|
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
FOOTNOTES
|
So the doctor heard nothing of anything all day - he was fetched by the nervous would-be-father early in the morning when the sun wasn't even seen anywhere and the roosters were still dreaming; onward he went, on the rickety bike, through the misty succession of dirtroads and pathways, passing countless palm trees and shapeless surroundings, to the patient and the firstborn. It was a problematic deliverance. He didn't even have time to get home and got to spend the night there because the mother was hovering between here and thereafter. That morning, people said, the communist man then took the madame doctor with him after he and his armed comrades failed to locate the elected victim. No one was to see them ever again. When the party's grip on Jakarta was broken just a few ugly hours later, and the top party officials sought sanctuary deeper inland, the villagers were assembled to hunt the communists down and do unto them what they had done upon the generals. On whatever pretext the doctor went to look for his wife, too, but she had vanished tracelessly - so did her lover. And he returned home a different man. From that day on he scarcely left the house even if a king were to summon him. The profession was eventually abandoned. A year later his father died and left him the money to procure the orchard. A new house was built among the trees to lodge a wounded pride that rarely met the world except on harvest time and bad mood. This was the first of such biographies that I eavesdropped, and accidentally the first knowledge of the shakeup upon the country and of the kind of things that could leave it in shambles. If the scenic and placid lilt of the village could be turned into such a horrific hullaballoo, then we were, I thought, justifiable if getting collectively paranoid. A headstrong fear is likely to incinerate us; it is not unique to get scared of something and its opposite at once, like people were suffering from in the seething mid-sixties and churning end of the nineties. Grandma's bedtime stories of what it was like under the Dutch and Japanese boots gave me the first impersonal pictures of the world I would have to live in - I guess I was talked into being a little grateful for what we got then; what the habit of saying grace in mealtimes at school would fail to install had been easily done by the World War II Japanese soldiers and the total ruin we had become under their rule. Grandma admitted that she wasn't really reduced to a handwringing hangdog, being in a lesser kind of oppression with the white-collared slightly noble family which only had to sacrifice all of their golden jewelry; but people she knew had died like flies of absolute starvation. The Japanese era is forever imprinted on our minds as the time when people were turned into their inner instinct of animalistic survival - deprived of any sort of food civilization had given them, they ate anything in the streets - rats that were just as hungry as they were, customarily inedible leaves, rice husk, snails. The marauders had also taken away any possibility to get wearables, so people wore gunny-sacks and jute rags. Based on historical records I later browsed, Indonesia during the second World War looked like the - ironically - place after a nuclear bombing in the movies. Those days, when the man of the orchard was taking a nap, I singled out one of his trees and picked up the fruit I had many uses for - to bribe my little sister with, then she'd give it to Mom who'd slice it in halves and pour the juice into a glass, add some sugar, give it some water, and drink the mixture, and the remains were to wash the dishes with. Whenever we got a cough, Grandma gave us the calamondin juice mixed with sweet soybean sauce. This remedy worked most of the time. Indonesia would have been nowhere without calamondin. Other kids were simultaneously rocking other trees and seizing the national treasure for themselves. The youngest kid whose talent in mischief was seriously minimum was to be on the lookout; at the first snicker of danger we fled like ants under a torrent of Raid. One afternoon, of course, we were caught. Mom got to pay a few cents for the alleged loss - lower than my booty's market worth. I don't know what the other moms did, but the one across the road spent the rest of the day cursing her son and the man in an exquisite diffusion that we couldn't differ the targets. After three p.m. she even dragged in her late husband and her younger brother and the village headman and approximately twelve neighbors into the argument. Our house, a small box wearing thin and mossy terracotta rooftiles on top, whose walls were whitewashed bamboo plaits squaring a few meters of dirt floor, was right where a sidewalk might be. If I were to sit at the door and straight my leg a passing truck would be able to snatch it without even trying to, so to speak. The house next door was occupied by God knows what - I'd never paid any attention to them, for reasons that elude my remembrance - probably their absolute lack of questionability. There are things that exist solely for getting ignored. We just walk past them without a glance: trees along the palisades, groceries lining the way to the mall, and good people. People who don't give us any chance to paint pejorative sketches of are as well as inexistent. Slums, on the other hand, very exist. That's why mayors always yearn for some architectural paregoric and the Governor of Jakarta concluded that putting up massive statues would help reducing poverty in the city - if never itself, then its looks. Severed from our shack by the road was a large wooden house on a