Among The Believers Part 24

He laughed. "It slipped my mind. When there were floods, people would go to have the feel of water in the road. It's a great thing for them. Then we go boating. There's a story-but I never experienced it-that young girls would come out of their house in festive dress, in best dress, and the boys will take the opportunity to see them. They wouldn't go any deeper than the knee. And the boating. Each house will have a boat kept under the house, will take it out and prepare for boating session. Row the boat around the village and see what it's like when there is water where water isn't normally. When the flood starts we cut banana trunks, poke a bamboo right through them, and on this raft we go paddling about."

"That sounds like paradise to me. Your eyes light up even as you're talking about it."

It was how he sometimes talked of his village, not like a villager, but like a romantic traveller, like a man who now looked from a distance.

"Rain was something we longed for. I always like water."

Some days later-Anwar Ibrahim had gone to an Islamic conference in Bangladesh, and there was less to do in the ABIM office-Shafi came again. We took a taxi and made a tour. We drove about the new residential developments in the beautiful hilly land to the west of the city. I saw a well-kept city where the money seemed to be spreading down fast, but that wasn't what Shafi wanted me to see. The difference between the old and the new was the difference between Malay and Chinese. And even when the houses were new, Shafi could spot the Malay house and the Chinese house.

I began to play the game with him. I was a novice; I chose easy examples. We pa.s.sed a house stacked around with lumber. I said, "Chinese house?" Shafi said, "Chinese house." We pa.s.sed a house with rows of orchids in the front garden. I said, "Malay house?" Shafi said, "No. Chinese." I gave up.

Farther out, suburbs turning to country, we pa.s.sed some girls, one quite pretty, sitting in a bus-stop shelter. They were Malay girls.

Shafi said, "Timeless people."

"How can you say a thing like that?"

But he was using the word in his own way. And he wasn't speaking as a romantic, but as a reformer. "Timeless people. People who have no limits about time, and they are careless about time. They can afford to wait for a bus. There is no hurry for them to get things done, and in some villages you see people play dumb. Playing cards, chatting. 'Where are you going?' 'I'm going to market.' If you ask, 'For what?' they wouldn't give you specific reasons other than that of aimlessness, to see people as they go and to meet friends and say h.e.l.lo and after-nearing lunchtime-return home. And when they meet the friends they would say, 'How are your children? How about the catch? Is there a lot of fish in the market? What is going to happen to that family? How is the flood? Fifteen feet? Nineteen feet?' Timeless people."

We reached palm plantations. The rough-trunked trees with the dark-green fronds grew in rows. Heavy grappes of the oil-producing nuts, yellow and red, were stacked at the edge of the field, wet after rain. The sky was grey; more rain was coming. We turned back towards the city.

The driver said, "Mushrooms!" and Shafi asked him to stop at the Malay roadside stall where the mushrooms were. They were big white mushrooms on long stalks and they were tied up in bunches.

"They are not cultivated," Shafi said. "They are gathered in the forest."

I said, "They look like flowers."

He said, with a curious tenderness, looking at the bunches he had bought, "They are a kind of flower." And when we drove on again he said, "In the village they always said, 'Never use a spade to dig up a mushroom. If you do that, the mushroom will never come again.' I thought that it had to do with the metal. But it wasn't that. If you dig up a mushroom with a spade you dig up the spores, the subsoil."

The girls were still sitting at the bus stop.

Near Kuala Lumpur, Shafi had the driver turn off the highway. We drove through a Malay squatters' settlement: people coming in from the villages. The houses were like the houses in the villages, but closer together, and without the green. The houses went up overnight, and Shafi pointed to the big sheds, with lumber and other building material, that served the squatters' needs.

"The Chinese," Shafi said. "Exploiting."

"But they also provide a service."

"Providing a service is only seventy percent with them."

"That's enough. You want men to be perfect. That's the difference between us."

We had lunch at the Holiday Inn. He made no trouble now about the food.

