Inner Light

The sound of the mu’ezzin, prerecorded and wafting in from a nearby mosque loudspeaker, the call to prayer, in Arabic but in a melody unlike the Middle Eastern tune I learned, was a constant and predictable intrusion. Even watching television—yes, even in Nakao Village, they had television and, I supposed, a satellite dish—a popup appeared on the bottom of the screen at prayer time, but I never saw anyone actually pray. Yudhie says that Granny is very devout and lives like a nun. He showed me her tiny room, and he was right. She has it set up as a prayer room with a small cot. Though she doesn’t understand Arabic, she prays in the language just the same. At prayer time, she just disappears.

Before it got dark, Yudhie, Riyanto and I took a walk. I think Riyanto wanted to show us the land, and also show us to his neighbors. We saw the little pond where he fishes for the family’s meat, and the rice paddies nearby. We passed a few neighbors’ homes and spoke greetings. As evening wore on, we walked to a corner store and sat on the veranda talking to the owners and their little boy. No one spoke English, but a few words here and there. Everyone was pleasant and soft-spoken. Never did I feel unwelcome. In the evening, a relative who was a Muslim elder stopped by and spoke to me a little, asking where I was from. I got the feeling that most of these people had never seen a bulé up close.

Campaka flower

Nightfall, my first night in the real Yndonesia, the land where the night air is scented with the perfume of campaka and jasmine, where we are serenaded by softly croaking frogs in the rice paddies, or the rising and falling shrill of crickets, where calm is the night, like it were made for the whole world’s sleep. The modern world still penetrates even the remote countryside. Somehow Riyanto got another temporary circuit rigged up with a light bulb attached, which he hung up in the bed room Yudhie and I would share. What looked like a queen size bed filled the tiny room. A crude shelf hanging from the wall was where I laid my glasses when I went to sleep, Yudhie between me and the wall. Clean, quiet.

We turned off the light bulb and settled down for the night. Yudhie sleeps deeply, I sleep almost not at all, or at least, very, very lightly. At precisely four in the morning, I am awakened by the loud crowing of a cock somewhere outside, but far off. Then, almost without a break, about a dozen or more other likeminded fowl began amusing themselves at my expense, one of them crowing to wake the dead right outside my window. Then, the mu’ezzin starts up, and a soft but persistent Arabic chant calls the faithful to prayer, and there I lie, happily staring blankly but resignedly—and contently—up at the heavy beamed rafters, counting the slats between the roof tiles that are admitting the faintest light, as so many ‘windows to Heaven.’

I hear the slight sound of others moving about in the cottage, but it is still dark. Soon, though, the light bulb hanging from the ceiling in the next room, which is the room where we sit to eat, socialize, and watch television, is turned on, casting a reddish glow on the rafters above my head. The walls of the rooms do not go to a ceiling, but end where a ceiling would be if there were one. Someone is out in the yard drawing water now. I hear the clank-clank of the chain that pulls the bucket up from the deep well. Water is being poured into the reservoir from the bucket, and then into other buckets, and brought in.

The women are up in the pre-dawn darkness starting their chores. The mu’ezzin has fallen silent, and I hear what sounds like the scrubbing of the cement floor in the next room, a sound rhythmic and almost musical. Silence reigns, as far as human speech goes, but yes, the cocks are still crowing with stubborn regularity. Are they having a competition out there? More water at the well being brought up, I can hear the chains rattling. Now, it must be food preparation. I hear the sound of chopping. Are vegetables being chopped for our breakfast? Yes, here too we will eat what I soon learn is the breakfast food of Yndonesia—rice, rice and more rice, with veggies and fish and other tasty things, of course.

I listen and I look, my ears and my eyes growing more and more accustomed to what are no longer strange surroundings but rapidly becoming home for me. Yudhie beside me is sleeping still through all these sounds and sights. I would wake him to share this experience with me, but I don’t. I know that to him this is what he has known most of his life. It wouldn’t sound or look to him as it does to me. I let him sleep, even ‘when morning gilds the skies, my heart awakening cries, may Jesus Christ be praised!’ Yes, that Christian hymn starts unwinding its strains in my mind, and my lips silently sing it. Then, with the scripture, ‘This is the day that the Lord hath made, let us rejoice and be glad in it,’ I simply thank Him.

