by Nigel Barley
– T. S. Raffles
Once again Raffles was trying to pick up the dropped stitches of history, re-tying broken threads, re-establishing a past which was a mere illusion, a creation of his own wishful thinking. He quickly ‘discovered’ that the treaties between the Dutch and the Minang were purely commercial, having no political implications! The stage was set for a great British takeover in Sumatra, a new province centred on Padang, reviving the fortunes of a vanished empire and the glories of a classical world. In his treaty with the ‘Emperor’ of Minangkabau he was careful to have himself named as the emperor’s representative to all the Malay states. The Company was not impressed and sent him what would in later times be termed ‘a rocket’. They told him to stop messing about and give Padang back to the Dutch.
* * *
May leaned back and sighed contentedly. The demons of doubt that usually nagged at him seemed, for once, at peace.
‘Indonesians,’ he said dreamily, ‘are the happiest people in the world.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Some time ago, two of our friends had an accident. Their motorbike hit a bus. One was killed outright. “Better to die like that,” we said, “than to live a cripple.” The other was horribly maimed and what did we all say.’ “Well, he was lucky really. He could have been killed!”’
Yet was in no mood for anecdotes. The anthropological urge was upon him. He was soon in full flight, trying to grasp and encapsulate the Minang with the desperation of a homegrown ethnographer who constantly stubs his toe on the contradictions and inconsistencies raised by his own broad generalizations. It is impossible to paint with a broad brush when standing so close to the canvas.
‘There is one legend that tells you everything about the Minang social system. The house holds onto its women, its fields and the children. But what if the men get lost? What if they forget their own house? Have you heard of Malin Kundang?
‘Once upon a time, there was a poor widow who lived with her only son, Malin Kundang, by the sea. She had only a tiny, tiny field, so however hard she and her son worked they never had enough to eat. Her son also worked very hard for the neighbours and he fished. He did everything a man can do to earn money and by the time he was fifteen he had saved a little, enough to go away on a trading trip.
‘He got on a ship and set off. His mother cried. He cried. Week followed week. Year followed year. She had no news of him. Five years, ten years. Still no news.
‘One day a big ship came to the village. The neighbours called to her, “Hey, mother. It is Malin Kundang who has come back with great wealth.”
‘She set off, trembling, tears in her eyes. There on the bridge of the ship she saw him, dressed all in gold, with rings and jewels on his fingers and necklaces of diamonds. He had become a man. He had grown tall and handsome, with dark eyes and flashing teeth.
‘She called out to him from the crowd and he looked to find her. She was skinny, poor, dressed in rags. At first he did not recognize her, then he was ashamed. His beautiful wife was beside him, horrified at the hideous old woman claiming to be her husband’s mother.
‘“Is it true?” she asked.
‘“No,” said Malin Kundang, his heart full of pride. “That is not my mother.”
‘Then his mother called out on God and cursed him and God heard her. He turned the ship and her son into stone. You can still see it at the village of Air Manis. I will take you tomorrow but it is not nice any more. They have repaired it in cement. It is like Disneyland.’
We were sitting on a big rock, not Malin Kundang’s, in the middle of a hotel. They were drinking beer. When Indonesian students drink, they drink to get drunk. They told with glee the story of a foreigner who had come and asked where he could get beer because he was thirsty.
It was a strange hotel. The décor was extraordinary, a cross between a rock-garden and a gigantic, seedy Indian restaurant with rooms replacing the tables. But it was football again that overshadowed the whole establishment. The owner was a foot-ball fanatic, and his passion had driven him to form his own team from the staff. They were posed athletically in portraits all over the walls, dangerously close to those of the President and Vice-President. The man who did the cooking had been hired for the outstanding strength of his left foot. The man who worked out the bills had recommended himself by his ability to leap six feet in the air and catch a football in one hand. The indispensable players knew they could not be fired under any circumstances and had abandoned all further dissimulation to sit all day in the hall frankly gossiping and eating copious meals of their own devising.
Yet’s audience listened to the tale and nodded. ‘Malin Kundang was a bad son. What does it matter what a man does as long as he loves his mother?’
I was tempted to tell the Jewish joke about Oedipus – ‘Oedipus Schmoedipus, so long as he loves his mother’ – but knew it could not possibly survive translation.
* * *
Out of the blue came one of those turning points that make Raffles’ life more the stuff of fiction than of fact. An incautiously worded sentence from inimical Lord Moira lent itself to misreading as an invitation to visit. Raffles and the Editor did not even wait for a proper ship. They were off like a flash to Calcutta in a tiny vessel at great risk to life and limb. Then something inexplicable happened. Lord Moira underwent an almost religious conversion. The change is coincidentally marked by Moira’s change of name to Lord Hastings. He was transformed overnight from nonplussed, reluctant host into a supporter – more – a ‘fan’ of Raffles. The man must have had charm.
