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Intan Paramaditha :Malam Seribu Jahanam (Night of a Thousand Hells)
This book concerns three sisters. We are told that there are quite a few stories involving three sisters such as King Lear and Cinderella. These three are a course Indonesian. The oldest isMutiara , known asMuti. She is known as the caretaker. When she was younger, she looked after her two younger siblings and now she is older. She has had to look after both parents. At the start of the book their mother has died and their father has just had a stroke and is in an intensive care unit. Muti has what seems. an important sjob but when she is not at the office, she is at the hospital waiting for news of her father. She is not married but she does have what she calls children but they are all cats. She lives in Jakarta. She is thinking of emigrating to New Zealand.
The second sister is Maya, the traveller. She is a writer and she lives in New York. The youngest sister. is Annisa, she is married and lives inKotawijaya with her husband and two children. She was always the golden girl, the favourite of her father and was always going to be a beautiful bride.
While waiting in the hospital Muti sees on the news that there has been a suicide bombing inKotawijaya. She is somewhat worried that.Annisa may have been affected. However, when they finally release the names of the bombers , she realises thatAnnisa and her husband and children were actually part of the suicide bombers. They attacked both churches and a group of trans women. Muti is astonished as Annisa had never held particularly strong political views.
The book is about the effect on the two surviving sisters and what they think may have lead to this attack.
Muti does go up toKotawijaya unlike the relatives of the other attackers. It seems that the attack was organised by a group called b Jamaah Junud Al-Huriyaut whose name means Group of Soldiers, which is apparently is linked with Isis
She identifies the body of her sister but can tell the police officer little as she has had not much contact with her sister recently. She returns to Jakarta the next day.
We gradually pick up the story of the family. It was not necessarily a happy one. The two parents quarrelled and often had money problems. The mother worked but her money went to help her family who, according to her husband were lazy and only knew how to gamble and drink. When younger the sisters were close but the two oldest ones grew up. They moved away from playing together. They were particularly close to their grandmother. They often stayed with her and on one occasion. a key issue occurred which none of them had forgotten with the oldest sisters reading and mocking their younger sister’s diary and she taking her revenge by poisoning a cat and they taking their revenge by putting her down a well.
Muti makes a great issue about how she is the caretaker but she seems happy enough in the role. She never seems to have had a boyfriend but a tutor she had when she was at school was clearly a possibility and he proposed but not to her but to Annisasa even though he was already married.
Muti dotes on what she calls her children, i.e, her cats and very much spoils them
but at the same time, she relishes it
Maya also has a somewhat complicated life she has a boyfriend in New York but he is married and still living with his wife .This is a course an issue throughout the book she’s writing a novel and the novel is based on the life of her grandmother she has not told the others, fearing their reaction. We do see samples of this novel and of course it relates to their real life. She will eventually come to Indonesia to assist her older sister but, perhaps inevitably, they quarrel.
Both sisters do a bit of exploration to see if there were any clues about how their younger sister was going to behave and indeed they do find one or two things, for example in an old diary.
One of the issues is burying Annissa and her family. When they try to bury them in a local cemetery, the locals object strongly to having suicide bombers in their cemetery. In the end Muti decides on cremation which is not in in accordance with Muslim practice, but she feels she has no choice.
The two sisters go and visit their nephew who survived. He had been on the back of a motorbike with his father and had jumped off. He was badly injured. He is now in hospital. He refuses to speak to anyone and is obviously very traumatised.
One set of the victims was a trans group and we learn much later about this group and how the woman in charge had done a lot to help trans people in Indonesia. It becomes more complicated when we learn that the son of their grandmother’s maid was also trans and she turns up and recounts her story. She is now called Rosalinda
The story carries on and we see what happens to what we now consider as the three sisters, namely, including Rosalinda. They get into the Covid era but also all three change and change their aspirations in the light of what happened.
To this day, I don’t know where my sister took a wrong turn. We’ve tried to guess—maybe it was this, or that—adding and subtracting to make sense of it all. But now, after four years, I realize how strange it is, this obsession with having things make sense. And just how everywhere she is, just how undead
They continue to investigate why their sister did what she did they come up with some conclusions.
This is a very clever story looking at how a suicide bomber and her death can affect a wide circle, obviously both the family of the bomber and my family of the victims. But we also learn to a certain degree what might have leadAnissa to commit the deed, and not only commit the deed with her husband but bring in her very young children as well well. We also deal with the aftermath such as a family being hounded by journalists and the effect on the extended family also it is true that the two surviving sisters have been scarred for the rest of their lives and that point is very much made.
Publishing history
First published in 2023 by ramedia Pustaka Utama,
First English publication in 2026 by by Europa
Translated by Stephen J. Epstein and Tiffany Tsao