On love, for Joss

1. Joss has asked me to write about love.  She’s going to a wedding soon and I guess because I had one once she thought I might be the sort of person you’d ask.  This is strange to me, because normally love is the sort of thing that people my age don’t want to ask me about if they’re going to a wedding.  Normally, people my age are a bit embarrassed by the fact my wedding didn’t work out so well.  I like to think that this is something that we all grow out of, but a part of me knows that it might not be: that maybe there are a limited number of times you can cry forever before the village stops coming to your aid.  Or that maybe failing in marriage is like dry rot: it catches, it sets in, and once you look at it under the microscope you can see it everywhere.
2. When I first moved to Jakarta I noticed that men hold women by the wrist instead of the hand as they walk down the street.  This seemed awful and strange to me, so possessive.  Then, as my eyes attuned, I realized that women held other women by the wrist instead of the hand as they walked, and that men did it to other men, too.  And I began to wonder about what it was like to hold someone by their hot, slick fingers, instead of the cool encircling of a moving wrist.
3. I’m editing the English translation of a report for the Indonesian National Commission on Violence against Women at the moment.  Editing it requires a feat of un-imagining.  I take sentences that have been translated by google and turn them into new things that are poetic in their awfulness and make sense.  The new sentences I make read like this: the Criminal Code only recognizes rape as penile penetration of the vagina.  As a direct result of this, women who experienced sexual violence during the May 1998 Riots are reluctant to talk about experiences of rape that involved the forcible penetration of the vagina by foreign objects unrecognized by the Criminal Code, including household instruments, boards and miscellaneous materials.  If you read this another way, it says: the mechanisms of love are the same ones that we put into use in waging war.  People live through it, somehow, they keep on going.
4. Today, I received another invitation to a wedding.  They seem to happen here every day.  Maybe it’s just because there are more people in Indonesia, and so more of them are getting married.  But still, the whole process seems to go backwards.  In Australia, the long part, the hard part, comes before getting married.  Here, the long part of a relationship, the hard part, comes afterwards.
5. I wonder what it means to commit to that one day. 
6. Walking into any bookshop the world over is a lesson in love.  Trawling the self help section will show you thousands of words on what it should be like, how to get it, how to keep it once you have it, what to do with it after it has faded and gone.  But for all of that, what love actually is is so badly defined.  Such a small word for such a myriad of meanings.  As so often in life, it’s only once you move on to the fiction section that you begin to understand.
7. There is a note in my Indonesian lessons on how you can’t love ice cream, you can only like it.  You ‘suka’ ice cream, or you ‘suka sekali’ it.  You don’t love it.  The word ‘love’ in Indonesian is serious, and is reserved for the realm of serious things.
8. What does it mean to love someone?  It’s a question that rotates and rotates through my days of office and Jakarta grind and struggle with so many answers and yet so few that satisfy me.  Having spent too long approaching the world through theory, I can’t help but look for theories that will help me understand.  But self-help books make me gag and the advice offered up by Hollywood only lasts until my ice cream has melted and leaves me with a slightly upset stomach.  I’m starting to feel that loving is something that can only be answered in practice.  Maybe loving isn’t something that we discover in the rituals and in friends’ advice and the self-help section, but in the daily living of it, like breathing, or walking to the bus stop, or making cups of coffee.
9. Once, when I was in primary school, I remember sitting in the back of the car and talking about the mother of one of my friends who had been married four times.  I was talking about it in the way that I’d heard other kids in my class talk about it, full of scorn and condemnation.  I don’t think I would have used the word slut, but I’m sure it was present in my intonation.  I remember my mother slapping me down verbally for my arrogance in the way that only she can.  She said: that woman is so strong. 
10. She’s been hurt three times and she’s still prepared to love in the fourth.

Pressure, updrafts, tipping point, the beginning of the wet.

Wet season is here.

People have been whispering about it for ages, every time a storm comes over the city.  No one knows when wet season starts: the month and week shifts every year, a rumour. 

Lightning hits Jakarta between one hundred and one hundred and twenty days per year.  Experts say that the high rate is due to a mixture of pollutants like aerosol, humidity, and updrafts that start the wet and the lightning.  But everyone here knows that it starts when Jakarta’s mutterings have reached a breaking point. 

And Jakarta is full of mutterings right now.  The corruption commission (KPK) is under investigation, the Indonesian National Police in disarray defending their stance, the televised hearings running until three in the morning, the city a heaving mass of outrage.  Walking in the kampung last night every television was out on the street, people crouching on their haunches to watch in the shifting darkness.  Out the front of the KPK’s building tents have been set up where protestors camp out all night under a row of nooses.

I can’t work anything out.  When I asked my Indonesian friends about what’s going on late this afternoon they shook their heads.  It’s a relationship, they said.  It’s complex.  You can’t start.  Outside our window the sky lowered.

Walking into the lobby of my new office building at five thirty this evening I found a milling crowd under the chandeliers, tapping feet on the edges of the indoor garden and yakking into their mobile phones.  Sitting on the edges of the fountain and looking gloomy, clutching laptop bags to their bodies and sighing.

