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
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The first cat in my life came by one day. Her name was Thorn. She owned the family next door, which entire members shrieked her name out in futility outside while I and the cat laid down on the cold floor in a hush-hush companionship. She loved to chase the wax toys around and end the imaginary hunting session with a lethal jump upon it. I conscripted the cat for my domestic odyssey; she was no snitcher. She helped me to operate tin cars and such to see what made them run; I betted against her on whether my finger could be shoved into the hole on the bedstead or not - I lost, and almost lost my finger in the process, while Mom and Grandma lost their patience. Grandma had passed away with the knowledge that I could not climb a tree; she had never known that I was so thoroughly corrupted by Thorn and was perching on one of the trees whenever she thought she couldn't find me anywhere. Disclaiming this skill was better to have other kids to climb and get bitten by ants and hand me, the local Iago , the fruit. In the backyard which started to spread from behind a door in a tall wall, there were more trees, and a column of aloes that Mom used to wash her hair with. There was also a huge terracotta basin that got me contemplating a murder (of the silent toddler who kept following me everywhere back then - no, not Thorn). Grandma's older sister, a widow, lived in the house, too, and she spent her time more often in the backyard. She was a sad, transparent figure in Javanese dress who walked without a sound on the tiles and on the grass alike. Everything that was sharp and bright in Grandma was seriously toned down in this woman; she was like a lightbulb being in service for years and flattering shadows rather than emitting illumination; bent but not broken. I spent much time with her, watched her cooking her own meal on her tiny coal stove, got her hazy smile whenever she thought my stories about the day funny enough. Previously she lived in another house, not her own, but belonged to her ex-husband. She didn't have anything after the divorce but was allowed to live there with her son. The young man then left the house and never talked with her again for good, prompting the end of the free lodging she had had. After living with Grandma she moved to her eldest sister's house until she died. All her sisters and brothers, I guess, blamed her for her own fate - a woman without any skill to depend on, her eldest sister kept saying, shouldn't hang her pride so high around the Milky Way . She divorced her husband after finding out that he had kept a mistress, and this, in others' view, was a stupid reason. The whole bunch of Grandma's siblings were as romantic as the Microsoft Corp. Or at least they were mostly some foggy realists occasionally smitten by vivid daydreams. At the time, I knew nothing of the woman's history, but Grandma's realism bothered me there in the old house by the busy street; so I told her that in my eyes she didn't treat her sister the way she should. I thought she would get mad at my weird departure from the meaninglessness of infancy, but with her miraculous oddity she didn't. She only said that it was already the best that she could afford to do, giving her a room; she didn't have any money herself; she said her opinion about the sister was her own business but the seclusion was the older grandma's own choice - that was why Grandma rarely went to the room where she resided in. I wasn't satisfied with the reply, but my vocabulary wasn't sufficient to enter an argument. So from that day on I always asked for an extra ice, an extra cake, an extra everything edible, and brought it to the back of the house; fueled by a dim thought of what to do if there is a wounded wild animal hiding in one's property. Once in a while, silently Grandma added some cigarettes, an ounce of tobacco, some betel, or a pack of tea to the extra something in my hands for her sister. I got a glimpse of the nature of such actions when, after some repetition, Grandma's sister cried when I brought her a piece of beef. I interrupted my own lunch to do this, and was broken-hearted to guess that it wasn't appreciated - Grandma got no choice but to try to explain to me that the alleged good things must be alloyed with commoner substances to achieve durability, and kindness is to be gotten rid of sparingly. If you have ever tried to talk philosophy to a four year-old, you'd know how Grandma raked her brain that day. In the old house a clanish atmosphere was seeping through the gates all the time. There was one gathering that I still recall. I can't remember what the occasion was, but I'm sure it was a family party of some sort. Every aunt and uncle was there, every grandma and grandpa, too; the Javanese tradition of unnecessarily implicating as many people as possible in cooking and such, to reduce a professional caterer to tears, was still observed by Grandma since she had the place for them all. Plaited matresses were spread over the grass, and the aunt with the loudest voice vied for the first place in unbearability against one of her aunts, Grandma's eldest sister. Their voices still ring in my head now. This aunt was older than Mom and had been trying to look even older - nothing beats age in getting the upper hand in familial disputes over how much salt was to be going into the curry in the making of such a communal cuisine. There was no other kid because Mom's cousins, except that aunt, were all singles at the time. And my cousins were a pair of subdued older boys - just imagine, being at home with the mother of theirs all day - mercilessly uninteresting, and they, like all boys, seemed to be taught that girls were a species akin to smallpox. So all went like that and a mountain of rice was the