Among The Believers Part 29

The reply came, and Umar laughed. "He says 1945. I must say that's news to me."

I said, "I was expecting to hear about the young Sukarno in the 1930s."

"I wasn't expecting that. Sukarno was exiled for much of that time. There wasn't that amount of media coverage in those days. And what there was the Dutch controlled. I was expecting him to say that he first heard of Sukarno during the j.a.panese occupation, when the j.a.panese brought him back from exile."

So the old man had heard of Sukarno only after independence had been proclaimed in August 1945. Sukarno had appeared suddenly, the leader, not only a man with an army, but also a man to follow because of his looks and because he spoke well.

Two white cows at the other end of the yard were eating cut gra.s.s. The tinkling of the bells around their necks accompanied the old man's bubbling talk. Life had turned out well for him, after all, better than he might have expected during the j.a.panese occupation, when times were hard and he had no knowledge of the existence of a leader.

But why, though being so well-to-do, with his acre of land, which was a lot, and his duties as koum, why did he live in such a poor hut?

Umar and Linus talked, and Umar said afterwards, "It's a matter of a particular life style." Then Umar put the question to the old man, and the old man said, "It's the way of Islam."

It was a way that was no longer being followed, he said. Only a third of the Muslims lived as Muslims; only a third went to the mosque. There was a change among the young, though. Why? Perhaps, he said, it was because in the government schools religion was being taught as a subject, and the young people had to study it if they wanted to get good grades.

He and Umar talked some more. The slender, long-legged c.o.c.ks of Java walked about the damp yard; the cows' bells tinkled; the old man's wife watched us from the dark, junk-filled verandah and smiled.

Umar said, "I've been asking him about the wayang." The puppet theatre. "Whether as a Muslim he objected to the Hindu stories. He said no; they were just stories."

We made our way back to Linus's house-more tea, more steaming corn, a plate of hot chips made from some kind of dried fruit. Linus's mother walked out with us when we left. Sh.e.l.led corncobs were drying on a mat in the front yard. The cobs were to be sold, to be crushed for oil; everything had a use here. And this time I took in the little roadside shack which was the family shop: Linus's family were also traders.

Umar wanted to show me the traditional Javanese house. Linus knew where one was. The house was not prepared for a visit, was cluttered; but the woman of the house smiled while we looked around, and showed us where the shrine to the rice G.o.ddess would have been. And it seemed to me that after this intrusion, Umar, as we left, made an especially low bow and did an especially long sideways shuffle. Such archaic elegance; and the ordinary main road, with its scooters, was only a few minutes away.

Here we had created a disturbance, though. The children had come out to watch. Every little girl had a doll, but it was a living doll: a little brother or sister held on the hip.

It was only half an hour to Yogya. But not all could make the journey from village to town as Linus had done. Linus was privileged. He was a poet; he had a sense of who he was; he could be a man apart. Not many villagers were like that. They had been made by the villages. They needed the security of the extended family, the security of the village commune, however feudally run, however heavy the obligations of the night watch or the communal labour in the rice fields. For such men the villages were indeed enchanted places, hard to break out of. And if a man was forced to leave-because there simply wasn't the land now to support him-it was for the extended family-and something like the village again-that he looked, in the factory or the office, even in Jakarta.

ISLAM, like Christianity, complemented the older religions. The religion of the village was a composite religion; the idea of the good life was a composite idea. People lived with everything at once: the mosque, the church, Krishna, the rice G.o.ddess, a remnant of Hindu caste, the Buddhist idea of nirvana, the Muslim idea of paradise. No one, Umar Kayam said, could say precisely what he was. People said, "I am a Muslim, but-" Or, "I am a Christian, but-"

And Umar told this story about the Prambanam villagers. In 1965, after the military take-over, the government, nervous of the communism of the late Sukarno period, required everyone formally to declare his religion. The people of Prambanam were in a quandary. In one way they were Muslims, believing in the Prophet and his paradise. But they didn't feel they could say they were Muslims: they broke too many of the rules. They knew that their ancestors had built the great ninth-century temples of Prambanam-which people from all over the world now came to visit; and though they no longer fully understood the significance of the temples, they knew they were Hindu temples. They liked watching the puppet plays based on the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, and they knew that these were Hindu epics. So the Prambanam people felt they should declare themselves Hindus.

