Indonesia, Etc.: Exploring the Improbable Nation (42 page)

I slept on the schoolroom floor with Mijak and two other Rimba boys who were now teaching at the school. In the morning, one of the boys stood and shouted: School-time! ‘
Sekolah!
’ No one appeared. When I went down to the river to bathe, I found a gaggle of small boys splashing and giggling. What about school? I asked. Maybe after hunting, they replied.

Later that day, Mijak and I went off to find Gentar. He was in a different part of the forest, about two hours away by bike. The plan was to meet him in the ‘trans’ – the Javanese transmigration village – nearest to his home patch, then go into the forest to stay with his family grouping. When we found him, he announced a change of plan. A child was sick with an ‘outside disease’, one their own shamans couldn’t fix, and the group had moved out of the forest to be close to a Javanese shaman. Plan B was to stay in Gentar’s house in the trans, and make a day trip into the wild the next day.

I was disappointed. I had been looking forward to a bit of forest living, a change from the breeze-block bungalows that people had kindly invited me to stay in so often already, tidy houses with cement floors, pink satinate curtains hanging where doors would normally be, and bare lightbulbs that were left burning all night.

But Gentar’s house was not a bungalow with pink curtains. It was two square metres of black plastic tarpaulin under an oil palm, in a plantation. The tarp was strung over a central pole and held up by a stick at each corner. The floor was made of the spines of palm leaves. The kitchen was a cleft stick wedged over an open fire under the front corner of the tarp. In this space sat Gentar’s wife, a beautiful, bare-breasted girl who looked as though she was still in her teens, and their three naked children.

Gentar brought offerings from town: parcels of cooked rice and catfish, instant noodles, cheezy potato chips. His wife and children fell on the latter, systematically munching through the junk food, then throwing the shiny rainbow packaging on the ground of their otherwise largely biodegradable home.

‘Where’s your tarp?’ asked Gentar. Mijak and I looked at one another. I had a sleeping mat, a mosquito net and a couple of sarongs, but no tarp. I produced a rain poncho, but Gentar was unimpressed. He sent us back up to the trans to get supplies.

When we got back, Gentar had changed his shorts for a scarlet and gold bathroom towel, and was playing with his kids. The youngest, a pudgy girl of about two with a runny nose, was strung about with amulets to protect her from evil spirits. Gentar handed a large machete to his middle girl, a five-year-old, and asked her to give it to the house-builder. As if born to carry sharp weapons more than half her height, the child carried it over and handed it to Mijak. He looked panicked.

He shuffled from one brand-new Converse to another and wrung his hands, still encased in the gloves he wore to protect himself from the sun on the bike. Since we would only be here a couple of nights it hardly seemed worth building a shelter, he said. I looked at the rain clouds massing overhead, then looked back at Mijak. He turned away. I suddenly guessed that although Mijak had grown up hunting and gathering in this forest with the rest of his tribe, the aspiring lawyer had no more jungle survival skills than I had. I wondered if you could will incompetence in certain tasks onto yourself, a sort of psychosomatic response to worlds you don’t really feel you belong to. Mijak’s true place, one couldn’t help feeling, was sitting drinking cappuccinos with a bunch of young student activists in a trendy cafe in Jakarta.

We both looked hopefully at Gentar. ‘
Aduh!
City slickers!’ shrieked Gentar.

Gentar had thick, curly hair and a broad nose which seemed to take up a lot of the real estate on his face. Though his eyebrows were painted in a severe line across his face and his eyes drooped under them, he was the twinkliest Indonesian I have ever met. Each grin revealed a meagre collection of teeth, and the grins were many; Gentar was a born tease, and seemed to enjoy nothing more than a good-natured prodding of his friend Mijak’s pretentions to urban modernity. Mijak reciprocated in good spirit. The two had recently been to Jakarta on a trip organized by their former teacher Butet. On the way into town from the airport, Mijak had to stop Gentar from getting out to see what was wrong with the car, which wasn’t moving. ‘An everyday Jakarta traffic jam, and this jungle bunny thought we had broken down!’ Mijak teased. But he was happy enough to let Gentar build a shelter for us.

