Indonesia, Etc.: Exploring the Improbable Nation (41 page)

I decided that I couldn’t wait around in Haloban for a shaman who might be a charlatan to catch a croc. The next day I packed up and walked down to the pier. I was negotiating passage out with some fishermen when ‘Crocodile, crocodile!’ the shout went up. Up and down the creek where the fishermen kept their long, thin canoes, men ran to boats, piled in, puttered off to the Beach of Death. ‘What are you waiting for?’ one of my coffee companions motioned me over to his boat and we joined the convoy. There was some texting back and forth: ‘They say it’s seven metres long!’

The woman had been eaten while searching for clams in the muddy mouth of a small creek. Now, dozens of boats were trying to get into the creek, bumping and jostling for prime real estate. Our boat was towards the back of the crowd; my companions motioned me to get out and wade to shore. I wondered how well secured the seven-metre crocodile was.

I pushed through the thigh-high water towards a little shack with a palm-frond roof. On the ground was a sleeping mat, a little cooking pot, a harpoon and a bag of rice. This was the Whisperer’s lair. Looking around, I realized that although plenty of women had been flapping around excitedly in town, not one other woman had come to witness the capture. The men, on the other hand, nudged and pointed, keen to explain the process to me, all wanting to be heroes by proxy. The crocodile had shown himself on the other side of the creek, some said, though no one had actually seen him. The shaman was apparently trying to coax him into a rattan noose, see, over there.

It started to rain. I put on my yellow poncho. Two men tried snuggling under it for shelter; I shooed them out; laughing at their cheek. It was all very good-natured. Then, from the other side of the creek, there was an angry shouting and a flapping of arms. It semaphored itself across the water. The men on my side turned towards me and started shouting and flapping too. I realized that I was the object of this sudden collective wrath.

‘No women allowed! It takes the shaman’s power away!’

I retreated to the edge of the wood; the men who had been so friendly just moments ago all turned their backs on me. The air went icy.

After another few minutes of faffing around, it was clear that no one would be trapping a crocodile today. No one but the Whisperer himself had actually seen the croc. Now, he was claiming that it had got away because the Foreign Woman had polluted the scene. The men who had swept me so enthusiastically into their boat on the way here would no longer look at me. The men who had laughingly muscled in under my poncho – all became silent and hostile. One younger man with spiky hair and bit of urban slang took some pity on me; I could walk back to town with him, he said. But in the hour and a half that it took to stumble back to town through the sandal-sucking, toe-nipping mangroves, he didn’t speak to me at all.

I’m still not quite sure what went wrong, but my guess is that the men knew that women weren’t really allowed in the hallowed world of crocodile capture. Because I was such a strange beast, though, I stood outside their whole cosmos; as a woman I didn’t really count. Then, when the Whisperer failed to produce his croc, he seized on me as an opportunistic excuse. It was frightening how quickly I had turned from an irrelevant curiosity into a pariah.

Close to the middle of Sumatra, in Jambi province, sits the Bukit Duabelas National Park, which takes up 600 square kilometres on the map. It is home to a tribe of hunter gatherers somewhere between 1,500 and 5,000 strong, known to some as
Orang Rimba
– the Forest People – and to others as
Kubu
, which translates roughly as Savages.

Until the early 1990s the Rimba People had virtually no contact with the world that they call
Terang
, ‘The Light’. It was around then that the chainsaws of loggers, plantation companies and plain old land-grabbers began to let the light into the thick primary rainforests of the area they inhabit. Realizing that the Rimba could neither defend their way of life against the intruders nor choose any workable alternative unless they could engage at least minimally with the outside world, an acquaintance of mine, Butet Manurung, had started an informal school for children of the tribe. I had been fascinated by her book about the experience,
The Jungle School
; now Butet put me in touch with some of her former students, firing off texts to Mijak and Gentar. Both men were among Butet’s earliest students, both studied despite fierce opposition from their families, and both became teachers in the school. They are friends and co-conspirators in trying to shape the future of their tribe. But they could not be more different.