The trouble then was that they didn't know what they should do as Hindus. They had no priests and no idea of the rituals they should perform. They sent for Balinese Hindu priests, and the Balinese came over with a Balinese gamelan orchestra to instruct them. But it didn't work. The past couldn't be reconstructed; the old rituals and theology couldn't take again. And so the people of Prambanam had returned to being what they had been, people of a composite religion.

On Thursday, at that time of late afternoon which Prasojo had said was the most beautiful time of the Javanese day, a woman sat outside her little shop in one of the main streets of Yogya, making up little banana-leaf sachets of rose petals, jasmine, and the sweet-smelling lime-green flowers of the ylang-ylang. She was pregnant and she sat with her legs apart. The banana-leaf pieces were in a basket; the petals and blossoms and other things were in separate dishes. She worked fast, taking two strips of banana leaf, pinning them together at the bottom in a pocket with a piece of coconut-leaf rib, throwing red and white petals into this pocket, adding jasmine, sometimes perfume from a bottle, and then pinning the pocket at the top. Sometimes she added a yellow paste or a piece of a brown stick-it depended on what the customer wanted. The waiting customers were girls and women. The sachets cost fifteen rupiah, under three cents. They were flower offerings to be made to the spirits of the dead; they were to be used in houses or placed in graveyards; and Thursday evening was the time to buy, because Friday, the Muslim sabbath, had become the holy day.

Umar Kayam lived opposite a Chinese cemetery. It made for openness and quiet, but some of his relations didn't want to visit him. He told them that the Chinese were industrious and successful and Chinese graveyard spirits were likely to be good spirits. But some people didn't want to hear.

The religion which at one end was the religion of unfettered awe was at the other end a religion of extraordinary refinement. The people who lived close to the spirits of the dead also possessed living epics that had become moral texts. The rituals and difficult theology of Hinduism couldn't be re-established. But Hinduism had left Java its most human and literary side, its epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata; and the epics lived in the puppet plays, the wayang.

The Mahabharata was longer. It took nine hours and was "heavy" for a puppet-master, who had to do all the characters, all the different voices. The Ramayana was done more often; and everywhere in Central Java the word Ramayana appeared-on the backs of buses, on shop signs. The stories, reworked and added to over the centuries, had become part of the common imagination. The characters were at once divine and human. Even in the programme notes for the abbreviated tourist wayang across the road from the Sheraton Hotel, the characters were referred to as R. Rama, R. Lesmana, R. Hanoman-R. for raden, a n.o.ble, as some people still liked to label themselves-so that the archaic, stylized puppet shadows on the white screen, while connecting people to a heroic past, remained related to the present.

The stories were more than stories. They were not flat. They offered ambiguities. Here, from Human Character in the Wayang, a book of reprinted newspaper articles by Sri Mulyono, a puppet-master, is one little part of the Ramayana story. King Rahwana of Alengka has abducted Sinta, the beautiful wife of King Rama of Mangliawan. King Rama invades Alengka to rescue his wife. Wibisana, the younger brother of King Rahwana, rebukes Rahwana for abducting the beautiful Sinta and pleads with him to return Sinta to her husband. Rahwana pays no attention, and Wibisana joins the invading army. Was Wibisana right to serve what he saw as the good cause? Or was Wibisana's act an act of betrayal? Need he have acted at all?

The invading army begins to win. King Rahwana in despair turns to his other brother, k.u.mbakarna. He tells k.u.mbakarna, "You are my last resource. My generals are dead. Our country is being destroyed. Help me." k.u.mbakarna says, "Return Sinta to her husband. You still have time." Rahwana refuses. He tells k.u.mbakarna, "Your sons have been killed by the invaders." k.u.mbakarna, in a frenzy then, goes out to fight the invaders and dies horribly. What cause has he served?

The good puppet-master, whatever his interpretation of the story, political, mystical, leaves the issues open. Everyone watching responds according to his character and circ.u.mstances. And the story is denser than appears in this account. Because every character trails his own ancestry and dilemmas, even the wicked Rahwana, even the beautiful Sinta. Everyone is engaged in his own search, and at his appearance in the story is in a crisis; so that, as in the profoundest drama or fiction, every encounter is charged with meaning. The epics are endless. The puppet plays bear any number of repet.i.tions, because the more the audience knows the more it understands; and interpretations of motive, of what is right and wrong or expedient, will constantly change.

