A letter to my lover – the shadow play of half-won affection

Address:

Sewer number 552

behind the mall

just next to the warungs

in the shadow of some great erection of a monument

to some dictator

or perhaps just To Hope

just down the road from that shiny international hotel

next to the kampong with the barefoot kids

and the hollowed out little men

wearing SBY t-shirts with blue sleeves.

Under the yellow-orange light of the almost-dark

- because it never gets dark here, never -

there lies my Jakarta.

A nondescript afternoon during the quiet of Ramadan 2009, looking out over Bundaran HI with its rigidly hopeful figures symbolising the optimism of tomorrow.

To my Jakarta,

I’m not sure if I ever told you. But I almost left you. A few months back I was offered a job living in Bali and travelling to eco-lodges in some of the most beautiful places in this country – places that are easy to love. When I was offered that job my mind whirred with new possibility. I was so excited I felt like my skin might rupture and erupt with starbursts; I was so charged with hope and opportunity.

My job would have been to inspire people to visit these incredible places, to help them reconnect with what drives them, with what feeds their souls. After living in Jakarta for some months, I could appreciate how important it was to escape to a naturally beautiful place – to appreciate the wondrousness of the world and remember why life is such a gift. I remember digging my fingers into my thighs and emitting a little screech with my eyes shut tight. It was all a little too exciting. I even had to do a couple of handstands to get rid of some excess excitement. Yep, it was like New Love.

And then, there was you. I felt that I had given you a fair go to show yourself to me and it appeared that we were not really hitting it off, and that most likely we would never really hit it off. Every day you muffle my skin with your smog and your heat and trip me up with your broken pavements. You gave me an eye-ulcer, blurring your beauty; you fractured my kneecap so I had to hobble across you, you infested my digestive tract with warring bacteria and parasites and then pumped me full of antibiotics that made me feel that I was dying and eating nails at the same time - but somehow didn’t kill the nuclear-resistant amoeba.

I know you’re trying to tell me I’m not made for this place; that I’m too fragile to exist here. And you’re looking to poison me from the inside out. Last night my stomach warped and bubbled and I threw up black sludge that looked like the rancid stuff that pumps through your sewer canals - your lifeblood, carrying whispers of corruption and unmet expectations across the skin of your city. Well, it’s not my life-blood. My body thinks that stuff is poison and to be honest, I’m inclined to agree. Do you think you’re fooling anyone, pumping poison through your veins every day and pretending it is blood? After a while people can tell poison from blood and they want the real thing.

Sometimes it’s hard to love you. Sometimes I need tequila shots just to get a laugh out of you.

But. We had our moments. Like that time when I was walking home with my idealism dribbling in my wake and I looked up and you’d made the moon full and bright and yellow, and a breeze skipped up my spine and with Feist in my ears you gave me goose-bumps into the thick night. I thought of you fondly then. And that time I was really sick and just needed to get home, and you opened up the magical skyways of the city and flew me home with no macet at all. And all the times when one of your people – one of the 18 million beating hearts throbbing within you – has reached across the chasm between us and handed me a little piece of understanding, with a gaze or a conversation or a brush of fingertips.

I want you to know that I notice. Every time you rustle your skirts and show me a bit of beauty, I’m watching.

But I still want more. I want that feeling of lacing my fingers into yours in the middle of the night and feeling the squeeze around my knuckles which says yes, I’m here. I want to fall asleep with the knowledge that when I wake up your beating heart will be within reach of my fingertips. All this I can see in shadows, like the ghostly apparitions of a wayang puppet show. Just beyond my reach, on the other side beneath your cloaks, where other people make the shadow-play of our almost love story. I’m wondering if you’ll ever make it real. I want it to be and I’m willing to suspend disbelief to make it so.

