The Celebrated Poison Tree

Paeans to our beloved state of motionless repose.

What follows here are descriptions of Batavian social depravity from the perspective of a British officer, John Stockdale, as written in his majestically-titled: “Sketches, civil and military, of the island of Java and its immediate dependencies : comprising interesting details of Batavia, and authentic particulars of the celebrated poison-tree” (1811).

“Most of the people who live here, and even many of the rich, who, it might be supposed, had attained the summit of their wishes, have something in their countenances expressive of discontent and dejection, and which seems a certain sign, that all is not right within. The climate may, undoubtedly, contribute much to this appearance; the animal spirits do not flow in that free circulation, nor do the powers of the mind possess that strength and elasticity, which animate the human frame, and give energy to the exertions of the soul, in more temperate climes. This is not all; for, after a short residence in this debilitating atmosphere, a state of languor, and love of inactivity soon overcome all the active powers of the mind, and, occasioning a total neglect of exercise, ruin the constitution, and induce an absolute repugnance to every kind of occupation. The only resource for those who are in this state of listlessness, approaching to torpidity, is, to seek for relief in society, and to endeavour to kill the heavy hours in the most frivolous manner: smoking tobacco, uninteresting and useless conversation, drinking, and card-playing, form the sum of their amusements; and having, in this manner, spent the day and part of the night, they rise the next morning, utterly at a loss how to pass the many tedious hours of the day they enter upon; and devoid of all inclination for reading, either for amusement or instruction, they are compelled to go the same dull round, and are only solicitous to make choice of such ways of killing time, as least interfere with their beloved state of motionless repose.” (pp 252-3)

Stockdale’s single mention of theatre in the whole book reads as follows:

“There was a theatre at Batavia,
but it was soon given up.”

Getting Into Character

Elsewhere in the Citradel...

So I’ve been re-working this one scene for a few days now. It’s the final scene of a section, a climax & cliff-hanger, & it may be a while before I really nail it. Working its rough draft is a real cringe-fest most of the time. Just one bad sentence after another until I figure it out. But that’s how it goes. What I really need to do it is put it aside now & write the next five chapters, then go back to this one with its destination more clearly in mind. I’ll start that today.

When I’m working on an action scene like this one, it isn’t a sedentary affair. More often it feels like I’m actor preparing to perform the roles (all of them). I’m still by myself at a desk in a quiet, closed room, but I’m usually talking aloud to myself the entire time—reciting the dialogue & narration to hear how it sounds (I want my books to be good read-alouds). Sometimes I’m actually pantomiming through the action. Occasionally I draft E to help me out with this—Okay, stand here, grab hold of me like this, no, how bout like this? Yah, okay now if I come in like that, what direction would you fall?--though what I’d really like is a set of nimble actors on hand—a private troupe that I might store in a big wooden trunk by my desk, say--who will pop out on demand & perform drafts for me.

Meanwhile, I’m also trying to get into character psychologically. With certain characters, it’s probably better for everyone involved to have me doing this garreted somewhere in southeast Asia.

Every once in a great while, though, as a result of a particularly concentrated effort, I have a split second like this one, & it’s odd but I kind of love it, not a madness but a peculiar cognitive achievement, like having dreamed you are an owl, or three people at once, or can breathe underwater, or have died without fear:

This morning I rose from heavy sleep in a slow, upward fall, like a leaf drifting up from the bottom of a lake. I lay floating there on my back, eyes open, neither here nor there. Somewhere nearby E spoke & said my name. For a long split-second, the name touched me only with a feather of nostalgia, invoking a long-forgotten memory of someone I had once known as a child, but hadn’t thought about in years & years. It made me smile to think of her, of that lost time & place, but it wasn’t me…because my name was—---. And then, of course, it wasn’t.

I love it. On to Chapter Next.

From Us Plucked Chickens

The governing ambition for any worthy acronym is first: that it be mellifluous, & second: that it form a clever word in and of itself. Here this is a national sport. Consider these 3, in order of complexity:

Bule Gila, a 'crazy gringo', elegantly shortens to BUGIL, which in general means naked or stripped bare, but specifically means:
“a plucked chicken”.

KAKILIMA. A kakilima is a kind of roadside food cart. The word is a combination of: Kanan Kiri Lintas Manusia, that is: ‘To the right, to the left, people are passing by’. Brought together, kakilima means “Five Feet”—three feet for the cart, two for the vendor. They are also, generally, about five feet long.

