How the Story of Nasrul Marhaban’s Death was Told and Remembered

2021/09/21

This is an English translation for “Bagaimana Nasrul Marhaban Mati dan Dikenang”, an Indonesian short story that appeared in the magazine Tempo on 15 June 2014. // Ini terjemahan bahasa Indonesia untuk “Bagaimana Nasrul Marhaban Mati dan Dikenang” yang terbit di Tempo, 15 Juni 2014. // Original text: here.

This is exactly how it went: nearly seven years ago, from the narrow balcony of his home, Nasrul Marhaban leapt into the two-meter-deep water. He was then dragged away by the rushing wave to the river where he drowned and died. The next day, his body was found stuck the river’s sluice gate.

It was eight at night when the flash flood struck his riverside town. Beaten down by torrential rain, the local government sent out rubber boats to rescue all the townspeople trapped in their attics or stuck on their rooftops. One by one, these people leapt onto the boat before they were whisked somewhere safer. Among the townspeople rescued were the wife and two children of Nasrul Marhaban.

Nasrul Marhaban should have been one among them as well, had the plastic-wrapped Qur’an not slide from his arms and fall with a splash into the water below, just as he was about to leap onto the boat.

Alas, the truth was thus: the plastic coating containing the holy book really did slide down from his embrace. Nasrul Marhaban shouted the names of God as he jumped into the water, surprising a number of people who were witnesses to the event. He managed to reach for the parcel before quickly turning around and attempting to swim back for the boat. Alas, swimming against the current with only a single hand free to paddle was not an easy matter. For those terrible moments, he was like a man who only swam in place, not an inch of difference from where he had begun. The stick-shaped man coughed out water more than a few times. He panted over and over again. The boat tried to reach for him, but alas it was too slow to race against an incoming wave. As has been told, Nasrul Marhaban was dragged by the water and down to the river, leaving behind him the screams of his wife and children and all the townspeople who saw him as he went.

According to witnesses of the event, on his last moment Nasrul Marhaban finally let go of his holy book. His head bobbed up and down on the surface, and some had claimed that he managed to call for God on the final moments before he disappeared under the water, never to be seen again.

The death of Nasrul Marhaban, caused by his intense desire to save the holy book that fell into the water, became the talk of the town. From the mouth of one person to the ears of the next, the news quickly spread even all the way to the next town over. Thousands of people attended Nasrul Marhaban’s funeral the very next day.

“Nasrul Marhaban truly died a noble death, as he tried to save the holy book he most respected,” Ustadz Bahtiar said on his funeral speech.

A vigil was held the day after the funeral, and it went on for seven days afterwards. Hundreds of people stayed overnight in the increasingly stuffy Mosque Assalam.

“Nasrul Marhaban’s act of bravery should be something we all look up to, for he is willing to sacrifice this transient world for the eternal salvation of the afterworld,” Haji Mahfudi said in a short speech during the vigil.

Nasrul Marhaban was born and raised in the same town where he died. He married Emeh, also of this town, and the couple were blessed with two sons. He worked at an auto repair shop not too far from his home. His paycheck was barely good enough to fulfill his family’s need, to the point that some might call it lacking. Even so, he rarely complained. The only thing he occasionally worried about was the regular flood that often swamped his neighbourhood, the sort of flood that eventually took his life.

No different from anybody else who lives in this town, Nasrul Marhaban and his wife and kids were forced to take refuge away from their home each time their neighbourhood was struck by a flood. The government office, the local elementary school, and the Mosque Assalam are the usual choices of living space when disaster strike. Nasrul Marhaban always chose the mosque as his preferred refuge.

It was common knowledge, however, that Nasrul Marhaban was not in fact the kind of person who frequent the house of prayer. His decision to take refuge in the Mosque Assalam each time his house was swamped by the flood was therefore a source of common gossip across town. Someone, who knows who it was who started it, even made a mocking joke out of it. Nasrul Marhaban, they say, only visit the mosque on three occassions: the Eid Al-Fitr, the Eid Al-Adha, and the Eid of the Flood. He never once visited the mosque on any other day, not even for the weekly Friday prayers.

But who would have thought that Nasrul Marhaban’s name would be spoken with such reverence during a Friday prayer speech? Ustadz Komar spoke of Nasrul Marhaban as someone who managed to close their life’s journey in a most honourable way, dying free from sin. Ustadz Komar told his audience of how, despite being known as someone who never visited the house of prayers, Nasrul Marhaban is the sort of person who would rather lose his life than see his holy book be swallowed by the flood.

“It’s extraordinary,” so the Ustadz said during his Friday prayers speech, a week after the incident.

And so it goes that days, weeks, months, even years after his funeral, the death of Nasrul Marhaban remains in everybody’s lips. Every time the flood returns, the people of the town will always think of Nasrul Marhaban. In their temporary refuge, in the coffee shops, in mosques, they all speak of the story of how Nasrul Marhaban met his end.

Every year before the start of Ramadhan, Emeh always visits the grave of his late husband. After putting down fresh jasmine flowers, she sits at the edge of the grave and quietly says her prayers. She prays that God accept all of Nasrul Marhaban’s good deeds, that He forgives all his sins and missteps. Emeh knows that the neighbourhood remembers her husband as the man who was dragged away by the flood and lost his life because he wanted to save the holy book. That was indeed how it went, but only Emeh knows that just the day before the incident, her husband had just received his paycheck for the month. And it is only Emeh who knows that the man often placed the money he just received between the pages of his beloved holy book.