OxTravels

by Mark Ellingham

  Arifin

  RUTH PADEL (born London, 1946) is a poet, novelist and travel writer. Her poetry collections include Darwin – A Life in Poems, a verse biography of her great-great-grandfather Charles Darwin, which was shortlisted for the 2009 Costa Prize. Her novel Where the Serpent Lives (2010) is set in the forests of India, where part of her travel book, Tigers in Red Weather, an account of tiger conservation in Asia, also takes place. She is a Fellow of the Zoological Society of London and of the Royal Society of Literature, and is currently Resident Writer at university College london. www.ruthpadel.com

  Arifin

  RUTH PADEL

  The rain is lashing glass. I’m looking at it from the porch of a guest house on the outskirts of Pagalaram. Around the open door is a vine of vermilion blossom. The flowers, wide as the Amaryllis lilies that open for my mother every Christmas, nod frantically and their hairy stamens jounce in racing water. Far away over ricefields I can see a mountain, perfectly triangular but blurred. It is like looking at Hokusai’s Mount Fuji through molten tissue paper.

  I am the only guest here. It is August, I’m on Sumatra to look for tigers, and have been grinding over hole-studded roads on South Sumatra in a car all day, except when the generator fell out of the engine and we waited several hours for another. With Lilik, my translator and guide. I’m trying to plan tomorrow.

  Lilik works for a Padang travel company who said he knew all Sumatra perfectly. He grew up behind the walls of a police compound. His father was a Javanese policeman. In the old days, Sumatra was the Island of Gold. Today it’s oil; Sumatra is the mainstay of the Indonesian economy and is run from Java. All day, the only villages Lilik approved of have been the ones with tidy white edging stones and fences. He says this means they belong to people from Java.

  We have an itinerary and in a couple of days will set off to Mount Kerinci – where human beings and tigers live really close to each other in dense forest – and stay with a Tiger Team which protects humans from tigers and tigers from humans. But I have arranged my first few days on the island around symbolism. My hope, in every tiger range country, is not only to see different types of conservation project and tiger population but also to learn about each country’s tiger history and symbolism – what tigers mean to human beings.

  Most people in tiger range countries live in cities and don’t know what it is like to live with tigers, but even in areas where tigers no longer live they still are thought and talked about. Yesterday I asked a university lecturer in Padang the word for tiger in bahasa Indonesia. ‘Harimau,’ she said, ‘but in villages they say “Grandmother” instead. They say “Shhh, Granny’s near,” so the tiger won’t hear and be angry. At least, that’s what people say they say. I don’t really know. I’ve never been to the villages.’

  I want to get closer than this. The Malay world specialises in tiger magic. I have photocopied a chapter from a book about the history of tigers and people here. The Dutch anthropologist who wrote it says there used to be tiger-charmers and were-tigers (like were-wolves) on Mount Dempo; and also a unique carving from the mysterious, megalith-prone culture of first-century AD Sumatra, of two tigers mating. Between the paws of the lower tiger, presumably the tigress, is what looks like a human head.

  THIS STATUE STANDS, or it stood seventy years ago, in a village called Besemah on a volcano called Mount Dempo.

  Lilik has never heard of a tiger megalith and scouring upland villages for a statue is not his idea of fun. The foreigners he shows round Sumatra want scuba diving and nightlife. But among my photocopied pages is a photo of it taken by a Dutch aviator in 1932. Lilik looks at it suspiciously. ‘Your curiosity is very specific.’

  ‘Are we near Mount Dempo?’ We should be, we have taken long enough to get here.

  ‘We go, tomorrow.’ He has no real idea of where Dempo starts, and has never heard of Besemah. He has no detailed map. We shall just have to start somewhere and ask. He agrees to pick me up at seven and goes off to stay with Javanese friends in Pagalaram. I look at drumming rain and writhing blossom.

  Suddenly a willowy boy of about twenty is beside me. He is wearing a T-shirt the same scarlet as the flowers and I feel he has been called out of them. He has streaky shiny hair over a wide forehead, cheeks pitted like corroded stone, bright black eyes and a very smooth top lip with no central groove.

  The tiger megalith on Mount Dempo

  ‘Mount Dempo?’ I ask. He smiles and waves at the mountain. I show him the photocopied photo. ‘Tiger megalith? Do you know it? Tigers? Harimau?’