I said, "Is it really true? You've never thought or talked about your life as you've done with me?"

"It's true. To me what is past is past. I feel I have no time to think of those things." And he added, "Those good old times."

He knew nothing of history. From his parents he had heard about the j.a.panese occupation of Malaysia during the war; but that was all. There were old legends in other districts; but in Kota Bharu there were none, or he had heard none. At school he wasn't interested in history. And now there wasn't time for learning or reading; there was his work for the movement. The rich past of his people remained closed to him: Hinduism, Buddhism, animist belief.

He existed in a limbo. He felt that as a Malay he had nothing; and in reaction he wished-as though such a thing was possible-to be nothing but his faith, a kind of abstract man. To be civilized, he had said, a man had to know where he had come from and where he was going to. That wasn't a matter of history; for Shafi that was only a question of correct religious belief. Everything flowed from the true faith. Out of love for his Malay people, his wish to put the world right for them, he wished them to be as cleansed as he thought he was. That was the great task he had set himself.

I said, "But isn't religion diverting people from what they should be doing? Isn't it giving them an easy way out?"

He missed my point. He interpreted the question in his own way. He said, "We are the first generation. It's only a few who can understand the complete way of life of Islam. We want to change from the normal tradition, which is not the true Islamic way of life. But the process is difficult and takes time."

I asked him about Nature. I told him what Mohammed and Abdullah had said in Penang: that Muslims sought to coexist with Nature, and non-Muslims, especially people of the West, tried to conquer it.

He didn't take up Mohammed and Abdullah's phrases. "I must be very frank with you. In my village there is no development. No tin mines, no rubber estates. So I have little to say about it." His experiences were smaller and more personal. "When I was young my impression of my surroundings was that they were clean. The streams were not polluted with any chemicals. The only polluting thing we had was the smell of the pigs and the pigs' waste in the neighbouring Chinese community. When I was fifteen people started building batik factories-three, one Malay and two Chinese-and the chemicals were being discharged into the river. And this disturbed our swimming activities in the small stream nearby. They spoilt our playground. They should have put the waste in a hole. My gang-my teen-age friends-was not happy with it. That happened to be a Chinese batik factory and we despised it very much."

"I was reading a Malay novel. The writer talks about pools of urine below the verandahs of the houses."

"That is biological pollution and sometimes these wastes are fertilizers. Bird droppings, chicken droppings. However, the waste of pigs is not in our favour because of the religious restrictions."

"Did you think the hills beautiful when you were a child? And the young rice plants?"

"To us it was a common sight. We never thought whether it was beautiful or not. But we read in a few novels about paddy fields and the wind blowing through the bamboos making a kind of sound, natural sound, and that made us realize the beauty around us."

"You said this morning, showing me the houses, that the Chinese planted for commercial reasons and the Malays for aesthetic values."

"I didn't say aesthetic."

But he had. The word had made an impression on me. Perhaps-though the word could be justified-he hadn't used the word he intended. He meant that the Chinese house and yard was a commercial establishment; that the people in the house with the orchids in rows grew those orchids for money. The Malay yard was a garden, part of a home; it remained part of the good earth, part of Nature, even if some of the fruit and food it produced was meant for sale. There was no one word to describe that. "Aesthetic" (though fair enough) was only Shafi's shorthand, the word he had let slip, and was not strictly defensible. Perhaps the idea hadn't been fully worked out by him. Perhaps-though the difference was real enough, could be felt and seen-there was no definition of the difference between Malay and Chinese houses that couldn't be shot to pieces.

And I wondered how far-added to the absence of the sense of history-this inability to fit words to feelings had led Shafi to where he was. Feelings, uncontrolled by words, had remained feelings, and had flowed into religion; had committed Shafi to learning the abstract articles of a missionary faith; had concealed his motives, obscured his cause, partly hidden himself from himself. Religion now buried real emotion. He loved his past, his village; now he worked to uproot it.