So here we are. I gave up that job in Bali to be with you. And now we’ve got less than 3 months left together and already I’m feeling the nostalgia of losing you. I look out into the glowing clenched-fist night and feel a swell of clarity. I feel like I’m finally starting to understand you, and I can see your fingers unfurling so I know you feel the same. I like to think of you as one of those songs that I didn’t like at first but then I kept hearing it and eventually I fell in love with it, because it’s not as cheap and easy as a pop song. People ask me if I think we can work it out and I say ... maybe. Clear-eyed Sydney calls me home and makes so much sense, like the boy with the clean fingernails and a full time job. And of course Sydney will win in the end.

But I’ll always look for you, blazing and darkening in shadow movements behind the screen. I’ll sit and watch untiringly through the night like Indonesians do; everyone else will be on the side where they can watch the skilful puppet master and the intricately designed puppets, with the gamelan orchestra creating its nightmarish soundtracks. I’ll be alone on the other side of the screen, watching the silhouettes shifting and stirring and embracing and quivering as they love, fight and betray their way through life. And I’ll make it all real with my belief.

We’re the lucky ones, because we know ahead of time that we are ending; we can say everything we’ve always wanted to say. So let’s just enjoy the time we have left together. I know you’re not big on beginnings and endings (more on that later), but I am – so try to think of something meaningful for our farewell.

Love, (that’s right- love, don’t be malu)

Ali xx

Peering across the divide - a few little notes on faith

I’ve wanted to write about faith since I moved in Indonesia. But finding words to talk about faith is difficult and feels fraudulent, like saying I love you just because someone else says it and you want it to be true.

It’s necessary to think about faith in order to understand this country; without religion, life here is confronting and confounding. Faith is everywhere, operating in tandem with every life experience, informing so much of everything that happens. Every day, no matter where you are, you can hear the sound of a nation of believers as they are called to pray. The faith of this country wakes you up in the morning with devoted humming that creeps through the crevices of your apartment.

Five things I have learnt about faith, from the faithful and the faithless:

1. Faith needs nothing earthly. Mosques are great empty spaces with shiny marble surfaces, where the faithful join together to bounce their prayers off the walls and hear them back again. Here, the faithful don’t require anything to help them believe. Their belief is bottomless and nebulous in its expansiveness; but hard-surfaced in its strength.

2. Faith is about being grateful and expressing hope and asking for help and saying you’re sorry. These are the things that people have trouble doing every day of their lives.

3. Faith finds meaning in the things that happen to you and gives reasons for the moments that bring joy or distress and provides comfort when the world is loud and unhearing. These are the things that people want from the moment they’re born.

4. Faith requires trust in the intangible, belief in the unfathomable and loyalty to something that is everywhere and nowhere. These are the struggles of life and have nothing and everything to do with a God or Gods. These things are hard for everyone, every moment, every day, no matter where they live or who they love or what they believe.

5. Sometimes it’s sad not to believe, but you can’t just choose to have faith. Sometimes it’s just too difficult to believe in things that you can’t hold in your fists or prove with facts.

I recently edited a report for the Indonesian Commission on Violence Against Women, about horrific human rights abuses against women in May 1998, when riots raged across Jakarta and other cities of Indonesia. Amid the chaos, mass rapes and other appallingly violent acts were carried out, predominantly against Chinese Indonesian women.

Editing the report was excruciating not just because of its content but also because it was so poorly translated – words had been changed from Indonesian into muddled English that tripped over itself often nonsensically. Every so often while editing the report I came across an indecipherable paragraph of translated English, and would have to refer back to the original text in Indonesian. Using dictionaries and online translation tools I constructed paragraphs – bundling words together like hellish building blocks to form awful sentences. Finally emerging with meaningful sentences like: the research indicated that mass rapes were conducted almost simultaneously, in a manner that was organised and widespread across a number of different riot locations. Going over and over the translation and hoping that I somehow got it wrong.

Almost at the end of the editing, I was finally presented with a gift. So Indonesian this is: to receive a small piece of clarity and beauty at the end of a dismal journey.

The final appendix of the report: the prayers. It was a strange thing, after wading through the report’s jumble of lost meanings, to find that suddenly everything makes sense in verses of prayer. Reading the lines of the prayers was like discovering the code for understanding the report – there it was tucked away at the back, only to be found by those who persevere to the end. This elusiveness of meaning is so typical of Indonesia.