Outside, in the time it takes to be shuttled down from the 13^th floor by sparkling elevator, it had become dark.  It took me a moment to realise that it was’t real darkness, that it was the weight of water in the air. 

I rolled up my slacks and waded across the building’s grounds to stand, already soaked, on the pavement and try to hail a taxi in the stationary traffic.  The security gaurds watched me from under the cover of the first security entrance, laughing.

My Friday batik welded to my skin I retreated back and stood with them for a while, looking at the lights of the cars and the waves their passage sent up over the street.  An ojek driver came and stood with me.  Macet total, he told me confidingly from inside his swaddling of plastic bags.  You can only go home by Ojek.

He was right.  We didn’t so much drive back to Kuningan as wade, trailing our feet through the water that brushed against the engine, shuffling down Sudirman and then Casablanca with mouths and eyes full of stinging Jakarta clouds.

The sky comes down to the 21^st floor in wet season.  And Jakarta is beautiful, huddling under overpasses and smoking in the darkness, wheeling lights of the stationary warung in the purple night.  Lightning and thunder like a stage show, smacking and rolling and howling.  People laugh at each other, umbrellas bloom on the pavements in hallucinogenic rainbows of colour and bravado.  Because nothing can keep you dry, not the yards of ponchos that go flapping down the streets or the rolled up windows of the cabs.

The muttering has broken.  At least until the morning, when the pressure will start to build again. 

 

Listening for the string of pearls.

To understand what Jakarta is about, you have to listen.

There are no books you can read about it, no bank of stories accumulated in your cultural psyche.  When I first moved to Paris I knew the city in a way I didn’t know Jakarta when I stepped off the plane, in a way I will never know Jakarta. 

A thousand movies and picture postcards and novels and songs had prepared me for Paris.  Funny Face and Fred Astaire whirling Audrey Hepburn along the Seine.  Eloise and her hotel, the mournful strains of Holiday’s April in Paris, the tall grey latticework of the Eiffel tower etched into my cultural memory like a beacon.  A patina of preconceptions covered the architecture of my days.

But Jakarta doesn’t work that way.  In this humid place, the books you buy in shops are covered with a tight plastic wrap to protect them from the world outside.  Newspapers mould if you leave them outside, and the things that you read in English language history books lie, or tell half-truths, or simply don’t know.

The street revolts in Paris in 1969 have been so well documented that every minute is accounted for.  But trying to find out what happened on certain night of 1965 when the communists briefly took power, maybe, is impossible.

My mother talks about how stories in Asia aren’t like stories in Australia.  In the West, we need a narrative arc.  We crave a beginning, a middle, and an end.  But in Asia, the dominant story pattern is the String of Pearls.  Moments strung together which form a whole, not driving the story forward but letting it accumulate.

You learn about Jakarta by listening for pearls, trying to tune your ears to the constant background hum to pick out the important bits.

The city is built on gossip and word of mouth.  The omnipresent mobile phones glued to ears carrying news and scandal across crowded roads and abandoned buildings are fleshy, sound wave googles.  The women sitting out the front of their houses preparing meals the queens of cultural knowledge and anecdote.

Newspapers here don’t report the news here, they just repeat it.

Walking through Jakarta with the people I’ve met here has taught me which buildings are built by which corrupt officials, which roads not to take, which cavalcades belong to who, which uniforms mean what: the myriad things that make a city an organism and not just an abstract mash of buildings and flesh.

Until moving to Indonesia, the flip side of listening for me was asking questions.  Relentlessly, sometimes, prodding and poking and searching for the things I wanted to hear or know.  But in Indonesia, asking questions can be hard.  Partly because most of the time I don’t know what to ask, and partly because there are so many things that you can’t ask about. 

Here, listening is about accepting what people choose to tell you, and waiting.

Recently, in Ubud, I heard a woman talking about her life as a lesbian in Indonesia.  She has a long time partner and is accepted into her partner’s family completely.  Her partner’s parents love her.  But no one, in the years upon years that they’ve lived together, has ever referred to the fact that they’re a couple.  You wouldn’t ask.  You wouldn’t say.  You’d just listen to the silence and work out what it meant.

Here are some of the things I’ve learnt to listen for:

1. The smack of the street vendors’ woks, tinny and metallic.
2. The thousands of horns on the roads and the things they mean: move, stay, I’m here, you’re in the way, thank you, I hate you, you’re about to get a fender up the rear.
3. Thunder over another part of the city.
4. The song of the ice cream man on his bicycle, five notes over and over which mean ice cream.
5. The wail and boom of the call to prayer.
6. The TransJakarta attendants calling out the stops: Halimun – Dukuh Atas – GOR Sumantri – Hotel Indonesia- Monas – Glodok – Kota.
7. The difference between buleh which means amusement and buleh which means anger and boleh, which means: ‘Can I help you?’ 
8. The shrill, demanding whistles of the traffic Paks.
9. The sound of a hundred people waiting in a close space.

