It’s the night before Ramadan in Jakarta. The skies above the city are a baleful, watchful blank. But down in the streets, there is the glint and bang of a million fizzing, dirty stars.
Nation
I’ve never understood what makes a stretch of dirt, infrastructure, and flesh into a nation. What people mean when they say they’re fighting for it. Whether they’re killing and dying for history, or for leaders, or for people, or for ideas, or for money, or for fear.
If you go to Australia’s capital on April 25th, you find that Canberra has tarted itself: a plastic hussy complete with bunting and hysteria and fake tattoos. Parks are packed with children waving Australian flags, tears and heartfelt thanks for half-remembered half-truths booming out over loudspeakers, all accompanied by the clap and scream of jets whirring overhead in high, blue Aussie skies.
I live in Jakarta now, in a place where the skies are rarely blue. A hungry monster of a city, twenty million and growing daily, sucking in migrants from the faltering Javanese countryside and belching out piss and plastic and fumes and shit into the open drains that line its arteries.
Jakarta
It’s a quarter to seven in the Jaya Pub in Jaksa, Central Jakarta, and the aging barmaids are doing their hair in smoke-stained mirrors. They touch one another’s shoulders and stroke party worn skins in the half-light, tightening aprons and artfully undoing and redoing the top buttons of their shirts.
There are only two customers in the pub, both of us buleh, and neither of us is making eye contact.
The night manager sits in front of a television with a choking kretek in his hand, watching the face of the outgoing vice president slip in and out of focus as he addresses the foreign press.
There’s no sound on the television. Frank Sinatra is playing loudly through the dark air. But it’s July 2009, and we all know what the vice president is talking about. We don’t need the sound.
A sign on the wall says: Indonesia needs more know how and less know who.
Another one says: My wife ran away with my best friend. I fucking miss him.
The three guards out the front of the Starbucks I go to every morning start up a communal yell as soon as I appear on the corner opposite. They flap their hands and dance at me. They hoot, guffaw, they sing.
As I begin to understand more of what they’re saying I also begin to wish that I didn’t. Every morning their leers widen, mobile phones come out. The week that they begin to grab me and yell “giggedy” is the week that I begin to climb the fence on the other side of the car park and sneak into Starbucks the back way. To the puzzled Ojek drivers watching me it must look like I’m ashamed to be entering the place. They are kind. They feel they understand my shame, and avert their eyes, and say nothing.
The slums in the city are called kampungs, which translates as “village”. On the Northern docks, the kampungs are stinking and low to the floodlands. Every wet season, they wash away. Every dry season, they are pulled from the sluggish waters and nailed together again. To walk into them you have to stoop and bend. Women cry and put their heads to your shoulders and pump your plump arms for money. In South Jakarta, the kampungs are full of small, winding paths that disappear into walls and lilting graveyards. Chickens and cats and children run through them, trailing white paper kites and dust.
At The Dragonfly on any given Saturday night you can walk down red carpet and into a solid body of Hugo Boss, Chanel, Drum and Bass. The walls are soaring, filigreed light and metal, the floors rising in a steady swoop towards the DJ box. On raised podiums satin women gyrate manicured limbs and neck bottles of vodka, and men with shirts peeling back cleanly from perfect skins palm designer drugs into designer slacks.
In 1965, literally overnight, the government changed. No one knows quite how. History here is not something that can be pinned into books. In the year that followed, over a million people were killed by mobs and neighbours. Communism was purged. Now, to be without religion in this country is to belong to a series of events that people would rather forget: the gap between Sukarno and Suharto. The State says there are five religions, and one belief. And so there are.
Traffic jams in Jakarta have their own word: macet. Macet is more than a traffic jam, macet is a place with its own customs and rules, a labyrinth of metal and concrete and barely-suppressed rage. A place of waiting and fumes and transit and horns and anger and streets which only go in one direction, and where you are held in limbo, your destination lost somewhere in the mist of stationary bumper bars behind you.
This is a city where sex and bodies are taboo: where women hold grimly onto the flimsy plastic of speeding motorbike seats so that they aren’t seen to be touching the waist of their drivers. A city where bodies are covered knee to shoulder every Friday, for modesty, for piety, in prayer.
It’s city where sex and bodies are everywhere.
In the children with children themselves who sit grabbing on the beaten metal floors of the bus corridors. In the putrid human shit that drops from gaping anuses over bridge sidings and is gobbled by fish at the moment it makes contact with the canal. In the jerky bells and chimes and banshee calls of the waria men-women who stalk Jaksa after sundown. On the other side of red carpets and hotel bars, and in the air-conditioned heights where expensive touch is traded for plastic credit. In the frantic chasing and copulating of expatriates, and in the deliciously vulnerable inch of exposed wrist which the TransJakarta guard flashes at passengers as he waves them onto the busways.
Atlas
I had an atlas as a child. It was black and oblong and called The Student’s Jacaranda. It looked a bit like my dad’s Far Side of the Moon album, a prism on its cover spilling a rainbow towards the dog-eared spine. As my dad sat and played records, I lay on the floor, conquering.
I have no recollection of looking at Indonesia in this atlas. I do remember looking at the white and grey pages of Alaska and Antarctica, and at the heaving lines of the topographical maps. I remember looking at huge stretches of blue emptiness, interrupted only by latitude’s and longitude’s fast arcs.
I never thought that I’d grow up and live in the cramped red dot of a city. I thought I’d be out in the open, riding the longitudinal lines to their end, rushing forwards off the edge of one map and into the next. Travel, according to the Atlas, would be wheeling and rapid. Looking down over the world I could see myself skimming lightly across its top, my toes never quite connecting with the ground, the cool, musty air of my parents’ un-renovated Ivanhoe front living room stretching out in a bubble behind me.
Nation, Jakarta, Atlas.
It’s the night before Ramadan in Jakarta. In the street below my apartment there are kids setting off firecrackers, laughing and running and screaming as they bang and sparkle into the hot night. Tomorrow, the fast begins. But tonight, there are firecrackers: bursts of stars low over the kampung of a city where the sky has been empty for years.