It’s a simple truth: you will never understand anything about this pocket of the world until you listen to its people pray. In this land where everyone believes in something, it makes no sense to attempt to comprehend it without grasping the way its people believe.

In prayer, the translated phrases about May 1998 are achingly poetic.

The prayers speak of immaculate flesh with blood gushing all over; of sacred wombs, torn and tattered; of lives, dying and exhausted; of brutal, foul grips of anonymous villains. The prayers speak of tears that wither; they appeal for help to show truth as truth, and to give strength to Indonesia’s leaders who must scale their way righteously. The prayers ask that the souls of their loved ones may rest in Your Most Consoling Gardens.

And then, making the most sense of all:

We could not sigh our pains to anyone but You
... this misery is beyond our possibility

Indonesia is a collection of thousands of islands with lots of dark corners where unspeakable things are often left unspoken, where issues that might cause offence or distress are rarely confronted, where - only if absolutely necessary - hushed tones are employed to tenderly dab at awful things. In this world, there are countless souls who could not sigh their pains to anyone.

And from another world, the faithless are left to peer across the divide, struggling to deal with the miseries that are beyond our possibility.

Hope, Faith, Found - Padang, one month on.

“You can’t fight with nature. You have to try to be friendly with it,” says Abi as we look out the car windows at the buildings in Padang, Sumatra, which have been made crooked by the temperamental earth. We are both strangers here; he is from Bandung in Java (another island just across from Sumatra) and I am from Sydney in Australia (another island, down a little and to the right).

We are looking around us and trying to work out how concrete turns to cardboard and caves and crumbles and warps and twists and zigzags. Here, we pass a house that has reared up and speared itself through a white van parked in front. There, steel reinforced columns, now ruined, leer serrated teeth at us.

“People talk about making buildings earthquake-proof. It’s not possible. Maybe earthquake friendly,” says Abi with a serious laugh.

I remember someone in a UN coordination meeting a couple of weeks earlier saying that this earthquake behaved oddly, with the tectonic plates moving up and down against each other, rather than side by side. Cheeky earth behaviour.

“I guess it’s hard to make something earthquake proof, because you never know which way the earth is going to move,” I say, feeling incredibly inadequate and unlearned, but for some reason still compelled to fill the air with words.

It has been a month since the earth here heaved and wrenched open, killing an estimated 1,117 people, injuring many more and leaving hundreds of thousands of buildings in Padang and surrounding regions ruined. (The government estimates over 200,000 houses are moderately or severely damaged).

And everywhere around us, life goes on. Young men transport televisions on their laps on scooters, streets carts roll and make fried treats and fresh juices, school girls in pure white jilbabs giggle and look at their phones and talk behind their hands and yell out to the white girl “hello mister” and laugh hysterically.

The organisation I’ve been working with in Jakarta is funding the installation of some water filtration units in some of the worst-hit villages around Padang; I’m here to oversee the project. Abi is our project manager here, doing an amazing job of organising everything.

I can’t help feeling entirely irrelevant and screamingly white as I inspect our third location. We follow a hand-drawn map to a kampung (village) and then we’re led down dirt tracks through to a family and their filthy well. It has been made more filthy by the recent earthquake, but I can’t help thinking it wouldn’t have been too clean to start with. Miya, a Padang local who is also helping to supervise the project, speaks to members of the community in Bahasa Indonesia, as I try to understand what they’re talking about. It is the family’s well, but it can serve the community and they are happy to share the water.

A naked boy of about 5 bounds around me, climbing trees and falling sideways, giggling and gazing with wide quizzical eyes at the strange white bulk towering over him.

“Are you happy with this location?” Miya asks me after a little while.

I think it’s important to be rational about it, so I start asking questions about how many families live in this village; will everyone be able to easily access the clean water? Are we sure it’s not contaminated by salt (this is one of the few things these particular filtration units cannot filter)? Is the community willing to work together to maintain it? And what is the water supply like currently – how do they use the water from the well as it is now? (Apparently they use rocks and other materials to filter it. Gazing down at the swirly brown water in the well, I don’t have the brain machinery to comprehend this). Eventually I just nod and tell them that yes, I am happy with this location.

