Indonesia, Etc.: Exploring the Improbable Nation (13 page)

I had grown accustomed to obeying Mama Bobo’s quiet commands. She would look me over and make me change my Javanese sarong for a local one; she reminded me to leave a small banknote in the dish with my sacrificial chicken; she nudged me to go and sit on other verandas if she thought neighbours felt neglected. But when I had asked to see the sacred objects in the smoke-crusted cage above the fire, her response – ‘you’ll have to stay until someone dies’ – seemed a command too far.

After I moved on through the islands, we kept in touch by text message, Mama Bobo’s all the more urgent because THEY WERE ALWAYS ALL IN CAPITALS. After six months, she persuaded me to come back for jousting season.

When I reappeared in Waikabubak in April 2012, six months after my previous visit, the owner of the guest house brought me sugar-free coffee without even being reminded. The girl in the internet cafe cleared another customer out of my favourite desk as she saw me walk up the drive. The owner of a restaurant that I was fond of gave me a free plate of chicken to welcome me back. Climbing up to Tarung, I found Mama Bobo sitting on the veranda of her house, exactly where I left her. When she saw me she leapt up and jumped up and down with glee. I felt like a soldier come home from the wars.

Then Mama Bobo’s pleasure left her, and she began to wail. She grabbed my hands, clasped them to her chest, shook her head, wailed some more. Her sister-in-law had died the night before. I made soothing noises, but she flapped my sympathy away. She wasn’t upset about her sister-in-law. She was upset because she had urged me to come back for the jousting and I had come. But now, because she was in mourning, she wouldn’t be able to come to the tournament with me. That meant she would break her side of the bargain. The delicate laws of reciprocity which hold everything in place in the Loli culture would be knocked off kilter.

I reminded Mama Bobo that this is just what she had hoped for. Now we could go to a funeral together. She seemed greatly cheered by this. I’d have to go and visit her dead sister-in-law first, of course, so that I could be properly introduced to her before the funeral. But there would be plenty of time; the corpse would be receiving guests every day for a week.

I suggested that we go the following day. Bobo shook her head and dropped her voice, something she often did when she considered that I had, out of forgivable ignorance, said something inappropriate. ‘Not tomorrow. There are things still to arrange.’ And I understood that even someone of Bobo’s standing would take a bit of time to muster the gifts that they were obliged to take to the sister-in-law’s clan, the family to which Mama Bobo had belonged until her marriage. The gift list would be dictated by a long history of exchange. Clan A gave us a pig when so-and-so died, family X brought a machete when Y was buried. I found another friend in Tarung at her loom that day: she was frantically weaving the ikat cloth that she would have to take as a mark of respect for Bobo’s sister-in-law.

I hadn’t been quite as aware of all the rituals of exchange when I had first taken tea with a corpse two decades earlier. I had gone back for the funeral that time too, but it had been a relatively simple affair; I remembered just one cow slaughtered. Now I scoured my iPad for photos of that earlier ritual, which I remembered as being in the general vicinity of the central town of Anakalang. I found the photos; the scenery around the grave site was undistinguished but there were other pictures, taken the same day, which showed a clutch of pixie-faced schoolgirls grinning at me from behind an elaborately carved tomb which would be easy to locate. I set out to see if I could find dead Granny’s family. I parked my motorbike by the carved tomb, and showed the pictures to an old lady who was sitting on a veranda a few hundred yards away. She identified one of the funeral guests, and sent me to a village about a mile down the road.

The dirt road of my memories had been paved over by asphalt, but I did eventually find the house where I had first met Granny. Sitting on the veranda was Granny’s niece Rambubera, a woman a few years younger than me who had posed proudly to be photographed with the corpse during my first visit. I proffered the photo, which I had printed out to give to the family. ‘That’s not me!’ She was vehement, but her eyes were rheumy. I pulled out my iPad and zoomed in on her face. ‘Not at all, not me!’ She rummaged around in her sarong, drew out a wallet, and produced an ID card, crispy with age. ‘Look! There! That’s me! That’s what I look like’. She pointed to the tiny black and white photo.

I didn’t want to upset her, and was about to leave when a man in denim shorts with smiley eyes came out of the gloom of the house to see what was going on. It was the boy who had invited me up onto this very veranda twenty years earlier. He remembered me, and called others out of the dark interior, where they were watching an Arsenal match on TV that seemed the only change to the place in two decades. They started looking at the pictures: ‘Look, that’s Uncle Timus!’ ‘Hey! There’s me!’ They teased Rambubera because she hadn’t grasped that she would have looked different when she was younger. She sulked a bit, but couldn’t resist the draw of the photos. Soon, she was recognizing and pointing and laughing with the rest. The man in denim shorts, still smiley but no longer young, offered me a cup of tea.

Two decades later, while waiting for my second chance to go to a dead lady’s tea party, I enlisted my friend Jerome to come with me to the pasola jousting on the beautiful clifftops near Gaura, where the cattle-rustler-turned-village-head Pelipus lived. Jerome was a French researcher whom I knew from Jakarta; he studied criminality and urban gang culture. Looking for a bit of a break in a kinder, gentler Indonesia, he’d come to Sumba for a couple of weeks.

Tall, swarthy, heavy-lidded, Jerome was an instant hit with the younger ladies of Mama Bobo’s clan. He was perfectly at ease sitting around on verandas for hours, washing in the river, eating dog-liver dinners. But he was, after all, on holiday; he still wanted to do some of those beachy things that ordinary people do when they are near the mile after mile of deserted white sands that Sumba provides. I did a deal with Jerome. If he would give me a lift to the jousting on the back of his bike, I’d promise to leave the ceremony early and go to the beach with him. He put his swimsuit in the well of the motorbike and off we went.