bed of stones, and a bit to its left was the only thing a house should be according to my sister - brick and concrete, tiles and terrace, garage and fences. But none was really visible at night - tons of gold in a barnyard wouldn't automatically mean electrical power in that village. The population of that real house comprised of a man, a few nonetities as far as I was concerned, and a girl whose wickedness was several years away upward from mine; she already went to primary school when I was a mere unschooled kid purloining calamondin. A rich farmer like her dad was revered very thinly in villages - basically the Javanese merely tolerate wealth, and only up to a certain point, while their demigods are the intellectuals and political hot shots who -- in Utopia -- shouldn't get rich. In the olden days aristocrats got the share of the collective respect even though they were rich, because they were rulers and rulers be as God's will, so such riches came from God with the best of all intentions to give the people some welfare and that was the end of the matter. People respect teachers and ulamas automatically, but Godless money wouldn't give you more than an anorexic size of a smile and a latent wish for your downfall. It was still so even though the way the rural wealthy lived didn't show that they enjoyed it; the garage was around a car because it was more practical and cheaper to have one rather than to use the public bus that took forever to reach the town, the trucks were had because of the same reason concerning harvest, the concrete was to dodge frequent repair, the tile was for easy cleaning after being used to dry sheaves and grains of paddies, the terrace with the chairs was because the front room was infested by sacks of peanuts and maize, the fences were because otherwise all the goats and sheep and cows that kept roaming around on their own would transform whatever was dried on the tiles into a colossus of unmarketables. The man was the girl's grandpa if age was to be the measurement - but by law he was her father. The much younger wife passed away when giving birth to that feminine brat. He didn't get remarried. Every morning he rose at the same time with the sun, drove to the fields without ever warming up the car, and got back with fresh peanuts to grace the whole tiled yard all day, while the leaves were to be driven to his stables. He was a reliable, punctual, man of routines. He even talked mechanically, to stop when the batteries that I imagined were stored somewhere inside needed a recharge. I didn't think that anything might ever happen to such a sterile corridor of a life, but the mother with the machine gun in her mouth across the road told me that the man's sister had been a lifelong patient of a mental hospital in town. She got there when only ten, after stabbing her mother or something. Maybe the neighbor told me this because she thought it was also my prospect - a wish that I could sincerely cherish. At five I thought it was lucrative enough - there wouldn't be such a thing as Math. A slice of the silent road was always eaten by piles of palm tree trunks, sawed away from I didn't know where, to dry under the sun and wet under the rain - the second was unintentional. Palm trees are my eternal source of amazement. Everything it is had a way with the perfect rural functionalism. The trunk made some building materials, kitchen utensils and something my sister fell off from; the leaves were braided into baskets and lined up as roofs; the ribs of the leaves were to be everything - outdoor brooms, chicken sate skewers, sealers of traditional wrappings, toothpicks, Math-teaching equipment at school; the roots were long-lasting seats; the young fruit was the best cold drink and antidote to poisoning, the ripe was the main ingredient of Javanese cuisine, its hair was to be indoor brooms and its thick skull was other arrays of household items like ashtrays and saucers and cups. The first bedtime tale I remember was of the palm leaf ribs - Grandma quoted President Sukarno's parable that designated Indonesia as the broom made of such ribs, capable of driving evil and the Dutch and Japanese (he repeated himself twice here) off, while individually an ethnicity was just one thin rib of no great use. What a mammoth of a task he had had - and no great resource to back him up. The solidifying of this union called Indonesia had been achieved in a short time, by the persuasive power of being in the same kind of colonial boats pirated indiscriminately in the middle of a tempestuous politically incorrect sea, but it might have been like assembling something using some glue; nails would have been better and some carpentry could have permanently baptised it into one unscrupulously firm product. Like every Javanese woman her age, Grandma was more or less in love with our first President - who was everlastingly memorized as a womanizing dandy sinfully (from the eyes of his rivals) driven by a brilliant mind and inimitable will and far-reaching statesmanship. To Grandma, that Indonesia had had so many First Ladies in neat succesions during his time was something of an enviable achievement - in both direction. President Sukarno had died the year I was born. Five years later Grandma still talked of him as is, never was. She showed me a newspaper cut that she always kept inside her colonial trunk, of the President chatting and laughing with JFK. I owe her the sight. Never, ever, again in our lives we were to see such a beautiful glimpse of bilateral diplomacy. Both presidents were mercilessly good looking, young, zestful and had the deserved self-esteem; even if we were just a wobbly emerging nation Sukarno didn't show any hint