Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples

by V. S. Naipaul

  But it was no longer a purely agricultural village. The five principal houses belonged to people who did other work, town work, and sometimes quite unusual work. The man just across the main road was a government officer of the third grade: he was Linus’s uncle through his step-grandmother (perhaps the second wife who had been indirectly responsible for the impoverishing of Linus’s mother). There was a compiler of an Indonesian dictionary; then another uncle of Linus’s who was a sculptor, a maker of official statues; an aunt, who was a Javanist and a mystic with a huge following, Linus said, and who sometimes lived in the city; and there was a retired Muslim high-school teacher who had done the pilgrimage to Mecca. A factory worker kept a nice house, beautifully painted, and with Japanese bonsai trees and other plants outside, quite unprotected; but this was “only for show,” Linus said, meaning that the man wasn’t as well off as the others. And there was another relation of Linus’s—living next to the plain wooden building that was the Catholic chapel—who was a PE instructor in Yogya and traveled to work every day.

  The village had changed, and Linus’s family circumstances had changed. But old village commitments, old loyalties, had to be honored; they were helping to impoverish Linus’s mother even more.

  The neighbor who was a sharecropper was a widow and very poor. She had five children. Two worked as servants in Jakarta. The eldest and the youngest lived with her, working as laborers in the rice fields and elsewhere. The fifth child was a mason.

  Linus said, “The mason came three months ago and asked to buy some little piece of land from us, to make a small house for himself.” The poor and cramped kampung hut in which the family lived was on land that belonged to the sculptor. “The mason said, ‘If you don’t give us land, where would we go?’ And then my mother reminded us that when my father was a child, the woman who took care of my father was the grandmother of this family. ‘So we have to remember this history of your father.’ So we will sell the land, a hundred square meters. We have a thousand square meters of garden. This relationship with our neighbor is more human. We’ve made a written agreement. That is new: until now everything was oral.”

  They had three pieces of rice land, in all about an acre. It would have been worked cooperatively. This explained the crowded, busy little rice fields on the other side of the main road, far down the dirt road behind the good houses and the flags and decorations for the independence anniversary celebrations, RI50. As soon as the car began to go down that road, I recognized the land as the land I had seen in 1979 with Linus and Umar Kayam: it was what I had carried away in my head as Linus’s village and turned over the years to a pastoral vision of a complete civilization. I had seen it in 1979 on a morning in December. Now, in August, on a late afternoon, it was dustier and harsher, the Java of straw hats and many hands, fertility eating up itself.

  For every eight pounds reaped, Linus said, a helper received one pound in payment; if the helper was a member of the family he received half of what he reaped. And this village was full of Linus’s relations.

  There were other obligations. “When there are weddings in the village we have to make a gift often thousand rupiah.” Something under five dollars. “This is the custom of the village people. After my father’s death, of course we don’t have many invitations, but we still receive some. One hundred kilos of rice will fetch forty-five thousand rupiah. From our land we get from twenty to twenty-five quintals. That is, two thousand to twenty-five hundred kilos.” Five hundred dollars’ worth, at the higher figure.

  Linus said later—without prompting from me, and as though it was something he had had to think about—“I could become a rice farmer if I decide, but I think it will be hard for me to spend all my energies in the rice fields.”

  And too many things had changed. The village life had changed. There was no longer the music, the nightlong shadow theater with the well-known characters and stories. Even the rice had changed. “The old traditional rice was full of savor and taste.” He made a gesture, taking his fingers to his nose. “The new Filipino rice—you can’t eat it in the evening if you cook it in the morning.”

  Somewhere in those fields his mother was working. Somewhere in the house his invalid sister was living out her day.

  We began to drive back to Yogya.

  He said, “The village is in crisis. The urban process is happening here too. They already divide the rice fields for their children, and the fields become very narrow. Many young-generation Javanese do not have rice field. They look for a job in the city. My mother is the last generation to live and work in the village. The young generation who stay in the village and work in the rice fields usually are not educated. The educated people who work in the towns and live in the villages become commuters.”

  And rice work was now a torment; the cycle had speeded up too much. The old rice took four and a half months to ripen. The new rice ripened in three months.

  “Now after sunset the farmer is tired and only wants to look at TV. In the village there are no longer enough gamelan instruments. They don’t have enough money to buy. Their money goes to educate their children and on health.”

  He telephoned me at the hotel late that evening. It was something I had asked him to do, so that we could have a last talk before I went back to Jakarta.

  He said there was something he had forgotten to tell me. He had had an important message from Siddhartha not long before. It was one of those messages tapped out—tuk, tuk, tuk—on his friend Landung’s palm, and read later by the lady from the mystic circle. Life on earth was only a process, Siddhartha had said. The true process, the true life, began after death. “Process”: that was the best Linus could do: the word used by Siddhartha was hard to translate. I felt that the word might have been a Javanese word, like those Linus was well-known for using in his poetry, words that limited his appeal, but which he used for their accuracy and their emotional charge.