10. The silence which means you can’t ask: that you’ll have to wait, and keep on listening.

 

The last few weeks have been hard.  There are so many things I can’t write about on this for reasons that I can’t write about.  But the amount of energy it’s taken out of me has made me feel like throwing myself back into exploring the city again.  So be prepared for less thinking about Jakarta, less exhausting questions, and more listening to Jakarta, and accepting it just as it is.  A string of pearls. 

Starting: now.

On writing in the world: Ten things about Ubud Writers and Readers Festival 2009

1.  Driving into Ubud in the lowering evening after three months in the close skin and concrete of Jakarta the headlights pick out bare, fleshy flowers and crumbling shoulders on the sidewalks.  Winding the windows down lets in air.  Climbing out of the car at the Honeymoon my high heels falter on folded bamboo and incense.

2.  I have an idea for a story, a woman from Connecticut tells me in the back of a golf cart as we climb up through the grounds of the Four Seasons Hotel.  But I’m not a writer.

3.  An Indonesian poet sits in the air conditioning waiting for his session to start, letting the minutes tick past the hour, watching the walls for people with different tongues who have never read his poems and who will never read his poems.  Last week, he lost his house when the earth jumped up and ate it.  His translator sits to one side, picking at his nails.

4.  Cok Sawitri, her hands open to the audience at ten in the morning, explains the difference between a male and a female penis.  You cannot pair a woman and a man together for this exercise, she says.  When you pair the opposite sexes, they always lose control.

5.  On the edge of a patron’s infinity pool on Friday night, laughing and filled to the brim with lychee martinis and sweet sticky rice, an American woman in her late thirties peels off ill-fitting batik skirts and throws herself into the water.  Behind her on the wooden decking, a slim Balinese DJ puts on the first strains of Can’t Always Get What You Want, and then the dance floor is full of gyrating, sweating writers, madly strumming air guitars and stamping flat feet in the warm air.

6.  My step father gets into the car just as the old man slams his hand against the front passenger door, grasping at the handle, shoving a carved monkey against the glass.  Please have, the man says.  Please have.

7.  These are strangers.  Even here.  Not Australia, not America, not a festival of what and who but an argument about mights and maybes and is: for a few days, there is nothing embarrassing about belief. 

8.  A friend of mine drives up from his village and I go looking for him in the leaning stink of the markets, women pinching at my scarf and calling for my eyes.  But all I’m looking for is him, creeping round corners and peering over decaying balconies, wanting to see him first, wanting to see him when he doesn’t see me, and to see what he looks like when no one’s supposed to be watching.  He looks like this: he looks exactly like himself, bag slung over one shoulder, enormous paddle thongs on his feet, sifting his long hands through old silver and asking for nothing. 

9.  Out walking, I get lost in the high morning heat.  Far away from the main streets and the hawkers and the dogs the world has stopped, heavy green rice paddies and towering banana leaves.  Dirt tracks through the paddies that lead you on and on and then fade away into nothing, the edge of the jungle.

10.  In the car one evening Ketut tells me that the best way to learn the language is to learn the culture first, and that the language will come easily after.  You can’t understand the language unless you learn the culture, he tells me, leaning on his horn.  Ketut’s wife Janet has built the festival and together they have built the hotel I am staying in and the open, airy restaurants where I sit with my friends and spoon fresh sambal onto my plate. 

I’m going home to Jakarta on Sunday, I tell him.

Oh, he says.  Jakarta has no culture.  You, you cannot learn that language.

 

One thing about Jakarta:

1.  It’s ten minutes to midnight, and tomorrow it will be Tuesday, and my boss will fly to Padang with a camera and an emergency food supply and a huge, pregnant belly.  Earlier today we had lunch to talk about what I’ll do while she’s gone, and I told her about what Ketut had said.

A real Jakartan, she shook her head and agreed.  We’re forgetting, she said.  Then she began to talk about all the things she remembered, and she splayed her fingers, and she laughed, and her voice rose, and her ice cream began to melt. 

A bit of this, a bit of that, Javanese and international and Betawi and Indonesian and Canadian and tough as nails and relentless and classy as hell and brash and loud and yet making each step carefully and considered in the way that only the Javanese can and always reading the things that no one has said, watching her and her melting ice cream in that restaurant she became my hope that Ketut was wrong.  

The thing about culture is that it’s not something you preserve.  You can’t pickle it and put it on a shelf and open it up and look at it later and find that it’s the same thing.  Jakarta is more and less than the sum of its parts, spilling out at the seams, turning and restless and fouling its jar and refusing to sit nicely on the shelf.  A process instead of a product, and not always a nice one, sure.  Not one you can sell in a brochure, not one you can travel to, but maybe, just maybe, one you can travel through. 

My parents and my housemate are asleep inside, and out here on the balcony the lights of the kampong spread and glow in the pollution.  Horrible.  And lovely.

Becoming and Obama: the question no one answered, Ubud Writers and Readers Festival 2009

Oh, Oh, Obama.

