Blue Rose Monday

[part 1]

 

The veterinary lore had flushed Dora's sleep into the morning.

"Now you know Bangkok roosters are most sensible," the distinct voice of Mrs. Susi's* -- the one nobody within the radius of ten meters from her house could ever have mistaken for any other's, it was equipped with the built-in Dolby stereo system and a splash of something that silverwares produce when they fall one upon another - "Only yesterday I told Mr. Bowo so and he agreed with me. There is no doubt whatever that the cats started the fight."

Mr. Bowo as a matter of course would have agreed that the sun wriggled in mambo around the earth and the mango tree in his mother in-law's yard had yielded a crop of grapes if Mrs. Susi proposed so, especially before supper. He was the woman's husband. Dora thought she couldn't lift her eyelids at all and would have lied down awake all day long in an anticipation of the act of courting migraines for the night, but the mention of cats got her feet on themselves and they took the rest of her along. She glanced at the black plastic clock on the rack; it was seven-thirty. A very indecent hour to be talked away. She opened the bedroom window and others under the same roof, still to the fowly tales that drifted through the airvents. Here and there the timid, baritone voice of Mr. Giman of next door penetrated the jungle of the silverwary words and lent the acoustic jam a small but socially thanked-for relief.

Dora opened the door near the well that led to her backyard and looked for the cats she didn't own.

None of them were there. Her older sister Amelia had driven the pair of bored but elfin furballs into the house on Sunday, asking her to look after these felines until she and Eri, her husband, got back from Jakarta.

The sun had displayed itself like an internally decomposing but outwardly glittering dandy of Oscar Wilde's time, narrowly escaped a likeness to Michael Jackson, when Dora unlocked her front door. A terrace was spread there outside, a bamboo chair sat down with rickety ease under the golden rays. The white and orange cat was sitting under the tamarind tree. His inseparable buddy, all black with a white patch under his chin, hugged a branch of the tree and was apparently napping.

Mr. Giman's house didn't provide anything that could prevent the people at Mrs. Susi's porch from seeing Dora. The same kind of small yard of Mr. Giman's house was entirely devoid of vegetation and the baldness gave them a direct view of the terrace, the chair, the tree, the cats, and the woman who pretended she didn't see them.

"Mbak* Dora!" Mrs. Susi called her.

"Hi," Dora waved her hand as if she were the last innocent girl in the world, all others had perished under the boots of poultry inquisition, "Good morning, too!"

Nothing on earth could make my sandals walk past the inexisting gate and across the alleyway and onto her slippery tiles, Dora said to herself. She knew if it was really urgent the neighbor could scarcely wait to go to her in the first instance.

She was doing it now.

Mrs. Susi worked for a governmental agency. She was wearing the color of unbaked terracotta around her substantiality, complete with a nametag sewn to stick permanently on it, and other emblems were littering the surface, enough to sustain most tailors' theory that they (the tailors) simply got to get the highest pay compared to the rest of the human race since they were the ones endowed with the most nonsensical tasks such as embroidering Indonesian civil service emblems. The office would have started its unreasonably dignified leisure at eight, so she didn't have much time to hang around the house in the morning, and Mr. Bowo had already warmed the car engine up. Dora was already lucky even though she still didn't think so. If it were Sunday Mrs. Susi would have talked of nothing else but the furry criminals and her noble fowls from dawn to dusk to every ear that she could nail down.

"Mbak Dora," Mrs. Susi re-started, now at ten inches away from Dora, but her system had never come with a remote control, so Dora saw Mr. Bowo instinctively had the car roaring slightly louder, "Are those cats living in your house?"

"When I went to bed they looked like so," Dora said, "But I have no idea about the rest of the night." She already put on her defensive mode, quite unplanned, but perhaps the official air of the woman's attire had intimidated her to. A good citizen simply couldn't help feeling intimidated by anything related to the government, since it usually meant trouble. Mrs. Susi did look like the government. She even wore a pair of official-looking black high-heeled shoes, a must for many female civil servants, and they made Mrs. Susi officially two inches taller. "What they might have done?" Dora asked her, stressing the third word.