  When I got back to Jakarta I found a letter which Linus had sent me more than two weeks before but which I had not had. It was a letter which (partly because of the language) I would not have understood without having met him. It was about the stresses with which he lived, and also about his spiritual teacher, a man of sixty-five in the next village, a Javanese-Christian-Reformist mystic. It gave a further twist to what he had told me.

  His dream of Siddhartha and death worked on me during the night, and in the morning I awakened to a clear knowledge—almost as to something about myself—of the pain Linus lived with, family pain, pain as a writer, pain for all the things of Java and his village which he saw being washed away. I saw at the same time that—unlike Mariman Darto, the young Muslim, who had found a kind of support outside his village with CIDES, however illusory that support might be—Linus could live nowhere else but in his village and in his house. It was the only place where he could find all the things and relationships that gave savor and point to his life.

  7

  OH MAMA! OH PAPA!

  LUKMAN UMAR was born in 1933 into a poor farming family in Padang in West Sumatra. He was the last of six children. Life, already hard, became much harder with the Japanese occupation in 1942. More than fifty years later Lukman remembered how in 1943 he and other boys of his age had been made to carry stones from the river for the airport the Japanese were building at Tabing, a few miles north of Padang.

  Some years later—perhaps after the end of the war, though exactly when wasn’t clear—Lukman’s father left his family to go and open a piece of forest and turn it, in the immemorial way of Sumatra, into a rice field. The father didn’t return; and though nothing was said directly, it is likely that he had started another family. A second marriage, a second family: in Indonesia, as in other Islamic countries, it was a familiar story. The adventure had religious sanction, but the consequences never ended for the two families. It made for a society of half-orphans, in a chain of deprivation and rage: an abandoned child often became an abandoning parent.

  Lukman’s mother, when she was left
alone, earned a livelihood by making and selling Indonesian sweetmeats. Lukman helped with the baking and the serving; he also, in the mornings, hawked the sweetmeats about the village before he went off to his school. He could have gone to the Dutch school—he had passed the entrance examination: a teacher in the primary school had made him go in for that—but his mother didn’t want him to go to the Dutch school. She wanted him to go to the Muslim school. At the Muslim school half his time was spent on religion, half on general subjects.

  In 1955, when he was twenty-two (and—just to give a context and a reference—about two years after Imaduddin from North Sumatra had got to the Institute of Technology in Bandung), Lukman Umar went to Jakarta. The family—and this would have meant various branches of the extended family—didn’t want him to leave Padang. In Minangkabau custom a husband is bought by a wife, not a wife by a husband; and though Lukman Umar didn’t say, it is possible that the family were hoping to get something from his marriage. His mother, however, wanted Lukman to go to Jakarta to carry on with his studies. She pawned her land certificates to get the money for the fare; she had inherited a little land and rice field from her parents.

  In Jakarta Lukman Umar stayed with a relation. For a month, making use of his talent as a hawker, he sold peanuts. With the money he made he went to Yogyakarta. He stayed in very cheap rooms, costing 100 to 125 rupiah a month, something under a dollar; and he moved many times. He wrote the entrance examination for the Muhammadiyah university, the Indonesian Islamic University, and did so well that he was offered a scholarship.

  At the university he saw a business opportunity: he saw that students needed lecture notes. With the help of some of the university lecturers he began to publish their lecture notes. That led him to the selling of books and paper, handling goods on consignment. From that a magazine agency and book-distribution business grew. In this way, without capital, he was launched. He called his agency Ananda Agency (ananda meaning “beloved son”), and it was dedicated to his mother. The business grew very fast. He was able soon, with the help of God, as he saw it, to lease a house which he also used as his office; later he built a house for himself. It was just as well that his business grew like this: there were twenty-five people of his mother’s family in Padang that he was now looking after.

  He became a publisher in his own right. In 1973—his publishing ambition now reflecting economic and educational changes in Indonesia—he began to work on a fortnightly magazine for women. It was to be called Kartini, after the short-lived Javanese princess—born in 1880, and dead in childbirth in 1904—who, in the discouraging circumstances of colonial Java, spoke up for the rights and education of women. The first issue of Kartini was published towards the end of 1974, and was an immediate success.

  Lukman Umar thought it was Allah’s blessing. But it was also his publisher’s instinct, his flair, his truth to his own emotions. Just as politicians and writers have their own way of dealing with the demons of their early life, so Lukman Umar found in Kartini the perfect way of transmuting and sublimating the pain of his early life. It was a magazine pitched at the lower middle class—no one had done anything like this for them before—and it was known for its emotionalism. The combination had made Kartini the most popular magazine in Indonesia, with a circulation of 160,000; it was now published three times a month. The emotionalism was not artificial, the work of consultants; the publisher had only to look inwards, into his own heart, to know what would find readers.

  One of the famous features of Kartini was its agony page. It was called, in English, “Oh Mama! Oh Papa!” The idea must have been Lukman Umar’s, because when I met him he said, through an interpreter, that for him the English words stood for a cry from the heart. The originality of the feature was that it just gave the story. There was no aunt to comment or to give advice; readers did that. The device was simple and trouble-saving, but the effect was powerful. Private trouble wasn’t being idly exhibited; it was given importance—the “emotional” title of the feature ensured that—and it was shared with a community; there was no wise person above it all.

