by Carl Hoffman
“You have villages like this in America?” asked a man wearing a Pertamina oil company baseball cap on his head and a blue one-piece jumpsuit. He had thick, jet black eyebrows and a gray mustache over a pair of crooked white teeth, and he spoke formally, with what I thought was a Dutch accent, like many elderly English-speaking Indonesians who had been educated when Indonesia was a Dutch colony. His name was Santoso.
I looked at the village on the beach. Shook my head. “No,” I said, “definitely not.”
“A landscape like this?”
That was a harder question to answer; there were tropics in America, after all. But no, not really. Not like this, which I told him.
Santoso looked puzzled. Together we gazed at the sea and the shacks and the children. “But America is big and great, no?” It was an odd thought—that a great and big nation would not have a little village nestled on a beach in a vast jungle.
He wore a heavy gold ring with an orange stone as big as a quail’s egg. I said I liked it. “You have no stones like this in America?”
The next village was called Wayalikut. “Have you written in your exercise book about the nice panorama of Wayalikut village?” he asked.
The day passed. Mile after mile of deserted green coast, thickly overgrown with palm trees and black sand beaches that became white in places, villages of fifty houses of rust and thatch. The crew cooked meals and fed me: rice and cabbage and bony dried sardines with a fresh, fiery paste of hot peppers ground out in a stone mortar. I’d told Joppy I was going to Lambrule, which was the first of our two official destinations. Over and over again people had asked me why, which I finally understood when we got there. Lambrule was no different from any other of the villages, except that it had a long concrete dock and some streets with half-finished concrete houses and a half-finished church. But no restaurants, no hotels; no stores or shops; just a pressing damp heat and a tangle of green vines and a single potholed street. “Panas!” everyone said to me—hot!
“I think I’ll continue on to Leksula,” I told Joppy, who introduced me to a policeman in shorts named Deddy. “He will show you around,” Joppy said. “Don’t be gone long, though.” Deddy escorted me in the searing sun. He didn’t speak English, so we walked in silence and almost nothing moved in the whole place.
Late in the afternoon we hit Leksula, and it was little different from Lambrule—just a minuscule village on an island in the middle of the ocean. Within minutes of our docking, Hendro showed up. He was twenty-one, wearing shorts, a camouflage-colored sleeveless T-shirt, flip-flops, and, as the village’s known English speaker, he had been quickly summoned. “Let me show you Leksula!” he said, beaming, excited. As we walked down the long concrete pier, crumbling in places, a beached and ancient wooden ferry on its side in the shallows, the skies opened and warm rain came pouring down. Hendro didn’t seem to notice, as the pier ended and mud and puddles began. The main street paralleled the shore, and we walked between corrugated and concrete houses, people huddling under porches and staring at me under the downpour. Nothing about the place really registered to me, at first. Just a heavy stillness. Hendro tapped my shoulder and pointed to a man in a doorway. “There is someone trying to say hello to you,” he said. I waved. The man waved back. “Why don’t you sleep in the village?” Hendro said. “You can enjoy village life. It is much better and you will not go up and down like you will on the boat.”
“Is there a restaurant or somewhere I can get a cup of coffee?” I asked.
“Closed,” he said, “but we can go to my aunt’s house.” We stopped at a one-story concrete house surrounded by mud and chickens, with an open door. Removed our flip-flops and went in; the front room had a wooden and floral print sofa and two matching chairs, their backs covered with antimacassars, and a wooden coffee table. Portraits of stern-looking army officers gazed down from the walls. Hendro went into a back room, and a few minutes later a middle-aged woman came out bearing cookies and two cups of instant coffee. We were both soaked. Slowly a gang of children gathered at the door, peering in. Laughing. Calling out, “Hello, mister!”
“When I finished elementary school,” Hendro said, “I decided I wanted to go to music school. I like music very much. I want to go to Jakarta, but I can’t do it, I have no money. Now I just practice my music in the church; it is a symbol of God.” He paused a moment and said, “New York is the biggest city in the world, isn’t it?”
“No,” I said, “not even close. Jakarta is bigger than New York!”
“Well, it’s the most beautiful city in the world!”
“No,” I said again, “there are many other cities that are much more beautiful. Paris. Rome. New York is very crowded.”
