Prelude: On the other hand, some real taste of actual life in Java, Indonesia, is depicted here in grotesque faithfulness; I unintentionally have deduct the possibility of artistic adultery throughout the process of writing it. Everything recounted here is time-bound to the calendrical area between 1970 and 1988, too -- that way the piece also refrigerates sociopolitical makeup of the two decades, especially the cultural frame of mind of the 1980's, assuming it has one. Anyway, even if none of the self-appropriated utilities exists, still the piece represents what made me like this today -- divorcing scales of measurement, these pages tell what I wouldn't have been without. That, too, I sanely think, wouldn't be of any use whatsoever. Yet thanks for even glancing this far into my interior.
Related somehow: Real life in Java, Indonesia, during the late 1990's Panorama of a Javanese Neighborhood Ghostbusting For Dummies: Guide To/Out Of Personal Archæology Indonesian Educational System In Late 1980's The 17th Year: Essays About Me, written by some acquaintances in High School Javanese & Indonesian Food, Drinks, Fruits, Veggies, Snacks Javanese & Indonesian Languages Meanings of Javanese & Indonesian Names
Tons of thanks to the early readers of the book when still in the form of bound scratches: Paulus Soeko Prasetyo (New York, US), John & Betty Grubbs (Springfield, Mo., US), Betsy Clark (London, UK), Lance Gallagher (Montrose, UK), Noel Susenowati (Solo, ID), Asada Kanae (Nara, JP), Greg Manning (Singapore), Günther Dau (Rendsburg, DE), and H. Danarto (Jakarta, ID). Thanks to those who had given me chances in the write thing from 1977 to 1988: H. Danarto, Prof. Dr. Umar Kayam, Veven Sp. Wardhana, Handry TM, Arswendo Atmowiloto, Emha Ainun Nadjib, and most of all Linus Suryadi AG -- you were one of the very few human beings I never regret of knowing. Long overdued thanks to Muhammad Fathkhul Hidayat -- from whom I got everything good for free and to whom I didn't give a chance to witness the development of my kooky self beyond infancy; Herman Tandyo for the "I'm gonna fight hell to have you" thing; and Novita Erry Astiani, Lusi Damayanti, Endang Kurnia Maharani and Novia Widyaningtyas, to whom I should have said this ages ago when it might have mattered, "you'd been the truest of all friends". God bless you all, guys, and I'll always remember you even outside the weepiest monsoon nights. Thanks to those who had tried their best to make the recalled years a misery: without you all, I wouldn't have been, compared to you, a better version of the kind in this mammalian kingdom. Concocted in the mushiest memory of R.Ay. Harmini Soemaatmadja (1918-2000), a.k.a Grandma -- the person to whom getting to the bottom of the pit could be a vacation.
FOOTNOTES
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I know my story won't interest anybody. It doesn't interest me, either. So for the sake of justice for all I write it down. (Sorrel Clare) I hate to spread rumors - but what else one can do with them? (Amanda Lear)
Once upon a time, so I shall begin, a nondescript bundle of a pseudo-woolen blanket was downloaded from a four-wheeled flighty vehicle after a long bumpy ride across three provinces and a rickety ferry over the channel. In it was me. A non-paying passenger because I could have been anybody's hand luggage, no bigger than one of the hens tied on the roof of the bus and way smaller than the trunks tied near the weary fowls. The bus stopped right in front of an old house, like all buses did out of habit; they used to have got and disposed of passengers at that point along the wide, busy interprovincial street which no kid under twelve was allowed to cross alone. The street was everybody's way out of town eastward. The nearest place of importance was the town's furniture producers who all came from one family and had settled down in half a quarterful of area just for making and getting rid of this single merchandise. There was a church nearby with a tall Mother Mary statue in the middle of a lotus pond that gave it a touch of Buddhism and an overall impression of doubly-manifested tranquility. Close to the bottom of the list of landmarks was a tortuous railway and an old man who had seen Mao Zedong in person. The redemption of the house' and its neighbor's insignificance was the matchless presence of a shatterproof historic banyan tree - the whole area was named after this tree. Banyan trees mean a lot to Indonesians, by the way. They had been given some sacrosanct halo, a specieswise snapshot of notions such as peace, wisdom and harmony. A banyan tree has been one of the national symbols, made to denote the third of the five basic principles of this republic, saying unity. While keeping the principles as an ideology, using them as its source of legitimacy by the characteristic cosmetology, and enshrouding them with political tabooes to further elevate their sanctity, the New Order regime took the banyan tree as the ruling party's symbol. That had lowered the banyan trees' place, but