The Mispa

 

They come back different, the women do. Changed. You can see it in their eyes first—something that wasn’t there before they left for Mecca, something that glints like the sequins on their Mispa when the airport fluorescents catch them just right. The men folk notice it too, though they won’t say so out loud, not in polite company anyway.

Every year it’s the same ritual at Sultan Hasanuddin Airport in Makassar. The returning hajjah emerge from that silver bird like butterflies from cocoons, except these butterflies wear gold and crimson and emerald green that hurts your eyes to look at direct. Their head coverings—those Mispa—catch the light and throw it back at you like accusations. Like secrets.

“They want to show their families that they have performed the Hajj,” Iqbal Ismail would tell anyone who’d listen, his voice carrying that careful tone of a man who’d learned not to question certain things too closely. But late at night, when the sea wind whistled through the palms and the old stories seemed to seep from the very stones of South Sulawesi, even Iqbal wondered if there wasn’t something more to it. Something older than Islam. Something that remembered.

The Mispa itself—now that was a thing to behold and fear in equal measure. Not just cloth, no sir. This was silk that whispered when it moved, beads that seemed to pulse with their own inner light, sequins that caught your reflection and held it just a heartbeat too long. The women who wore them walked different too, like they were carrying something invisible on their shoulders. Something heavy as prayer, heavy as the weight of what they’d seen in the desert places where God was supposed to live.

Mary Elizabeth Kowalski—though she’d been Sitti Khadijah since her conversion twenty years back—had worn one when she returned from her pilgrimage in ‘98. Her neighbors in the Bugis quarter still talked about it, voices dropping to whispers when they did. How she’d floated down the airplane steps like she was walking on air itself, her Mispa shimmering gold and red as fresh blood. How her eyes had gone distant and strange, like she was seeing through you to somewhere else entirely.

“Ma’mispa,” the old women would murmur, using the ancient term that meant more than just “wearing the cloth.” It meant carrying something. Being marked. Being chosen. Or maybe cursed—the difference wasn’t always clear in the old stories, the ones that predated the mosque and the call to prayer, the ones that remembered when other gods walked these islands.

The tradition stretched back centuries, they said, back to 1605 when Islam had come to the twin kingdoms like a fever dream, transforming everything it touched. But transformation was a tricky thing—sometimes what looked like change was really just the old darkness wearing new clothes. The baju bodo had been modified to cover what the new religion said should be hidden, but the shapes beneath remained the same. The old hungers, the old needs, they just learned to whisper in Arabic instead of the ancient tongue.

By the 1920s, when Makassar became an official departure point for the hajj, the Mispa tradition had grown more elaborate. More… hungry. The cloth got richer, the decorations more intricate, the ceremonies surrounding the mappatoppo ritual more complex. Forty days the women had to wear their taliling, the wrapped shawl that marked them as different, as other. Forty days to let whatever they’d brought back from the desert settle into their bones.

Some of the younger generation had started abandoning the old ways, trading their distinctive Cipo’-cipo’ head coverings for modern hijabs that made them blend in with the crowd. But the old-timers, they knew better. They understood that some traditions weren’t just customs—they were containment. The Mispa wasn’t just about showing off your pilgrimage status. It was about keeping something locked up tight, something that needed the weight of gold thread and ancient prayers to hold it down.

Because here’s the thing about holy places, about walking where prophets walked and touching stones that had witnessed the birth of faiths: sometimes you bring something back with you. Something that whispers in the small hours of the morning, something that makes the sequins on your Mispa gleam like eyes in the darkness.

And sometimes, late at night when the trade winds blow just right and the old stories seem to leak from the very ground, the people of Makassar lock their doors and whisper prayers to gods both new and old. Because they know, deep in their bones where the ancient knowledge lives, that the women who return in their glittering Mispa are never quite the same as the ones who left.

They come back different, the women do.

Changed.

And change, as any fool in South Sulawesi could tell you, wasn’t always for the better.