SUPERSEMAR is the most clever & complicated of the bunch. Supersemar is the name of a famous historical document. It’s the letter, signed on March 11, 1966, that officially installed Soeharto as the country’s leader, superseding Soekarno—essentially legalizing his coup. A big deal.

Now we all know political figures like to compare themselves to heroic figures from history and myth, & Soeharto was no exception. Soeharto liked to compare himself to Semar, who is a revered character—a kind of holy clown figure, actually—from Javanese folklore. There’s always a wayang puppet of Semar. Still with me?

Okay. The document’s full name is ‘The March 11th Instructional Letter’, or: Surat Perintah Sebelas Maret. SUPER SEMAR. Impressive.

Strategic Location

Returning with books & groceries today we passed an enormous, abandoned mall. A mall like you know it: lavish & huge, taking up an entire city block, 8 or 10 stories high. We had just come from one of these, in fact. But this one, the whole thing—brand new!—was closed & rotting.

Consider the sheer quantity of riches contained within an upscale mall & what it means to be able to construct one: the land, the building (materials, AC, power, plumbing), all the merchandise itself, the food & jobs. And what it means to lose one—in this case, without every having used it. They built this colossal thing with the treasure of a nation that could not finish it or maintain it or fill it. The waste of it is staggering.

Krismon, the money crisis, that’s how everyone explains it. Krismon was a decade ago. For all the things going well in Indonesia, the economy has been stagnant for 10 years. Everywhere you go in the city—even right there out our window—there are gigantic building projects begun & scrapped. Acres of land hold only the stillborn foundations or high skeletons of buildings, spiked with rebar, filling with water. In ruins before they even existed. Sometimes they’ve left the bulldozers & cranes behind, too.

Just beyond the lost mall, squatters had built shelters in the old construction area, literally a gullied triangle of dirt between three roads. They’d roofed with cock-eyed blue tarps & squares of corrugated aluminum. Eight open doorways in a tight line, all of them filled with plastic hangers of bright laundry. Given its location alongside traffic & its clear boundaries, it had the unfortunate look of an unkempt zoo exhibit. Five women, two little girls, two babies all sat chatting on a concrete ledge in the umbrella shade of a single tropical leaf. An empty food cart, its front glass hand-painted with “Bubur Ayam” (chicken porridge), laid at a forsaken tilt, looked like one of those miniature wrecks that decorate aquariums.

In the trees above it all hung a plastic banner, still legible in cheerful orange & yellow: “FOOD COURT in STRATEGIC LOCATION.”

Celebrations

On Valentine’s Day Jakarta filled with hearts. Extracted from its infidel origins, a celebration of Love just fills a universal niche. In a Muslim country sending Valentines presents a paradox, but only truly troubles a few.

The day’s top story photo: women in black burkas, faces covered, buying Hallmark Valentine’s Day cards! Buried on page 5: women in black burkas protesting the same! Never mind that I’ve seen more black burkas in St. Paul than Indonesia. The paper itself breaks the tie with half a dozen Valentine-themed ads. The all-embracing religion of commerce.

And now it’s the Year of the Pig. Banned throughout the Soeharto regime, Chinese New Year has become a national holiday. From rafters & shop fronts, all the paper hearts transform to piglets. Conveniently, everything is already decorated in red. The poor purist is everywhere besieged. Note this Chinese-Indonesian pig has blue eyes, a bindi dot, & looks like a leprechaun. It must particularly gall the women protesting V-Day that pork is trayfe.
I mean: Haram. Forbidden.

Today we traveled to the Chinese neighborhood of Glodok, where the streets are strung with red lanterns. This was the area hit worst by the 1998 riots, which brought down the Soeharto regime. Like the Rodney King riots, the 3 days of violence & looting spread to target privileged ethnic minorities, in this case the Chinese. They’re only about 3% of the population, but command a disproportionate wealth. Over 6000 buildings were damaged or destroyed. A whole mall was burned. 1200 people died. Thanks to the 1997 Asian financial crisis, you can still see rubble & burned-out buildings from the riots 9 years ago.

Along Glodok’s narrow, winding roads we found the Dharma Jaya & Dharma Bakti temples. These are modest buildings, but date back to the 17th century, which in a tropical climate is an architectural miracle. The outside courtyards thronged with beggars in rags & soldiers in black. The crowd milled, fronting babies, the elderly & disfigured, until soldiers began to shout & wave batons. Then the crowd got noisy & started to move as a herd. Evan slipped into the smoky red temple. I backed against a gate to watch as the gathered Poor--who were there as such--reassembled in tight, toboggan lines & opened their umbrellas for the sun.

