By the time they returned to Jakarta, Bambang’s father had been transferred to a new position at Indonesia’s busiest port, Tanjung Priok, and the family had moved into a four-bedroom government house in an expansive residential compound for customs department officials and their families in the affluent suburb of Pondok Bambu, East Jakarta. Bambang’s three unmarried sisters still lived at home, as did his younger brother, Eddy, the family’s equally pampered second son, a budding artist who would later join a national dance company.
Robyn had always got on well with Bambang’s father, known in the family as ‘papi’. ‘His children loved and respected him; but they feared their mother—she was the strong one’, says Robyn. The matriarch had lost none of her regal aplomb. In addition to her role as mistress of the household, she was an enterprising wheeler and dealer who traded in land, gold and precious stones and an inveterate gambler who spent long days playing mahjong at the gambling dens in Chinatown. On her return home each afternoon, chauffeured by a neatly uniformed driver in the family Mercedes, she would run her manicured fingers along the carved timber furniture checking for dust, to ensure the servants had not neglected their chores. While Robyn and Bambang had been in Sydney, his mother had set up her own beauty salon, after obtaining certification from the French cosmetics house Lancôme. She ran it from an enclosed pavilion attached to their home, where the well-heeled wives and daughters of Jakarta society would come to be exfoliated and coiffured. The salon was named ‘Devi Suni’ in honour of her granddaughter.
‘Mami’ was besotted with her long-awaited first grandchild, who was doubly treasured for having been sired by the family’s eldest son. She explained to Robyn that grandchildren born from sons are known as cucu (pronounced choo choo) dalam, which means ‘incoming grandchild’, denoting the family’s ownership of the child, while those produced by daughters are known as cucu luar, or ‘outgoing grandchild’, as they are automatically deemed to be on their way ‘out’ of the family to become part of the paternal clan.
Bambang’s eldest sister had married and had two children of her own, who were designated as cucu luar, which made them effectively second-class grandchildren, it seemed to Robyn. ‘The way they were treated, it was just shocking. They weren’t even allowed to eat the same food as my daughter. If they sat down to eat chicken, my daughter would get the best piece and as much as she wanted, while they got one piece each.’ The family’s attitude, as Robyn saw it, was: ‘Devi belongs to us’, whereas ‘the other children didn’t count’.
She was disturbed to learn that the family’s claim of ownership over her firstborn went even further, according to the tradition as it was explained to her. ‘The first child of the first son goes to the grandparents to be brought up. My daughter was the first grandchild of the first son, therefore my mother-in-law felt she had the right to take her. It’s very common in Indonesian culture that children don’t necessarily live with the parents; children are not individual possessions, they are part of the family. My mother-in-law wanted to exercise her right to take Devi and bring her up, which was the custom.’
There was no way Robyn was handing over her child, so mami had to content herself with lavishing gifts and special treatment on Devi. By Robyn’s account the child slept in her own double bed, and if she wanted ice cream the chauffeur would be instructed to take her out in the car to get some. The contrast with Robyn’s own spartan upbringing could hardly have been more stark. ‘The decadence was just shocking. It was gross. I hated it’, she says. The family’s extravagance seemed to contradict the basic tenets of their purported faith—such as egalitarianism, temperance and charity. And Robyn now knew that their animist rituals and indulgent habits were not condoned by Islam. Mami placed charms around the house to ward off evil spirits, dabbled in black magic and gave thanks to her dead ancestors for their food at mealtimes. When Bambang’s uncle came back from the haj pilgrimage to Mecca, he sat down with papi over a glass of Bintang beer to tell him all about it.
Despite the growing tensions in the household, Robyn was determined to be a good Javanese wife, and threw herself into the role.
‘I did reach a stage where I lost myself’, she remembers. ‘I tried so hard to fit in that I actually lost myself. I was just fulfilling the role of a Javanese wife—when I wasn’t a Javanese wife. Even Bambang used to say, “Why do you try so hard to be one, when you’re not?”’ Over time, she would reach the reluctant conclusion that, try as she might, she would never completely belong. ‘In a culture like Indonesia they never really accept you. You’re always an outsider. You will always be an orang bule—a white person.’