He said, "Talking about banana plantings and the Malay house, I had a little disagreement with my father. I was very much attracted to beautiful flowers and wanted to plant them in front of the house. But my father made a big hole directly in front of the house and after a few days of burning some waste, some rubbish-banana leaves, gra.s.ses, and other garden waste-he planted a banana. And I was not very happy with it. He said, 'We will have fruits from banana. We will not be able to have anything from flowers, which we cannot eat.'

"I called my other sisters and brothers to be with me, defending my case, but the banana tree remain there. After a few months banana begin to bear fruit, and my father started to tease me. 'Look, we have the fruit of our labour. And you don't have anything from the flower plants you have planted.' Actually my father dug the hole right where I used to plant flowers. Later on, until now even, I begin to dislike planting flowers because it did not give much benefit except for beauty."

I said, "What do you think of the incident now?"

"My father was right. Even now, my wife wants to plant flowers in the pot, in the house here in KL, and I insist that we plant some greens, some vegetables instead."

IV.

INDONESIA.

USURPATIONS.

The people here have lost their religion.

SITOR SITUMORANG.

1.

a.s.saults

Shafi changed his mind about me right at the end. The morning I was to leave Kuala Lumpur he telephoned to give me the names of some people in the Muslim movement in Indonesia. He said it was harder for them there. The army ruled in Indonesia and the army was hostile to the movement. Then Shafi telephoned again. He wanted me to stop at the office on my way to the airport; he wanted to say good-bye. But when, just over an hour later, I went to the ABIM building, Shafi wasn't in his office; and he didn't come down from where he was.

He sent an older man down. This man wore a black Malay cap and he had just come back from Switzerland, where he had gone on Islamic business; these new Muslims travelled a lot. (The news in some quarters in Malaysia was that Europe was converting fast to Islam. Scandinavia, always liberal and wise, had already fallen; France was half Muslim; in England hundreds were converting every day.) The man from Switzerland talked to me about the seizing of the American emba.s.sy in Tehran. He said the Western press reports were so biased he didn't know what to believe. But he had heard in Switzerland that the Americans had hired some Iranians to attack another Western emba.s.sy, to discredit the revolution. Revolutionary Guards had found out about the plot and had led the hired band to the American emba.s.sy instead.

And it was with a depression about Shafi-and the Islam that camouflaged his cause-that I drove through the rich, ordered plantations to the airport of Kuala Lumpur; and landed later that afternoon in Jakarta.

It had rained. The roads were edged with red mud. Long corrugated-iron fences (concealing what?); fruit vendors sitting with their baskets in the wet; buses with smoking exhausts; crowds; a feeling of a great choked city-red tile roofs, many trees-at the foot of the scattered skysc.r.a.pers; the highways marked by rising smog. After the s.p.a.ciousness of Kuala Lumpur it was like being in Asia again. Newsboys and beggar-boys with deformities worked the road intersections. Men carried loads in baskets hung on either end of a limber pole balanced on their shoulders, and moved with a quick, mincing gait. (Later, in the inland city of Yogyakarta, I tried a potter's load. The strain was less on the shoulder than on the calves, which jarred with every weighted step: it was necessary to walk lightly.) But Jakarta was also a city of statues and revolutionary monuments: a freedom flame, a phalanx of fighting men armed only with bamboo spears, a gigantic figure breaking chains. They seemed unrelated to the life of the city, and the styles were imported, some Russian, some expressionist. But what they commemorated was real: national pride, and a freedom that had been bitterly fought for.

To be in Jakarta was to be in a country with a sense of its past. And that past went beyond the freedom struggle and colonial times. The Dutch had ruled for more than three hundred years; Jakarta was the city they had called Batavia. But the Dutch language was nowhere to be seen. The language everywhere, in Roman letters, was Indonesian, and the roots of some of the words were Sanskrit. Jakarta itself-no longer Batavia-was a Sanskrit name, "the city of victory." And Sanskrit, occurring so far east, caused the mind to go back centuries.

