always been a-capital B, capital D-Big Deal. “You came with the dawn,” her mother told her, “just after Subuh, as if you wanted the world to be fresh for your arrival.”
Hamra stared at the cracks on her ceiling and wondered what surprises awaited her today. The clock had been a birthday present the year she turned seven. That had been the year of everything Minnie Mouse, her absolute favorite cartoon character; she had worn a red dress with a skirt that twirled and a big red bow in her hair, and Opah had produced a magnificent cake in the shape of Minnie herself, a wonder of icing and deft knife work. Opah’s cakes had always been the best part of birthdays back then. But back then was a long time ago, long enough to be a whole other world.
Ten had brought her own guitar and the promise of lessons, the inevitable conclusion to a year of hardcore flailing over Taylor Swift’s 1989; the cake was an Oreo cheesecake hastily bought from the bakery in town because Opah had forgotten the cake she was baking in the oven and it had burned all black, filling the house with acrid smoke. They’d laughed, then. “A silly mistake,” Opah had said, tears in her eyes from giggling over it all. “Just one of those things.” That was the year her grandmother began using sticky notes to remind her of things. “I’m a little forgetful these days,” she’d say with a wave of her hand. “Ala, you know lah how it is with us old people.”
But as the year turned it was clear the burnt cake was only a glimpse of what was yet to come.
Hamra’s eleventh birthday was the year everyone forgot about presents, because in the middle of laying the table for her favorite meal-nasi ayam, and if she tried hard enough she could still smell the chicken roasting in the oven bear- ing the faded sticky note instructing: This is HOT, do not TOUCH when light is ON, just one note in a forest of notes they realized that Opah was missing. She’d walked right out of the house, with the cake Hamra and her mother had helped her bake, without her shoes. They found her at the edge of the jungle, feet covered in mud. “I’m taking it to my mother,” she’d said crossly. “It’s her favorite, Victoria sandwich.” At that point, Opah’s mother had been dead for over a decade.
They brought her home and cleaned her feet, placing Band-Aids carefully over half a dozen tiny cuts from where Opah had stepped, unseeing, on rocks or thorns. Later, Hamra dug a fork into the cake and ate one single bite. It was delicious, and somehow that made her cry even more.
For her twelfth birthday, Hamra got a generic grocery store chocolate cake and her very own phone. Her parents did not explain why, only that “you’re old enough to have one now.” But twelve-year-old Hamra understood things that eleven-year-old Hamra might not have; twelve-year- old Hamra knew adults said things even when they didn’t really say them. The phone was so her parents could make sure they always knew where Opah was. It was so that they knew she was taking care of Opah properly when they weren’t home to do it.
Hamra thought about all of this. She thought about the pandemic, and about her parents and their worried faces, pale with exhaustion. Then she looked over at Minnie. Some of the black had rubbed off her nose. Hamra had spent the past year or so lobbying hard to have it thrown out so it could be replaced with something sleek and cool, something befitting an almost-teenager. But all her impas- sioned reasoning had fallen on deaf ears; Ayah had merely said “We don’t waste money replacing things that still work perfectly well.” And so that was that.
“Maybe we don’t need any surprises this year,” Hamra said to Minnie.
Minnie just smiled her wide plastic smile. Tick.
At 7:34 a.m., Hamra sat, washed and dressed, at the break- fast table, nibbling on toast slathered in Nutella and waiting for someone to wish her a happy birthday.