Coming to Ubud, Bali, after three months in Jakarta has made me slightly nauseaus.  I hardly take my sunglasses off, and not because the light is harsh.  The light is like syrup, the air clean and moist, the world a verdant, indecent green.  My third day here and I still try not to look too hard at things in case I notice that it’s all just a joke: that there are seams in trees where they’ve been recently erected.  That if I touch the plants my hands will come away with paint on them.  That the still, crumbling buildings are cardboard cut outs.  I leave my sunglasses on because I’m scared of the disappointment I’ll feel if I take them off and find that I’m not in the world, but in an adult, Bali-Disney set.

But I’ll write of the strangeness of Ubud later.  Because I have Obama on my mind.

About an hour ago I got out of a session at the wonderful Ubud Writers and Readers Festival with the sort of manic frustrated energy that ideas should give you.  Remembering all the reasons why politics is everything: because politics is people.

The session was called Writing in the New World: Obama and Dissent.  Hosted by Michael Vatikiotis from the Humanitarian Durant Centre for Dialogue in Geneva, the panelists included Antony Lowenstein — who wrote My Israel Question a while ago in Australia and set off a spate of angry press – eloquent novelist Jamal Mahjoub, and Fatima Bhutto, niece of former Pakistani Premier Benazir Bhutto.

The panel was superbly moderated.  I’ve only been to a couple of sessions here but, as with all the writer’s festivals I’ve ever been to, they’ve often suffered from lack of competent moderation.

And if there was anything that could have killed this session it would have been a bad moderator.  The enormous, open marble hall where it was held perched on the edge of a ravine was packed, the audience full of maniacally twitching listeners who, as the panel went on, began to mutter and twist in their chairs, bite at nails and wind cheap batiks into knots.  The middle aged women behind me started low rants half way through, as if the bottled political frustration of years was rising on their breaths like a stench.  Snorting and exhaling rank disappointment and dissent, maybe more with themselves than the world.

The theme that arose from the panel was the need to criticize and watch Obama for faults.  That the promise of Obama and the symbolism of his presidency was new, but that the world he was inheriting was old.  Bhutto spoke again and again of the wrongs the American administration continues to perpetuate on the world and the danger of letting what she called ‘Obama-mania’ blind us to them.   Dissent is not disloyalty, she kept repeating. 

I could see that many people disagreed.  What about, they were shifting, what about what about.  What about the other people we should hold to account.  Whose fault is this really?  Can’t we enjoy this rhetoric?  Can’t we enjoy this moment?  Haven’t we won, somehow?  Give him time, people kept repeating: give Obama time to realize all the things we need from him.

Their disappointment was endless, and their hope new and fragile, and you could feel the edges of despair moving in against the wall-less room as the panel went along. 

For a moment, Obama’s election was a reprieve from the endless battle of politics.  It’s been proof, to so many people, myself included, of the possibility of change.  A visual reminder of the wonder and plasticity of human society.

What I wonder at is that anyone could ever think that was enough.  The disappointment and anger that was already palpable in the high, luridly verdant hills of Ubud today was sad, not because it showed a lack of faith, but because it showed a lack of understanding of what democracy and politics are.

William Hastie, the first African-American judge on a Federal court of appeals, once said that ‘Democracy is not being, it is becoming.  It is easily lost, but never finally won.’

Obama’s election isn’t the end, but just another beginning.  And I wondered at the woman who stood up and asked a wonderful question but who qualified it with ‘…but I’m only a normal person.’  I wondered who exactly she thought politics was about, and who it was meant to be for. 

The question no one answered was asked by a skinny, earnest US college student, who thanked the panel for dealing critically with Obama and fumbled with her microphone.  And the question was this: what can we do to rectify the blunders continuous American administrations have made in the world?

Everyone laughed, the whole room, as if she’d asked something stupid, something naive.  They took another question straight away, and answered that instead.  I felt bad for the sloping back of her head and the way she looked around at everyone else in the room, wondering if anyone was going to bring it up again, beginning to blush and cringe as she realized that the conversation had moved away.

Because in the end, asking what we should do, what we can do is the best, the most responsible, the most fundamental of all political questions.

Jakarta, lover.

If Paris were your lover, then you would be constantly in awe of it, delighting in its bodies and wanting to consume it and stepping over its fault and frozen aches and diseases just to glut yourself on the rich sickness of its skin.

If Melbourne were your lover, you would spend long afternoons together with coffee and in cold winds talking your mouth dry, huddled in black, waiting until it was time to drink again.

If Jakarta were your lover, you would take it home to meet your parents and it would drive up in a Ferrari and then walk inside and shit all over their floor.  It would laugh, refuse to clean it up, and proceed to cook dinner in the most elaborate and polite way possible. 

Then it would take your parents’ garbage outside and spend hours burning it on their manicured front lawn, smoking a Kretek and looking silently into the sky while your parents waited, puzzled and scared, for it to come back inside and talk to them.

 

I’ve had a friend in Jakarta over the last two weeks, and showing her round this new lover of mine has been a sweaty time, sometimes a painful time.  Walking someone through your world always makes you see it anew through their eyes, and showing Jasmine the pieces of this city that I’ve worked so hard at has been no exception to the rule.

And I have tried to love this city.

My god, have I tried.