The hotel was known as the Borobudur Intercontinental, after the ninth-century Buddhist temple in central Java. The ground plan of that great nine-terraced temple was the basis of the hotel logo: three concentric dotted circles within five rectangles, stepped at the corners with a rippling effect. It was stamped on ashtrays; it was woven into the carpets in the elevators; it was rendered in tiles on the floor of the large pool, where the ripple of the blue water added to the ripple of the pattern.

Indonesia, like Malaysia, was a Muslim country. But the pre-Islamic past, which in Malaysia seemed to be only a matter of village customs, in Indonesia-or Java-showed as a great civilization. Islam, which had come only in the fifteenth century, was the formal faith. But the Hindu-Buddhist past, which had lasted for fourteen hundred years before that, survived in many ways-half erased, slightly mysterious, but still awesome, like Borobudur itself. And it was this past which gave Indonesians-or Javanese-the feeling of their uniqueness.

THE statues of war and revolution in Jakarta were overemphatic; some were absurd. But they commemorated recent history; and that history was heroic and dreadful, and dizzying to read about.

It was the j.a.panese who, when they occupied Indonesia in 1942, abolished the Dutch language. They ordered all Dutch signs to be taken down or painted out; and overnight, after three hundred years, Dutch disappeared. The j.a.panese established Sukarno and other Indonesian nationalist leaders (imprisoned or exiled by the Dutch) in a kind of Indonesian government during the war. The j.a.panese organized the Indonesian army. This was the army that fought the Dutch for four years after the war, when the Dutch tried to rea.s.sert their rule. And this was the army that afterwards, during the twenty years of Sukarno's presidency, held the scattered islands of the archipelago together, putting down Muslim and Christian separatist movements in various places.

Independence was not easy for Indonesia. It didn't come as regeneration and five-year plans. It came as a series of little wars; it came as chaos, display, a continuation of Sukarno's nationalist rhetoric. Sukarno's glamour faded. The army's power grew. It was the army that eventually, in 1965, deposed Sukarno. The army claimed that the communists were planning, with Sukarno's pa.s.sive support, to take over the country. And after the chaos and frustrations of independence, there was a terror then greater than anything the archipelago had known.

A hundred thousand people were arrested. There was a ma.s.sacre of Chinese (resident in Indonesia for centuries, and traditional victims of pogroms: the Dutch themselves killed many thousands in Jakarta in 1740). And it is said that in popular uprisings all over the archipelago half a million people thought to be communists were hunted down and killed. Some people say a million. Indonesians are still stunned by the events of 1965 and later. When they talk of 1965 they are like people looking, from a distance, at a mysterious part of themselves.

Now the army rules. The khaki-coloured army buses are everywhere; and Jakarta is dotted with the barracks of kommando units (strange, that this particular Dutch word should be retained) that fly the red-and-white Indonesian national flag. The army has made itself into a political organization, and it has decreed that it shall be powerfully represented in every government.

It is the army that holds the archipelago together. And army rule-after the Sukarno years of drift and rhetoric-has given Indonesia fifteen years of rest. In this period, with the help of Indonesian oil, Jakarta has sprouted its skysc.r.a.pers; the main roads have been paved; the beginnings of services appropriate to a big city have appeared. In this period of rest there has also grown up an educated generation, the first generation in fifty years to know stability. But the army rule chafes. And already-the trap of countries like Indonesia-with stability and growth there is restlessness.

The restlessness is expressed by the new Islam, the Islam that is more than ritual, that speaks of the injustices done to Allah's creatures and of the satanic ways of worldly governments: the Islam that makes people withdraw, the more violently to leap forward.

IT is dizzying to read of recent Indonesian history. And to look at it in the life of one man is to wonder how, with so little to hold on to in the way of law or country, anyone could withstand so many a.s.saults on his personality.

Suryadi was in his mid-fifties. He was small, dark-brown, frail-looking. He was born in East Java and he described himself as one of the "statistical Muslims" of Indonesia. He had received no religious training; such religion as he had was what was in the air around him. He wasn't sure whether he believed in the afterlife; and he didn't know that that belief was fundamental to the Muslim faith.

