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