Every spare moment of the last three months I’ve walked its streets and explored its backways and trawled its malls and warung and poked through its drains and ports for small corners and patches of concrete that will let me love them.  I’ve only spent three nights outside the city, and coming treacherously back into its smog and smell I’ve sucked it into my lungs and told myself it was embracing me again. 

I’ve eaten food in its gutters and sucked up chocolate martinis in its most elegant halls under the smiling mouths of rows of uniformed wait staff.  Stumbled its nighttime streets and stood sweating in its afternoon press.  All the time, filing away every moment, turning it all into need, polishing it as smooth as I could or swallowing it whole if I found I was about to start gagging.

It was bullshit at first, of course.  But somewhere along the line, without me even noticing it, it’s starting to become the truth. 

I could see that Jasmine saw Jakarta with the same slightly horrified eyes that I had at first, and I was desperate to persuade her of the worthiness of this new beau of mine. 

I trekked her relentlessly through it, from mall to mall to port to pasar to warung to ‘waterway’ to kampung to hotel to batik to bar.  I anecdoted to my highest possible capacity, attaching history to the bland faces of buildings and lavishing romance on the spiked protrusions that run through the city’s arteries, corrupt metal monuments to the monorail which was never built.

Because that’s Jakarta: just like Javanese culture, so much goes unsaid, and if you don’t know what you’re looking for, you’ll never, ever be able to pick the story out from the heat and the mess.

And stories are everything here.

Tomorrow I’m forsaking Jakarta for the first time, leaving Java behind to fly to Bali and Ubud for the Ubud Writer’s festival where I’ll meet up with my mother and step-father.

I’m nervous, in a way.  

Sitting at lunch today with my boss as I proudly displayed my new Jakarta love tokens – the mammoth, luscious Jakarta Good Food Guide by Laksmi Pamuntjak and the Green Map – she laughed at me and told me I was seeing more of Jakarta than Jakartans do.  It’s not mine yet, I felt like protesting.  I need to get it.  Damn, I need this. 

When I come back, I’m bringing my parents too, and they’re going to meet Jakarta for the first time.  After five days in Ubud, I have no idea what this city will look like to me when I get out of the plane and step into the stench of Sukarno-Hatta.

Because like any good relationship, I recognize that I have to love this city for what it is.  And while it stands burning rubbish in the front yard, I have to go out there in the mosquitos and the dark and keep asking it to let me in.

Playing Barbie

1.  In the garden of my grandparent’s old house in Sandringham there was an oak tree that I used to sit in.  We all did, all seventeen of their grandchildren… at the time.  Or at least, we all tried to. 

It was a long way down to the ground from that first branch. A long way to fall.

Looking down from it, when I finally got there, the bare garden stretched away on all points of the compass.  You could just see over the fence to the tarmac of Edwards Street.  From further up, your cousins would call to you that, if you could only make it that far, you could see Port Phillip Bay and the ocean.

Getting into that tree was the pinnacle of adulthood.  No one would help you up.  You were either tall enough to make it, or you weren’t, and that was it. 

Inside the house, unbeknownst to us, our parents and their parents were fighting and crying and standing in the kitchen so they didn’t have to stand in the living room, or standing in the living room so that they didn’t have to stand in the kitchen. 

 

2.  They always say that all’s fair in love and war.  What everyone actually means when they say it is: nothing is ever fair in love or war.  It never gets that easy.  It’s a full contact sport, and someone always gets hurt, as Jon Bauer once told me, blowing on his soy latte and being serious in the Fitzroy rain.  If it’s worth it, you have to be prepared to lose, or to hit the ground. 

And on that Sunday morning, looking out over the grey intersection of St Georges Road, I agreed with him.  If they don’t, I thought, then it’s not love or war.  It’s just the game we make when we’re pretending and dabbling our feet in the water and pulling Barbie’s hair this way or that so that she fits the character we’re looking for her to play.  We talk her into it, and out if it, and around it, and we change her shoes, and then she fits.  If it’s worth it, then you don’t worry about her shoes.  You jump, or you fall.  And sometimes, you do both.

 

3.  There is a place on the edge of a precipice near one of the houses I grew up in where the thyme grows so fast and hot in the summer that it’s like sitting in crackling change, high above the ground.  When I went back there as a nineteen year old I hadn’t sat in that spot for ten years.  And it smelt exactly the same.  And looking down over the foothills of the Alps towards the sliver of ocean in the distance I could smell exactly the same smell, and it made me wonder at how much had changed.  (So arrogant, I had no idea how much there was left to change, yet.) 

When we were little, our parents would set fireworks off for us from the precipice on our birthdays, expanding Catherine Wheels and explosive white rockets.

In a patch of rock on the ledge, one of my parents had carved their initials.  I walked over it twice when I was nineteen, being careful not to step on the scarred rock as I went back to the house.

Because I marvelled at the bravery of their fallings, all my many parents.  And at the things that might happen if you pushed your heels off through the air.

Ramadan in Jakarta: fasting, feasting, and forgiveness.

For the last month in Jakarta, and all over the world, millions upon millions of people have been fasting. 