Not long after settling in at Pondok Bambu, they discovered that Robyn was pregnant with their second child. Her joy was quickly tempered by Bambang’s horror at the prospect of having to endure the ordeal of another birth, if only as a witness; apart from which, he simply didn’t want another child. He urged Robyn to terminate the pregnancy using a herbal concoction that replicates a morning-after pill.
‘Just tell my mother and she’ll get the herbs for you to drink’, he advised.
But the suggestion was anathema to Robyn, whose conservative personal morality and years as a Catholic would not allow her to contemplate an abortion, regardless of her husband’s view.
‘He was adamant, and I was just as adamant, because even before I was a Muslim I was pro-life. I think that it’s murder.’
Tired of his obstinate spouse and overbearing family, Bambang decided to return to Bali, preferably without Robyn, telling her it would be best for her to remain in Jakarta with his family until the birth. Anticipating the arrival of another cucu dalam, Bambang’s mother was happy for Robyn and her beloved Devi to stay. Mami was sure that sooner or later Boy would grow up and accept his responsibilities as a husband and father, and that Robyn should wait patiently like a faithful Javanese wife until he did so. But Robyn was having none of it. ‘I was expected to stay in Jakarta and be looked after and play the part, while he could do whatever he wanted. I put on a scene—no way was I getting left behind and stuck there with them. So I went too.’
On the subject of her pregnancy, Bambang had made his position quite clear. ‘He told me, if you continue with this pregnancy, consider it your child and not mine. Don’t tell me about it, don’t speak about it, I want nothing to do with it. I was not allowed to mention it or talk about it; for all intents and purposes it was like it didn’t exist.’
Despite his denial and the awkward relations with her in-laws, Robyn says the thought of leaving Bambang and returning to Australia did not occur to her. ‘I know the negative effects on children who come from broken homes’, she explains. But their marriage was clearly doomed. ‘That was the beginning of the end for us. From this point it was much more blatant: you have your life and I have mine. And mine was being a mother and responsible for two human beings.’
Leaving Jakarta to go back to Bali meant Robyn had to quit her job as an English teacher, which she had resumed on returning to Indonesia. This left the couple without an income. Bambang’s parents paid the bills, the servants’ wages, and the costs of maintaining their property in Denpasar, which included a supply of staples such as rice, cooking oil and kerosene. But the cash flow from the family coffers effectively ceased.
‘His mother wanted to smoke me out, so she stopped sending money’, says Robyn. ‘We were still supported—there were clothes and food, but no cash. There was this massive house in Denpasar; we had electricity and water because the bills were paid, but there was no money. Bambang just saw it as them wanting something, trying to control him, as always.’ His mother would visit once a month from Jakarta, bringing gifts for Devi, and always making it clear that if they returned to live with the family they would be looked after. Proud and stubborn as ever, Robyn refused to ask her for anything.
In Bali, Bambang returned to his familiar life of late-night jam sessions with his musician buddies in their old hangouts at Kuta Beach.
‘Where the blo
ody hell have you been?’ Robyn would bawl at him when he came home.
He was always perplexed at her fury. ‘Yeah, I haven’t been home for three days—and?’
He would simply pick up his guitar and start quietly strumming. ‘It was like talking to an alien’, she recalls.
During one of her visits from Jakarta, Robyn’s mother-in-law offered some maternal advice.
‘Why don’t you try one day to do it like a Javanese woman?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, if you were a Javanese woman and your husband did that, when he came home you would not even let on that you knew he had been gone for three days. When he came through the door you would smile and ask him how he was and talk about the weather, then you’d go and make him a cup of tea—with your own hands, not ask the servant to do it.’
She went on to explain the Javanese psychology behind her advice. ‘If you do it this way, when he comes through the door, it will make him very nervous and anxious. You show him he’s not very important because you didn’t even notice he was gone. And by making him a cup of tea yourself, you don’t give him any reason to blame you, to say that you are the problem in his marriage. And then later you say to him, “you know, I do worry when you don’t come home”. And then you say nothing else. And he will feel so guilty, he won’t do it again—at least for another three or four months.’