He sipped his coffee. Thought. “Mister Carl, why aren’t you an actor in Hollywood?”
“I never wanted to be an actor,” I said, and asked if he had a girlfriend.
“No, but I would like one. I have no job, so I can’t have a girlfriend.”
When we finished the coffee the rain had stopped. Out we went again, and this time people flooded into the streets. Staring at me, waving, calling out hello. They were all in groups. Men held hands with each other, walked with their arms around each other. They squatted on the ground together, sat on walls together. A soccer game broke out on a muddy field. Always, everywhere, people were together; that’s why my being alone was so hard to fathom. By now, everyone in town knew I was there, and suddenly I felt like one of the Inuit brought back to New York by Admiral Robert Peary after his polar expedition. I was seized with an urgent need for privacy. I wanted to be alone. Hendro took me back to the ship, where at the dock children were bombing off the pier, throwing each other into the ocean in their shorts and T-shirts, tumbling on the sand on the beach, playing with a joy and abandon long absent from the organized soccer fields and playgrounds of American cities. A crowd had followed us. Young. Old. Children. Men. There must have been twenty or thirty of them. They climbed on board following me, literally stood around me, surrounding me, watching me. I waved. They waved.
Joppy understood and opened a cabin for me, said I should sleep there tonight. It was tiny—two bunks not quite six feet long, the cabin only four feet wide. Instantly there were ten faces at the window peering in. I felt bad, but I did it anyway: took out my sarong and hung it over the window. The cabin was dim. Sauna-like. Airless. And it felt like the greatest refuge on earth. I was a freak in a village so far removed from the world it was almost inconceivable. No cell phones. No Internet. No roads to get here, no roads from here to anywhere else, just a big green mass jungle rising behind the village where, a man on the ship had told me, were “men without religion.” It was hard to understand my own reactions, feelings. I wanted to embrace it, revel in it, take a little house and live here and get to know it. And once again I wanted to flee from the village as fast as possible. Part of it was simple: I’d been raised in such a different environment and I was used to so much personal space and privacy. But I couldn’t help feeling there was something else, too, something deeper that I was just beginning to figure out—that as I pushed further out into the world alone and surrounded by otherness, amid people so deeply connected, I wanted that, too. The very gulf between me and everyone staring at me made me feel that much more alone and hungry for a genuine connection that I wasn’t getting constantly moving through the world.
That night Joppy took me to dinner in town. We ate in a concrete room with a single bare lightbulb, rice and fish and cabbage and hot sauce. “When I was first arrested,” he said, “the Seamen’s Mission paid for a lawyer, and many people from a church came to see me. But then it stopped and I was alone. When I got out and back to Jakarta I made a promise that I’d never drink again. Bad things happen.” That idea of aloneness again; Joppy had come back to Buru, married; now he had a family here.
After dinner we strolled up and down the street. The dark was deep, impenetrable beyond the weak bare bulbs of shops selling shoes and T-shirts and sarongs, and rice an
d mangos. Stars sparkled brightly overhead, millions of them. Girls walked arm in arm. Boys held hands. Suddenly I felt overwhelmed again, and it wasn’t people staring this time. The night had given me a cloak of anonymity; people couldn’t tell the strange “mister” was in their midst until I was nearly upon them. It was hard for me to imagine flourishing outside of a major city, and these days even a remote American farmstead was hardly remote, so many places interconnected by the web, highways, telephones; they were how I thought of and defined the world. But there were millions and probably hundreds of millions of people around the planet who lived in tiny, remote places like Leksula. Nothing but sun and sea and sand and jungle. And each other; people were so connected to each other in this little world. I was such a loose atom, ricocheting around the world. Walking with Hendro, he’d said, “This is my brother. My aunt. My cousin. My sister.” Their world was this, right here. These shops. This sand. This harbor. These people. And Leksula was big; it had a concrete pier! The villages of Buru were tiny outlying worlds as removed from Facebook and the economic meltdown as Mercury and Pluto. That we were all out there simultaneously struck me as incredible. I myself had parroted the cliché that the world was getting smaller every day, but walking through the darkness of Leksula it didn’t feel that way. It felt vast. Huge. And I was very far from home.
HENDRO WOKE ME up at 6:00 a.m., knocking on my cabin window, one eye peering through a crack that the sarong failed to cover. “My aunt wants to invite you for coffee, Mister Carl!”