Salvation is the ultimate good, nirvana; it is to be achieved by the conquest of the senses-a way that is full of self-deceptions. And the Islamic idea of paradise fits easily into the Buddhist-Hindu dream of the life without worldly entanglement and stress. The Islamic idea of the omnipotent G.o.d merges into the more mystical Hindu concept of Wisnu, Vishnu, who, as Sri Mulyono says, is "Truth ... Reality, the source of all things and all life."

The open-and-shut morality of Islam, always with its answers in the book or in the doings of the Prophet, gives way in the puppet theatre to something else. Hinduism and Buddhism shed their complexity. It is as if, at this far end of the world, the people of Java had taken what was most human and liberating from the religions that had come their way, to make their own. Umar Kayam saw the wayang and the epics as the core of Javanese religion and civilization. They explained the ritual, the courtesies, the constant preoccupation with human behaviour.

There was another side to this concern with beauty and correct behaviour. In 1965, when Sukarno and his communistic government had been deposed, between half a million to a million people were slaughtered in Indonesia. All the frustrations of overrefinement came out then; every kind of private feud was settled. In Hindu Bali, which the tourists now visit, the killing was as fierce as anywhere else. But there, to give a touch of ritual to the butchery, the village gangs took out the gamelan orchestras when they went killing.

ISLAM was part of the composite religion. And the questions raised by the Australian academic in his letter to Taufiq remained. What did the new missionary Islam, the Islam of the pesantren, have to offer these villages? What new ideas of land tenure, what kind of debate did it offer to these villages which were not as enchanted as they looked, where the balance was broken?

There were too many people. But the government family-planning programme was threatening the extended-family system, the protection that system gave. More food was needed. But the new rice that gave two crops a year destroyed the old rhythm of village life, interfered with the festivals, didn't give people the time for the puppet plays, and in this way was undermining the old civilization, breaking up the bonds between men. The farmers were in debt. The two crops a year made them borrow from the bank for fertilizer and seed. The extension of rural banking was meant to help, but borrowing from the bank was not like borrowing from the village moneylender, whom everyone in the village knew. To borrow from the bank was to become the puppet or victim of an impersonal inst.i.tution.

The koum of Linus's village said that young people were learning more about Islam at school and for that reason were becoming more interested in the faith. But the koum's Islam was the old Islam of the village; and the koum, with his fees for his religious services, his acre of land, and his knowledge of the past, saw himself living in the good time. There were many people now who knew nothing of the j.a.panese or the Dutch, many people for whom there was no longer room in the village, people who were being ejected or banished from the only way of life they knew. They lived in a bad time; and the Islam that spoke to them was not the koum's Islam, but an Islam that sanctified their sense of wrongness.

At Pabelan I had been given a copy of an article from an unnamed magazine. It was an interview, by "a Christian lay person," with a Muslim kiyai or pesantren leader. "You ask me the situation of the farmers today and how the kiyai can change this unjust society? The farmers today do not receive justice. Most of them are poor because they have no land. There are more farmers now who have no job. The landlords use machines, instead of the farmers, in their farms. The farmers receive very low prices for their products. Meanwhile, the rich in our society are so rich. They get their wealth from the money that is given or lent to our country by very rich nations. Now, how can a kiyai help in the changing of this kind of society? How can he make the landlords and the rich give up their properties which, according to Islam, belong to Allah and must be given back to the people who are creatures of Allah?"

But who were the creatures of Allah and who were not? What land was there to give back in overpeopled Java? Java was not Malaysia. Most of the people in Linus's village farmed half an acre. Were these people rich? The koum, with his acre, considered himself well off. What land did he have to give back?

The Islam that was coming to the villages-brushed with new and borrowed ideas about the wickedness of the machine, the misuse of foreign aid-was the Islam that in the late twentieth century had rediscovered its political roots. The Prophet had founded a state. He had given men the idea of equality and union. The dynastic quarrels that had come early to this state had entered the theology of the religion; so that this religion, which filled men's days with rituals and ceremonies of worship, which preached the afterlife, at the same time gave men the sharpest sense of worldly injustice and made that part of religion.

This late-twentieth-century Islam appeared to raise political issues. But it had the flaw of its origins-the flaw that ran right through Islamic history: to the political issues it raised it offered no political or practical solution. It offered only the faith. It offered only the Prophet, who would settle everything-but who had ceased to exist. This political Islam was rage, anarchy.