So the next time Bambang came home after a night of partying, Robyn said nothing, set her jaw and made him a cup of tea. He was waiting in the blue room on a sofa beside the gold-inlaid coffee table, with his mother and sister.
‘I was gritting my teeth, trying to smile’, she recounts. ‘I made this cup of tea, and I could feel the spoon grinding on the bottom of the cup. I came in with the cup of tea and went to put it down on the coffee table. Then for one fleeting second, I glanced up, and they were all smiling at me—and I lost it.’
She smashed the cup on the coffee table, sending shattered china flying. ‘Where the bloody hell have you been?’ she screamed.
Eventually Bambang’s nocturnal revelry became so conspicuous that even his parents grew concerned. In a rare show of paternal authority, Robyn’s father-in-law, Amir Andjilin, paid a visit to the house in Denpasar, to put a stop to it. ‘He came to Bali and decided to take Bambang back to Jakarta with him because of how Bambang was behaving. He was basically taking him back for detox. For whatever reason, the offer was not extended to me.’
Six months pregnant, Robyn was left alone in the house in Denpasar with two-year-old Devi and a servant girl. Other than the usual supply of staple foods and kerosene, there was little else in the house. Robyn survived on her child endowment pension of $14 per month, paid by the Australian government into her bank account at home, supplemented by the odd cash gift sent by her mother.
Two months before her due date, Robyn went into premature labour and had to rush herself to Denpasar’s Sanglah Hospital. Normally a solid young woman, her weight had dropped by 8 kilograms to 47 kilograms. ‘It was really terrible, I nearly lost the baby, I was in a terrible condition, extremely underweight. I was in the public ward; it was the filthiest place I’ve ever seen. It was disgusting—there were no sheets on the beds, there was blood on them from the previous patients, there were nits in the pillows. You had to bring your own drinking water; that’s how bad it was. And there were rats as big as cats in the bathroom.’
After she was stabilised and the contractions stopped, a pair of nurses came around to take sterile urine samples from all the maternity patients, armed with a metal kidney bowl, a ‘not so stainless’ steel jug, and a mouldy-looking orange tube. ‘The sight of this antiquated equipment was almost enough to make you lose the baby’, says Robyn, who was in the bed closest to the door. With minimal ceremony, the nurses inserted the tube in Robyn’s urethra and deposited a urine sample in the metal bowl. Then they sloshed some water from the jug on the tube to clean it, made their way to the neighbouring bed and repeated the procedure, continuing around the ward until all the maternity patients were done. ‘I have never been so glad to be the first in line, and I refused to think about where it had been before me’, says Robyn.
After seven days, she was discharged, under orders to have complete bed rest until the birth of the baby. She arrived home at the house in Denpasar to be greeted by her mother-in-law, who announced she was taking Devi back to Jakarta to look after her for the duration of the pregnancy. ‘Her opportunity had come because the doctor had said I had to have bed rest and was not allowed to pick anything up. So instead of arranging for me to be looked after, she said, “I’m going to take Devi back with me because you won’t be able to look after her”. I was so ill I couldn’t fight her. So she took Devi and promised to bring her back two to three weeks before the baby was born. She had finally got what she wanted—she had her granddaughter living with her. I was an afterthought. She, for all intents and purposes, became Devi’s mother, because she was the matriarch.’
Before leaving with her granddaughter, mami arranged to have the house in Denpasar more or less cleared of furniture and valuables, which were placed in locked rooms. ‘So they took Devi and left me and the servant in the house with no money’, says Robyn. ‘They took the furniture, the cutlery, the statues, everything. They left a couple of plates, spoons, glasses and two chairs. The rest they put in the other half of the house and locked it up.’ It was never explained why this was done. Robyn assumed it was to prevent her from selling the family’s belongings or the servant from stealing them.