the actual plants were, thank goodness, intact and functional as always. In the case of this particular tree, pedicab drivers played dominoes under its homelike shade in dry season, bus-seeking pedestrians rested there looking like lost, vagrants used it as their address, and yearly goats and sheep for the Idul Adha were to wait their honorable end at the exact same spot. The tree has gone now, but the name stays on. The front yard of the old house served as a comma after the asphalt ended and before the entrails of the living quarter. There was a pomelo tree outside a window, a grapefruit-bearing vegetation, and another of the same citrus family, that yielded small fragrant lime reserved for medicinal purposes. All these were to make my little sister's life after nineteen seventy-two; she got her name from the front yard's nonsense. This, though, some said, had been the reason why she blossoms forth. I, being named earlier than the day I saw those trees, escaped the horticultural tragedy. But I have to bear a comedy of some biblical portion - I can't be sure which is worse. The woman whose Semitic name I came to sign legal papers by was reportedly above fifty year-old when she was firstly spotted entering the Bible, and every male in her domesticity died of this or that Semitic cause, and her widowed daughter in-law kept her alive by enmeshing what was overlooked by some Semitic harvesters in their Semitic fields. Next, she adopted an alias and a something in-law after God engendered for the former daughter in-law a husband who excelled in everything compared to the woman's prematurely departed son; he wasn't only alive, but also rich. She then was said to have been living happily ever after as a social epiphyte. No wonder some ancient Chinese sage kept saying things like "Careful with naming things lest they live it" - or something to that effect. Anyway, the porch and the front door of the house couldn't be seen from the street because of the existence of a legion of rough-petalled, pinkish flowers in stubborn thick bushes. I can never make my way through flowers, so I can't tell you the name of the floral plague. All I know about flowers is that some of them are roses and some are not. These were definitely not. The windows that oversaw the street were three-in-one each. This extravagance was probably a divine afterthought to make up for our near future - we would live in a house completely devoid of shutters, glass and any sort of leaf soon. In the morning the glass would be opened, then the first leaves of wood, afterwards the seemingly airproof outmost shutters. Behind one of the windy windows I used to sit an afternoon away, watching the mobile people outside in and across the street; I also sat there at night to marvel at the foreheads and noses and butts of fast trucks and buses - there was something poetic in their strong light that pierced through the darkness. I wondered where all those people were going to and arriving from; why did they do all that, what for; what had implanted a perennial sneer or carved sadness on their faces, was their utmost perplexity really worth it - questions that I was to ask all my life. As far as I can recall, and by extorting older people's confessions, I used to talk with Grandma or Mom or whoever else was around since I got off that bus. They said I was not a cryptic chatter ("Gagagoo? Bllllp eez gcckkk!") or frantic shrieker ("Look, Mom! Look! An ANT! Mooooom!!! LOOOK!!!"), but spoken words made their way into me faster than the development of the needed biological apparatus. So it enabled some sane conversation in Javanese and Indonesian since the second year of my life, but at that point my anatomy could only pronounce 'r' in English. It took some time to mend this defect. Compared to my little sister, of course I was a relentless talker - but anything was, for that matter. Those days, after an alarmingly long silence that almost got Grandma the conclusion that God didn't intend her to get near speech at all, my sister only talked once a year, and it happened such as when someone had offered her the same slice of cake for the seventeenth time in a row. Her favorite word was "No." She used her big blank eyes to convey any other word, and got irritated when everyone mistook what was not said. Her chief occupation was devouring watermelons to the last bite between two long naps. But sometimes she was awake enough to play with me for maybe two minutes. For some scatterbrained length of time we existed in a perfect mutual dislike. This kindred spirit of reciprocal antipathy was, I guess, the only similarity we shared and that had convinced people we were sisters. It was hard to tell otherwise. We have distinctly different noses. Besides the nose, I also had a pink inflatable plastic giraffe with black spots. It was a serviceable toy. But I always tried to cajole Grandma into buying me more and more of the brittle wax toys. Once every several weeks a man with large baskets appeared at the unlocked gate offering this tribute to the childish