He belonged to the n.o.bility, but in Java that meant only that he was not of the peasantry. The Dutch ruled Java through the old feudal courts of the country. But Java was only an agricultural colony, and the skills required of the n.o.bility in the Dutch time were not high. Suryadi's grandfather, as a n.o.ble, had had a modest white-collar job; Suryadi's father was a bookkeeper in a bank.

It was possible for Suryadi, as a n.o.ble, to go to a Dutch school. The fees were low; and Suryadi, in fact, didn't have to pay. The education was good. Just how good it was was shown by the excellent English Suryadi spoke. And recently, wishing to take up German again and enrolling in the German cultural centre in Jakarta, the Goethe Inst.i.tute, Suryadi found that, with his Dutch-taught German of forty years before, he was put in the middle cla.s.s, and he was later able without trouble to get a certificate in an examination marked in Germany.

Early in 1942 the j.a.panese occupied Java. The message from Radio Tokyo was that the j.a.panese would give Indonesia its independence, and there were many people willing to welcome the j.a.panese as liberators. Suryadi was in the final year of his school. The Dutch teachers were replaced by Indonesians, and the headmaster or supervisor was j.a.panese. For six months cla.s.ses continued as they would have done under the Dutch. Then-and it is amazing how things go on, even during an upheaval-Suryadi went to the university. The lecturers and professors there were now j.a.panese. But the j.a.panese simply couldn't manage foreign languages. They recognized this themselves, and after a time they appointed Indonesians, who worked under j.a.panese supervisors.

The Indonesians used the cla.s.ses to preach nationalism. Already much of the good will towards the j.a.panese had gone. It was clear to Suryadi that the whole economy was being subverted to a.s.sist the j.a.panese war effort. Thousands of Indonesians were sent to work on the Burma Railway (and there is still a community of Indonesians in Thailand, from the enforced migration of that time). Radios were sealed; the radios that had once brought the good news from Radio Tokyo could no longer be listened to.

Two incidents occurred at this time which made Suryadi declare his opposition to the j.a.panese. The university authorities decreed that all students were to shave their heads. It was the discipline of the Zen monastery. And Suryadi felt it as he was meant to feel it: an a.s.sault on his personality. And then one day on the parade ground-students were given military training-a student was slapped by a j.a.panese officer. All the Indonesians felt humiliated, and Suryadi and his friends held a protest demonstration in the university. Thirty of them, teachers as well as students, were arrested by the j.a.panese secret police and taken to jail.

In the jail they heard people being tortured for anti-j.a.panese offences and even for listening to the radio. But Suryadi's group were treated like political prisoners; and they continued to be disciplined in the way of the Zen monastery. They were beaten with bamboo staves, but it was only a ritual humiliation. The bamboo staves were split at the end; they didn't hurt; they only made a loud cracking noise. After a month of this Suryadi and his friends were released. But they were expelled from the university. So Suryadi never completed his education.

They had got off lightly because the Indonesian nationalist leaders were still cooperating with the j.a.panese. Sukarno never believed that j.a.pan was going to lose the war, Suryadi said; Sukarno didn't even believe that the atom bomb had been dropped on j.a.pan. It was only after the j.a.panese surrender that Sukarno and the nationalists proclaimed the independence of Indonesia. And four years of fighting against the Dutch followed.

What events to have lived through, in one's first twenty-six years! But Suryadi was without rancour. The events had been too big; there was no one to blame. He had no ill-feeling towards either Dutch or j.a.panese. He did business now with both; and he respected both as people who honoured a bargain. The j.a.panese had the reputation in Southeast Asia of being hard bargainers (there had been anti-j.a.panese riots in Jakarta because of the j.a.panese domination of the Indonesian market); but Suryadi had found the j.a.panese more generous, if anything, than the Dutch.

