Kijana (25 page)

Great. My little brother thought I was a scaredy cat. I caught Josh's face in the light. He was thinking the same thing as me.

Despite the lack of coffins in that part of the caves, there were skulls in odd places. The sight of the skulls perversely gave me some comfort, as they refocused me on why we were down in that godforsaken place.

We crawled through another small tunnel, which opened into a large cavern, then into another tunnel through to an identical open area. I suggested there was nothing left to see. Beau didn't answer. Josh thought it was funny. Beau looked at him as if to say the two of us were free to leave, then continued moving forward. The cave led to yet another tunnel, which Beau peered into by using his flash. Josh and I stayed in the opening waiting for him to advise us if it continued. He set off another flash, which disturbed something. It squealed and sent Beau leaping backwards. A dark object exploded from the hole Beau had been peering into. Josh hit the deck and let out an almighty scream, quickly followed by his trademark nervous laugh.

‘It's just a bat,' Beau said.

Josh was still laughing. ‘Then why'd you jump so far?'

‘Yeah, it's just a bat,' I said mockingly. I was only fooling around but Beau took me seriously.

‘Yeah, well if
you
want to lead, go ahead and do it!'

Josh's laughing subsided, leaving an awkward silence. Beau didn't say a word as he turned and headed back in the direction we'd come. I knew I'd made a botch of the situation. Maybe I'd dug a little too deep. I was only doing it to get a rise out of him for the camera. Josh knew that, but either Beau didn't catch on or he was fighting something else.

I'd sensed he felt increasingly on the outer when it came to us three guys, especially without Maria around. Leading us through the tunnels may have taken on greater significance for him than I had realised. Until that point of the trip I'd never really let him take control of anything, despite my complete trust and reliance on him.

He made a mockery of my earlier concerns by leading us quickly and easily to the cave entrance. The sunlight brought everything back into perspective and our confrontation deep within the cave was left there, dead and buried. Instead, our stomachs reminded us it was lunchtime. Gibson, like a true guide, knew the best local eating place.

Less than half an hour later we were sitting on a wooden bench choosing from various bowls containing chicken, buffalo and green vegetables. All were presented in different sauces and all looked like they'd been cooked two days previously. Nonetheless, they were delicious, if not a tad spicy.

As we ate, I again asked Gibson about the funerals. He again became coy, replying reluctantly that he may know where a corpse lay, where we may be welcome to visit and film. It would cost us, he said. Of course, we were willing to pay. Where was the dead person and how much would it cost, I asked.

‘Cigarettes,' he said, would be sufficient payment. Maybe money was a little disrespectful for such macabre information.

Our destination was 25 minutes out of town, but he knew the way well. On the way we stopped by a stall to purchase the cigarettes. I asked him which brand he smoked. He pointed to one of the clove brands and spoke to the stallkeeper. I beckoned for a packet, but the stallkeeper pulled down a whole carton, completely ignoring me. Gibson, on the other hand, nodded sheepishly but wouldn't meet my gaze. I watched dumbfounded as he scuttled back to the car with his spoils. This bloke was good, no doubt about it.

The car climbed further into the hills along another dirt track until it stopped, seemingly in the middle of nowhere. We would walk from there, Gibson announced. He then hit us with a bombshell. He was taking us to his family who would show us his deceased grandmother.

I immediately felt bad for the way we'd pressured him. No wonder he'd been reluctant. Suddenly it didn't feel right to be paying to film a dead person. I looked at Gibson and his carton of cigarettes and immediately felt like a gravedigger. Hardly a word was spoken as we followed him down a path through a small forest of bamboo. It felt like a funeral procession already.

The bamboo cleared and a wooden house came into view. It was built on stilts and below it an old man was hammering away at something. Next to the house were two traditional rice huts. Their distinctive rooves were typical of many we'd seen around Toraja.