Flotsam and Jetsam
I had not meant to go to Bali. It was all a matter of planes and the high tide of the tourist season. I had been before and found it, in May’s word, ‘unbecoming’. Tourism is not ennobling either for the givers or the receivers, reducing humanity to its lowest common denominator. Australians were everywhere, organizing pub-crawls around the beachside drinking halls, fornicating, fighting and vomiting. A leaflet pressed into my hand at the airport was a rich ethnographic document. It dwelt on the tedium of Balinese cuisine, which had neither chips nor Vegemite; no wonder it gave everyone diarrhoea. The punch line urged, ‘Avoid hangovers. Stay drunk!’ There were many people in the streets avoiding hangovers.
Raffles had not meant to come here either. It was contrary winds that had blown him to Bali just after the death of Olivia. This suggested to me a common destiny that should not be fought, a divinely ordained chance to visit the places Raffles had seen. Moreover, from Bengkulu I had an unpaid debt, a promise made to the God of the Five Principles that must be kept – Nyoman’s university dues.
The threatening hand of the God of the Five Principles hovered over me at the airport, mysteriously withholding my luggage. The idea of a kind customs official seems strange to English ears, yet in Bali I found one, who took me on a tour of vast, hissing sheds piled high with homeless suitcases. I was told to wait, and sat upon the suitcases of others as a child is given a dummy to suck.
One by one the security men filed in and lined up for parade before a thin, etched man covered with gold braid.
‘I have loved you,’ he cried in tones of strangulated anguish. ‘You are professionals. Trained. You are famous.’ The word called for amplification. Famous even as far as Italy.’ He wrung his hands. ‘We were brothers: I was your big brother, you were my little brothers. And now this. This terrible thing. A broom has disappeared – stolen – from this very shed!’
Securely invisible behind a screen, two security men giggled silently and wagged reproving fingers at me in silent mockery of their superior.
‘The natives of Bali, although of the same original stock with the Javans, exhibit several striking differences, not only in their manners and the degrees of civilization they have attained, but in their features and bodily appearance. They are above the middle size of Asiatics, and exceed both in stature and muscular power, either the Javan or the Malayu. Though professing a religion which in western India moulds t
he character of the Hindu into the most tame and implicit subserviency to rule and authority, and though living under the rod of despotism which they have put into the hands of their chiefs, they still possess much of the original boldness and self-willed hardihood of the savage state.’
– T. S. Raffles, History of Java
The hotels were all full. I trudged from one to the next, humping newly restored luggage. It was unbelievable. There were so many hotel rooms some of them must be empty. I sat down at a stall and moodily sipped a cold drink.
There were a lot of men sitting about in sarongs, smoking. They waggled their eyebrows at me, we began to talk. They were building workers, Muslims, from the neighbouring island of Lombok, fleeing drought to seek work jacking up tourist hotels in Bali. One man had brought his three sons, aged fourteen to eighteen. He had not seen his wife for a year.
‘This is the last job,’ he sighed wearily. ‘I have to go home.’
‘Yes,’ chorused his friends, ‘his hand is nearly dropping off.’
I explained my own plight.
‘How much,’ they whispered, ‘do they charge for a room?’ I told them. They fell about laughing. It was twenty times what one of them could earn in a day.
‘That’s crazy. Have nothing to do with it. Come and live with us,’ they offered. ‘We’re building the hotel next door. It opens next month. There are lots of rooms. Pay us what you like.’
It was an establishment of extraordinary but gap-toothed luxury. It had a marble bathroom but no water. Most of its contents were mysterious to the men who had installed them and as a thing of beauty and no utility, to enter it was for them almost a religious experience. For Muslims, with their ritual ablutions, cleanliness is indeed next to godliness. A bucketful of water was left outside my door every morning like an offering.
‘Would you like a window?’ they had asked.
‘A window would be nice.’
‘Wardi – a window!’ One had appeared in an hour.
There were no ordinary light-bulbs, but chandeliers had arrived, so one was mounted temporarily in my room. You had to walk round it to get to the marble bathroom.
They worked from dawn to dusk but in the evenings engaged in a parody of domestication, washing, cooking and dreaming of home. I was scandalously caught one evening sewing a button on a shirt I was already wearing. This, they warned me, was a terrible evil. To do such a thing was to risk being lost for ever in the forest.
Their great private preoccupation was the construction of a roulette wheel. It was a complicated device made of wood and coat hangers, built by a syndicate of hopefuls.
‘There is a Chinese who comes every Saturday and wins the men’s wages. It would be much better if I won the men’s wages,’ the foreman explained with irrefutable logic. ‘However, there is one problem. We cannot remember the sequence of numbers around the wheel and on the board. There is a place where white people go to gamble, where we would be shy. Could you dress up and go there and make notes and …?’
‘Of course.’
* * *
‘In the arts, they [the Balinese] are considerably behind the Javans, though they seem capable of advancing rapidly. They are happily not subjected to a frame of government so calculated to repress their energies or waste their resources. They are now a rising people. Neither degraded by despotism nor enervated by habits of indolence or luxury, they perhaps promise fairer for a progress in civilization and good government than any of their neighbours.
They are strangers to the vices of drunkenness, libertinism and conjugal infidelity: their predominant passions are gaming and cock-fighting. In these amusements, when at peace with the neighbouring states, all the vehemence and energy of their character and spirit is called forth and exhausted.’