The questions were something of a charade because as soon as I saw the stagnant brown well water and felt the curious eyes of the children living there, there was no way I could suggest another location.

I’m shamed by the thrill I seem to have supplied to the people in the kampung, and as we leave one of the women puts her hands on mine and rubs my white arms and I feel an acute sense of unbelonging.

Over the next few days I am continually struck by the incredible resilience of the people here. I peer at them through my white eyelids and try to imagine how it would feel if this place was my home; if the mosque where I worshiped and believed cracked and buckled to the ground; if I was homeless and living in a tent while mourning the loss of friends and neighbours and family. Or even if I had escaped harm or direct effects – still, how would it feel to have my friends and neighbours suffer, to have my city so callously ravaged?

Everywhere there is hope and energy for the future – people are rebuilding, standing tall on ruined buildings and making plans for new ones; teaching children in tents while schools are repaired or rebuilt from nothing; worshipping and believing as they have done every day of their lives. Of course there is sadness and devastation and there must be despair, but there are also so many signs of joy and forward-looking hope and pride; like snapshots of lessons in how to have faith and be happy:

The teenager walking across a bridge on her way home, caught in flashing rains and leisurely twirling an umbrella as if performing singin’ in the rain on stage.

The friendly faces greeting us along the sides of the village streets, waving at us as we drive past.

The leathery man lazing on his broken porch, gesturing to me to indicate I am welcome to come and look closer at his ruined home.

The principal of the school who pops his head over a broken fence and tells me that his school was crushed so now he is teaching somewhere else - just over there, do you see it; my school is in the white tent that says UNICEF.

The group of schoolgirls sending reams of giggles across the ruins of the Ambacang hotel, where so many souls were lost just weeks ago.

Looking across this fractured landscape with pale eyes and white skin it’s easy to feel despair creep along your arms, lifting your hair into goosebumps. But if you concentrate on watching the people, digging and carrying and constructing, straight-backed with faith and busy with plans, it becomes easier to smile with them and understand how they will survive.

Lassoing the stars from the gutter - the unraveling of Jakarta

Jakarta is the lover I picked up in a club in one of those crooked back alleys with hidden nooks and grimy doors that open into dark rooms full of dodgy characters with everywhere eyes. Jakarta and I did tequila shots together and woke up with pasty mouths and sketchy night recollections. She is the lover I’m ashamed of, the one I’m most seduced by, the one I hate the most and love the most. She’s the one I keep in secret, meeting in shadowy laneways along broken bricked footpaths, in the gutter next to sewers, and sometimes - when we’re feeling decadent and daring - in the looming shiny malls, where we watch each other’s reflections in the windows of shops containing items we can never dream of affording.

My lover will often flash about millions of Rupiah but the gifts remain undelivered.

My parents have expressed interest in coming to visit me in Jakarta and I’ve coaxed them down from their excitement, managing their expectations and making excuses for my lover.

“But you won’t like Jakarta,” I say pleadingly, “I mean, I don’t mind living here, but I don’t even know what you would do here…”

The divide is so great that I can’t even imagine my parents and my new secret lover in the same room together.

“But it’s your home,” they respond patiently. “We want to know what your life is like.”

What they really mean is: “We want to know who you’re spending all your time with, and whether we approve.”

“Maybe I can meet you somewhere else?” I suggest hopefully, shamed by my own shame but still trying to change their minds. I make a few half-hearted suggestions - like sunshiny Bali, or straight footpathed Singapore - somewhere that’s a little more husbandly material??

Everyone has a lover like Jakarta at least once in their lives: the lover nobody else understands. You know the one I’m talking about, because you’ve had one too. Your parents don’t approve, your friends wonder why you keep going back, and everyone tells you over and over that you’re just too good for it.