  More subtle (and more Indonesian) was the feature called “Setetes Embun,” “One Drop of Dew.” The words were mysterious, but Dita, the woman journalist who translated bits of Kartini for me, said in a matter-of-fact way that the language was symbolic and would be understood as such. Dew might stand for tears or for beauty or for kindness; every reader would interpret the words in her own way.

  The “One Drop of Dew” story we looked at was called “In the Fierce Heat of the Sun.” The narrator is a girl who is the last of seven children and is very spoilt. She can stand no hardship; she is frightened whenever she has to leave the house and go somewhere; she doesn’t like making any decision.

  I said to Dita, “Isn’t this girl overdoing things?”

  Dita said very seriously, “This is a person without confidence. I know many people like this.” A friend of Dita’s, from an over-protective family, was like the girl in the story; she wanted other people to make every kind of decision for her.

  In the story the narrator is especially tormented by the heat of the day. It is one of the reasons why she is afraid of doing anything or going anywhere. She is worried about getting too tired. She gets a headache when she goes out into the sun; she can even become sick. To go anywhere in the city means running out in the sun to get a scooter taxi. When she does get one it is crowded, and people jostle her. Sometimes, when she’s going far away, she has to take three different scooter taxis, and then she feels she is the unluckiest person in the world.

  She goes (braving everything) to spend time at her sister’s. The first day, in the afternoon, when the sun is really hot, she sees an old man working in the garden, cutting the grass with a long curved knife—she is such a town girl, and so sheltered, that (somewhat unbelievably) she has never seen people cutting rice, and doesn’t know that the old man is using a common reaping knife. So, like a child, she looks on with fascination at the old man, so wrinkled, running with sweat, but working on steadily with his long knife in the afternoon sun. She asks her sister about the old man. The sister says he works as a gardener for a big company in the mornings; then he comes to work for her. One day the girl takes the old gardener his lunch. She talks to him. She learns that he is sixty years old, and is living alone in the city, in one poor room; the wife and four teenage children for whom he is working are far away in the village.

  I said to Dita, “Didn’t she see people like the old man before?”

  Dita said, in her judicious, un-blaming way, “It’s rather impossible. You see them, for example, from a bus—you see people working on the road or sweeping the road. We know that their homes are far away, and they are working here for their families. I don’t know why the narrator didn’t notice that before.”

  Now the narrator is tormented by the thought of the old man, who not only has to work hard in the sun every day, but also has to live alone, away from his family.

  Dita said, commenting, “Family is everything for us.”

  The narrator sees what a small thing the heat is, and how wrong she was to complain. It is the resolution of the story, the moral, the one touch of dew in that issue of Kartini, to balance the cry of pain on other pages.

  I had thought that Dita was held by the story. But at the end she let it go very easily, and said, “It’s a very simple story. Femina maybe would have been more interested in why the girl is so indecisive, and so frightened of going out. Here the girl says it’s only because of the sun.”

  Femina was the rival, middle-class magazine. Lukman Umar, with professional severity, had not taken its name. But at Femina he was never far from their thoughts. They said, though, that they were the very first women’s magazine in Indonesia. They had started a year or two before Kartini, and Lukman Umar had been one of the early distributors. And they too had a success story to tell. Their first issue—after six to eight months of planning—had sold fifteen thousand copies at 250 rupiah, then
worth about twenty-five cents; the second issue had sold twenty-five thousand, the third thirty-five thousand. When sales reached fifty thousand, the competition, Kartini, appeared. And Lukman Umar had shown his flair: he had not tried to imitate the successful middle-class paper; he had followed his instincts and created his own, an extraordinary mixture of the sensational, the religious, the emotional. Now, twenty years later, the current was running his way.

  Mrs. Mirta, elegant, slender, at ease in many languages, was one of the two founding editors of Femina, and also the daughter of the scholarly founder of the press that owned the magazine.

  She said, “I should tell you that for quite a lot of people Femina is so Westernized.” Though that wasn’t how she had thought of it. “What I was trying to give when we started was a more pragmatic way of looking into things. Giving people alternatives. An outlook that is more open, and not based on traditionalism.”

  Things were now more clouded; traditionalism and pragmatism had different associations. The changes that had come to the limited colonial society after twenty years of independence, the opening out of everyone’s world, had made a woman’s magazine possible, and had appeared to show a clear way ahead. But now religion, the stresses of the half-converted country, and the great new wealth had given an unexpectedly backward twist to things.

  Mrs. Mirta, describing the potential audience of her magazine, said, “They are simple people with money. They are not nouveau riche, though some are. The setup of Jakarta society still has the same values. Their intellectual scope is the same.” It was easier for Lukman Umar to speak to that audience. He was a graduate of the Muslim university, and he knew his audience well enough to publish a successful religious magazine. “He’s more Indonesian, more familiar with the roots of the people. So he’s got more readers. His way is not pragmatic, but more emotional.”