SUDDENLY in Yogyakarta there were tourists, tours from j.a.pan, Germany, Taiwan, and Australia; and the Sheraton began to fill up. What was there for them in Yogya? What did the Australians do? Where did they go? The visitors I saw at the temples of Borobudur and Prambanam were Indonesians, and a few Germans. The gamelan orchestra played in the Sheraton lobby for an hour and a half in the morning and an hour and a half in the afternoon; but no one seemed to listen. In the restaurant on the seventh floor there was cla.s.sical Javanese dancing of a high order for an hour in the evening; but there were always empty tables there. Yogya, in fact, was only a halt for the tours, something thrown in. The true goal was Bali, of the enchanted name: Bali for Christmas.

I wondered about the Australians. But I knew what one of them was doing. He was preparing a scholarly paper on the charcoal-burners of Java. It had been discovered that they were a disappearing species, with the cutting down of the forests of Java; and apparently there were people in Jakarta who, though selling tomatoes or repairing shoes or pushing food carts, insisted that they were charcoal-burners. I had heard about this sad idiosyncrasy from a pretty woman sociologist who had contracted typhoid from being in the field, padding about a Javanese village. And I had thought that that was all that could be said.

But the Australian I had then met had already spent two months researching that very matter. Two months! He laughed at my exclamation. Two months were nothing. A scholarly paper required interviews, questionnaires, tables. The academic life might appear leisurely, but it had its severities!

He telephoned the evening before I left Yogya. He had actually seen a man in the street that afternoon carrying a load of wood on his back. He had felt like running after the wood-carrier, clearly a charcoal-burner, someone with charcoal to burn, and interviewing him. But he hadn't. He was with Javanese friends-at that pleasant time of day; he had let the moment slip. He had watched his rare quarry-who knows, perhaps the last charcoal-burner in Central Java-walk away below his load in the dusk, disappearing in the black exhaust of the Yogya buses and scooters.

But the Australian had made his arrangements. In Yogya he had a kind of tenure. I hadn't. On Christmas Eve the Sheraton threw me out and I had to go back to Jakarta, to the Borobudur Intercontinental. So the royal palace of Yogyakarta remained unknown to me; its Buddhist mandala unexplored; the nine gateways that matched the nine orifices of the human body; the rooms that symbolized so many things, the trees that held such varied meanings; all the mingled Hindu-Buddhist-Muslim mysteries of kingship in Java, matching the wonder of the unique civilization.

5.

The Loss of Personality

The Borobudur Intercontinental in Jakarta changed its character at Christmas. The men from the multinational companies, and the foreign economists and advisers, left. Many of them were solitary, middle-aged men. Some went home; some went to the cooler hills or to the islands. The Borobudur offered cut-price holiday deals for local people; and the local people came, with their families; it was a recognized way, among the well-to-do, of spending the holidays.

Children ran up and down the carpeted corridors and played with the elevators. Nannies or ayahs, some of them barefooted, dandled babies. One Chinese family, doing the right thing for the holidays but not enjoying it, spent a whole morning sitting silently on the upholstered benches outside the elevators on the fifteenth floor. The head of the family, an old man with a ravaged face, wore a singlet without a shirt. From the fifteenth floor the black-haired heads in the pool with the rippling Borobudur design seemed unnaturally large, and (also because of their number) suggested tadpoles. One morning I counted sixty-three heads in the pool.

Simple pleasures; but they were feeding resentment. Resentment of Chinese; of foreigners; of people with skills Indonesians didn't have. Resentment, perhaps, of the skills themselves, and the new order they were bringing in, which no one yet fully accepted: new men, new status, new power, new money. Wrong men had money. Wrong men gave themselves feudal airs. Wrong people romped about the Borobudur and showed the other side of the new society.

"Cheap for you," the girl said at the hotel shop, when I bought a bottle of port for the holiday. "But not for us." And her big smile-yet not her old smile, not the smile I knew-was chilling.

The feeling of wrongness was there. All that had been done during the fifteen years of peace could be ignored. The richer the country became, the better it was made to run, the easier it was for its creative side to be taken for granted, the easier it was for the new inequalities to show. And people could long for 1945, when everybody was equally poor and everybody had the same idea of what was right and wrong. In the town, as in the villages, every improvement made matters worse, made men more uncertain.