"You know I keep two Bangkok roosters, " Mrs. Susi replied, "Mr. Bowo is so fond of them and he would never leave the house without a lengthy farewell at the fowls' cage, and a welcome conference after he gets back home in the evening." Poor Mr. Bowo, Dora thought. Men who kept pets and/or loved fishing always seemed to her like refugees, usually as ones who had to flee some domestic despotism. "He is sure he has locked the cage last evening. But this morning the two roosters were in the backyard, and there was a terrible noise as they were attacked by cats." Mrs. Susi paused, not to allow any response nor to sink in an impression, but because she coughed.

Dora quickly asked, "Did he lock the cage, or did he lock the roosters inside it?"

The look in the woman's eyes could have been made of the same material that the bars of the cage were made of. "Roosters are the most calm, composed and noblest of creatures," she said, in a tone worthy of an audience with Queen Elizabeth of England. "They were not prowling the night away like certain brutes." She seemed to get thoughtful at this, probably remembering a nephew, or perhaps she was having a flash of Batman: The Series in her mind. "Those cats," Mrs. Susi pointed at the ginger, and the cat instantly walked away to the terrace, "broke into my house, caused some roof-tiles to fall off, and attacked my roosters. If you intend to keep them here they must be put into a cage themselves. Mr. Giman is concerned," Dora turned to look at the man who stayed in his own yard although not being uninstalled from the discussion, because a married man is never to talk with a single woman from too close a distance, and he, really, Dora thought, looked like the embodiment of the word 'concern'; "Mr. Giman keeps parakeets. He is afraid if your cats would do the same there."

"Outside the movies I've never seen a cat having her way through locks and keys," Dora said. "Anyway, they're my sister's," Dora shifted the blame to the direction of the person who would have been just as concerned as the angry Bangkok roosters' mistress and the worried parakeet-man, only in the exact opposite direction. She could imagine Amelia standing in her place, coldly staring at Mrs. Susi and getting her even madder, at which point she would have picked the ginger and held it all through Mrs. Susi's wrath. "They're staying until Wednesday," she added.

"Even so," Mrs. Susi said, "They are your responsibility. The fact is the roosters' cage was locked, and they were safe inside, until the cats came in. We were lucky they weren't hurt, but luck can't be relied upon the second time around! Until the cats are gone I would thank you if you keep an eye on them, keep them off my roosters and Mr. Giman's birds."

"Okay, I'll put them on a house-arrest," Dora promised. That was impossible to enforce to cats. But she was, in the name of social peace, expected to say that.

"Good." Mrs. Susi looked at her left wrist and almost jumped at the sight shown by her watch. "I have to go now," she marched out of the gateless fenced yard and reproached her husband for failing to inform her they were late to work. Dora looked at them for a moment. Their old car was once pink but now, thank goodness, had been transformed into the look of having been bleached without an intention to arrive at any certain hue. The advancedly married couple were working at the same office, too, and their esprit de corps in all paths they had trodden got its booster in the state of childlessness.

Mr. Giman, having no word to deliver, had slipped away noiselessly from the low fence separating their houses.

An old bicycle whose experience in the traffic battle had been carved everywhere as scars and bruises and reassembled pieces it carried around like badges of courage, was coming into Dora's yard. It escorted Sari, the young woman who helped her cleaning up. Sari was almost a decade younger than Dora, but she made up for what years she lacked with a hurried supply of kids - at twenty she was already a mother of three. Her husband Yanto worked at the gas station. They lived, all five of them, in a hut of ancient bamboo plaits, generously lending some irony to the beauty parlor in red and gold brick and mortar that was built a few months ago right nextdoor. They rented the hut for a big number of small errands a year - done by both husband and wife for the landlady. Dora met this figure once - nobody she knew could fit so perfectly into the role of landowning and property-renting than the woman. She was around sixty, tall, broad, talkative, and exacting in her demands. Dora got to see her that time to pay a small sum of money that the landlady asked for from Sari and Yanto since that year they had had less time and energy to serve her domestic cause - Sari's last baby was born prematurely and both mother and kid had to stay in bed for some time. The young couple couldn't have paid the compensation. That was the preliminary of Sari's informal but permanent employment. Before it happened, Dora only called her in whenever she felt that camels could have lived on the dust in the house if they emigrated from the desert.