Over the next few hours, people drifted across from the shelters they were staying in, a few oil palms distant in this direction or that, until quite a crowd had gathered. Men in loincloths or shorts, bare-breasted women, an infinity of children wearing tiny sarongs, outsized shorts, amulets or nothing at all. They all squatted a safe distance from me, and there was a bit of speculation about my gender. ‘
Jantan atau betina
?’ they asked one another: Is it a boar or a sow?

One man, who had obviously had more contact with The Light than most, declared solemnly that I was a ‘
banci
’, a transgender. He was one of the more beautiful people I’ve seen; his smooth caramel skin stretched across high cheekbones between perfect almond eyes and a full, symmetrical mouth. He had a hint of a moustache and a goatee and long, wavy hair. He had wrapped a woman’s sarong into a loincloth that revealed perfectly formed buttocks. Out of the corner of my eye, I considered his flowing locks and the flowery design of his lilac-coloured sarong and thought:
I’m
the tranny?

For most of the time I was in and around the camp, this permanent gallery simply stared at me, utterly expressionless. If I smiled and waved, I got no reaction at all. When I told Gentar’s family the story of the lost shoe with much pantomime and schlurping sound effects I could hear the spectators howling with laughter, but when I turned to look at them they went rigid again, as if we were playing that game where people try to sneak up on the leader, but get disqualified if the leader turns around and catches them moving.

After dark, Gentar and his wife went down to the river to hunt frogs. I wasn’t entirely clear about the process – the only equipment they had was a torch, a small cooking pot and a large machete – but I went along anyway. Within seconds:
Thwack!
Gentar had leapt down the riverbank into the water, stunned a largish fish with the handle of his machete, and popped it into the cooking pot. The same method seemed to work for frogs and for fish as small as my little finger, though the latter could also be grabbed with bare hands. By the time we went home to our tarps the cooking pot contained one big fish, half a dozen small ones, and a single frog. Though I had waded thigh high in the water lunging at everything that moved, my contribution to the catch was nil. The next morning, the eldest girl came over and presented me with a steaming basin of rice. Sticking out of it was a twig on which was impaled freshly barbecued fish and a frog’s leg. It was one of the better breakfasts of the trip.

After breakfast, Gentar, Mijak and I set off to ‘go inside’, to penetrate the forest that is the Rimba’s true home. We drove through miles and miles of oil-palm plantation, interspersed with occasional bits of scrub. In one scrubby bit, we found tracks of the sun-bear. This black animal with a deep yellow V on its chest is the smallest of all the bears, though adult males still weigh more than me. It has a very long tongue, adapted for winkling wild honey out of nests hidden in tree trunks. I had never seen one in the wild – they are classified as ‘vulnerable’ by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. Do you see bears a lot? I asked Gentar. ‘See them a lot?’ he twinkled. ‘We eat them a lot!’

Cresting a hill under a threatening sky, we were faced with a scene of devastation. Felled branches, charred tree stumps, upended rootballs being washed gradually skeletal by the rains. There are few landscapes as dispiriting as a recently-but-not-all-that-recently cleared patch of rainforest. The new growth – weeds, vines, grasses, nothing beautiful or even useful – sprawls over dead tree stumps like gang members invading rival territory. Far away, a wall of green marks the place where the chainsaws stopped. It’s a reminder of the forest that stood on this spot for thousands of years, before the whirring and creaking, the shouting and thudding reduced it in a matter of days to this post-apocalyptic wasteland.

Gentar, who had been chatting cheerfully all the way, went quiet. I asked him if the area that we had been driving through for the last hour and a half was all forest when he was a kid. He stopped the bike, turned and looked at me, and said: ‘It was all forest in 2006.’