of inferiority there in Washington, D.C. Grandma said he and JFK had a lot in common - and our President, according to her, had dined with Marilyn. On my fifth birthday that year such a love of Sukarno had started to be perjured as paganism by the new regime. All of his life Suharto was to spend his time fending off this one phantom under his presidential bed; he had been trying to delete everything Sukarnoist from the nation's impressionable soul - to no avail. Sukarno's grave was guarded by secret service agents who took plate numbers and names and pictures of those who dared to visit it (Grandma did); Sukarno's sons and daughters and friends were pressed to stay away from politics; fabricated ponderous reasons were to be elaborated lavishly upon every arrest and exile of the former President's allies. But the cult had never diminished. As usual, repression only garnered worldly canonization. Shamans prayed at the site, peasants asked for salvation, working-class persons joined the remains of Sukarno's party that Suharto had compressed and mixed-up with a lot of others in the hope for internal mutation - in nineteen ninety-nine the much-wronged eldest daughter of Sukarno's, who at first was hesitant to let herself be used by the cultists, won the first democratic general election. Maybe Sukarno was not a good President in his later years. A few even said he wasn't effective as President. The one who be the first to break the line, who unsheathed the sabre and shouted at his men to rush forward and finish the enemy off, usually are only good at that and no other thing; the aftermath of victory perhaps is some quieter, managerial mind's task. To lead is never the same with governing. But he made me proud, albeit many years too late, by being photographed that way with another legend - it satiated my prematurely woken romanticism. It even meant more because when his daughter became President, her first bilateral picture was with George W. Bush. That birthday morning came as usual to behold an old dress that was trimmed and tucked and whatevered else in every angle so it resembled a brand-new failure. Grandma made a rice cone , dyed yellow with turmeric, halves of boiled eggs were around its base and omelettes sliced like ribbons were the outer ornament. A red chilli was hoisted by a toothpick on top of the cone. It was a traditional cake for a Javanese on every significant event, but she left out the usual heaps of vegetables because I shunned the species for the long first years of my life. The cone and its accesories were on a piece of banana leaf, snipped round along the edges of a saucer. I wore the long dress all day - it was too hot for such an extravagance, but the lure of the luxury of spoiling a special attire unpunished was stronger than the infra-red. I went to the river in the most unseemly dress, and just for the sake of my daily program went to the orchard, too. We were caught again. But this time with our chins held high we paid the fruit on site. I got a dollar that day; I owned the world. Then we bought some fruit salad with some insanely hot sauce, and waited for the candyman. The candymen were extinct a decade later; so were the candywomen - a fact memorized in the nineties' melancholic postcards and even actual attempts of vivifying. Candymen walked around bearing a moderate carrying pole for a pair of wooden boxes. When he stopped and sat on a small stool he carried along, whether buying or not kids were always forming a thick human fence around him. He had to repeat saying "Don't touch that! You'd get burnt!" every ten seconds or so - one of the boxes contained a terracotta stove housing lit coals, on top of which he put a thick pan full of simmering syrupy sweet, very red, heaven to my five year-old head. Why it was always red, no one could say, but the taffy produced out of the pan was really like nothing candymaking transnational companies would ever have to offer. A stick was used to scoop a bit of the red stuff and put it into a metal candy mold, shaped like birds, cats, and so on. A piece of the scraggy rib of a palm leaf was shoved in the middle of it. Using a small insignificant-looking tube the candyman blew the thing and a hot red candy was ready to burn our tongue at the first lick. Candywomen operated very differently. They carried the stoves in a bamboo basket, strapped on their backs with a shawl crossing their chests. They made the candy in secret - I'd never seen them doing it, all I could see was the winnowing tray, covered with banana leaves, on it was some flour. Their candy came in several different colors, shapeless sometimes but usually square. The hot candy out of the pan was rolled in the flour and they sold it cold. I remember that one candyman because it was my birthday and I could afford every shape he got at once. It was a mortifying dilemma, in normal days, to decide for a cat or a lotus; the cat was a work of art but the lotus was several grams fatter. But un-birthdays were strewn all over the calendar, so other inventions got to be made to bear them all.
|
All you could possibly know about Indonesia even if you don't wanna History of Indonesia since 300 A.D. 'til approximately yesterday Getting real in the island of Java History of Indonesian literature, fine arts, movies & television Indonesian Food, Drinks, Fruits, Veggies, Snacks How We Tell the Difference Between Tourists & Expats Don't
Get Here Javanese & Indonesian Traditions About Which We Are Just As Clueless As You Are No Cliché: What Foreigners Say About Indonesia When Cornered to Total Honesty
Byte
Back: Sunnyside: The
Crowd:
RainForestWind/AmeMoriKaze/AzuchiWind Click
Here
for Most recent update: two cups ago
|