I washed my hair and body in a bucket and we walked into town, children in red skirts and white blouses walking to school. It was so quiet, nothing but the sound of their voices and laughter. We walked through town and at a big, well-kept house, Santoso—the man from the ship with the ring and Pertemina baseball cap—was drinking coffee on a wide verandah. He rushed out. “You must come and sit and meet my brother. He is the headmaster of the high school.”
Hendro and I sat down at a table covered with a yellow plastic tablecloth, and sipped coffee with Santoso’s brother and sister. Santoso reached over and held my hand. It was a disconcerting sensation, this strange man holding my hand in his. My American instinct wanted to pull it away; it went against everything I knew. But it also felt nice. Warm. Welcoming. It just was—the most elemental of human connection, laden with no expectations. An embrace, and no one else even noticed it. We said goodbye after coffee, and I followed Hendro through town. Birds chirped. The sound of voices on the breeze, since there was no traffic, no sounds of mechanization at all, and we came to a long one-story building with jalousied windows, gardens. This was the high school, Hendro took me into the headmaster’s office, the school’s English teacher came in, and we visited on a sofa, Hendro and the teacher translating.
“How glad I am you have come to Leksula,” the headmaster said, placing a hand on my knee. “What has brought you here?”
It had a formality, we were two heads of state meeting on some official state visit, two representatives from far-apart worlds.
“I am a journalist and I want to see the world,” I said. “Not just the parts where everybody goes, but the faraway parts.”
“And what do you think of it?”
“It is beautiful and quiet,” I said, “and it feels very far from home, even though your school looks very much like a school in America.” This last point was only a little bit of a lie—all schools did kind of look the same, after all. “And,” I said, “I have been received most graciously with such hospitality.”
He smiled. Nodded.
They took me for a tour; we peeked into tidy, spare classrooms with students sitting at desks in rows, and passed two poor boys standing by a flagpole in the courtyard, each balancing on one foot. “They’re bad,” Hendro said. “Always late.”
A horn sounded, the Star announcing its departure. I had to go. Again.
The teacher and headmaster shook my hand, thanked me profusely for visiting the high school and Leksula, and Hendro walked me back, through the tropical heat and stillness and dogs and little garden plots. I felt embarrassed by my celebrity and by the generosity and curiosity of Hendro, Santoso, and the headmaster. To me I was bringing so little to them, offering them nothing. Why show me the high school? Why take time out of his day to sit with me? Why hold my hand? Why be so kind to me? I bore no gifts. I could give them nothing. But Hendro spoke English, and spoke it well; the high school offered English—it was the language of power and of the world, of opportunity and the future—and I was its representative who’d just dropped in one afternoon out of nowhere on the Amboina Star. It was hard for me to imagine going so gaga over an Indonesian dropping into town, almost anywhere in America. It wasn’t like we’d been studying Indonesian for years without ever seeing a real Indonesian. It wasn’t like we’d all dreamed about going to Indonesia—Jakarta as the most beautiful and biggest city in the world! Hendro lived in a tiny village on a remote island, idealizing everything his village wasn’t, and I was an emissary of that ideal. The whole concept humbled me.
“You must come back again, for longer,” Hendro said, beaming, on the deck of the Star as we stood surrounded by twenty passengers. “When you come back,” he said, “we can find you a house in the village.”
SOON WE WERE OUT on the water again, nothing but sea and sky and crowded ship and village after village. This time a big swell was coursing in toward the beach, and the Star rolled heavily. A child vomited repeatedly, the puke running down his father’s leg and foot, a man with teeth as black as old wooden boards from betel-nut chewing, as my fellow passengers stared listlessly in their nausea. Overhead, frigate birds circled round and round, and flying fish glided over the wave tops. “Up in there,” said Alex, the second engineer, pointing to the verdant mountains of Buru, “there are cannibals.” He touched his arm knowingly. “They eat you.”
Toward dusk, great gray clouds moved overhead and we left Buru and headed out to sea and rolled and pitched in a darkness without stars, a wood-and-steel speck in a vast ocean. It was in conditions like these, on nights like this, that ferries went down and disappeared, lost forever along the capillaries of a still-large planet.