Inside the red lacquered temples it’s so smoky with incense & the six-foot crimson candles that sinks are set up in many corners to bathe the eyes. By the end, mine were streaming & blind. Everywhere there is fire and offerings. In some sense, these temples have been in a constant conflagration for 350 years.
[I’ve loaded a separate set of photos for New Years.]

Outside again a new ruckus rose & all the cameramen bunched like fish to food: A series of rich men had begun distributing rupiah bills to The Poor, one after another. It’s the custom of holiday to give money. Frowning men in army green kept strict order & the place in line with bamboo poles.

Wear a Sign Across Your Back

Tonight we saw a goofy Indonesian sit-com in which the “Bad Guys” were signified by one of them wearing an Osama bin Laden t-shirt.

Odds are, this teenager here is mostly excited just to have the word FUCK writ in block letters on his back. I’m not saying it’s all innocence: there’s plenty of bad stuff brewing here. But what do you do when you really are just a kid playing guitar on the street & so many ‘bad guys’ on the nightly news seem to look just like you?

Even more poignant, though: this t-shirt is from Bali, sold all over the island, commemorating what they call 'Bali Black', the October 12th anniversary of the 2002 Bali bombings that killed hundreds & impoverished thousands. Is this kid Muslim or Hindu? You won't know by looking.

Kites

Sixteen kites have fallen over the Dutch graveyard below, lost forever. Most are white. Some red or green. They’ve appeared on the ground like twirling seed pods or some fallen seasonal fruit.

Don't they allow the kampung boys through the gate (where the groundskeeper solemnly asked if we had family buried here) or do the boys from the less-hallowed graveyard just not bother to retrieve their lost kites, only made of paper, sticks & string? Maybe they will be gathered up by the gardener's little son, a boy of 4 or 5, whom I’ve seen crossing the grounds stark naked & newly bathed, alone (if you don’t look up) in his vast garden of foreign ghosts, happily shivering up the flagstone path after his father.

Just across the street, the Javanese graveyard is full of kiting boys, who scramble over the statuary & make way for funeral processions. Many graves are raised rectangles of stone planted over with grass: perfect platforms. Six or seven kids will jostle together atop one of these, their kite lines somehow not tangling. Given the number of fallen kites, I have to wonder if their lines are coated with glass, as described in The Kite Runner. A few adjacent graves have a kind of metal cage over them, maybe to prevent this very thing: being danced upon by kite boys. It seems stingy.

As I’m watching, three loose kites bob right by me, born along on an invisible air stream 25 stories off the ground. As if they weren’t merely cut free but are going somewhere.

The Good of Small Things

Before the flood became everyone’s primary concern, I asked our guides which national issues most concerned Indonesians these days. The most common answer: the plane crash.

Over New Years, an Adam Air flight went down somewhere in the ocean with 102 people lost. The plane broke apart, however, & Indonesian authorities did not have the technology to recover the pieces. They couldn’t find the black box. The tragedy, people said, had become a national disgrace.

The US came to help. I don’t know if this appears in stateside papers. We sent in ships & technology that helped Indonesia search for this plane & for what happened. The awareness of this aid & gratitude for it was palpable to me just talking to people on the street. Also, the embarrassment that their country could not muster the resources for this by itself. Same goes for flood relief. Such small efforts do great work in the world. I think it makes a much bigger difference than we realize.

The Train

A couple weeks ago we took the train to old Batavia. The train is a gritty experience & only something we could manage--I mean to get somewhere on purpose, on time-- because E speaks Indonesian. The guidebooks don’t even mention it as a transportation option.

The number of women in hijab was strikingly higher in the station, seeming 90% or more, leading me to think again about the correlation of such choices with poverty. Some trains are packed to bursting. People ride on the roof. The doors stay open to provide ventilation. Inside the red floor is slick with mud.

We board & stand to the side, the only bules (BOO-lay = gringo) they’ve seen all day. It’s not crowded, but all the seats are taken. A wizened woman flocked with family gives up her seat for us, insisting despite our fervent protests that we take it. Everyone on the car takes note of this exchange while studiously ignoring us in the universal etiquette of subways. But then the guy selling oranges from a bucket & chips from a rack can’t suppress his curiosity. Breaking character, he looks us in the eye & asks, “Where are you from?”