Sari had been an orphan for life. She stayed with somebody she called 'grandma' although they weren't related that way, for a few years in which the woman fed and clothed her and paid for the schooling, favors she returned by labor in her rice fields. Sari finished Elementary School at twelve and began her search of a job immediately, doing odds and ends until she finally found Yanto - who was involuntarily leisured from being a member of his own family after the marriage; it was seen as a mortal sin because his father had taken an oath to form a connubial relationship with his best friend; an everlasting brotherhood that was to be built upon his son and the other man's daughter. The details might have brought forth dissimilarities between her and Sari, but in essence Dora thought the detachment of a larger background than their immediate selves was shared. They were more or less by themselves in the crowded world of elaborate familial ties and an alarming supply of insects.

Dora walked into the house and made herself some coffee. Sari was standing precariously on a thin, tall, rustic stool she had put on the kitchen cupboard to reach the imaginary dust - Dora thought the ceiling up there was clean enough - and she wouldn't come down when Dora expressed her unwillingness to house a self-induced brain concussion. That was probably Sari's way to say she needs a specially designed contraption to do the thing, Dora thought, and put this what's-its-name tool with long handle into her shopping list. She was a bit annoyed. Sari, with all her good side, had this characteristic more likely to be found in cats - Dora wouldn't give in to the prevalent idea that it was the Javanese mode of communication because she believed it was born specieswise. When Sari needed something, she wouldn't have asked for it, instead she would have kept silent and employed some non-verbal ways that could relay her message across to Dora's eyes. It had happened before several times, always within the realm of housekeeping - like, she made a show of tapping the last sandy morsels of sugar inside the bowl when they needed sugar; she brought her old shirt to wipe the floor with when the cloth for such a purpose fell down to pieces after its thousandth use. Amelia's cats were using the similar tactics - the two of them had been sitting pretty facing the empty melamineware that was to be their temporary dish in exile. Dora, who hadn't noticed them before, poured on the biscuits and watched them eat for a while. The one bag Amelia left there couldn't be enough for two days. All pet food was imported from places like Australia, so the price was quite heartbreaking for the uninitiated.

"Mrs. Susi complained about the cats," she told Sari when the latter came there with a broom made of splintered palm leaf ribs.

"No way the cats are gonna do any harm," Sari commented, "They got enough to eat here."

"Well, some people got doubly devilish after they're full of dinner," Dora said. "Most senseless and cruel acquisitions were planned by full bellies."

She got back to the house, and the black cat had occupied her favorite chair near the window of the living room. Dora picked him up and put him on another chair; then quickly sat down before the upset cat came perching back.

"I hate you," Dora said, beating him in transmitting the same message first by his green eyes.

Her coffee was still too hot. She lit a cigarette and pulled the small table closer with her foot - the black cat seemed to wait for his chance to reclaim the chair - and opened the envelopes that were stacked there. She didn't bother herself with the fat brown envelopes bearing the names of magazines or newspapers - they were only returned manuscripts which she tossed into the plastic basket for Sari. At least Sari could get herself thirty cent worth of waste paper this week - her guesstimate was that there had been a kilogram of such junk. Sari collected used paper, old clothes and shoes, and glass bottles to be sold to the purposefully wandering merchants of trash that came once every two weeks around the neighborhood. Dora knew they sold such things and many other items in the traditional market, as individual oddities and as bulks of one kilogram each - she had no idea who the customers could be, but certainly there were some such persons. They had had their own profitable, time-tested concept of recycling a long long way before the imported vogue embarked.