But you’ll hear none of it! You’re too far in it. Your lover seduces you with grand plans and glances of greatness amid the squalor. (My lover, Jakarta, is a shameless slut and seduces many this way – it’s famous for bringing the young and ambitious from all over the Indonesian archipelago to its heaving bosom on the promise of unimagined richness). This lover beckons you close and with an arm around your shoulders and says - LOOK! Look up through the smog and see the stars! We can lasso them together; I can show you how – do you trust me? No one knows what really goes on between lovers, and who could understand the sacred bond shared between two souls who plot to capture the stars together?

The unravelling of Jakarta is a forever entertaining journey. This city always feels as if she’s holding back beauty; always holding the promise of more – if only I love her a little more! If only I make her feel secure that I won’t leave her, then she will stop running around and showing her beauty to others (she’s always ugliest with me). She only wants me to believe in her!

And I do believe, I really do… this particular quest for beauty is just taking a little longer than I thought.

Next time my parents ask if they can come visit Jakarta, I just might say yes…. Perhaps the four of us can sit in the gutter together with the sewer stench in our nostrils, and my lover can show us all how to lasso the stars.  

Unhappy neighbours

Bodies are washing up on beaches.

I read that in a newspaper article about the tsunami in Samoa. I wondered about the person who wrote that. Bodies.

For me, the saddest thing that happens when there’s a natural disaster is that beating hearts - living breathing people - become bodies in just a few catastrophic moments ... bloated bodies washing up on beaches, bodies with a foot peeking out of building rubble in newspaper photos, bodies floating along on a magic carpet of debris on floodwaters through villages. People who love and are loved somehow morph from being single souls and instead become part of rising death tolls and statistics and numbers unaccounted for and people-shaped mounds in yellow body bags.  

It happens when death makes sweeping movements. When the deaths come in piles – when people die in the hundreds and thousands. All of a sudden the process becomes business like and emotionless. And people wash up on beaches like pieces of driftwood.  

Perhaps the language is supposed to desensitise us to the shocking calamity that has ravaged our world, perhaps without this we would have trouble processing the enormity of thousands of lives (thousands!) lost all at once, all in a moment. Is it even possible, as a fellow soul on the earth, to comprehend the horrifying reality that sometimes the ground beneath our feet betrays us and rears ferociously, bringing utter devastation to our world? It’s far too sad and scary a concept to consider.

When people aren’t numbers, then they might be me or you.  

Imagine the ground shaking so strongly that you need to sit on it to keep yourself from toppling over. This is what people in Padang, West Sumatra, had to do a few days ago. Imagine your home collapsing in on you while the world lurches and shoves in all directions.  Imagine the panicked screams of your friends and family members as your world crashes and falls around you. Or the ferocious sound of the sea rushing in from all directions and snatching your voice away so you can’t yell out to your husband or wife who is being swept away on great bulky waves.

"I don't know how to describe it, it was like a mountain coming out of the sea," a chief in one of the worst hit villages in Samoa told AFP.

These are the scenes of childhood nightmares; of Armageddon and cataclysmic planetary episodes. In the midst of all that, you would think the whole world was ending.   

Imagine that your father, or mother, or babies, or brothers and sisters – are somewhere in all that madness, in amongst the crashing and the jolting and the collapsing and the flooding and the screaming and panic, and you can’t contact them because all the communications are down. Imagine searching through hospital corridors, or worse, along rows of yellow body bags, for a hint that somewhere in there is a familiar somebody.

The transition from alive to an approximated number in a death toll comes quickly.  

The tectonic plates of this region are unhappy neighbours. It’s an odd thought to ponder, that beneath our feet, the very crust of the earth is rumbling, shifting and colliding, mostly without warning and sometimes with calamitous consequences.

In Australia (the lucky country) we have our very own plate. Which I guess is kind of like living out in the countryside where your neighbours’ fences are somewhere out on the horizon, so that when they’re screaming out for help, you can barely hear them. But they’re still your neighbours, and if they were in trouble you’d still do everything you could. And you’d still mourn with them in their sorrow, because it could easily have been you.  

 

Budi, teruslah bermain bola (Budi, keep on playing ball).

July, 2009.

I thought it was thunder.