No one moves, but everyone in earshot is actively listening now. We tell him & can almost hear the mental exchanging of bet money all around us. A subtle tension breaks. Traveling Americans often believe America is the most loaded word in the whole world. Sometimes I think this, too. Then an older woman at E’s elbow stands & with inscrutable emotion says in English, “American? God BLESS you. Yes, yes. God bless you,” and takes my hand with great feeling.

I don’t know why she said this to us. Is it because we helped them find the plane? Is she moved by some Hollywood image of Americans? Or is it personal: an American she once knew & loved? My frame of reference is useless: all I think of is our footprint on the world & feel that so-common relief of American travelers when we’re greeted with kindness instead of rage. Is she old enough to have felt it when the US—a superpower unsullied by obvious colonies—brokered the 1949 UN deal that ejected the Dutch & handed Indonesia its sovereignty? Or is she, like many older village women, simply exorbitantly polite to visitors? Does she say “God Bless” because that’s what it’s expected Americans like to hear (to listen to our news anchors & politicians, we do say “God Bless us” an awful lot)? Or because she is a Christian & believes we have that in common on this mostly Muslim train?

We can’t know what she was thinking, only smile & offer blessings back, keenly aware that our response to this now has an ambassadorial quality. It staggers me to think on it: how casually a single person can represent The United States. How can any one person possibly do that? Especially in the Muslim world where Americans are so fraught about our public image. But such things are effortless, constant, & decided in the blink of an eye: everyone will leave the train car with some impression of ‘Americans’.

Three Winters

Wintering here in the flooded tropics, tapping toes to “Ya Hussein”, dining on noodles & mangosteen, we’ve just caught a glimpse of our frozen home. The contrast is delicious.

Take a look at our friend Theo Theobald on TV, dog-sledding through the Minnesota Boundary Waters. She’s an instructor, so this is her commute. One year ago, I was right there with her & the sleds myself, calling "Let's go!" to a wheel dog named Havoc. Now I’m in downtown Jakarta where the wildlife is alley cats & water rats; in Ely: moose, otter, wolf & fox. Swallows & jackfruit; eagles & jack pines. The mosquitoes we have in common.

Right this minute there's a one hundred degree difference in temperature between this winter home & that one.

Meanwhile, part my head is socked in Sydney Cove, Australia, where it’s almost July 1790 & a third kind of winter altogether.

Outside, the evening adhan is soaring. Inside, Evan plays Part’s Berliner Mass. In a dreaming dimension, two characters of mine are dancing to fiddles & an Irish drum while a third leaps headlong off a cliff. I hardly know where I am sometimes.

Radical San Marino Programming Activates

...speaking of Barack Obama...

“Evan?” I knocked again on the bathroom door. He'd been in there awhile.

“Are you all right? Can I bring you some Pepto Bismol or something?”

“No,” he called through the door. He sounded weak. “No, that’s okay. I’m just going to..arrg..uhll…pray.”

“I’m sorry, you’re going to what?”

“If it’s God’s will, this, too, shall pass.”

“Hmm. I wonder if some Pepto might not be part of God’s plan for your bowels?”

“No! I am no longer taking medicine of any kind. The ills of the flesh…I just have to…ahhh, ohh…pray harder.”

“But you’ve never---” Then suddenly I remembered: Evan spent five years at a Christian Science elementary school. And he was a choir boy. The indoctrination had finally taken hold of his mind.
I’d married a fundamentalist sleeper agent.

“All those morning chapel sessions,” I said hopelessly.

“Errrg,” said Evan.

Anecdote of Floods

NP, who works in the Fulbright office, told an anecdote today about living through Jakarta floods.

She grew up on Ambon, one of the Spice Islands on the Banda Sea. Later she lived in mountainous Bandung, here on Java, where landslides, not floods, are the seasonal threat. Experiencing her first Jakarta flood, years ago, she was horrified. She couldn’t believe what was happening. Panicking, she grabbed her Bible & fled the house.

This was a stupid thing to do, she recalls now. For there she was, carting around a large book in a downpour—the most easily replaceable book in the world—while her house was flooding & she had nothing else with her. As it happened then, & in the years since, the flooding into the house itself was minor. The worst part is the water is dirty, so until the house is completely cleaned & dried, it smells bad.