The only envelope which content was read happened to be a request from the Department of Literature of a university to deliver a 'small piece on Shakespeare' that it would print in their English Literature Sub-Department internal bulletin and if she would agree to be one of the speakers in the subsequent discussion then they would get truly gratified. This could be the cat food, Dora thought, or it might be another pure request of selfless labor - she had heard the university's public grievance that they couldn't raise the tuition fee for fear of the students' revolt but they would have to close down certain facilities this semester because of the professed lack of means to keep them in operation. Yet this wasn't anything until she knew what it was. She threw the letter onto her computer desk.

Wrestling against financial problems everyday could be some economists' idea of having fun - but mere mortals like her wouldn't find it amusing most of the time, she thought. Like Sari's, her house belonged to a landlord. It was to be her home address for two hundred dollars and fifty cents a year - a baby ant compared to the mammothian eighteen hundred dollars a month that Yosep's brother paid for his apartment - his daddy, though, thought of it as a part of the investment, as was the tuition fees extorted by the American university. Yet Dora wasn't sure that she could raise the sum on time during the next few months before she got to renew the lease. There were the telephone bill, the gas, the electricity, the water supply and neighborhood necessities such as her share in providing for the nightwatch men, the possible weddings of friends, birthday parties, the birth of somebody's baby, funerals, and so forth, that all demanded some gifts of money according to the customary guideline. Plus she got to send a few dollars to her mother once a month - this was her self-imposed burden to repay what she had taken in exactitude, and her mother's salary was surely impossible to have lived on so she welcomed some additional dimes and had never faked parental dignity. Dora inhaled deeply and saw the black cat had settled down on the chair he previously rejected on the ground of what her mother didn't resort to. "You pride little autocrat," Dora said to him. The cat closed his eyes and pretended that he heard nothing. Dora laughed.

There was a commotion outside, and the voice that was, alas, only one-tenth of Mrs. Susi's habitual loudness, calling everybody from the paved alleyway. Dora hated this part of her days, and got up as fast as she could, but it was too late. "Miss Dora, vegetables, chicken, shrimps?" the vendor had already showered the words to every attentive ear around - because otherwise they all would have missed the day's cooking materials. Dora didn't want to miss her but she detested to hear her name being called in public places for whatever cause - even if she were in an Academy Award night.

Like everyone else, Dora knew the peddler and the woman knew a lot more people outside her circle of immediate neighbors. She was thirty-four, or so she said, her name was Endang and her husband Wawan, her eldest kid was in sixth grade of Elementary School and the youngest in kindergarten, her mother had passed away when having a holiday in the zoo five years ago when the elephant trumpeted an earache for the visitors, and her father in-law got some gall-bladder problems. As the barter of personal info was largely one-sided in Dora's case, what she had gotten was limited to those. Mrs. Susi certainly had known every piece of the mosaic named Endang and all about every relative and friend of hers - because the vendor got the equalizer when it came to Mrs. Susi. She was the one who told Dora about the socks Mr. Bowo was in the habit of leaving on the kitchen table.

One by one the neighborhood wives, daughters, housekeepers and assorted other females came to the spot where the red bicycle with large baskets rested. Mr. Giman was the only male customer, being retired from whatever business he had gotten his back problems and the idea to keep parakeets from. His wife still worked, and his two children had been married and lived in Jakarta. He would linger at the edge of respectability - his own gate - until no woman was left around Endang, and only then he took what was left as the day's menu. Dora had never asked if he was the one who cooked - she planned to ask Endang about it.

"What do you think we are? Goats?" the slim but acid voice of Mrs. Lia greeted Dora's ear when she reached the vendor. The basket of green edibles that day was curiously dominated by young cassava leaves, and that was the fact Mrs. Lia pointed at.

