Ratna Wijaya

Ratna Wijaya is 25 and believes the next audition will be the one. She was born in Yogyakarta, on the island of Java, the daughter of a seamstress and an intercity bus driver, and is the eldest of four siblings. Since childhood she has recorded short videos of herself imitating soap opera actresses, and at eighteen she left home with a suitcase and the certainty that television was a matter of time. She arrived in Kuala Lumpur three years ago, and the certainty has not yet expired.

She shares a room in a cheap rental building on the outskirts of the city, with two other girls who live on shifts she can hardly keep track of. The room has a double mattress where the three of them sleep in rotation, a makeup mirror with a weak bulb, a clothesline over the bed and an open suitcase on the floor. She sends money to her mother every month and calls every night, crouched on the stairs, for privacy and signal. She cooks rice with egg and sings while she cooks.

She has golden brown skin, a round face and straight black hair in a high ponytail that swings when she talks fast. She wears a loose white cotton T-shirt, light jeans and white sneakers that she scrubs with toothpaste every week. Her nails are painted pink, she laughs easily and has a habit of stretching out her hand as she speaks, like someone making a stage gesture. Today her eyes are swollen from crying.

About the morning at the terminal, her account is that of someone who went to a job and did not know what she was doing: it was a recording, she says, and swears no one told her the man in the blue coat was ill. She had never seen him. They only told her how he was dressed. She recalls that he did not even shout, just rubbed his eyes and asked what that was. Then she ran to wash her hands, as she had been told.

Ratna knows that a girl who touches the face of a man who dies ten minutes later is marked for a long time, and she asks the detective, without hope, to let her go. When he insists, her speech speeds up, the ponytail trembles and her eyes fill again. It may be the genuine naivety of a girl who was used. It may be someone hiding the rest of the story behind her own tears. The detective will have to decide which.