Having grown up in the Spice Islands, NP has a developed taste for spices. She combats the flood waters today with special candles, scented & votive, & boiling pans of cinnamon, nutmeg & clove. This time of year, she keeps a packet of her important documents & items ready to grab, her Bible safely on a high shelf. She’s one of the only Christians in her neighborhood, so when the neighbor children see the candles in her windows, they come running over to her house all excited, crying, “Auntie, Auntie, is it Christmas?”

“Sure,” she shrugs. “It’s Christmas. Come on in.”

Unsinkable Things

The Declamation Laboratory...

Late in the evening, E appeared for a rehearsal at the arts center, only to find the entire complex (& most of the street) in the dark.

Flooding had cancelled the rehearsal. Jose Rizal Manua, its unsinkable director, had invited E to come watch them work the well-known playwright, Putu Wijaya’s “visual theatre performance” WOW. Instead E hung out with JRM & some artsy folk at the complex. They sat outside, the tile patio piled with weathered books for sale, all of it illuminated by a few flame torches. JRM’s little shop here is called Bengkel Deklamasi, the "Declamation Laboratory," which seems to function as a salon more than anything else.

...Taxis, Cappuccino, Waria...

After declaiming in the torchlight with the artistes for a few hours, E walked out to find a taxi, but there were none. Not even a bajaj. The entire main street was dark, even the coffee houses closed. So he crossed over to a central commercial boulevard, where at least two elements of Jakarta's nightlife could not be sunk by flooding: waria--the lady-boys (“Hello, Mister! Where are you going? Hey, Mister, what do you like?”) & the massive 24-hour Starbucks that has taken over the building once housing the tourist information center. For really, what’s a stranded traveller need more: information or a quadruple ristretto venti latte with a shot of durian syrup?

He found a taxi there. Taxi drivers have remained laconic on the subject of floods, even this one, & the savvy ones know which routes use the high roads. Flooding happens every year, they pish (bravado, I say). Every year there’s an outcry to do something about it, every year it doesn’t happen.

...Headlines...

Headlines are always extreme. But in every accountable way this flood is much worse than usual: more water, more & new areas submerged, more sickness, more displacements. Huge numbers are displaced every year as a matter of course, the numbers including everything from voluntary moves to a hotel, just to be safe, to having one's home destroyed. Usually the annual floods linger for a few days & then everyone moves back in & squeegees the water from their floor. This year the disaster is that it’s still going—the problems rising less with the familiar presence of water than with the molding, breeding, road-blocking, unsanitary duration of it. Nobody can say when it will stop.

...Illusions & cash...

But we are fine right now. The people we know here are fine. We went down to the apartment's pool for the first time yesterday & discovered it is absolutely exquisite. With front page photos crazily in mind, we went swimming.

Illusions

In a wee-hours dream, I mistook the air conditioner's motor for rain.

If that constant, thrumming Hhhhh had actually been the rain, it made for a solid down-pour the likes of which I've heard sustained nowhere but waterfalls & it inspired a deep, mammalian terror for the sheer unnatural length of it. Holy, holy, I was thinking.
Everyone below will drown tonight.

I was half-asleep, listening to this as lightning strobed the room. A layer of fear buzzed on my skin like a static charge: What terrible hubris, I was thinking, to have suggested that location or money could do anything but delay the hand of God. And then, with that burst-spring of comedy that too often accompanies my private emergencies: In the morning we’ll just tip the building & sail it out to the Java sea with pairs of every ex-pat & twelve of every vermin! When I finally forced myself awake & to the window: it was not raining at all.

I switched off the AC, feeling foolish. E sleeping undisturbed. A soft, piratical Tom-Waits muezzin was chanting alone, his minaret become a lighthouse: “Ya Hussein, Ya Hussein, Ya Hussein, Ya Hussein…”

Concluding from our window view that the city appears dry—which it does insanely appear—may be a little like when C & I went camping around Lake Superior & blithely peered into the black southern sky remarking, "Huh, no northern lights"—the entire half-dome of sky in silent flames behind us.

The morning paper didn't arrive till evening, the delay its own headline.

High & Dry

This morning the paper shows us graveyards filled with refugees: the living camped above the dead. 340,000 displaced. The Koran Tempo (Koran means "newspaper" in Indonesian) has made its masthead wavery, as if half submerged in water.