"Some people think these are vegetables, " lightly Endang replied, "They have vitamin C and B and others, too."

"I love cassava leaves." Mrs. Karti, the big bulk of wisdom (Mrs. Susi's words) came joining in. Her voice was like a bass guitar's. She didn't distribute the pleasant sound unprovokedly, so into the voice then had crept in a certain tinge of unfathomable meaning that, nonetheless, sounded important in the highest order. Dora thought Jaco Pastorius' fingers delivered the similar impression.

"I'm running out of elpiji,*" Laila, daughter of the Karmans, said to Dora with the air of suggesting that it was a privilege of some kind. She had finished her Secretarial Academy education a few years ago but couldn't find a boss other than her ailing mother. So she stayed at home since.

"The grocer's out of gas?" Dora asked, a little alarmed. She hoped the stock of rusty blue metalworks would get themselves refilled before her gas tank was empty, too, which might happen soon.

"Last night I still saw some," said Mrs. Ida from the yellow house. "Unless somebody took them all for a mass suicide I don't think they'd run out of gas so quickly."

"But there isn't any tank left," Laila said.

"In that case you'd better look around and see who isn't present," said Mrs. Ida.

Endang casually observed without stopping her task of whacking open a hard coconut shell with her stubby blunt knife, "Where is Miss Anisa?"

"If there is to be a suicide, it's more likely to be me than Anisa," Laila said. "My cousins are coming to lunch and I don't even know what to serve, plus this gas thing."

The two, Laila and Anisa, were the only female neighbors around Dora's age, and they were all singles. The younger and older ones had been a string of Mrs.'s. But she was the only one who lived by herself there. Socially this was a dangerous position. What saved her was her job. The average homemakers regarded artists as an entirely different species, and as such were given special temporary rights - with the consideration of the possibilities of repentance; the rights were hoped to be taken away again when they have come back to their senses and acquired real jobs.

"Give me some of those wretched carrots," after the prolix speech about the demerits of cassava leaves Mrs. Lia was almost normally business-like.

Dora only bought a bunch of fresh spinach and a soybean cake. She still had a couple of packets of instant noodle in the kitchen. Her two meals a day rarely went beyond forty cents. She put the chosen spinach away to avoid Mrs. Novi's complete disregard of anyone else's property, but she had to wait her turn to pay because Endang was busy unpacking spices for other customers.

There are millions of Endangs exactly at this minute all over the country, Dora thought, unpacking bundles of uncertain clothes and dubious plastic bags for millions of citizenesses. Each of them knew a Mrs. Lia, a Laila, and they noticed the absence of an Anisa - Dora thought that copies of the same prototype that had yielded Mrs. Karti was not to be found in every crowd, so she didn't include her in the imagined vegetable-vending epistemological package. Perhaps, she continued, not too many Doras either, for good or bad. She watched the tablecloth that was spread on the alleyway, displaying the rest of the spinach and cassava leaves, green cabbages, red and green chilli, dark violet eggplants, chopped young jackfruit, cucumbers, melinjo* leaves, long beans, and others. Her sister Amelia shopped in supermarkets for these same things. Although she was the sole financially sane member of the family, she wasn't as able to spend as she might have wanted to, so her mother said it wasn't time yet to buy vegetables in supermarkets. But Dora could understand Amelia's reason - comfort and ease aside, the spinach under Endang's care couldn't compete with the decidedly longer freshness supermarkets offer to keep and to charge them for it. And there was one advantage Dora most emphatically envy the supermarket-goers for - they didn't have to dread the probability of missing Endang in her rounds, they didn't have to see Mrs. Lia's nose, and they didn't have to consider other customers who might have fought for the only one ripe jackfruit or green apple or better-looking spinach. But then again, Dora thought, they wouldn't have known Mrs. Karti's voice, they didn't know the real worth of the merchandise, they wouldn't know an egg just snatched from under the hen's rear end - and they would never know that Mr. Jaka, husband of Mrs. Lia, had been seeing another woman, and that Laila's little brother Husni had been grounded for the confiscated pornographic video CD's found in his room, under the mahogany chest, disguised as Disney cartoons. Just how on earth Endang excavated this sort of info, Dora couldn't venture a guess. But she was sure that after Mr. Giman got into his house with the (possibly, since no one but Mrs. Karti wanted it) cassava leaves, Endang would have gotten the data of the early morning veterinarian feud. That was one of Sari's invaluable characteristics, not to distribute such tidbits; never; not even when she was expected to, such as when Mrs. Bambang didn't have time to print official invites to her silver wedding anniversary that was unplanned but was to be carried on upon her sons' arrival. Because of Sari's omerta almost no one in the neighborhood showed up.