  He nods and disappears. Maybe he didn’t understand. It’s been a long day, with a lot of not understanding in it.

  I go indoors and watch a woman cooking rice. Suddenly the boy is back with a blurry pamphlet. In it is the same photo, a larger reproduction.

  ‘You know it? You know where it is?’

  He nods again, points to himself and Mount Dempo, then puts his hand down as if patting a child on the head. I think he is telling me he grew up on Mount Dempo.

  ‘Tigers?’ I say hopefully. ‘Real harimau? Or people’ – I try and mime it and he smiles – ‘who turn into harimau?’

  He has a radiant and confident smile. I suddenly feel hopeful.

  ‘Might you come with us to Dempo tomorrow?’

  He nods again. Before seven next morning he is back, in a faded blue T-shirt and floppy hat. The rain has gone.

  ‘Arifin,’ he says. We shake hands. Lilik, in a pale apricot shirt with perfectly ironed creases, is not sure he wants Arifin on board but sees I am delighted and agrees to translate.

  ARIFIN SAYS HE STUDIES in Benkulu. But he is free, for this one day, to show us Dempo. I say I am interested in finding out about tigers here, and how people feel about them.

  There is silence between us as the car bumps along. I stare into early morning mist. The paddy fields are green glass edged with a dim frieze of palm trees.

  Besemah turns out to be a district, not a village. Arifin gives instructions to the driver.

  ‘My family,’ he says, and Lilik translates as he goes, ‘lives in many places on Mount Dempo. My little brother is twelve. He studies in an Islamic school in a high village. Higher up, is the village of the megalith. The village of my father, higher still. My older brother lives lower down on the other side.’

  Arifin’s track is climbing the slope of the volcano. Green bamboo whiskers trail over little streams. This used to be thick forest: it is now agricultural land and the white flowers of the coffee smell like linden. As we climb, we see misty green gorges and higher peaks beyond, striped with burnt lines where even this secondary forest has been stripped. Far away are even taller mountains, so soft in this early morning light you feel they would arch their backs and purr if you stroked them, and more mountains behind, in a never-ending vista. But not all of them are green. Clearing forest is an industry in Sumatra. For palm oil, for rice, or just on spec. I have seen burning everywhere. Coming in to Padang airfield two days ago I counted twenty-one plumes of smoke from burning forest. The pilot said he often couldn’t land for the smoke.

  In the upland villages, struggling with poverty, green coffee berries are laid out to dry in the sun and red water liles dot the little ponds. Tiny exquisite goats, white, soft lemon or fawn with trim black socks, play on the woodpiles. Beautiful stippled chickens, white and apricot with long slender bodies, peck around the rutted track. Every shack has a cage hanging from its eave where a songbird perches in sunlight. No shade, I notice sadly. Birdcatching is one of the biggest threats to biodiversity in Indonesia. Everyone wants a bird to sing to them. Many shacks have an empty cage whose dead occupant has not yet been replaced.

  ‘Birdsong makes you happy, more spiritual,’ says Lilik when he sees me looking.

  As we go higher I realise Dempo is not like Fuji; the symmetry was an illusion. We are climbing a huge ring of mountains curved round a plain, a giant ancient crater from which this active volcano’s two current peaks – Dempo itself, about 3,000
metres, and Merapi a hundred metres higher – have emerged like minor warts. There is a lake somewhere, too. But more importantly, I think, somewhere in this crater must be the epicentre of Sumatra’s ancient tiger magic.

  Some villages have plain names like Big Ditch. Others have grand names like Glory. The megalith village turns out to be called Rimja Sujud – ‘Jungle Reverence’. We step out and skirt the coffee berries spread out gleaming green, yellow and brown on orange earth. We walk to the top of the village to meet the head man who is wearing a gold-crusted blangkon. However poor you are it is important on Sumatra not to show it. No one is surprised we want to see their megalith. Sixty-six families live here and when the head man escorts us to the tigers we are followed by representatives of them all.

  At the far edge of the village is a field edged with banana trees, protected by a feathery fence of dried palm fronds. The statue stands beside the fence, blotched with rings of ochre lichen. The tigers’ faces are almost gargoyles, their eyes eroded into pools of shadow. Both are rearing, the tigress to get a good hold on her victim and the tiger to get a good hold on her. Together they are about as long as a small tiger, about seven foot. In 1932, the statue’s pedestal was completely sunk in the earth. Now it is clear and we can see the human head is actually a whole baby. Under the tigress’s tummy are more human feet.