– T. S. Raffles, History of Java
* * *
It was not easy to find the house of Nyoman, my footballing friend from Bengkulu. Not intending to stop here, I had not brought his full name, just the appellation that revealed his place in the sequence of children born to his parents. To look for someone named Nyoman in Bali is like trying to find Paddy in Dublin. I found the area with some trouble, then the street with more, then the alley after quite a lot more, but all attempts to get to the house failed. Then, in the distance, drying on a washing line, I saw a familiar blue blouson with the single word ‘Bali’ engrossed upon it.
I entered the gate and there he was, lined up with mother, grandfather, sisters and nephews, all adorned for the temple in cloths of gold and with flowers and gold leaves in their hair. Father was wafting incense in their faces, spraying a paternal blessing upon them with scented coconut water. They made me sit down and began to shower me with food and news. Behind the house, a pig was turning on a spit, slick with oil like a sunbathing tourist.
‘It is wonderful that you have come. It is an extraordinary day. We have just received the best possible news.’
‘What news?’
Nyoman took a deep breath and grinned. ‘There is money coming. Money from God.’
My mouth must have hung open. ‘From God? How do you know?’
The family settled as for a group photo and he began to relate the story, they nodding emphatically. Only later would I discover they did not speak Indonesian so could not possibly have understood a word.
‘It was this way. Like all Balinese, my father has his village temple. Always he pays more for its upkeep than his brothers. It has led to fights in the family. Well, one day an old man came to the house and tried to sell my father a coconut for 50,000 rupiahs so the money could go to the temple. My father was angry. “What?” he shouted. “How much does a coconut cost? 50 rupiahs? 100 rupiahs?” He chased the man away. But that night my mother had a dream. In it she saw we should buy the coconut, so we went round the family and friends and got together the money and bought it. And when we opened it, what do you think? There were four gold rings inside. They’re over there on the altar.’
I went over and looked. There were four cheap gold rings like they sell to tourists on the beach. I nodded.
‘It is the best possible sign. Money from above. We are taking the rings back to the temple. They will be used to cure disease.’
They looked at me. I seemed to be cast in the role of scientific observer sent to witness the truth of the event and set my seal of authenticity upon it.
‘Is there any sign of this money?’ I asked cunningly.
Nyoman shrugged. ‘Not yet. In fact my father has just lost his job. But it’s certain it’s coming.’
I felt vaguely annoyed, irksomely trapped, reduced to a minor motif in someone else’s greater design. ‘Look,’ I said. ‘I have a story to tell too.’ I told them about the promise made in Bengkulu, my unexpected visit to their island. I felt like the party bore longwindedly dissecting a joke everyone had already instantly grasped. They nodded and shrugged. Right, well, there it was then. The whole thing was explained. There was no need for me to be so surprised about it. They accepted the money in a matter-of-fact way. After all, it was not from me, it was from God.
‘And now,’ they said, ‘you had better borrow some proper clothes from us and come to the temple so it can all be sorted out by the priest.’
We drove for hours. I had forgotten to stand with legs apart while they tied the sarong, so I could hardly sit down in it. Fruit was passed around. In other cars, on other motorbikes, sat people of all ages going to temples. They were all laughing. It was most unlike church.
By the time we arrived it was dark and there was a great fussing with parking, officials with torches adding greatly to the difficulty of the whole operation. The younger members had to be enticed past the men selling fish satay and into the temple itself, where there boiled a sort of spontaneous riot. A priest was found and the story told again. He seemed delighted and drenched us in scented water, bustling off with the rings. I received rudimentary instruction in the right gestures and motions of worship, the sequence of colours of the flowers and was
entrusted with my own incense stick. But there seemed to be some disparity between our relative colour systems.
‘Now a white flower,’ Nyoman would hiss, passing me a blue one. ‘Now red.’ And gave me orange.
We progressed from court to court, the women hefting the piles of offerings about with brisk efficiency. At the highest point was a priest in white, arms raised in lengthy supplication. It turned out that he was only trying to mend the lights. At the crucial point of the ceremony, the electricity failed entirely and the congregation set up a great wail, being now unable to see the colours of the flowers in their hands.
‘They have no money to mend the lights,’ said Nyoman, ‘but who knows. Maybe now there will be more money from on high.’ It did not feel like a hint.
Torches began to circulate, passed from hand to hand after the surreptitious fashion of comic-reading choirboys during lengthy sermons. A boy took advantage of the dark, leaning forward to tremblingly inhale the long, black hair of the beautiful girl in front, then slumped back on his heels, sated and stunned, with a post-orgasmic expression of exhausted ecstasy and wonder.
As we left, they pushed flowers into my hair. The smell was evocative, thick, curdling, whorish. It was frangipani, ‘dead Chinaman flower’, again.
* * *
Tampaksiring was Bung Karno’s retreat on Bali. It was no problem to get in. The French waiter’s pourboire ‘drink money’ is the Indonesian soldier’s wang rokok ‘cigarette money’. This probably says a lot about both cultures.