When Dora counted the change into Endang's right palm she received the day's breaking news. "You don't know Suprapti, do you, Miss Dora?" Endang asked.

"I guess not," replied Dora, wondering what it was.

"It's good that you don't," the vendor fetched two lumps of salt for someone, still talking, "I have to go to a double funeral today at eleven. Suprapti went asleep yesterday when she was supposed to keep an eye on the kids, and both of them - both - were found by their own father in the afternoon, all blue and swollen and on the surface of the pond after being sunken."

Mrs. Lia put her nose into the news, "You mean she killed them?"

"More or less," Endang replied. "I don't think mothers who fall asleep when her infant kids are around a pond is not guilty of the kids' deaths. You can imagine the man's grief when he got home and lo and behold in his own pond -"

"Recklessness might be or might be not murder." Mrs. Karti, clutching a couple of eggplants that looked very small and subdued in her substantial hand, observed. This was rather like a message written in Morse codes.

"Yeah, well, in the streets that happens all the time," Dora commented, sensing that she was expected to get interested. "So how did the mother take it?" she asked Endang, rhetorically.

"Bawling like crazy," was the answer. "But even her own mother said that she deserved that."

"The dead kids did not." again Mrs. Karti said her mind. Endang shrugged expressively.

"Working mothers are always careless," Mrs. Lia chimed in; that was her pet subject, "I stick to my opinion that it isn't right to leave the care of our children on other people's hands. Nothing compares to a mother's." Looking at Mrs. Lia, Dora thought maybe so, and she felt sorry for the whole progeny - and if that nose was hereditary --

"Suprapti doesn't work," Endang said. "Her husband does. And they're so young," she shook her head, looking at Dora, "They got a shotgun wedding when both were still in Junior High. Even now with two kids they are, like, eighteen."

"EIGHTEEN?!" Dora couldn't help it. She wasn't surprised at the fact, and that was why she shrieked.

"I got married at eighteen myself," Mrs. Lia looked at her with contempt. "Age doesn't mean a thing. Either you are ready or not."

"Age does mean something," Dora answered, "Medically speaking it certainly does. Just ask any mediocre physician. And this couple were fifteen or sixteen when they got married because she was already pregnant. "

"I agree it's wrong," Endang nodded. "I was married after High School. I didn't dare to get pregnant before I was twenty."

"That's your cowardice," Mrs. Lia insisted.

Mrs. Karti delivered her verdict against her. "Fighting the Dutch* was courage. Pregnancy under twenty is dumb."

Mrs. Lia had her thin-lipped mouth opened to retort, but what did she say further was out of Dora's earshot. She saw Sari talking to someone at the terrace, and still full of pregnant teenagers and drowned infants she went back home with the spinach. Eighteen, she thought to herself. While age doesn't mean stages of mental development and phases of inner maturity, while it might just denote degrees of biological decay, still Dora believed Suprapti should have been spared the things she had endured since fifteen.