This picture from the paper is in South Jakarta & WE are in south Jakarta. The view out our balcony is of graveyards, too--the pretty European one gated, immaculate & always empty, the Javanese one vast, overgrown, & full of trash & kids. A basketball court on the side. Flowering trees. Beyond these graves we see the red tile roof tops of a kampung, then the taller buildings of the city. Through my telescope: NONE of it is flooded.
In the afternoon the graveyard fills with children flying kites.

No, we are in a cool bubble floating 30 stories above the earth. I can ride an elevator down to a little grocery shop, a gym, a swimming pool, & the Verandah cafe where I read each morning of floods & fever & all hell breaking loose outside. Yet we walked to a mall this morning to buy groceries & found the large culvert along the sidewalk at a low flow, the streets dry, the mall filled with mall people doing mall things. You would never know. The great irony of floods: there are water shortages everywhere. We ordered a refill & an extra bottle (to cache) this morning & they arrived at once, no big deal. Location, location, location. And money.

From up here, this does not feel adventurous. It feels like a strange sort of writing retreat--which it is. When we first arrived we rose (jet-lagged) with the dawn adhan & fell asleep hard by nine. By now we have worked back into our familiar grooves: talking past 2 or 3 AM, rising at 11 from wild dreams, grumping till coffee; he's cooking, I'm washing up; we read & write from the afternoon through midnight; some evenings there are performances, interviews. Exactly what it should be.

It's difficult to know what to do with the headlines yet besides donate money. Knowing what's happening somewhere around the corner, though, makes it hard to sit up here & simply write a check...like throwing a paper airplane from the balcony. Then again, fever follows flood in short order, as do all mosquito-born diseases; it's also hard to imagine how to lend a hand just yet without becoming casualties ourselves. I think we might give blood--Dengue fever has drained supplies--but I've not yet determined how to do this safely.

In the meantime, there is much editorializing of levees & government ineptitude, of the stupid issuing of building permits ('growth is good!') in areas intended as green spaces & reservoirs: all sounding very much like Katrina / New Orleans. Environmentalists are still not yet persuasive urban planners. Pragmatists mistaken for hippies. The idea that environmental planning might HURT the long term economy is an ever more shocking presidential argument before the economic crises of preventable floods & droughts. The Indonesian president is promising to open the south Jakarta sluice gate, even though that will flood the governor's palace (& Obama's posh old neighborhood, Menteng). "Let the Palace be flooded with water," orates the VP. "The most important thing is the people."

My widgets tell me it's 2 degrees in St. Paul. From where I'm sitting just now, it is sunny in Jakarta, & feels about 80. It is not raining.

The Menteng Kid: Barack Obama's radical youth

Well there's much excitement over here about 'the Menteng kid'--Barack Obama, Jakarta's own (on loan)--running for US President. As entertaining to locals is the hilarious (& privately horrifying) accusation that, while here at the age of 8, little Christian Barack Hussein of the 'curly eyelashes" was enrolled in a radical Islamic madrassa.

This school is not far from the arts institute, located in a posh residential area. If it isn't underwater next week, I think I may go visit. Mostly, I'd like to interview a student at SDN Menteng 01 (called 'SDN Besuki' in Obama's day), maybe an 8 year old in pink telling me, as many seem most eagerly inclined, why she loves Dora the Explorer. Sure, there are madrassas. But if anyone is indoctrinating public school kids here, it's the insidious triad of Dora, Hello Kitty, & Barbie.

Here are some facts from the Jakarta Post & history as Evan knows it. I'll try to verify these in person in the next few weeks. I'm not casting my vote here, but venal slander like this harms everyone.

* The "SDN" of the school's name stands for "Sekolah Desar Negeri" - that is: 'National Elementary School', by definition a secular, state-owned institution.
* In the 1960s, radical Communism was of enormous concern to Indonesia. Not radical Islam.
* The school then, as now, openly accepts students of all religions, including Barak, whose estranged father was a non-practicing Muslim from Kenya, & whose mother was a non-religious person from Kansas.
* It's said he was enrolled in this public school because his family could not afford the international school that most expatriate children attended.
* He was there for two years as a child.

Enough already.

It's all floods & fever outside here. Our taxies practically float away. Much discussion in the papers of global warming. It's quite the bubble we live in up here, looking down from our books & the 30th floor.

The Month of Lamentations

29 January

It is 3:30 in the morning. Called from sleep by an eerie, alien music from the minarets, I am having disrespectful thoughts.