That was the year that ‘Bapak Seribu’ – Mr One Thousand – came to these parts. The boys could tell me nothing about him except that he was from Medan. They said this man provided the capital and equipment to cut down thousands of hectares of primary forest, then parcelled the land up into lots, and sold it to villagers for a million rupiah per hectare. By what right? I asked.

‘Right? Right! Hah!’ Gentar exploded. ‘No permits, no rights. What he had was balls, that’s all!’

Later, when Mijak and I had left Rimba territory and were back on a state road, a posse of men roared past us in a cloud of petrol fumes and fresh testosterone. They were helmetless, heavily tattooed; strapped like weapons of mass destruction to the back of their outsized trail bikes were huge chainsaws. Mijak’s whole body tensed up. ‘
Preman buka hutan
,’ he said: Forest Terminators.

The forest that once stood where Gentar had stopped his bike had always been used by the peripatetic Rimba, but they had put up no fight when Bapak Seribu sent in the Terminators. Partly, the boys said, because Rimba are culturally averse to conflict. But also because the very concept of ‘rights’, let alone of Indonesian national law, is something that only began to exist for the Rimba once Gentar (Butet’s very first Rimba student) learned to read, write and speak Indonesian, once he began to teach Mijak and his friends, once they began to interact with activists and NGOs.

Now, Mijak was trying to act as a translator between the world of his birth and the modern world of his dreams. Through their little NGO, the young Rimba have hooked up with AMAN, an umbrella organization that claims to represent 1,992 indigenous groups across Indonesia, and that provides a forum through which they can lobby at the national level. AMAN helps identify which laws Mijak needs to read up on, but the battles the Rimba have to fight are mostly fiercely local. The NGO records and reports violations to the police, it paints banners and organizes protests in front of the office of the Governor of Jambi. All, so far, to no avail.

It’s not an easy task they have set themselves. Indonesia has fifty-two national laws, treaties and decrees governing the environment. Many contradict one another. To make matters worse, the two government departments responsible for trees – the Ministry of the Environment and the Ministry of Forestry – use different maps. In 2010 the President launched a project to create a single map, but it stalled. While everyone agreed that there should be one land-use map for Indonesia, no one could agree whose data it should be based on. Some 40 million hectares of primary forest appear on one of the two maps but not the other. In other words, government departments have between them ‘lost’ an area of primary rain forest larger than all of Japan. That’s just at the centre. District maps, as well as district laws on land use, are different again.

In practice, it hardly matters, because no one seems to take much notice of the regulations or the maps in any case. After driving another few kilometres over cleared land patchworked through with newly planted oil palms, Gentar stopped again, leapt off the bike and started kicking around in the undergrowth, first curiously, then increasingly aggressively. He was looking for a boundary stone for the national park that used to sit here, marking the point beyond which no forest may be cleared.

There was no sign of the marker. There was no sign of the forest.

As the ground got hillier, oil palms gave way to rubber. After about half an hour, I spotted something that looked like real forest in front of us. As we approached it, we fell on another scene of carnage. This time, there were no weeds or washed-out rootballs. Magnificent ex-trees lay prostrate where they had crashed, probably the day before. The tree trunks were still surrounded by sawdust, splinters stuck up jagged as a newly snapped toothpick.

Finally, more than two hours after leaving a place that was still jungle in 2006, we made it to the cool shelter of the forest. I was longing to get off the bike and walk, to swap the roar of the engine for the magical thrum of the jungle. I wanted to crane my neck and not be able to see the tops of the trees, I wanted to feel the decomposing crunch-mulch underfoot, to savour what was left of this majestic but impotent kingdom. But to young men who grew up as forest nomads, there’s no sense in walking any further than is strictly necessary. We stayed on the bikes as long as the path was passable.

Less than a kilometre into the forest, the sombre canopy was pierced again by sunshine and bright, weedy green. Young rubber trees were planted at careful intervals; cassava and other food plants grew around the edge of the clearings. These plantations belonged to Gentar and the other families in his grouping. Close by stood a small bamboo house raised on a platform, shoulder height. ‘My real house,’ Gentar smiled his toothless grin.