Throughout the night, bells are rung in the streets and prayers are offered up.  Muslims neither eat nor drink during the day in Ramadan.  They get up at three in the morning and prepare breakfast, because at the moment the call to prayer goes up at four am, they must begin their fast.  The fast breaks with the buka puasa at the fourth call to prayer and the slap and rumble of the bedug drum in the evening at ten minutes to six, Maghrib.

In Jakarta, the month is a strange time of both stillness and celebration.  The pace of everything slows.  The days move backwards into the morning as office hours change from 8-4.  Across from the building I’ve been working in, the restaurants hung sheets in the windows to shield furtive, lone lunchers from the thirsty city outside. 

The elevators and busways are filled with the stink of parched mouths and lactic acid.  The one time I forgot and drank from my water bottle waiting in the close air of the busway corridor number six I looked up to find a sea of heads turned towards me, hundreds of pairs of thirsty eyes watching the liquid move through the clear plastic.  Shamed, I rushed the lid on and fumbled it back into my bag, dipping my head and closing my own eyes against them.

From half past five the streets become a veritable mass of moving food carts and colour, motorbikes swarming to the warung like hallucinogenic flies, people hovering as gorengan are thrown into huge iron vats of sizzling oil.  The Es carts line multicoloured plastic bags of drinks along the front of their stands for easy access, teenagers watching the movement of the liquid with first-timer eyes, as the Ramadan fast starts for those who have reached puberty, although many younger children do partial fasts in practice for the big one.

Fast is broken in a joyful rush and tumble, and then the streets empty again, for Maghrib, or for the final evening prayer at seven thirty.

Fasting is more than not eating or drinking for Muslims.  It’s supposed to be a time of clear thought and prayer, a time which brings you closer to God.  One of my Muslim friends told me that it’s considered rude to do things during Ramadan that could anger people, as thinking bad thoughts will ruin your day of fasting and make it meaningless.

It wasn’t until the last week that I really became aware of all the things that Ramadan means to people in this city.  In the evenings, I walked through the kampong around my apartment building trying to capture something of the tension and release of buka puasa on my camera.  I watched the kids capering in the alleyways and the women hunkered down with their huge mobile kitchens, feeding passers by and laughing.

Bit it didn’t feel like enough.  For weeks, I’ve been subtly suggesting to a good friend of mine that she take me to mosque, to no avail.  Finally, on Wednesday, I covered my head and went on my own.  It was a few days before Lebaran, the holiday which marks the end of the month of fasting and coincides with the slimmest wane of the sickle moon.

I was three hours early for Maghrib at Mosque Istiqlal, a huge, white, soaring wing of a place in Central Jakarta.  It’s the biggest mosque in South East Asia, built to accommodate 120, 000 people, tiled and cool with the air blowing through its wide-open spaces and the silent step of hundreds of bare feet patterning the stillness.

As I walked and waited and sat and talked in low voices to the women who held my hand and hoped for me I think I finally understood something that’s made me sad about my atheism for a long time.

Leading up to and during Lebaran Muslims all over Indonesia are asking their friends and family and god Mohon Maaf Lahir Batin: forgive me from the bottom of my heart for my wrongdoings of the last year.  As the call to prayer went up across the city and people rushed across the tiled of expanse of Istiqlal I sat in the balconies above them, alone, and watched them ask for simple forgiveness in that cavern of stillness and breathing walls, and watched them receive it. 

And I wondered at what that must feel like.

Balance in a blister pack: hospitals in Jakarta

You haven’t seen a city properly until you’ve spent some time in its hospital waiting rooms. 

Some things are the same the world over.  Sickness and fear have a certain smell, of disinfectant and doubt and bureaucracy.  But the actual contours of the experience are always different.

 

In French hospitals I’ve been asked to describe my sex life in the most intimate of details because I had a sore elbow, in American hospitals I’ve been asked to fork out four hundred bucks for ten minute consultations which resulted in a packet of Panadol and a pat on the head, and in British hospitals I’ve been told to come back in three days for the morning after pill. 

This last week in Jakarta I got to see the inside of two hospitals. 

Vertigo, for me, has always been the film, and the sliding, quiet menace of Hitchcock.  I’d never really thought it was something you could live day to day. 

48 hours after the earthquake I went back to the office in central Jakarta.  At eight in the morning I walked into Starbucks and ordered my coffee, and read the paper, and then forced my way through traffic towards my high rise.  I spilt my coffee three or four times crossing the road, and had to stop twice and check that the lid was on properly.  I couldn’t work out why it was going everywhere. 

Going through security I dropped my bag.  The security guard and I laughed as we picked up my tampons.  I don’t think he realised what they were.

Within four hours, the world was tipping and buckling.  Breathless and miserable, I set a glass of water on my desk next to the computer that I could use as a gauge to see if the world was moving or not.  Convinced as I trawled through the UN updates on the earthquake that it was about to happen again.  After lunch I had to leave, and go home to lie in a room where the walls tipped and swayed.

That night I got drunk at an Embassy open bar, pretending I was in control of my body, and the next day it was eighty times worse, and I found I could hardly stand without having to check my hands on the apartment walls.   