  The head man speaks, gesturing to the tigers.

  ‘The Japanese were here in the War,’ translates Lilik. ‘They tried to take the megalith away. They cleared away the earth. But it was too heavy to carry. Also too magic. They left it here.’

  Another man points to the severed feet and laughs.

  ‘He says this is the result of adultery. Tigers make us keep the law. These tigers have eaten all the mother except her feet. Now they will eat the baby.’

  ‘What about the father?’

  All the men laugh. There are no women with us.

  ‘The tiger punishes only woman.’

  The head man speaks again. ‘When this man was boy,’ translates Lilik in his precise way, ‘the neighbours’ village was attacked by a man-eater tiger. But it only ate people who committed adultery. Everyone became very faithful and the tiger went away.’

  Arifin smiles and says something to me. I feel he understands what I want to learn. ‘He says,’ translates Lilik, ‘tiger is preserver of the law. These tigers protect Rimja Sujud.’

  THERE IS NO REAL JUNGLE near here now, which is why living tigers have disappeared. But reverence for them hangs on. In India and Russia I have met the idea that the tiger is the guardian of the forest. Here, it seems the tiger is protector of the people, too.

  I have no idea that in two weeks’ time, on Mount Kerinci, I will discover that tigers are very much a living archetype, that the Tiger Team uses tiger magic and tiger reverence to deal with problems between real tigers and people. I will discover the tiger on Sumatra is terrible but, like the Greek Furies, also the enforcer of human law. I will walk on a higher peak than Dempo, which still has its pristine rainforest. There I will be beholden to an invisible preserver of the law. With two members of the Kerinci Tiger Team, I will find tiger footprints laid freshly over mine. A tigress will stand very close to us, unseen, listening, watching, checking us out, and then go by. She will preserve adat, forest safety, by keeping herself safe – and also us.

  But now I just get back in Lilik’s car. We drive up a deeply pitted slushy track. In an hour we pass a village abandoned in the 1970s because of tiger attacks. Was this the adultery village, I wonder. Arifin doesn’t know. The car sticks in a rut and we get out. There is dense vegetation either side, long grass, enormous overgrown bushes. Arifin and the driver start putting stones under wheels and I walk on up the track. Round a bend I hear a crashing sound. Something is rushing up to cross the track. Out of the undergrowth thrusts a grey beaky face, a dinosaur, a crocodile – no, an enormous monitor lizard with chest and front legs like a Sumo wrestler.

  It stands completely still, staring at me with mad yellow eyes, then turns round and waggles away into the bushes.

  I walk down towards the car.

  ‘Look out!’ shouts Lilik. Between me and them a thin line of green is moving across the track. I approach cautiously and just have time to see the snake’s face before the head disappears in long grass. The upper lip has a pale line as if it has been drinking milk. From hours spent in Benkulu traffic jams studying Snakes of South East Asia I think this must be a white-lipped pit viper. It disappears into the long grass, all but the pink tail-tip which lies still, disguised as a blade of dead grass.

  We go on up. After hours on the volcano’s shoulder we come to open ground and a village on a cliff above a river. Like Rimja Sujud, this village is surrounded by a fence. We go in by a gate beside a large banana tree. Delicate white sheep, splashed and stippled with chocolate, are grazing in the compound, a lure for any predator. The houses are built on sturdy legs with wood piled underneath. I think of pit vipers and monitor lizards as well as tigers. Those woodpiles look very practical.

  Arifin’s father is a handsome man in a shiny satin shirt and black hat. With him are two men in yellow shirts: a man with a twisted foot and this man’s son Rahan. Rahan has a neat moustache and says he survived a tiger’s attack when he was clearing land to make the village.

  ‘The jungle was opened twenty years ago,’ says Arifin.

  Opening the jungle means chopping it down. There are fields all round this village now.

  ‘I was over there early in the morning, under that tree,’ says Rahan, pointing to the gate we came in by. ‘I was bending over to cut trees. The tiger came behind, put its paws around me and held my chest.’