I had arranged to meet Mijak in Bangko, a largish provincial town where he and a group of young friends had organized themselves into an NGO that focused on conservation and tribal rights.

The night before we were to meet, a young woman named Ira, who ran a coffee stall near the hospital, invited me home. There I met her sister and two unidentified relatives. One was a red-eyed man with a thick moustache who spoke only in Malay except when insisting that no respectable woman would travel without her husband. The other seemed more bohemian. His look – long, blunt-cut hair, squared-off glasses, manicured hands – was more Jakarta art gallery than provincial artisan. Not so his attitude.

I mentioned that I was planning to spend a few days in the forest with the Rimba. He looked questioningly at Ira’s sister. ‘The savages,’ she prompted quietly. Immediately, he said I shouldn’t go. First of all, he said, they had powerful magic. ‘Make sure you don’t spit. If you spit, they’ll collect it up and put a curse on you and you’ll never come back.’ Secondly, the savages were dirty and stupid. The proof of this was that when they came to town, they washed their hair with shampoo, but used water from the gutters for the washing. To me, that seemed a logical enough thing to do if you’ve grown up in a jungle where every water source is clean, but to the bohemian, it was so stupid that he repeated the story three times.

Ira’s sister’s advice was more sympathetic. ‘Try not to wrinkle your nose when you meet them, and don’t tell them they stink. They don’t like that,’ she said. Some Rimba were trying hard to become civilized, she said. ‘Lots have converted to Islam. So there’s been some progress.’

The next day, Mijak came to pick me up on his motorbike. This ‘savage’ had just got back from a trip to Jakarta and was wearing a brand-new pair of Converse sneakers, trendy Levi’s cut-offs and a long-sleeved button-down, ironed, over a clean polo shirt. As we left town and the road got dustier, he pulled on gloves, to protect his hands from the sun, and a surgical mask.

We drove through a string of ‘trans’ – small towns inhabited mainly by transmigrants from Java, full of mobile bank vans and women selling
jamu
, herbal medicine. All over Indonesia one finds these jamu ladies, very often dressed in a traditional Javanese sarong kebaya even when they had drifted to parts of the country where women wear all-obscuring full-length dusters or to cities where T-shirts and tight jeans are the norm.

Every morning before dawn, the jamu ladies cook up their various potions – this one of ginger, that one of seaweed, perhaps a bit of goat bile here and a handful of jasmine flowers there. They pour them into glass bottles that once held Coca-Cola, cheap whiskey or even Dutch-era gin, and stop the bottles with little cones of banana leaf. Then they load the bottles into a big wicker basket, sling it onto their back with a sarong, and set off on their rounds.

I generally choose a mixture of viscous yellow turmeric (anti-ageing) and ‘bitter’, the latter a thin, brown punishment cooked up from sambiloto leaves, an excellent stimulant for the immune system, they say. The jamu lady lays down her load, picks a small glass out of a bucket of water, and doles out this healing cup. Then she waits, expectant, with another bottle at the ready; a large splash of a galangal-and-honey cordial rinses the remainder of the medicine out of the glass, and the bitter taste out of the mouth. Jamu ladies are a well-distributed tribe; I must have drunk my morning jamu on at least a third of the days I was on the road.

Soon the towns grew fewer and the plantations larger. We passed a house that looked like a cross between Versailles and a prison, a caramel confection with engraved glass windows overlooked by three watch-towers. ‘Rubber money,’ nodded Mijak.

After a couple of hours, we stopped in front of a chained gate. A woman appeared, collected 5,000 rupiah from us, and allowed us into a rubber plantation. The toll gave us the right to buck and plunge on a ribbon of cleared mud that was at times axle-deep. On the worst stretches of this private ‘road’, I got off the bike and walked, angling up the banks and holding on to roots and branches to get around the deepest mud-pools.