result, the main dish for the night, plus some goat meat brochettes. My youngest and prettiest aunt who had done nothing all day but brushing her hair appeared in an acid-colored gypsy blouse and bright red bell-bottom - I remember every detail on her because the eldest grandma had correctly identified the attire as a loud challenger of her voice; and Mom's older cousin shouted the same opinion. The Beat Generation rags had apparently united the two and been responsible for the relative peace that the party was to proceed in. Grandma's sister sat in silent reticence all through the night after working with all the banana leaves all day; she made containers out of the fresh green leaves using a few pieces of palm ribs. That day she taught me how to do what for which - a complicated Javanese must-do in traditional observances, with some sacred chronology to follow - I practiced it years later when we were dragged into similar parties, though the rigidity of the rules around the temporarily communal kitchen always got on my nerves. The small, thick rice pancake with a piece of coconut in the middle, for instance, must be the last thing to do and can't precede any other culinary activity. So I got to be there all through the day because this pancake was actually my sole reason to go there - Grandma couldn't cook it like her abrasive eldest sister did, and I would bear hell and high water just for the pancake those days. For this she had to use a coal stove and a pan of a certain size; I had seen the times when the hostess gave her a kerosene stove or a larger pan and this grandma exploded like an advanced invention of Einstein's. In a world where every little piece of trivia had a cosmological reason and each grain of trinket was invested with a philosophical justification, I guess you couldn't be but growing up assigning meanings to most things, even a casual gesture, that come your way. The tribal scar had been on you. I still had another big day, involving a middle-aged woman who dressed impeccably like a middle-class Javanese about to attend a formal party - she went from door to door asking if the mistress of the house had some old clothes, paper, glass bottles and such to get rid of. In the 'and such' category was included hair - women with long hair could sell it those days if nothing else was had. If not the whole body of hair, a handful of loose hair still got its way into the matter of sale. The Javanese hairdo necessitates one to have at least my hair now, that reaches the waist; Mom's was even longer, she could have sat on it; but some cut theirs short or was too old to bother about it, so they bought cemara, a long ponytail they could twist into chignon. The sellers of such a thing had many kinds of merchandise; single-mindedly straight hair like the Chinese's, wavy hair, curly hair, brownish hair, white hair - every segment of the chignon-wearing population could be sure their needs were catered for. Real hair was valued better than the primitive kind of wig of the time. The merchant had known Grandma since Grandpa's days. So even if there was nothing to sell to her, she still dropped by and Grandma would pretend like she wasn't interested at all in the gossips she scooped up without even getting out of the door; while listening attentively - or so I suspected. I liked those days, since the woman brought us her garden's outcome according to the season - some lychee, sapodilla, rose-apples, guava, cashew fruit. But I loved her big bag more. She would show us what she had gotten so far from all over the town; funny skirts, faded batik, sometimes a brand new dress which, she said, came from a woman who always insisted on being several numbers smaller than her actual size, and thus had been her faithful client. The bottles were interesting because some still got their contents in different colors; imported alcolholic beverages came in pretty bottles that I would see one day two decades away adorning my college friends' rooms. Then there were odds and ends like a tin toy train, Mr. Potato Head, balding Teddy bears, literal silver spoons, antique blades, cocktail glasses, crystal vases, and so on. I had succeeded in talking Grandma into bartering my dress with a crystal swan, a bit broken at the tail but the dress was worse anyway. Then Mom bought an Aladdin lamp from this woman, too, out of her sense of humor perhaps - the house had some electricity and we didn't need the brass kerosene lamp until we left for the village. I gave away the crystal swan after some actual loud birds of that kind attacked me one day. It was ridiculous if not so horrible; I was on my way back from a grocery and where nothing was to be seen before now appeared two or three big white monsters with their scary long necks - and they chased people out of the yard. Well, it was someone's yard, to be exact; but it had been a shortcut for people to and from the adjoining quarter, so that I walked in and out of it as if it were a public pathway wasn't really unlawful. What a nightmare the genius owner of the swans had given me and dozens of other habitual trespassers. I spent several nights plotting revenge. But the swans were lucky; we got to leave the house. Grandma lost the ownership of it in court, the judge rewarded it to Grandpa's kids from his previous marriage. We used to sit on a matress under a tree in the district court's yard, sipping ice in a broiling day, waiting for Grandma who was in the court room. Those days were to be the last of ours to be spent under the old roof. We packed up a few belongings and re-installed ourselves in a village some twenty-five kilometers away eastward. The boldest ingredient of the village was a calamondin orchard. A river snipped it in two. In late afternoons some sniggering wind would pass them by; a village wind, if you know what I mean; an inrush of bacchanalian