"THE loss of personality," the loss of the shared feeling for good and bad: this was Darma-sastro's theme.

Darma-sastro was a high civil servant in one of the new departments concerned with technology. He had been described to me as one of the gifted new men of Indonesia; and he saw me in his office one evening after hours. He was in his late thirties or early forties. He smoked aromatic Dutch tobacco in American corncob pipes; this, in Indonesia, gave him a distinct air. He was not a handsome man, but he had authority and a presence. He was connected with the upper n.o.bility. He mentioned this only to play it down; but it was this connection that no doubt gave him his detachment from the new elite-"ten thousand, no more," as he said-to which he also belonged.

Darma-sastro said: "Among us there are now people who have lost their personalities or their ident.i.ty. They don't belong to the village any more. They have become too rich or too important. To them going back to the village would be a degeneration. They have lost the sense of security provided by the mutual-help society of the village. At the same time they are not individuals in the Western sense. They cannot stand on their own and as individuals interact on an equal basis with others.

"Some of them have been abroad, but there are many people whose bodies have been abroad but whose minds have stayed in the country. How do you tell these people?" This was the way Darma-sastro talked, asking questions and answering them. "They continue to congregate among themselves. They continue to eat the same food. They will not mix with Westerners. They will not subscribe to the newspapers. I have known Indonesians who have spent three years in the United States without looking at an American newspaper. What do they look at? They look at television. The contact with the West is minimal, and that's the way they want it to be. They can't function outside Indonesia. They remain villagers. They are there in the West only to get that diploma and to return to Indonesia with that ascriptive dignity.

"But here they are not members of the n.o.bility. They don't have the feudal values of n.o.blesse oblige. So, with their new dignity, they seek power and wealth, mainly. This is the cancer. In the old days important people had a responsibility to the society. If you were n.o.bility you were supposed to give an example. The people I'm talking about cannot function now as arbiters of right and wrong because they themselves cannot distinguish between right and wrong any more. Why? In their loss of ident.i.ty they have lost all values except those a.s.sociated with power. They are people continuing to look for their own security.

"It's not yet become a jungle, but we could get there. There are millions of people who are morally good, but they are powerless to enforce the good. There are thousands-and this is important-who are powerful but are not willing to enforce the good. So you feel adrift. Feeling adrift is like this. You know you should do good and avoid the bad. But now you have to think. And when you find yourself thinking about it, that is when you start feeling adrift. That is when you start feeling that the whole society is adrift. I am telling you: it takes a conscious mental and moral effort for someone like me to do the good. Which is wrong.

"Where does the money come from, that's encouraging all of this? It comes from oil." He walked about the panelled office, pointing to the steel cabinets, the modern equipment. He began to act out his words. "I live from oil, mostly-the government revenue from oil and the tax on other exports. That's when I'm here, in a town. When I'm outside the big cities I live off the land. We live off the people. I tax them, you see. I impose taxes on them. These people have to understand that I have my needs-they cannot come empty-handed to me.

"I am surprising you? In Europe in the old days the importance of a n.o.ble was measured by the extent of his land. In Java the importance of a n.o.ble was measured by the number of people on his land. Because people meant wealth: unpaid labour, part of the produce, army. We are not n.o.bles now, but we haven't forgotten that people mean wealth."

FROM high up, Jakarta was a spread of trees and red tile roofs. But the Jakarta map showed only a few main roads. These were the roads along which the traffic flowed, past the new skysc.r.a.pers and the parks and the monuments. The city was contained within these roads. Jakarta was a city without a focus, a cl.u.s.ter of urban kampongs or villages, and these villages preserved the haphazard structure of country villages. No street map could record the twists and turns of lanes and alleys.

In the centre the villages were of concrete. But farther out they could still be areas of green: houses in unfenced gardens, in the shade of fruit trees, with yards swept twice a day. These villages were still communities, still with their appointed "leaders." Such areas needed little to put them right. But many of these urban village communities were unstable. Land near the centre was valuable; villages could be bought up for development; and the community then had to move farther out. And families multiplied; land was divided and divided again; houses shrank, and the lanes between houses became narrower and narrower.