Next… On the road again

At home in Nakao

Home of Riyanto and his family, Nakao Village, Lampung

Our motorcycles pulled in at a neat little cottage made of cinderblock, roofed with terracotta. As we dismounted, people started pouring out of the house. Riyanto’s wife and her mother, as well as other relatives and friends. It was hard to know who was who at that first meeting, and I never did quite understand all the relationships, but we were met with a gentle and gracious kindness—I should say, I was met—for I was the stranger, and probably the strangest person some of them had ever seen. Yudhie introduced me to his step-mother and step-grandmother, but there’s no such thing as ‘step’ among them. Granny looked at Yudhie with as much love and pride as a natural grandson.

Hen and chicks, not the Garuda,
should be the national birds of
Yndonesia

Protocol, yes, even—no, especially—in a rural village. The front room of the house, the door left open, the only windows with glass in them, that was where we left our sandals, to enter the other rooms of the home barefoot. I noticed later that the motorcycles were also parked in this front room. The door left open allowed hens and chicks to come running in and out as they pleased, but no one seemed to notice. We men sat down around a table, while the women brought snacks, then rice and cooked food. Something that tasted like grape Kool-Aid with ice was brought in a pitcher along with glasses. The guide books all warned, ‘Don’t drink iced drinks. The ice could be from tap water.’ I shrugged and drank.

As it turns out, even in a small village where electricity comes into the house by a single wire that taps into the power line following the road, people know how to live clean and healthy. There, standing in a corner of the room was a water cooler like you’d find in any office, loaded with an inverted five-gallon plastic bottle of water. ‘I’m not gonna die after all,’ I breathed a sigh of relief. Remember, all this was very new to me. I hadn’t discovered yet that the guide books are warning tourists what not to do. I wasn’t a tourist, but a returning family member, and if my family could eat or drink something, it was safe for me too. Following this rule, sometimes against my common sense, I came to no harm.

There’s almost too much to tell, even about this short visit. Though daylight lasted only a few hours, it seems like we did and saw so much, more than can be described. Riyanto, though a Christian, was married to a Muslim, and so the house was full of cats. He sometimes threatened to do away with them—they were so many—but he never did. He is a gentle, quiet man, a little younger than me, who works on motorcycles for a living. His customers bring their sick cycles to him, and he heals them, squatting in the yard, using tools that’d be thrown away in America, with an ingenuity that puts formal training to shame. Boys and men stopped by all day, maybe to fix cycles, maybe to see the stranger.

Yudhie took me on a little tour of the house after our ceremonial first rice had been eaten together. The women had never joined us, but brought the food and drinks in, and removed them when we were finished. He showed me the kitchen, a very large room at the back of the house, whose back wall seemed to be made of woven bamboo rather than cinderblock as were the other walls, even the interior ones, in the house. The kitchen was absolutely medieval, with a raised floor at one end, and many kitchen tools I had seen in museums of ancient history. There were windows in the house, covered by woven bamboo shutters. In spite of the simplicity and poverty, everything seemed clean.

Despite the warnings that Indonesia would be crawling and swarming with insects, I almost never saw any, not a single roach, maybe a handful of flies—literally—and of course, a scattering of mosquitoes—I came away with perhaps a dozen bites. I saw plenty of ants indoors, anywhere you left food or sweets uncovered, they would invite themselves, but so tiny that you could scoop them up with a paper towel as if sweeping up spilled poppy seed, and throw them away. Riyanto’s women had caged song birds hanging in the front porch, or perhaps they were his, I never asked. I couldn’t figure out how everyone knew whose chickens were whose, but asking, was told, ‘Yes, we know which are ours.’

Granny with the ‘Big Bulé’ in front of her store, Nakao Village

Granny has a little store built at the edge of the roadside. There she sells small treats, fruit, and drinks, little gadgets and anything else she can find. Sometimes she even sleeps, or at least naps, in her little store. It has a single low bench in front of the window and under an overhang. Yudhie and I sat there as she patiently showed us the ‘right way’ to peel and cut up a mango, which we then shared between us. Literally, mangoes and rambutans and other fruit simply fall off the trees everywhere you look. It seems that almost every family in this village has a little store or shop of some kind on the road in front of their property. In Yndonesia, it seems everyone always has something to sell. It’s free enterprise run wild.

Next… Inner Light

Sumatera!

Lampung, Sumatera from the air

It was almost Christmas. We had talked about the possibility of visiting Lampung, the southernmost province of Sumatera where Yudhie was born and grew up, but we weren’t sure exactly when we could go, or how we would get there. Sumatera is the large island west of Java that extends northwest and borders the Malayan peninsula. Lampung is the province opposite Java, separated from it by a narrow strait dotted with volcanic islands, the most famous of which is Krakatoa, which detonated in 1883 and killed at least forty thousand people. Yudhie’s dad, Riyanto, still lives in Lampung, but is remarried into a Muslim family in a small village in the interior. We were going to visit them for Christmas.