Just once, I slipped. My foot disappeared, then my shin. I was gradually doing the splits, one leg sucked deeper and deeper into the morass, the other wedged behind a root on the bank. I pulled, wiggled, levered, until the mud ejected my leg with a great
schluuuurp!

No shoe.

Mijak, who had driven safely through the quagmire, was busy wiping mud from his Converse sneakers, trying not to watch me. Until now he had been rather formal with me; his guru Butet had charged him with my care and he took the task seriously. But the sight of my one bare foot, coated to the knee in milk-chocolate mud, was too much for him. He dissolved into giggles.

I could imagine how ridiculous I looked, but I couldn’t sacrifice half of my only pair of sandals. I slipped back into the mud, now submerging my forearm and elbow as well as my leg. Nothing. I slithered my hand around in the mud soup for a while, weak-kneed with laughter. Finally I felt something solid. Another great
schluuuurp!
and out popped my sandal, scooped high with mud. I waded to more solid ground and rinsed it in a puddle. It was missing its ankle strap, and I was damned if I was going back to the mud-hole to look for it. I improvised a strap out of a piece of purple ribbon cut off the top of my mosquito net. It remained in service until the end of the trip, six months later.

Whenever we met another Rimba on the road, the drivers would pull bikes up nose to nose, turn off the engine, and then just sit there for a long time, looking one another up and down in silence, like ants meeting on a trail to and from the anthill. Eventually, one would ask a question, there would be a short exchange of information, another longish silence, a curt nod, and then both would move off.

Our longest stop was for Mijak’s
temenggung
, the democratically chosen head of the small group of unrelated families which is the basic social unit for the nomadic Rimba. He was an impressively built man who wore nothing but a small beard and a loincloth. Across his shoulders he carried a rifle which looked like it might date from Dutch times. He walked with an odd, pigeon-toed gait that I saw in many Rimba as they tripped along in single file through the forest. Two hunting dogs trotted at his feet. Mijak showed him the greatest respect. ‘We chose him because he’s the toughest of anyone,’ he told me later.

At a certain point even the plantation mud-ribbon tailed off; we parked the bike and walked. As we plodded through the rubber trees, we passed halved oil drums filled with latex. It smelled toxic, like a garbage-strewn back-alley in New York on a hot summer’s day. Every now and then we’d come across a couple of Javanese workers quietly tapping trees, and they would call out polite greetings – ‘
Monggo, monggo
’.

I asked Mijak who owned these plantations. Mostly Rimba, he said. So why the Javanese? ‘The Rimba hire them to do the work; two-thirds goes to the tapper, a third to the owner.’ It’s these sorts of ‘one-third/two-thirds’ relationships, the ones that began as the Rimba brushed against the cash economy, that made schooling, and with it a knowledge of basic mathematics, important. Rimba don’t do their own tapping for two reasons, says Mijak. ‘First, Rimba are lazy. Second, they don’t know how to do it right. The Javanese work hard and don’t kill the trees. Everyone’s happy.’
*

In 2005, when Butet started teaching at the site where the jungle school now stands, it was a two-day walk through thick jungle from the nearest road. But as the rubber trees spread, so the road lengthened. Just about twenty minutes after we parked the motorbike, we arrived at the clearing where the school stands. There stood a teenaged girl combing her hair, ankle deep in litter – Indomie wrappers, snack packets, sheets torn from exercise books, plastic bags. Around her hips she wore a flowered sarong, around her neck a pink plastic necklace. Nothing else. It was like a dystopian Gauguin, a honey-coloured bare-breasted nymph grooming herself in a sea of garbage. Behind her, two tiny boys with miniature bent-wood bows fired arrows at small furry things up a tree.

Above the clearing stood the stilted schoolroom, wooden, thatched, open-sided, home-built. The school aims to work around the rhythms of forest life, equipping anyone who wants to learn with the basic skills they need to interact with people in the ‘trans’, perhaps even to interact with the other forces that are shaping their world: the authorities that deal with national parks or that try to enforce land rights, the opportunistic cowboys who threaten those rights.