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
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The wooden house across the road had its front yard besieged by cassava and other edible tubular-rooted plants, substitutes of rice in some areas, though in a fertile spot like the village they were just a second sort of diversion in dry season. The boy-prince to be sovereign upon all these was my ally, but we got to wait for the departure of the dowager queen to the market or wherever to be able to pull one plant out of the ground and take the roots. If she was around, they would be inaccessible. When it was cassava, he got to get rid of the incriminating evidence of its leaves by recycling them through the goats; his mother would have gotten really mad if she found this out because the leaves were edible and salable, just as the roots. A small fire was to be made of pieces of palm tree and dried rice husk, and we roast the thing, generating more smoke than anything else -- we often lost the sight of the food behind this shroud and got it grossly overdone. We either did this or made some trucks out of pomelo skin - I guess we were not very busy. Once in a month every sixth day Grandma had to go to the town to get her pension. Sometimes she took us with her, for a ride on a bemo. The vehicle looked like a scooter supporting a canvas-roofed box, with a weak engine and three wheels. The motored pedicab has gone now. Its cousin bajaj survived a good many cosmopolitan tempests in Jakarta only to get legally banned at the end of the two thousand calendrical years. But in the early seventies the driver took us to the town and back as a normalcy, through all sorts of driveways culminating at the town's marketplace where we got iced coconut milk and occasionally some fried chicken. My sister could never recall any of those rides - she fell asleep upon entering the vehicle, was woken up to drink the coconut milk, sleepily carried through the fascinating rows of snacks, to fall back to sleep once the driver turned on the engine. She always fell asleep on any mobile contraption - including bicycles. She had somnambulisted away the earlier years of her life. Grandma said that showed a genuine talent. In the evening, under the kerosene lamp that was hung on a metal cord in the living room we scanned books and magazines for pictures. Here and there some letters seemed to suggest some meaning but the singleminded search of the visual scared it away. The radio told us about things and people and places; America, wherever that was; China, I got a dim impression of its whereabouts, near the market; Soviet Union, at first I believed it was a company; Egypt, I thought it was a myth; Suharto - everpresent, though we had never seen him at all, being in a tropical place where newspapers were as rare as snow. Grandma told me that the mystique around the moon had been shattered a year before my birth; she couldn't remember the names of the astronauts except 'Michael Something' - who didn't set foot on the cold satellite's fabled face. It was funny that the lunatic and moonstruck would have to give way to other meanings; though Mom backed her up I still disbelieved Grandma until I got the access to TV and saw the film and, alas, also saw Nixon. Fortunately he had resigned when I heard this lunar story and was positively elsewhere when I saw the documentary. Then the storage battery edited a Javanese opera right in the middle of an exciting fight between the prince Arjuna and the inane demon Cakil, whose urgent need of a thorough dental surgery got into my sister's nightmares. Whenever this happened - the arbitrary death of the battery - then we went to bed earlier, where, by the way, the demon had been for the past twenty minutes - in my sister's nightmare. Later that year I guess a dozen of coconuts had fallen on my head, or I was hit by a commuting bus and got a brain concussion, or something - because out of the blank I started to make sense of the alphabet. It helped a lot whenever the battery acted up. I left the village with politics in my airhead; I had had too much of the radio which implanted the disturbing thought that Leonid Brezhnev was a cannibal; and the first book I read at the pace of a snail was Pergolakan ('The Upheaval') - it had taken me a year to finish and a lot of confusion to solve. I re-read it years later when my mental digestive system was in a camaraderie with written words, and the second straight reading confirmed my first slowly-grasped impression that civil war is the worst fate a nation could fall into. We passed the old house of the busy street on the way to the new place; they were only half a kilometer apart. So we were more or less back to the same spot. But this time we entered the dirt road, farther from the street, deeper into the haphazard slices of rocky, hilly area at the back of the town. It was a quarter that couldn't make up its mind whether to be urban or a suburb, but was quite resolute in making itself slummy. The prelude of the house was a spread of concrete narrow yard, and when the door was opened I found that it continued inward. By then my sister's meticulous account had registered the facts that sustained her comparative study, like, the old house had all the modern conveniences such as power, tap water, family bathroom; the shack in the village had a communal toilet and a communal well with pails and no electricity; this one now got power and family bathroom and a well with hand pump. Such a rich collection. The pump alone could have choked a computer. Everything about it was beyond description at short notice. But for practical purposes we weren't tall and strong enough to use it, so both Mom and Grandma got a version of some Madonna-like exercise -- a healthy continuation of the daily weight-lifting they'd done in the village around the well. The normal Indonesian task of taking a bath twice a day at the same time everyday had punctualized the way to the domestic muscularity. The surrounding area was like a violent digital game - the whole place was hilly once, then people manually chopped its parts off and drilled through it and did every possible damage for the sake of overpopulation; in the end we got the crematorium more or less underground, the hospital right beside it was hoisted uphill, the market under it slumbered halfway, some houses perched on top of cakes of rocks and some others crouched lower than one's feet when standing in front of those houses. The road that led to it from the east was even more quirky. An ordinary driver's licence wouldn't help you there - unless you're one of the inhabitants there was no way to drive through the literally rocky path, at one point it arched eleven inches towards the sky, next it dived five, afterwards it got vagaries at various heights - just imagine that if you can. It looked like a spot where baby diplodocuses and T-Rexes practised American 'football' on. In my first years there I walked through this jungle of rocks, then I rode a bicycle and later on a motorbike, or