Mumbai: The city’s cattle class train commute has put a big question mark over the future of a brilliant sixteen-year-old girl. Raushan Jawwad, who scored over 92 percent in her class X examination a few months ago, lost both legs after being pushed out of a crowded local train near Andheri on Tuesday.
—Times of India, October 17, 2008
SEVEN
The 290th Victim
“EVERYTHING IN THAT BOOK is true,” said Nasirbhai. It was almost 100 degrees, the humidity of the Bay of Bengal pressing down, and he was wearing a white dress shirt over a sleeveless undershirt, pleated black slacks, and black oxford shoes. Small scars were etched around brown eyes that studied me from a wide, inscrutable face; a big stone of lapis studded one finger, and a silver bracelet dangled from his wrist. He had a barrel chest and his hands hung at his sides, ready, waiting—never in his pockets. He looked immovable, like a pitbull, like a character from another time and place, and in a way he was. “That book” was Shantaram, the international best-selling novel written by Australian Gregory David Roberts, who’d escaped from prison in Oz and found his way to Bombay two decades ago, where he’d become deeply involved with its criminal gangs and Nasir—who always carried the honorific bhai, “uncle.”
“We met in the 1980s,” Nasirbhai said, standing on a corner in Colaba, one of Mumbai’s oldest neighborhoods and its tourist epicenter, the streets lined with vendors selling tobacco and sandals and newspapers and bangles, pedestrians as thick on the sidewalks as attendees at a rock concert. Roberts was famous now, a Mumbai legend, and through a friend of a friend had connected me to Nasirbhai, who agreed to take me deep onto the commuter trains of the most crowded city on earth, where the day’s simple commute was a matter of life and death. “Traveling on these trains is very risky because they are so full,” Nasirbhai said. “
But people must be at work, they must not be late or their boss will fire them. They must get to their destination, so they lean out of the doors, hang on to the windows, climb on top of the train. They risk their life to get to work every day.”
By population, the city—just nineteen miles across, with 19 million souls—was bigger than 173 countries. The population density of America was thirty-one people per square kilometer; Singapore 2,535 and Bombay island 17,550; some neighborhoods had nearly one million people per square kilometer. A never-ending stream of Indians was migrating to Mumbai, which was swelling, groaning, barely able to keep pace. In 1990 an average of 3,408 people were packing a nine-car train; ten years later that number had grown to more than 4,500. Seven million people a day rode the trains, fourteen times the whole population of Washington, D.C. But it was the death rate that shocked the most; Nasirbhai was no exaggerating alarmist. In April 2008 Mumbai’s Central and Western railway released the official numbers: 20,706 Mumbaikers killed on the trains in the last five years. They were the most dangerous conveyances on earth.
As we threaded through packed sidewalks and streets toward Chhatrapati Terminus, still mostly known by its old British name, Victoria Terminus (or VT for short), Nasirbhai talked about his life and meeting Roberts. “I was a big man then,” he said. “Fighting every day. Drugs were my business. I sold hash and brown sugar.” Usually when he sold drugs to foreigners, Nasirbhai did the deal and the transaction was over; dealer and buyer went their separate ways. For some reason, however, he and Roberts toked together. “I don’t know why. Destiny. I loved him. And then he started doing brown sugar and I hated him.” The rich smell of garbage and shit filled the heavy air, and Nasirbhai guided me like a child, between lines of traffic and careening buses. “If you’re not like me you cannot live in this city. You have to be tough.” Roberts, like so many foreigners, eventually disappeared, and Nasirbhai didn’t hear from him for fifteen years. He continued to live off the streets and deal drugs. Then, in 2000, he was arrested. Set up. “I sold a lot of drugs to Bollywood stars—I grew up with them, with superstars, including Fardeen Khan,” the son of the late legendary director Feroze Khan. For his deals, Nasirbhai used a taxi driver he trusted. The driver had been arrested for selling heroin a few days before, and, under pressure, had agreed to cooperate with police. By the time Nasirbhai met Fardeen on May 4, 2001, police from the Narcotics Control Board were waiting. “We were just making the deal”—Nasirbhai had nine grams of cocaine—“when a car came up in front and another in back. They jumped out with guns. Fardeen hit the locks, said, ‘What do we do?’ I said, ‘nothing, there is nothing we can do. They have guns.’”