Lying on my back half-sunk in dreams, half-risen into warbles that I know are words, strange shadows playing on the ceiling. After 20 minutes, I throw open a window and hold out a microphone to record this. The lamp at my elbow tips & shatters against the tile. I hear Italian widows wailing as they throw themselves into their husbands coffins; I hear hungry ghosts; kazoos; madness---I hear wrongly & I know it. It’s humid. There is lightning. I hear a terrible, weird, keening loneliness. They are calling & calling with a cutting urgency now, a lost cause, and I am at the window!
But they are not calling me.

This is different than any adhan I’ve heard. I wake through the night, stop work through the day. My pragmatism assaulted: I sense blasphemy in earplugs.

This is ignorance, I say to my frustration & resolve to cure it in the morning. Ignorance! It is worse because you don’t understand. If I only knew what was going on, why they are singing now, what they are saying, I would not be going quite so nuts.

NO BLISS FOR THE IGNORANT

At 3:30 AM, this is what it sounded like to me: the loudest call seemed synthesized, the voice most resembling a kazoo. Then joining Synthesized-Kazoo muezzin comes Underwater-Sermon muezzin, his low voice garbling out prayers, stories, lamentation. Then comes Chanting muezzin, repeating the same two, guttural syllables for fifteen minutes. And finally a chorus of Haunted-House-Ghost muezzins fire up, wailing up and down the scales in the background.

It's not very loud, all of this, but it's immensely intrusive and—so far—baffling to me. I think of social anthropologists past trying to make some sense of foreign customs & only making a holy mess of things. Fortunately for me, I have an educated guess, a native speaker & the internet at my disposal (...which, as we all know, is three times the ammunition you need to make a truly stupendous mess of things).

The Day of ASHURA

I should have asked earlier.

This is Muharram, the first month of the Islamic lunar calendar. The first ten days mark the Remembrance of Muharram: the martyrdom of Hussein—Mohammad’s grandson—in 680 (CE), at the battle of Karbala (which you may recognize as a contemporary battleground in Iraq). These ten days reach a climax on the day of Ashura (meaning tenth). Historically, Ashura commemorates two events: the day Noah left the ark and the day Moses was saved from the Egyptians by Allah. But among Shiites, Ashura specifically mourns the death of Hussein.

The remembrance of Muharram is a time of sadness & is often celebrated by public displays of grief. In Iran, taziyeh plays---passion plays—enact the martyrdom in its full & bloody horror. Some Shi'as self-flagellate with chains, beating their heads or ritually cutting themselves: embodying a connection with Hussein’s suffering and death. It also includes the public recitation of certain poems, prose & sermons to mourn, elegize or recount Hussein’s life & death. And chants of “Ya Hussein” (chanting muzzein). In Indonesia the time is also celebrated with kite races (I’ve seen dozens of kites flying in the cemetery below all week) & a ritual throwing of a giant funeral bier into the ocean.

Last night (Jan 29th) was Ashura: crescendo for the month of lamentations.

I know what I am hearing now. I finally know what is going on.
Call away, I'll still hear it, but I think tonight I will sleep all the way through.

Rambutan & Ramen

In the fridge today we have mangosteens, snakeskin fruit & hairy rambutan. Durian, lychee & sirsak-flavored yoghurts. Custardy winter melon juice & cans of Chrysanthemum tea. Baby bok choi & scallions. Those who know how well we eat at home will appreciate that we are mostly cooking ramen. The tofu is excellent.

I’ve started a photo set just for FOOD and will continue to update it as I gather images.

Sederhana is a good word—it means simple, easy, uncomplicated. When someone sees we’re westerners and assumes we (are Dutch &) hungry for five stars & a team of waiters, we demur & insist: sederhana. Give me a shaded bench outside, some noodles in broth, and a teenage band busking on guitars. Street food here is comfort food for a dollar or two: broths & noodles, fried vegetable cakes, meatballs, dried fish, rice & jackfruit—which is meaty enough to fool a carnivore. Lots and lots of meat & fish. There are also Tony Roma's, Wendy's, Starbucks, Dunkin Donuts, & KFCs all over. I finally managed to order Stir Fried Morning Glory at the little café downstairs. . I'd order it again, too, but if there was a morning glory in there, I couldn't say.

Today I saw a man tie a single durian onto his motorcycle at the end of a string & ride off with it that way, dangling. It looked like a medieval mace…but far, far more intimidating.