  He raises his T-shirt and shows rows of neat red dots like the line made by a pulled-out thread. ‘It clawed my chest and bit my head. I fought with my machete. Then other people came and chased it away.’

  ‘He was two months in hospital,’ says Arifin. Rahan takes my hand and rubs my fingers over ridged scars from the tiger’s teeth, under his hair.

  Upstairs, in the house, I meet Arifin’s mother and sisters. They are beautiful and have the same bright eyes, the same wide smile and upper lip. We drink tea and laugh, we talk of families, villages, tigers. Then we say goodbye and descend to a village lower on Dempo, a much richer village where Arifin’s older brother lives.

  ARIFIN’S OLDER BROTHER has done well. These houses are stone, not wood, and the front room is very pink. Pink carpet, pink lace curtains, pink plush sofas and an empty aquarium with a red velvet crocodile on top. Also a large TV, playing with the sound off. We sit on a sofa under a mobile of luminescent fish. The front door stays open to the street and small goats put their heads in followed by a very old man with a stubbly chin and a plump young man.

  The brother’s mother-in-law is tiny and wizened, with very snowy hair. Wearing a stripy T-shirt and long orange-and-black satin skirt, she settles on the floor like a cat.

  ‘Her sister was killed by a tiger when she was ten,’ says Arifin. ‘They were working in the rice field. She remembers flesh spread all around.’

  ‘Are there tigers here now?’

  ‘Many in the hills,’ says the young man. ‘Many people shoot them.’

  ‘What about people who turn into tigers?’

  Lilik translates this very distantly, I suspect, but the young man smiles.

  ‘I know one masu marai married to a teacher. He eats like an animal and his eyes stare, like a tiger. He turns into a tiger when he is stressed.’

  ‘Masu marai?’ I ask Arifin when we leave.

  ‘Men who turn into tigers,’ he says. ‘They walk with their head down. They have the wisdom of tigers. They have normal children. Food changes them into tigers.’

  ‘But you don’t have real tigers in this part of Dempo now. There is no proper jungle.’

  ‘No, but in the villages we have many laws, like you must not wash your saucepans in a running stream. And with all of them we say, if this law is broken, the tiger will be
angry. Harimau marah.’

  We walk between the stone houses on a steep lane to where we left the car.

  ‘There are also tiger-callers,’ says Arifin softly.

  ‘What do they do?’

  ‘They are dukun.’ Lilik, walking between the two of us, looks as if he wishes himself a million miles away. ‘A dukun uses incense, kemanyan, to open the door to the spirits. There is a door you can open. They summon a harimau roh – soul tiger – to be your guardian. It will come to your assistance when you call. Sometimes tiger-callers go into a trance. They growl, they are entered by the spirit tiger.’

  Lilik reaches the car with relief and opens the door.

  ‘Also,’ says Arfin before he gets in, ‘many villages have a pawang harimau, a tiger shaman, who calls a real tiger, too. But not so often now.’

  ‘How do you know so much about them, Arifin?’

  He smiles his bright smile, his mother’s smile. We get in the car and return to Pagalaram in silence. He seems to open up only in the open air. Or maybe he doesn’t want to betray any secrets.

  Real tigers are gone from these parts, I tell myself, but ideas of magical tigers are hanging on here like empty cicada cases when the life has left.

  At the door of the guest house I thank Arifin warmly and press money on him. For his studies, I say. For his brother, in the school up the mountain. Wonderful to meet you. So lucky for me. He smiles, we shake hands and I turn to Lilik to make arrangements. When I turn back, Arifin is gone.

  I start packing, ready for zoology now. Real forest, real tigers. Outside it starts to rain. My bedroom looks into the jungly back garden, with flowers like orange serrated swords, twining vines, shiny leaves as big as elephant ears. It is like being pressed up close to a wet version of Rousseau’s Tiger Surprised by Lightning, vegetation Rousseau dreamed up in Paris from the Jardin des Plantes.

  Under the tin roof thrumming with rain I glance again at the pages I photocopied from the Dutch anthropologist. Several clans on Mount Dempo, he notes, trace their ancestry to tigers. In the 1840s, one village was known to be inhabited entirely by people who turned into tigers at night. It must have been noisy up there, I think. Normal tigers are not that keen on each other’s company. But maybe were-tigers handle social relationships a little differently.