The days that followed were slippery, each one wending into the other as I tried to keep my balance.  I was prescribed Merislon, a drug for Menieres disease.  Not what I had, but I took it for 36 hours because I read a study a while ago that glowed a lot about placebos.  By the following Wednesday I found myself walking into a hospital in South Jakarta under strict instructions from my insurance company to get a CAT scan. 

I filled out forms and was directed through the maze of grimy beige and grey to the fifth floor, where I was bombarded with more forms and where I lied for the second time since I’ve been here about my religion. 

In the waiting room for the neurologist two eight year old girls in hallucinogenic pink Hello Kitty t-shirts were tearing pages from one of the Islamic women’s magazines and roaring at each other.  I sat on a plastic chair and pulled faces at them and they pulled them back, hollering with delight, edging closer to touch my skin and recoiling, squealing as if my whiteness burnt them.

The neurologist, when I finally got in there, was a prim and proper elderly Ibu with her hair carefully blow dried into a poof and a stethoscope slung elegantly around her neck.  How are you pooing, she asked me.  Then she lay me down on a bed behind a sheet and ran a series of knobbly little pizza cutters over my joints.  Roll over, she said.  Pull pants down. 

Is this for the CAT scan?

Yes, yes, needle for the brain.  Two needles for the brain.

I don’t like needles.  Will it hurt?

Ya, sedikit.  Sedikit.

A nurse with a cardboard hat flicked at the needle in my peripheral vision and spurted a great big jet of liquid into the air that landed on the floor with a plop.

Ibu Doctor’s phone rang and she answered it with one hand, the nurse grabbing my arse and pinching lustily while Ibu Doctor jabbed the needles in with her spare hand, talking about her dinner plans through her IPhone with the other.  In ten seconds it was over.

I had trouble getting off the bed.

When should I come back? I asked.  Sore ini?  This afternoon?

Tidak tidak.  Finished.  No scan.

What about the needles?

For the brain, for the brain.

I feel dizzy.

No, dizzy is not normal.  You feel fine.  I am writing this prescription for you.  This pill is for the brain.  It causes nausea.  This drug is for the nausea.  Nausea drug causes sleepiness.  This pill is to stop the sleepiness.  This is also for the brain, to stop dizziness, Merislon, take for ten days.  Take to counter three, please.

The nurse bustled me out into the waiting room, where I promptly fell over.  She watched me lying on the floor for a moment, adjusted her cardboard hat, and closed the door.  The two girls, thinking that I’d done this for their especial entertainment, fell over too, laughing and guffawing with delight.

I lay on the floor and sobbed for a while as the drugs, whatever they were, hit my brain with a come up like a clamp and the girls capered and howled. 

 

I’ve talked to a few nurses here since last Wednesday who’ve told me about the huge, silent problem of prescription drugs in Indonesia.  One, who worked in Kalimantan, told me that many people refuse to believe that they don’t need drugs, and will become agitated and confused if no prescription is offered.  Doctors dole out pills in unmarked packets with little advice as to what they are, and patients carry them home in the knowledge that they are carrying cures tight in their fevered hands. 

Placebos play an ancient, secure role in all medical cultures, and rightly too.  But this is more than placebos: not sugar pills or bottles of air but antibiotics prescribed for viruses, wildly inappropriate drugs for a vast array of illnesses: anything and everything will be poured into blood streams in a huge, chemical homage to modernity and hope.

 

It’s Monday now, a sparkling new week in Jakarta, and I find myself on the stable side of health again, with only a drawer full of unfilled prescriptions and a fading bruise or two to remind me of what it felt like to have vertigo in a city where balance comes in a blister packet of pale white pills.

Pacific Ring of Fire

I’m sitting at my favourite table outside on the central walk-way at the Taman Rasuna apartments armed with three tins of hair-of-the-proverbial-canine.  It’s twenty minutes past six, and at the tables around me people are breaking fast and eating loudly, laughing.  An old Chinese man is swinging his arms and doing calisthenics in his underpants on the side of the pool. 

Yesterday, an earthquake breaching magnitude 7 shook the city, and there was an evening of chaos.  For the last twenty-four hours I have lost faith in the ground.  All day, I’ve been watching the world of things closely, looking for ripples in my coffee cup and wondering if I’m imagining the slight reverberations I seem to see in the emptied yakult bottles lining my apartment’s benches.  No amount of beer last night could get rid of my fear and the bitter bite of adrenaline in my jaw, and the eight bottles yakult I downed today did nothing to stop my hangover.

I’ve never been so scared.

Not at first.  At first I didn’t understand what was happening, my colleagues J and S jumping from their desks and telling me in closed voices to grab things and walk slowly, walk slowly.  I just stood there with my laptop clutched to my chest saying huh? Huh?  Then the floor heaved and the papers slid off my desk.  Get your bag Ruby, get your bag, J kept on repeating, matter of fact and tight.  It’s an earthquake.  Walk slowly, Ruby.  Don’t panic.  We have to get out.  Outside.  Ruby, we have to get out of the building.  Now.  I stood for a few seconds in the doorframe, people streaming out of their offices and lurching down the hall, before it finally hit me and I began to move again.