No question then of garbage collection: that was left to the ragpickers, the men with the finely made bamboo baskets on their backs, who would sift through the garbage for everything that could be sold, every tin, every bottle, every sc.r.a.p of paper that could be flattened out and sold to somebody as wrapping paper. The precious fruit trees were fenced around, the bounty of a little piece of Java behind barbed wire, surrounded by little houses. And always children, in every open s.p.a.ce, in little broods, as numerous as chickens.

One little brood was at the foot of a rambutan tree, on the morning Prasojo and I walked through. An old man was up in the tree, using a bamboo rod to pick cl.u.s.ters of the spiky red fruit. Prasojo and I stopped to watch. The man's son saw us. He saw we were strangers; he took a bunch of the fruit his father had picked and offered it to us with the Javanese-Hindu gesture of courtesy: the fruit in his extended right hand, the fingers of his left hand touching his right elbow.

The fruit was money to the family; it was being picked to be sold. Just a few hundred yards away, beyond the maze of the village, was the main road, black with diesel exhaust and lined with little stalls. Jakarta was a city of five million. Here, among people close to the abyss, were still, miraculously, the manners of the country village, the graces of an old civilization.

Prasojo was less moved than I was by the offer of the rambutan. He saw it only as correct behaviour. He said, "It is how I behave myself. It is the behaviour of a man still in a community. In 'society' that same boy would probably steal your fruit."

The man in a community still lived in the old cooperative Javanese village way. The man in "society" was a man on his own, a man who had left his village and his fellows and cast himself into the town. Prasojo thought such people were "gambling" with their lives; he called them gamblers. They were the men who became rag-pickers. They were the men who could be seen picking up cigarette b.u.t.ts (but using two long bamboo sticks like long chopsticks) to sell the tobacco for a kind of cigarette for the poor. They were the lost people of Java, and some of them were even without "papers." They were the people squeezed out by the fertility of Java from the civilization of Java, people at the very bottom who had lost their personalities as much as Darma-sastro's people at the top. With their baskets on their backs, their long sticks, their minute diligence, their eyes forever on the ground, like people withdrawn from the bustle and the crowds, they were a warning to everybody else: things could easily go wrong.

Jakarta boomed. The city and the country needed wealth and skills. But these things created wounding divisions, and there was rage about the loss of the old order, the loss of the old knowledge of good and bad.

The holidays ended. The new rich and their children and their ayahs left the Borobudur Intercontinental. The pool was drained for its annual overhaul; where water had rippled blue, white tiles glared, and workmen chipped and hammered. The men from the multinationals and the advisers and the economists returned. There was peace in the corridors. It was back to business.

6.

Mental Training in Bandung

It was the rainy season. Even on bright days, southern Jakarta was hidden by cloud, skysc.r.a.pers and greenery and red roofs fading away. The land seemed flat, but there were hills to the south, and they showed when the cloud lifted. Up in those hills were the holiday bungalows of people who wanted to get away from the heat and humidity of Jakarta.

A freeway, cutting through agricultural land-the cause of student protest at one time, but now the freeway took much traffic-led part of the way to the hills. When the freeway ended it was crowded Java again, with a narrow road winding up through unending village (occasionally densing up to little towns), past vegetable and fruit stalls, to tea plantations, over which raincloud and mist drifted, mixed with the black exhaust of buses and trucks and scooters. Here and there the sodden earth at one side of the mountain road had slipped, and the roots of a tea bush, surprisingly thick and long, hung loose above the road.

From tea and mist the road dipped to a flat clear valley of rice, and then it climbed again, through sharp cone-shaped hills, to the plateau with the town of Bandung: Bandung of the famous postcolonial conference of 1955, with President Sukarno and Mr. Nehru; Bandung of the cool climate, one of the many Parises of Asia that people spoke about in colonial times; Bandung also of the famous Inst.i.tute of Technology, founded by the Dutch, and inevitably the forcing ground of revolution. Sukarno went to Bandung; his t.i.tle of "Doctor Engineer" came from this inst.i.tute.

And Bandung still had a radical reputation. It was one of the centres of the Islamic revival in Indonesia. Many of Prasojo's Jakarta friends had gone there for the holiday weekend, to attend a three-day Islamic "mental-training" course at the mosque of the Inst.i.tute of Technology.