The pasola is a jousting match between groups of fierce young men wearing incongruous head-dresses: fascinations of feathers or a cone tied on with flowing scarves. They ride on ponies decked out in ribbons and pom-poms, in bells and coins. But there is nothing fey about the fighting.

The jousters of Sumba rub against one another in wheeling packs. The men of one village gallop around in a circle, clockwise. Their rivals race anti-clockwise in a second ring. In each circuit, every rider has a heart-stopping moment when they are charging towards their foe. With one hand, they hang on to the reins, steer the horse, and somehow also form a shield by twirling spare lances. With the other, they hurl a javelin into the fray, trying to score a hit in the split second before they wheel off into another loop. Often, they have to twirl, hurl and duck an incoming lance all at the same time. And all while riding bareback at thunderous speed. It’s stirring stuff.

Getting to the pasola grounds was almost as stirring. Even Jerome’s long legs had trouble steadying the bike up and down the steep, muddy hillsides to the jousting site. All around, motorcyclists were going off-piste, upending themselves, dusting themselves off and getting back in the saddle. The jousters on their pom-pommed horses looked smug as they jangled past us up to the clifftop.

We did the rounds of the pasola field for a couple of hours, moving with the crowds, we cheered first for this team, then for that, we ate brown rice dumplings under the makeshift sun-shelter courtesy of the officials’ wives, we checked in with village head Pelipus as he refereed the jousting. Finally, Jerome began to show signs of adat overload; he put on his Beach Face. It was obviously time to leave. We went back up to the bike.

No key.

Somewhere between the lady he bought water from (which was she?) and the tree he had sat under (this one, perhaps), between the wives with rice dumplings and the bush he had peed in, somewhere on a couple of hectares of long grass pounded down by horses ridden by warriors in Rolling Stones T-shirts and pointy head-dresses, by spectators jumping on one leg and ululating, Jerome had lost a solitary Honda key, without even a key ring.

I thought at first he was joking, but no. He looked almost hang-dog, as if expecting me to be cross. If we had been in London or Beijing I might have been. But here in Gaura I was overcome by a millpond calm. For all the frustrations and inefficiencies of Indonesia, it’s almost impossible to get into difficulties that one can’t get out of with a bit of humour and a lot of patience.
Semua bisa di atur
– everything can be arranged.

In the time we spent looking for the key, the pasola came to a sudden end and everyone started to leave in droves. Being stuck all alone five muddy, hilly kilometres from the nearest settlement with a locked bike would definitely stir up my millpond of calm. ‘Arranging’ everything became a little more urgent.

Jerome, too long in Jakarta’s criminal underbelly, homed in on the loutiest guys he could find; he was looking for someone who could hotwire the bike so we could drive it back to town without a key. I, too long in the Jakarta bureaucracy, homed in on the person with the most authority. I settled for a cop with gold stars on his shoulders and a walkie-talkie in his hand.

I smiled a lot, explained what an idiot I felt, apologized repeatedly for the trouble and asked for his kind suggestion about how we might resolve the situation, all the while trying not to eye up his nice twin-cab flatbed truck too obviously.

He in turn called over someone with lots more gold on his shoulder. ‘How awful for you. I’m so sorry,’ said the senior cop, as though it was somehow his fault, not ours. He instructed Fewer Stars to get on the walkie-talkie, they called back the police transport truck that was already disappearing over the crest of the first hill, and we climbed on board.

When we came to where the motorbikes were parked, Jerome pointed out ours. Four well-built cops jumped out of the truck. While I shoved riot shields out of the way to make space, the boys wrestled the locked bike up in between the benches, and we were off.

It had all been so easy, getting the cops to steal our bike. Jerome, in a bit of a tizz just half an hour earlier, looked over at me from the opposite side of the truck. A wide, wicked smile split his face and he said in French: ‘I should have pointed out a nicer bike!’

I went to be introduced to Mama Bobo’s dead sister-in-law on the day before her funeral. The old lady was in a party dress, a big red bow fanned across her careful bun, a beautifully woven cloth pulled up around her knees. She sat on a chair of freshly cut bamboo. Her chin sank gently into her chest. It wasn’t easy to tell the difference between her and a quietly sleeping version of any one of a number of wizened grannies who were crowded into the gloom around her. Surprisingly, given that it was the hot season and she had been sitting in a crowded room for the week since she died, she didn’t smell. Mama Bobo prodded me, and I laid a huge bag of betel nut at my hostess’s feet. Others, I noticed, put their offerings right in her lap, but that felt a little familiar for someone I had only just met.

The corpse was the second of Mama Bobo’s brother’s four wives. Her brother had died a couple of years before, the first wife a year later. ‘They’re pegging out in order,’ said one of the attendant women, meaning the order in which they married their shared husband. She turned around to introduce me to wife number three, a tiny shrivelled slip of a thing, folded up in a corner behind the corpse. Her face had collapsed in on itself, its shape maintained only by the ball of tobacco under her lip.

Wife four needed no introduction; she was the one lording it over everyone else, at least a decade younger than wife three, gussied up in best brocade. Mama Bobo told me later that she never talked to her brother again after he married this woman, though she wouldn’t say why. She just shook her head and repeated: ‘It wasn’t right. It was not right.’ My friend made peace with her brother only after he died, with the offering of a huge buffalo.