"This is Jumri," Sari said to her when she was close enough to see the man in a gas station's attendant's uniform of prussian blue. He must be Yanto's colleague, Dora thought, and nodded to him. Jumri was neat and polite. Dora wouldn't have asked what was he doing there on her terrace when he was supposed to be selling gas if Sari didn't tell her on her own will.

"Jumri got a problem," she said after he left. "He has been seeing a girl named Wiwik, and they broke up last week, and later today I got to see her in hospital." Sari picked the ginger cat from the living room table that she was about to dust. "Wiwik drank a lot of insecticide last night," she continued.

"Jesus Christ," Dora slapped her own forehead. "Why are there so many teenagers clogging the Mall, if they are supposed to be dying?"

"Wiwik is younger than I am," Sari said.

"I was more likely to kill someone when I was your age," she felt acutely that she was that old today. This reminded her of the Suprapti case that she just heard of. She told Sari about it, and it turned out that she knew this other teenager. "I was passing her house on my way to drop Dede (her eldest kid) at the school. There were a few people around. At worst my guess was her mother died."

Dora wondered how come Sari didn't get the news earlier than Endang, if she knew Suprapti.

"She was Yanto's former girlfriend," Sari said.

Dora threw herself on the less-patronized chair (the black cat slept on their favorite one) and drank her cold coffee. So Sari wasn't on a friendly ground with the Suprapti girl, and she might also have felt less than sisterly towards this man Jumri's ex-sweetheart. It was only nine o'clock in the morning and she already got two funerals and another crippled heart in a hospital. "God woke up very early," she said to herself, and re-lit the neglected cigarette. She wasn't a good smoker but she needed it just in case there was to be more untimely nuptials or deaths or both -- the day was still long enough for massacres and ludicrous mistakes.

 

Footnotes

All you could possibly know about Indonesia even if you don't wanna

History of Indonesia since 300 A.D. 'til approximately yesterday

Indonesian Food, Drinks, Fruits, Veggies, Snacks

Indonesian Language
& the Original Indonesian
Ethnicities' Alphabets

Meanings of Indonesian Names

Indonesian Architecture

Indonesian Palaces

Ordinary Indonesian Houses

Indonesian Neighborhoods

The Backpackers' Hangout In Town

How We Tell the Difference
Between Tourists & Expats

Don't Get Here
Before You Read This!

Traditional Indonesian Brides

Indonesian Interior Designs

Indonesian Gardens

Indonesian Music & Dance

Indonesian Clothes

Indonesian 'Trademarx'

Pictures of Indonesian ethnicities

Indonesian Traditions About Which We Are Just As Clueless As You Are

No Cliché:
What Foreigners Say
About the Real Indonesia
When Cornered to Total Honesty

History of Indonesian Literature, Fine Arts, Movies & Television
(with pictures)

Indonesian Wedding
(photos & erudition)

Getting Onlinehold in Indonesia

Blue Rose Monday

Hypocrisy Of Mooi Indie

The Culture of Cannibals

Squadrons of Woe

My Generation

Night (=) Owls

Tommy Boy

Oh, Corea

Salad Day of the Village

Ashes Too, Ashes

Waterworld Miscalled

I, Too, Maybe Sing America

Rock Garden

Of Synchretism

No Wings On Their Shoes

Shop Talk

Snobs & So On

Really Duty Free

Between Osama & I

Only Fire Flies In Manhattan

School Kittens

Patriots (and Scuds)

Most Famous Unknown

Dreams Ain't Made of What Is

This April Mob

Schooled Miseducation

Ultra Poor

Dog-nappers, dog-killers & dog-eaters

Indonesian Art Spaces

Indonesian Prince, exalted poet & murder victim

The I of the Beholder

All the President's Men
(He & Himself)

Pictures of Indonesia
in the good old times

Romantic history of
the Indonesian military

What Indonesian
freedom fighters
looked like

Maps of this Republic,
the Island of Java,
the Province of Yogya

 

Me, Myself & I

Personal Words

Offline Ink Jobs

Wingding

Collexionz

People & Mo'