In May 1977, Robyn went into labour with her second child. Unbeknown to her, she was suffering from a complication known as placenta praevia, where the placenta is in the lower part of the uterus and may become detached, causing severe bleeding and blocking the entrance of the womb. She was haemorrhaging badly, and due to her relatively rare RH-negative blood type, there were no blood supplies available for transfusion. Lying on the delivery-room table, she remembers hearing the obstetrician commenting calmly in Balinese: ‘We’ve only got about half an hour. We have to decide whether to save the baby.’ She looked around, wondering who they were talking about. ‘There was no one else in the labour ward, only me.’ Robyn’s cervix was only 4 centimetres dilated. The obstetrician told her afterwards she was losing so much blood that he believed a caesarian section would be the only way to deliver the child alive, but that she would almost certainly not survive it.
She remembers placing her life in God’s hands. ‘I started praying and asking Allah to help me. I said that I trusted him, and that whatever he had planned for me I would accept.’ The next thing she remembers is an overwhelming urge to push. ‘The baby’s coming, the baby’s coming!’ she yelled. A few moments later, the baby emerged, with the placenta wrapped around his feet.
It was a boy, weighing just over 2 kilograms. They gave him the names Mohammed, after the Prophet, and Firmansah, which means ‘that which comes from Allah’. He was placed in a makeshift humidicrib—a wooden box with a glass lid, lit by electric light bulbs—while Robyn was left in the recovery ward. When her sister-in-law arrived at the hospital, she started screaming; Robyn hadn’t realised she was lying in a pool of blood. The doctor told her afterwards it was a miracle she hadn’t died.
‘Medically it was against all the odds. Technically I should have died, because I had lost so much blood. But I survived— thanks to Allah.’
After a brief visit from her sister-in-law and Bambang, Robyn lay in hospital waiting for someone to come and take her home. ‘The family came and visited, then for three days they didn’t come. No one came to get me out.’ She says the hospital staff wouldn’t allow her to leave with the baby because the bill hadn’t been paid. All she had was a platinum and diamond ring given to her as a gift by Bambang’s father, so she left the ring as a surety and walked home with the baby, returning later to redeem the ring and pay the bill herself with money sent from home by Bessie.
Despite mami’s promise to bring her back before the bi
rth of the baby, two-year-old Devi was still in Jakarta where the family was resisting Robyn’s entreaties to return her to Bali. She says they only relented three weeks after Mohammed was born, when she threatened to report them to the Australian embassy.
The next seven to eight months passed in a blur. Bambang had returned from Jakarta but was seldom at home. There was no regular income and not much food in the half-empty house in Bali. Robyn found a job teaching English at a Chinese-run language college in Denpasar, whose owners had a sideline distributing baby formula and supplemented her salary with powdered milk. Because of her RH-negative blood type the doctor had instructed her not to breastfeed, not realising that baby Mohammed had the same blood type. ‘It was just a time of intolerable living conditions’, Robyn remembers. ‘I tried to work and look after the kids, and I managed to feed them, but I was extremely skinny and ended up quite ill.’ Word of her predicament filtered back via the travellers’ grapevine to her friends in Sydney.
‘She went through a really, really bad time’, says her old friend Deborah Jensen. ‘After Boy disappeared into Kuta Beach, she had a shocking time. She was living on nothing in this house. A lady stayed with her as a servant, but they had barely enough to eat. This was after the horrible ordeal of giving birth to Mohammed. It was just a horrible ordeal until she got back.’
One day, as she was walking down the main street of Denpasar on her way home from working at the English-language school, Robyn bumped into an old acquaintance from Manly Girls High. The woman was a born-again Christian who was honeymooning in Bali with her husband who ran a surf shop at Avalon on Sydney’s northern beaches. They had known each other at school and on the surf scene, but were not close friends.
‘Oh my God, Robyn, what’s happened to you?’ the woman exclaimed.
Robyn was pale and emaciated. By this stage her milk had dried up, so she couldn’t breastfeed, even if she wanted to. Later the woman came to visit at the house in Denpasar, where Robyn was feeding baby Mohammed weak tea from a bottle, having run out of powdered milk.
The Mother of Mohammed Page 9