passion of procuring some destroyable treasure - he made the toys himself, by pouring multicolored hot wax into some terracotta molds and retrieved a rich variety of things and animals and fruit. I got a legitimate reason to want these things; my little sister -- the small, round, annoying noiselessness -- always sat on the fragile wax toys. Inside Grandma's parental kitbag resided harmful notions injurious to my idea of a lovable childhood and its candidacy to be such in memory. For instance, she overruled my plea to get us those great toys of movable ships (the propellant was kerosene) because they were made of Raid and Baygon containers; she overran me with uninteresting non-toxic playthings like water and backyard and sunshine; she ostracized the ostentatious snack tinted with textile-coloring material sold in the Sekaten festival; she issued the domestic ordinance that said my sister's phlegmatism didn't mean a reason to make her display any human emotion, such as pinching her so she'd cry. The rule concerning wax toys comprised of a strict prohibition of feeding my sister with it. Despite this, though, it still was a big day. Plus Grandma's knapsack of kinsfolk unpleasantry also affected my sister anyway - to consume watermelons, it was decreed, she had to do it piecemealy. Sekaten, of course, was the biggest days of all, and not only on my personal calendar; it's the greatest yearly event in town to celebrate the Prophet Muhammad's birthday. This is the marker of the 'Javanese Islam'. The main plaza would be jammed by tents of vendors, animal circus, ferris wheel and the like, and other typical wonders. We had a more or less zoo-like zoo and an amusement park that didn't look like one, but their being aground everyday in a year had made kids apathetic to the promise to go there. Sekaten, on the other hand, had its comparative rarity to excite. In my days the characteristic handicrafts denoting the event and containing its spirit were baked and painted terracotta piggybanks (which were not shaped like pigs). It was customary to buy one and choke it with coins to be whacked open the next year at the same festive atmosphere and get a new one. The most waited-for spectacle was the 'Satan's Barrel' - a motorbike acrobat who rode around a great wooden barrel. The festival filled up a whole month. Around the house, the events I waited in an influx of impatience for were less sparkling occurences. After the wax toys, another domestic big day was whenever the ice peddler arrived. He was an old man who never smiled, carrying rusty green iceboxes around. Under the dirty round cork was the beautiful cold wind trapped in cylindrical plastic sachets of all colors; mango, coconut, durian, orange, mung bean, raspberry, chocolate, mocca, tea, pineapple, and God knows what else. The ice was gotten from the biggest company in town which monopolized the business before the invasion of Wall's. It dwindled at the pace of rheumatism until what was left was just a small joint where I had my seventeenth birthday gathering in. The non-northernized flavor of the ice cream and popsicle and all is still to me better than what we have today - or maybe I'm only getting old. Grandma, like all her peers, was in a persistent dread of influenza which was perceived as being distributed randomly through anything. But she consented once in a while, and let us lick the ice all day and got some flu later, as she had predicted, regardless of the data that clearly indicated dysentery as having a greater probability to harm us. Our term for catching a cold is 'catching the wind' - so the exile of the actual wind tends to be done literally. The un-scientific notion, just like 'catching heat' , have been selling tons of herbal remedies and dubious medicinal syrups and placebos and irritating physicians and eternal. The unreasonable claim that chicken soup is universal fell flat when it came to us. Around me there had never been any Javanese being made to pour galons of chicken broth into his or her system when the flu came by. They'd just undress at the first alarm, and their mother or wife or sister or friend or professional masseur rubbed some medicinal oil or just what's left in a frying pan on the person, picked up a coin, and started to chafe the back, chest, arm or any spot of the patient until the skin turned red. Not everybody could be gifted with the secret of the art, so there's always a Master Chafer constantly in demand (Grandma), and another that everyone prefers to die away from rather than being handled by (Mom). The fishbones sketched on one's back after such treatment has been ridiculed in every way and nowadays a willing patient is a rarity but some say it's really the only sensible way to exorcise the flu demon. The "bless you!" when someone sneezes was as alien to me as the other 'universal' practice. People said instead "Go away, disease! Go back to the streets!". When it was a cat that sneezed, they simply said "Go away!" and nothing else.
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