While the local houses were basic, the rice huts were intricately built, with shards of bamboo sticking out the end of the roofline, like pan pipes, and motifs of buffalo figures painted in red, white and black. No two designs were ever the same, but they all had the very distinguishable arching roof.

We learnt that the roof was designed to resemble the spiritual ships on which the Torajan people believed their ancestors had arrived from the stars. It was this belief that made death not a tragedy but a celebration, for it signalled the deceased's return to the heavens above, to the place they called paradise.

Gibson greeted a man, who he introduced as his father. As Gibson explained why we were there, we politely stood and smiled, hoping his father would not be put off by our request. We also hoped he would not admonish his son for bringing us home. The next half an hour went by awkwardly as the old man appeared to ignore us. It wasn't until Gibson asked me to hand over the cigarettes that we got to shake hands with his father.

The old man took things very slowly and had a friendly smile that made me feel OK. Gibson's mother emerged and we were introduced. She then handed each of us a strong black coffee made of Torajan beans. Gibson then told us we should wait while they ‘got ready'.

We finished our coffees, then Gibson invited us to enter the house. He lingered behind as we climbed the steps towards the entrance. I moved as gently and as precisely as I could, taking off my shoes at the top of the steps.

‘Follow her,' Gibson said, pointing to his mother. He seemed awfully uncomfortable, as if we were about to walk in on a ghost. We followed the old lady along a passage, until we got to a doorway. She held open a curtain covering the doorway and ushered us into a small room. Beau went first, followed by me, then Josh with the camera filming.

Lying on the floor on the far side of the small room was the corpse, wrapped in sheets and covered by a blanket, with only her mouth and eyes exposed. I nearly bumped into Beau who had stopped not too far into the room, with Josh still trying to get in with the camera.

Gibson's father shuffled past us. He beckoned to us, indicating it was OK for us to come closer to the body. Josh was filming, while Beau didn't quite know if he should start taking photos or not.

‘How long has she been here?' I asked the old man, breaking the silence. He didn't understand me, instead shouting to Gibson who was elsewhere in the house.

‘What?' came Gibson's muffled voice through the thin walls, as if his father had asked him if he'd done his homework.

‘How long has she been here?' I began, starting in a loud whisper and ending in a shout.

Gibson relayed the question back through the wall to the old man still standing beside us. He shouted back in Indonesian and smiled at us.

‘Two months,' came invisible Gibson's translation.

What was up with Gibson, I wondered. Was he scared of ghosts or did he feel embarrassed at bringing tourists into his family home? Perhaps he wasn't allowed in the room. It was such a crazy scene I didn't know if I should feel relaxed or on edge.

The old man certainly didn't appear worried. In fact, he seemed overly casual about the whole affair. He smiled at us as he began pulling back the blanket to reveal the skinny body of his deceased mother-in-law wrapped like a mummy in cloth. The body had been preserved by injecting formaldehyde to retard the decaying process, which gave the family up to a year to save funds for her funeral.

We gradually moved closer, inspecting her face and trying to decipher which were her mouth, eyes and nose. Her face was a dark blue and looked as if it would sound hollow if tapped. The only other exposed part was her fingers, which stretched out from long sleeves. Everything about the body had shrunk. She looked like she could have been dead for 20 years. Only the bright coloured material she was wrapped in gave any indication of how recently she had died.

It was fascinating to actually examine a dead person and contemplate what it meant to be dead. I was surprised to find I didn't feel spooked by what was before me. The old man manoeuvred the blankets around as if she were merely asleep. Josh held the camera while I crouched over the body and explained the preserving process while Beau stood quietly against the wall, his hands clutching his camera at his crotch. I don't think he was enjoying himself.

‘She doesn't look very happy,' I flippantly said to the camera. It seemed this was no place for jokes, for Gibson's voice startled me.

‘She can hear what you say,' he warned through the wall. ‘Speak to her, tell her how well she's looking.'

I looked apprehensively at Josh and his camera.