The course was being given by a man famous among Indonesian Muslims, Mr. Imaduddin, an electrical engineer and an instructor at the inst.i.tute. Some people in Jakarta thought Imaduddin brave; others thought him dangerous. He had been released from jail five months before, after a year inside. His name, Imaduddin, Arabic rather than Indonesian, hinted at the kind of Muslim he was.

The outskirts of Bandung were more Javanese than Parisian in the dusk, with the dirt sidewalks and the makeshift roadside stalls. But it was the charmed hour, the "dating" hour Prasojo had spoken about, and for some time we trailed a dating couple on a scooter, the girl carefully made up to ride (arms on her escort's waist) through the smog and the traffic din, sitting with her legs to one side, her slippers dangerously dangling.

Prasojo said to me, "You were asking about the langsat complexion. She is langsat."

The colour of the langsat fruit was considered the perfect colour for an Indonesian woman. The fruit was pale-ochre, a pale adobe colour; and the girl on the scooter had a clear, southern-Chinese complexion.

The girl was embarra.s.sed by the scrutiny. When our driver played his headlights on her, her escort, already preoccupied by the traffic, became agitated; more than once he turned around to scowl. When at last they swerved away the langsat girl, slippers dangling, wickedly smiled, and Prasojo said, "Did you see? Did you see?"

We had to ask our way, street by street almost, to the inst.i.tute and the mosque. It was in the older, colonial part of the town: impressions, in the darkness and lamplight, of wide, silent streets, houses set back, and of a big administrative building in whose carved roof Java had become only an architectural motif, a piece of Dutch colonial exoticism.

The cylindrical tower of the mosque was "modern." It was past seven, and in the open paved s.p.a.ces between the mosque and its ancillary buildings, groups from the mental-training cla.s.s, boys and girls, were waiting for the evening session to begin. Soft girls' voices called from the shadows, "Prasojo! Prasojo!" The success of that boy! Girls liked Prasojo as much as he liked them; and now they thronged about him as though he had been away from them for weeks. The gaiety of the group was like the gaiety of campers. They were Jakarta young people, children of the middle cla.s.s. They were not like people of the pesantren, or like the more austere, closed Muslim groups.

Imaduddin was telephoned, and someone led us to his house. Before we could get out of the car, Imaduddin himself came out of his house to greet us, a man of medium height, broad-shouldered, wide-faced, smiling, open; and he swept us inside.

It was the house of a university lecturer, with plain chairs, shelves, but also with an Indonesian feature: two girls, relatives or servants, sitting on the floor at the far end of the room. They rose just after we came in and went away, no doubt to prepare the tea of welcome.

Imaduddin read the letter of introduction Prasojo had brought. His face lit up as he read; he said he was honoured. He looked less than his forty-eight years. His skin was smooth, his dark eyes bright, and he had a wide, humorous mouth. He was attractive, full of welcome. But how, he asked, had I got to hear of him? I mentioned the name of a Jakarta journalist, and Imaduddin said, with a laugh, "But tell him I am still fighting for my freedom! After five months. The inst.i.tute hasn't given me any duties this year."

"Why do you think they are afraid of you?"

"I don't know. I suppose they're afraid of my popularity with the students."

I asked about his name.

He said, "It's Ima-dud-din. It means the pillar of the faith."

"Did you take it yourself?" Some Indonesians did that. Prasojo had given himself a name, and told his parents about it afterwards.

"No, my father gave it to me. He was a student at Al-Azhar in Cairo. I have been Ima-dud-din all my life."

The tea of welcome came, in china cups, not gla.s.ses. The food of welcome was biscuits, of two kinds, in jars. This was not the hospitality of the village.

The interrogations had been tough in jail. The first had lasted twenty hours, but Imaduddin had no stories of maltreatment. Among his fellow prisoners there were some famous men. Imaduddin had met and talked with Dr. Subandrio, who had been foreign minister at the time of the army take-over in 1965. Dr. Subandrio had been accused by the army of plotting a communist coup with others, and he had been sentenced to death. Three days before the execution Queen Elizabeth of England had made an appeal for his life, and he had been reprieved. And for all this time-virtually forgotten by the world-this former colleague of Sukarno's had been in jail: it was not an easy thing to contemplate, sipping tea in Imaduddin's university house.

And it was strange, too, to think of Imaduddin, the new Muslim, and Subandrio, the old man of the old left-their causes opposed, and both causes deemed harmful to the Indonesian state-coming together amicably in the army-run jail.