sleep minus the wine. One end of the fenceless orchard faced the street -- a narrow, long, black asphalt driveway preserved languidly in time by a severe unemployment. Only a cow or two could be seen there on their way to wherever; a strayed truck would have been a spectacle. The Indonesian New Order regime was in a honeymoon with the people, when this street was laid down there; the regime built schools and opened up roads in the most unimaginable places around the country to rot and perish a little bit longer than the political infatuation between the newlyweds. The orchard had a nervy disorder. Not only its calamondin seeds courageously looked like they were strewn unmethodically in the dead of a moonless night by a blind senior citizen, but its wavering frontiers, too, were a constant daredevilry since they didn't give us any clear idea whether we were trespassing a private property or was it the private property which trespassed us. But kids under eight in the area knew, at least, the position of fear - wherever the proprietor of this orchard was at the moment. He was a substantial man - so heavy that he needed a thick teak stick as his third leg - and was known as the grumpiest veteran around. But this nonpareil noisome nook was at some point a human. He had a wife once; they said he lost her in the panic-stricken sixties, when good people and their opposite alike were busy being mobile, running away from or running after the communists or the right-wingers - those were the years of losses, the years of boundless scare, the time when nobody knew for sure what was what and where was where - the footprints we saw afterwards were of blood. Everyone in the village would tell you that the man's wife was pregnant when she was lastly seen -- they would also say that it wasn't the husband's kid. The man was a physician, and in those days he was as precious as gold, though fortunately easier to come by -- he was willing to mount his colonial motorbike to whichever way a patient was in a need of him. Today's doctors have never known the thrill of a midnight housecall; but this graduate of the Old School was shaken off bed at two in the morning every other day. Since his arrival there was less death of extinguishable causes. So much in demand, he was rarely home to see what had happened with his domestic realm - or to see anything at all, actually; in nineteen seventy-five there was no electricity yet in the village, so he was led to his palmy days through a dark passage that, for all we know, could have led a doctor anywhere or nowhere - considering that he practiced his Hyppocratic Oath with some Javanese laxity, and relied more on personal hunches than medical guesses. He often got the second opinion from the local shaman and added incantations to the prescription. The secret lover of the local Madame Bovary was a communist, they said. But he was also a bigamist - sometimes he preferred communism more, sometimes it was the doctor's wife's turn. His father and numerous uncles were reportedly in the movement since the end of the nineteenth century. While other parents bestowed a legacy of familial jewelry and bank notes, his dad handed down an ideology. The intentionally schismatic organisation that he was a member of was in a guerrilla war against everybody in the twenties. They agitated the urban coolies, the rural farmers and the malcontented students to wage a revolution which would eradicate the Dutch colonists, the Javanese aristocrats, the Muslim landlords and the Chinese merchants. The revolution got a detour to jail. Yet they would try again and again for the next four decades. There was a segment of the villagers who would tell you that the man was not so communist than he was Shakespearean. He, according to this strand of folktales, plunged headlong into the tumultuous sixties for a completely impolitical reason: he joined his father's organisation because they were the only one whose idea of management consisted of planning up a death row. Night after night the clandestine gathered around their underground table in an underground headquarter over some underground coffee (that's the only way to understand its taste), writing down a list of people to be terminally inconvenienced when the time came. The party's notion of being governmental evolved around this manbusting list. The man had to be one of them to insert just one name among the condemned; the one he wanted to do away with; the village doctor's. So the day finally came when the national radio station in Jakarta was seized by the militia, and under gunpoint a shivering newsreader transmitted the message that the country was now under the communist party's control and that it would get busy eliminating some dangerous anti-communist elements for days to come, so the people were expected to understand that it would be unavailable to govern. In the turbulent twenties there were only two or three radios around the village; one was boxed and mounted on some wooden sticks in the front yard of the district chief's office, where people on their way to and from the market stopped to listen to whatever was there ; one was in the spacious bedroom of the sugarcane plantation overseer; the third was a myth as far as other people knew - it was said to get hidden in a cowshed where the local communists held their meetings. Forty years later radios had been multiplying around the vicinity, but the one at the chief's yard and the one in the cowshed were still the most famous of all. While other people were getting collectively bewildered in front of the public radio, the man who joined the party to kill the doctor was listening in the legendary cowshed, and at the cue they dispersed to commence the supposedly political cleansing. But a baby had decided on exactly that day to get born.
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