Yudhie and Riyanto

When Yudhie was born, his dad disappeared from the family, and he did not find him again until he was a young adult. Growing up, he was raised by his mother, who was an invalid and died when he was fifteen, and then his older sister and some female relatives tried to take care of him as best they could. Yudhie had visited his dad a few times since they were reunited. It is a slow and lengthy journey by buses and ferries and motorcycles, taking at least one full day going and another coming back. After we came home from our trip to the mall, we weighed all the possibilities. Since we had the resources, we decided to fly to Lampung, and then arrange the final travel to the village of Nakao.

We bought two round trip tickets from Jakarta to Lampung and back, online and with the assistance of Yudhie’s brother-in-law who is a travel agent, living on the island of Timor, far to the east. Then Yudhie called his dad to tell him we were coming on the 22nd, visiting, staying one night, and returning on the 23rd. It doesn’t seem like a very long visit, but honestly, it would put the family in some difficulty for us to stay longer, and the visit was somewhat ceremonial, paying respects at Christmas time, and bringing some gift money. Yudhie also wanted to show me where he grew up, but when we got to his dad’s place, he decided that it could not be arranged. So we just enjoyed being with the family.

View from Riyanto's front porch

The flight was uneventful, other than the fact we were crowded into a plane with other holiday travelers probably going home to villages in Lampung as we were. Upon arrival, Yudhie navigated us by angkot and bus to an intersection on the edge of Lampung town where we were to meet Riyanto and a friend, both waiting with motorcycles to take us to Nakao village. This was going to be a real adventure for me. I hadn’t been on a motorcycle since I was a nineteen year old college student over forty years ago. Would I survive the voyage? I wondered. At our rendezvous point, there was Riyanto, waiting patiently with his friend. Both were clad in full motorcycle gear, leather jackets, helmets, the works.

Yudhie sitting in front of Granny's ‘store’

They had been waiting for us for a few hours! Our plane had been delayed in leaving, but we couldn’t reach them before they had hit the road. Nakao village was more than two hours away over mostly unpaved, dirt roads full of pot holes you could drown in, and all loaded with traffic going both ways, cycles, cars, trucks, even the occasional ox cart. After making our introductions, we each hopped on the back of a cycle, me tucked close behind Riyanto, two dads riding together, and Yudhie with the younger friend of his dad. Luckily it was sunny and not rainy. I wore only the short sleeve shirt you see me wearing in the pictures. Dust blowing at me at fifty miles an hour was the only discomfort.

Granny out for a walk, Yudhie sitting in front of her ‘store’

We stopped for gas. Motorcycles don’t use much, the gasoline costs only 4,500 rupiahs per liter, that is, about two dollars a gallon, and it is sold from a government franchise. While they gassed up, Yudhie and I went into the convenience store and bought a couple of big bottles of Sprite. Indonesia is Sprite and Coca-Cola country, not Seven-Up and Pepsi land. We took a few drinks and then climbed back on the cycles and took off. The roads were for the most part unbelievable. The ruts and holes were more normal than smooth pavement, many of them still full of water from recent rain. I held on to the cycle and Riyanto and moved like a horseback rider jumping hurdles. It was dangerous, but fun.

Nakao Village, North Lampung

By now, we had left ‘civilisation’ behind, for sure. That gas station was the end of it. Now, in the country side, it was mostly ox carts and motorcycles, along with foot traffic. Native-styled, beautifully and solidly built cottages met us by the minute in clusters. About every ten minutes—I am not exaggerating—we passed a mosque with its loudspeaker mounted on a tall pole. Colorful hens and cocks crisscrossed the road in front of us. Riyanto successfully avoided all of them, but one. ‘Someone will have some ayam goreng tonight,’ I hoped. Besides all the mosques, we knew we were in Muslim country because of the cats. The prophet’s favorite animal, they say, and so they love them too.

Ayah and Yudhie arrived safely

At last, we were turning into a dirt drive way. It was a church! And we drove in alongside the church and stopped, Riyanto talking to his neighbors and friends without getting off the motorcycle. They all smiled and looked happy, as well as amused as I think Riyanto was telling them of his hair-raising ride with the silver-bearded bulé that his son Yudhie had found somewhere and was bringing home. I noticed here that the men and boys smiled and laughed, something I hadn’t noticed much the day before in Tangerang.

‘Now, this must be the real Yndonesia,’ I thought to myself. We met up again with the other cyclist carrying Yudhie, and we drove the next few hundred meters to Riyanto’s place.

Next… At home in Nakao

Neighbors hanging out at Riyanto's house, Nakao Village