Suryadi was without rancour, and it could be said that he had won through. But there was an Indonesian sadness in him, and it was the sadness of a man who felt he had been left alone, and was now-after the Dutch time, the j.a.panese time, the four years of the war against the Dutch, the twenty years of Sukarno-without a cause. More than once the world had seemed about to open out for him as an Indonesian, but then had closed up again.

He had lain low during the later Sukarno years. Army rule after that had appeared to revive the country. But now something else was happening. A kind of Javanese culture was being a.s.serted. Suryadi was Javanese; the Javanese dance and the Javanese epics and puppet plays were part of his being. But he felt that Javanese culture was being misused; it was encouraging a revival of feudal att.i.tudes, with the army taking the place of the old courts. Suryadi had the Javanese eye for feudal courtesies. He saw that nowadays the soldier's salute to an officer was more than an army salute; it also contained a feudal bow. It was a twisted kind of retrogression. It wasn't what Suryadi had wanted for his country.

And he had lost his daughter. She had become a convert to the new Muslim cause-the Malaysian disease, some people called it here. At school and then at the university she had been a lively girl. She had done Javanese dancing; she was a diver; she liked to go camping. But then, at the university, she had met a new Muslim, a born-again Muslim; and she had begun to change. She went out with her hair covered; she wore drab long gowns; and her mind began correspondingly to dull.

Suryadi and his wife had done the unforgivable one day. They had gone among the girl's papers, and they had come upon a pledge she had signed. She had pledged to be ruled in everything by a particular Muslim teacher; he was to be her guide to paradise. She, who would have been a statistical Muslim like Suryadi and his wife, was now being instructed in the pure faith.

Suryadi didn't take it well. He thought now he should have been calmer in the beginning; by making his dismay too apparent he had probably pushed the girl further away from him. He said to her one day, "Suppose someone asks you to go out camping now, will you say, 'I can't go, because I have no a.s.surance there will be water for my ablutions before my prayers'?" He had spoken with irritation and irony. But later she came back to him and said, "I have checked. In the Koran there is nothing that says it is obligatory if you are travelling." And Suryadi understood then that she had become impervious to irony; that she had become removed from the allusive family way of talking. The intellectual loss was what grieved him most. He said, "But don't you have a mind any longer? Do you have to go to that book every time? Can't you think for yourself now?" She said, "The Koran is the source of all wisdom and virtue in the world."

She had married the born-again Muslim who had led her to the faith. She had a degree; he was still only a student at the university; but, like a good Muslim wife, she subordinated herself to him. That was the new sadness that Suryadi was learning to live with: a once-lively daughter who had gone strange.

Still, recently he had found a little cause for hope. He was driving her back one day to her in-laws' house, where she lived with her husband. He said, "I have bought that little house for you. Why don't you go and live there? Why does your husband want to keep on living with his parents? It isn't right. Why doesn't he make up his mind to act on his own?" She had said then, "He's got an inferiority complex, Father."

And this little sign, the first for some time, that his daughter still had a mind, was still capable of judging, was a great comfort to Suryadi. She had seen what was clear to Suryadi: that the boy was a poor student, didn't have the background, couldn't cope with university life. He was still some way from taking his degree and wasn't giving enough time to his work. During the month of Ramadan, the fasting month, he had given up his work altogether, fasting all day and going to the mosque in the evening to pray. That was easier than being with the difficult books; and his religious correctness was admired by his Islamic group at the university.

Suryadi's daughter had seen this on her own. That was some weeks ago. And it was now what Suryadi was waiting for: that in time she might see a little more.

At the end, just before we separated, Suryadi said, "But I've been lucky. I haven't been like so many others in Indonesia, switching to another wavelength under pressure."

"Another wavelength?"

"You know how people are like here. But perhaps you don't. They turn mystical. Logical, rational people. They start burning incense or sitting up at night in graveyards if they want to achieve something. If they feel they are frustrated, not advancing in their work or career."

"Do you call that mystical?"