 

Walk slowly

You walk slowly in an earthquake because the world is sliding and heaving around you and any step could take you one way or the other.  You walk slowly because hundreds and hundreds of panicking people running through the twenty floors makes the building shake even more, their panic and fear moving the foundations as surely as the snapping and collision of the tectonic plates below them. 

 

Don’t panic

I vaguely remember my friend V hustling me down the corridor with his arms out, shepherding me into the stairwell, saying go go go in his boomy voice and then he was gone somewhere behind me in the crush.  Thirteen floors is a long way down a tiny, crammed stairwell where the doors are opening onto every level and more and more people pouring in, screaming and crying, shoulders colliding with the concrete walls as they creak and heave and shudder, when the weight of people from the floors above is increasing by the second.  Women struggling with their high heels, trying to get them off and being shoved into the well.  Someone holding onto my wrist dug their fingernails in so deep that today I have a stinging scab where their panic took the skin off.

 

We have to get out

On the fourth level, I got out of the stairwell and into the car park, where a security guard was yelling for us to take the ramps.  And then I ran, still clutching my laptop to my chest as if it was going to keep the building together.  The car ramps circle in upon themselves down and down, folding in and out again through the levels to the ground.  And I was so relieved to be out of the close heat and the sobs of the stairwell and away from the stink of other people’s fear, just to be turning in the air again was enough.

 

Outside

Outside I stood and watched as people came streaming out of every orifice of the building, sobbing and yelling and stony faced running.  Someone put their hand on my shoulder and shook me and it was B from the office, and suddenly both of us were laughing like maniacs.  That was my first earthquake, he said in Bahasa.  What?  I was laughing too much to understand.  He repeated himself in English, that was my first earthquake.  Me too, me too, I said, which wasn’t true, but which felt true. 

And we kept laughing and laughing as other people came down and joined us, and they were looking at us like we were mad people, and we were mad people, and we were lighting all of his cigarettes even though I’m not smoking because who gives a fuck about cancer when the ground is going to kill you?  And we were still laughing when one of the people in charge of our organization came running over and said what do you think you’re doing?  Get away from the building.  What if the building comes down?  Get away.  Now. 

And he took my by the arm and pulled me down to a car park further up the road where we sat and stumbled out the aftershocks, the streetlamps swaying with each other and the billboards trembling.  And all around us the soaring might of Jakarta’s business district, suddenly fragile and heavy, kept in a high blue sky by a miracle of engineering and steel.  The ground sobbing away beneath us, hysterical, and finally, finally calming.

 

We have to get out of the building

Once, driving my brother Billy and his friend Piers through the bush in Northern Victoria, we had a long conversation about the worst way to die.  It’s one my brother and I have had many times since, altering its dimensions slightly but always coming to the same conclusion.  The worst way to die, we always end up agreeing, is as one of many. 

The example we use when we’re talking about it is a plane crash.  Billy says he hates the idea because he is terrified of ending his life as a statistic: three hundred people die in crash over the Indian Ocean.  And we both agree that we would want to be the pilot of an empty plane as it went down: that we could have that moment of seeing the world end for us in quiet. 

For the few minutes I spent in that stairwell that was all I could think of, that long-ago conversation with Billy and Piers in the dust and low grey of the Australian bush, racketing along a track towards Thurra River in the old Toyota with the sea appearing and disappearing over the dunes in front of us.  I can’t go out like this, in this disgusting well of flesh and concrete, surrounded by other people’s screaming and fear, and with no choice and no time. 

The moment I was in the car park I stopped caring.  With space around me and the sun coming in across the ramp I was myself again, and the building could shake all it wanted, and come down as it pleased.  I could jump if I wanted.  I was alone, and I could taste it.

One man who had pushed women over as he tried to get out was standing alone out the front of the building as one of our security guards hustled me, giggling still, past the building and down to the open spaces.  The man was just standing there, his face appalled, not moving or screaming or shoving anymore, just ashamed and shaking, minutes after coming face to face with a part of himself he will never, ever forget.  And I felt so sorry for him, so momentarily heartbroken by his face, that I finally stopped laughing.

 

Earthquake

Indonesia forms part of the Pacific Ring of Fire, a 40 000 plus long kilometer belt of oceanic trenches and volcanic arcs which is home to over 90 percent of the world’s earthquakes.  A shifting, busting place of colliding crustal plates.  This earthquake was a magnitude 7.3 on the Richter Scale, with 69 aftershocks.  Its epicenter was 115 kilometres from Jakarta, 30 kilometres off the West Javan coast.  Over 40 people have been reported dead along the coast so far, although numbers will rise as the missing fail to be found.  But in this wide country where counting lives is so difficult…  Towns destroyed, homes flattened.  In Jakarta, only one person died, of a heart attack from fear.  Who knows how many were injured clawing their way down staircases and out of malls.   

 

Now

Two months into Jakarta, watching the world for tremors and the places where it will give way.