‘She looks pretty good doesn't she?' I said, nodding at the lens in an attempt to be as convincing as possible. Josh was smirking behind the camera.

‘Seriously though!' I said loudly, so everyone could hear, including grandma.

We got the shots we needed as quickly as we could, then Gibson's voice came meandering through the wall.

‘It's time for her lunch.'

It struck me as an odd thing to say.

We took that as our cue to leave, and thanked the old man. We helped drape the blanket back over the corpse before leaving the room. It was one thing to read about the Torajan way of dealing with death, but another to actually see it for yourself. I left the room feeling honoured to have experienced it.

There was no sign of Gibson in the house. We eventually found him sitting on the porch staring out at the nearby hills. It was our chance to ask all the questions that had been running through our minds.

Gibson explained that in Torajan culture, the grandparents were the primary carers of the grandchildren. The old lady was more like Gibson's mother than his grandmother, we learned. He would have become too upset if he'd come into the room with us.

He explained that during the time the body was in the house it was treated as if it were still alive, hence Gibson's insistence she could hear us and that it was time for her to eat. Family members visited and spoke to the deceased, keeping them company until the funeral, when it was believed the spirit left the body. Only then would their deaths be mourned.

Gibson then told us his father knew of a funeral to be held in the next few days much further out of town. His family knew some people who lived close to where the funeral was going to take place. We would be welcome to stay with these people and attend the funeral, if we wished. It didn't take long for us to agree. We thanked Gibson's parents and headed back to the car.

It took us an hour to get there, along a very winding and bumpy road, climbing even further into the mountains. We passed rice fields on either side of the road where women sat, hunched over, planting new rice seeds, their ankles deep in a mixture of water and mud. Buffalos were often tethered near the houses, chewing their cud and swooshing flies with their tails. Due to the spiritual importance of the buffalo, they were a family's most prized possession, Gibson explained. They were always well fed, washed by hand daily, and allowed to roam free during the day. Of course, their happy lives came to a spectacular end when they were sacrificed, as we were to discover.

We arrived at the village late in the afternoon, stepping from the car into another round of introductions. Gibson appeared to know the people very well. The man and woman looked like they too could have been Gibson's parents, so I wasn't surprised when Gibson revealed this was actually his home. Confused, but not surprised.

We spent the afternoon walking through the surrounding hills. It was a hive of industry. Children and women carried sacks of rice from the field to a communal grinding machine that prepared the rice for storage.

We returned to the house to find Gibson sitting on the porch, chatting with his ‘family'. A freshly killed chicken was stewing on an open fire. As the sun went down we sat on the floor of the family house and ate dinner by candlelight.

As we ate I asked Gibson about the funeral preparations. He told me they were taking place about a kilometre away.

‘When will we be able to go there?' I asked.

‘Now,' he said. I was surprised, for I presumed it would be a daylight event. After dinner Gibson led us through the dark, down the side of the hill and past yet another rice hut until ahead of us we could see a few lights. Then came the sound of chanting. This was it – the preparations for a full-blown Torajan funeral.

We came across a clearing 30 metres wide by about 150 metres long. Along each side of this area were more than a dozen rice huts, arranged so that people could view the events that would unfold in the clearing. It seemed that some huts had been built especially for the occasion. The front of these buildings looked like any normal rice hut, while the rest of the building remained unfinished.

Gibson came across a family he knew sitting under one of the rice huts. The father, Paulus, invited us into his family's hut so we could watch a circle of men and women swaying from side to side and chanting like Tibetan monks.

The eldest son of the family, Ronny, was our age but only Paulus spoke understandable English. He introduced us to his wife and youngest son, Budi.

Paulus was a well-to-do man by local standards, wearing gold-rimmed glasses and shoes with socks. He seemed out of place considering the subsistence living of the locals. Paulus took a shine to our small camera, asking to have a look at it as Josh explained about the filming we were doing. Paulus then proudly pulled out his camera from a top pocket to show us.

‘Where are you parents?' he asked.