alternately was dumped by whoever owned the vehicle I hitch-hiked in right at the borderline of this irregular madness. And when I didn't have to use the path anymore because I no longer lived in the town, then the district bulldozed its way through it and laid down a smooth civilized driveway. I should have known the government hated me so much. Another path to reach the house by was a steep, nearly ninety degree sharp, dirtroad. The houses were from this angle located inside a bowl carved out of a single block of wood by a wild boar using its hoofs. Then there was a rocky walkway to the top of the hill from where you got to slide down to reach a road where the market was. Even the locals wouldn't attempt to ride anything up this one, except maybe lightning. An alternative to this would be a dying asphalt road that looked like being built in Queen Victoria's coronation day, or even more likely during George Washington's administration. In the eighties it provided shabby canyons and grand pimples all over its face that a stucked out-of-towner truck or a somersaulting pedicab in monsoon there were no longer spectacles. Those paths were why I believe that geography (geology in this case) makes people. The neighborhood was like their roads. The house was almost right where the four ways met. So it got no companion on its right side, but it slantingly faced a pair of concrete seats commonly built in such a place with the intention to serve some decent social functions and which in most cases ended up being the estuary for the flow of local drunkards and assorted crackpots, and to top all these exactly in front of the house was the neighborhood's dumpster. In 'junk days' - three days a week - a very old man with skin like parchments came there to burn the people's accumulated trash, generously sending off thick smelly smoke all over our house. At the sight of the approaching garbageman we would flee to every direction, the list of temporary refugees included the cats. Adjoining the dumpster was a spacious garden randomly inhabited by banana trees, cassava and chicken houses. It was a private property, but out of no option had become a public place. That was our playground. After school every kid around would come there and play marbles, hopscotch, Indian wars, football, badminton, or playing house - scraping dirt and using it to build walls and rooms, to be furnitured by pieces of glass, plastic toys gratis from some brand of snack, and paper figures. For a time there was nothing going on but the zing to play badminton - Indonesia was the world champ those days, and as sports didn't endanger the regime and could serve to divert attention from politics, whenever we won the All England tournament or others of the kind everything was halted to hold a national celebration. I even had to ask for a racket because nobody would play anything else. I was worst at kasti - a game similar with baseball - generally pathetic in high jump and pole vault, and entirely helpless in swimsuit-related sports, but I was with the school's sprinter, relay racer, driller and gymnast delegates in students' tournaments, something constant to me from elementary to high school. I simply hated badminton, but after a while I could cope with the national frenzy and until now I only confine the dislike to watching it. Once in a while somebody's parent won big at cards and gave everybody a treat - the whole neighborhood would be gathering in the garden, watching monkey acrobats . When a respectable Someone lost a daughter in a nuptial, he would also use the same garden and everyone got there to watch the all-night Javanese shadow-puppet theater. This was really a big event. The main course and single reason for the gathering itself was not as significant as what it had amassed as side-effects. Candypersons would flock there, every snack vendors as well, toy peddlers, balloon sellers, people who sold soft drinks - Coke and Pepsi were not there yet outside the center of the town, so we mostly got homemade lemonade and sudsy ginger syrup. And all of these wonderful angels of retail would remain there until the last element of the stage was brought down. When it was a wedding, as long as I wasn't lent as a bridesmaid -- that meant the heavy chignon made of some stranger's hair to pull me into migraines, and high-heeled slippers that I couldn't walk in, and rented Javanese full-dress that kicked out every possibility to move -- then I could get some fun like everyone else. The only miserable persons around in such occasions would be the bride and groom and their immediate families. They got to sit upright for hours in any weather, inside the rented dresses and slippers and all. When we finally got a TV set, it substracted a little of the possibility of outdoor calamities and hooked me up to Jimmy Carter.
I can't provide any believable excuse for this, it just happened. Maybe the hint of peanut-farming did it. This might have clicked with what I have known in the village, even though Carter had sent me cringing at his "I would never tell a lie" vow, his unapologetic religiousity got me sneering, and (but) his Human Rights dogmas in foreign relations had outraged the Indonesian politicians. Big men, big ideas, big events, big naivete - the seventies and eighties were magnetic madhouses. I kept my eyes on the Egyptian Anwar Sadat, the Cambodian Norodom Sihanouk, the Libyan Muammar Khaddafy, Iranian Shah Reza Pahlevi and Ayatollah Khomeini, and Jugoslavian Josef Broz Tito among others, plus the row of Soviet dispensibles, that prolonged the trail of such persons as the Argentine Juan and Evita Peron, the Indian Nehru and Indira Gandhi and the Egyptian Nasser; our Sukarno was among these, too. Argentina seems to retain its ability to elect romance Presidents, but generally today's politics is just too square and straight and plain - and, once it was not, it involved leather thongs and White House interns and then a possible global war. So saddening and uninspiring. In the end of seventies and early eighties when no political assassination was done we got Laverne & Shirley, I Dreamt of Jeannie, Hawaii'an Five-O and Mission: Impossible - late shipping of import from Jimmy Carter's land of the politically righteous. But TV or no TV I went jogging every Sunday morning. Those years I had four or five steady fellow-joggers. We would start the morning run at around five-thirty; if we started earlier than that, it means some criminal intention, because it usually happened after we spotted some ripe mangoes in somebody's yard the day before. Our biggest catch was several kilograms of star fruit. It belonged, locationwise, to one of the kid's own uncle; incredible that the man didn't think of us at all when spreading his wrath around in the forenoon, accusing everybody but the real fencebreakers. We always gave such a dirty treasure away to other kids and sometimes like the star fruit to their mothers, too, whenever it was more than enough to consume sinfully by us alone.
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