In Indonesia, the weather is truly a force. In the wet season, often the thunder will drop over Jakarta like a smattering of firecrackers on bitumen, clapping across the sky and setting off car alarms. Or it will pop like a gunshot in the distance. Mostly the storms roll over the skies in the afternoons; morning thunder is relatively uncommon. It is also very rare to have rain in the dry season.

So that morning when I awoke to a sound like one great clap of thunder, I sat straight up in my bed. And there, from my little apartment oasis, 28 floors above an awakening city, I wondered why on earth there was thunder at 8am in the dry season.

It didn’t occur to me that a few kilometres from my bedroom, two men had just detonated backpacks and suitcases full of nail-packed high explosives inside the Ritz Carlton and the JW Marriot hotels in Mega Kuningan.

I wandered out into the lounge room and my flatmate swung around to me from the TV, open mouthed, phone in one hand and the other outstretched, pointing toward our open balcony door in the direction of Mega Kuningan where 9 lives had just been lost.

I thought it was thunder, I heard myself say.

We watched the TV coverage together for a little while and I wandered out onto the balcony, confused about how this could have happened, just over there, just beyond that road, through that haze. Where my friends attend meetings, and take salsa lessons, and have breakfast.

When it became too much to try to understand the local TV coverage, I went back into my bedroom. There, my unanswered phone had vibrated itself off my bedside table with warnings from the in-country managers of our program.

You don’t have to go to work today. (It hadn’t even occurred to me to get dressed).

Stay somewhere safe. (This was a difficult command to follow with confidence).

Don’t go into the Kuningan area. (This was also difficult- I live in Kuningan so I was already breaking this last warning).

The rest of the day was spent watching coverage on TV, calling friends, returning messages, hearing reports of car bombings on the roads (this didn't happen), watching more coverage on TV, talking talking talking... and.... sadness. A friend of a friend was killed. Another friend knew someone who had his leg blown off. Sadness that made me sick in my stomach and weak in my wrists.

This is my home. So yes, I'm angry. And a little bit scared. But the predominant feeling is sadness. That unbearable, aching sadness that wraps itself around your chest and tightens, slowly. I'm sad for the people and families directly affected. Sad for this wonderful country and its people.

When I first decided to moved to Jakarta from Sydney, a number of people thought it was a strange choice. But the most offensively sweeping warning I received was: “you know they put bombs under tables there.” At the time I was pre-emptively protective of my new home and sighed and said something along the lines of don’t be ridiculous. Because it was ridiculous. It still is. The statement was ill-advised, over-dramatic and damaging. After the bombings, the memory of that warning magnified my sadness, because somehow that person has now been validated and that ridiculous, sweeping remark has been made less unreasonable.

One of my Australian friends in Jakarta saw an Indonesian colleague later that day, just hours after the bombing. “So do you think this means Manchester United won’t come anymore?” The young Indonesian man asked sadly. It seemed a flippant concern.

Indonesia isn’t high on the list of tour stops for world-class sporting teams. It is, however home to many passionate soccer fans. The top soccer players are idolised and there are posters of them on the sides of street stalls, above road overpasses and on bedroom walls across the country. Manchester United had been scheduled to arrive in Jakarta a few days after the bombing, for an exhibition match with the Indonesian team. It was a rare and highly anticipated visit and the city had been bannered with massive advertisements for months. Great red posters, with Manchester United players wearing traditional Indonesian batik over their soccer uniforms. The symbolism was unpretentious and effective, aimed at engaging the hearts of ardent young soccer fans across the archipelago – to tell them that the best players in the world knew that Indonesia existed, and it was important enough to visit for a soccer match. “Mau?” (want?) the posters asked, as if inviting every young Jakartan to come and meet these superstars in person.

YESSSSS!! You could imagine the chorus of young people who could never dream of being able to afford to see them play anywhere else.

The team was scheduled to stay at the Ritz Carlton. The visit was cancelled.

Soon after the bombings, the building-sized banners plastered across Jakarta advertising the game were replaced with simple black banners with the sentence: “Budi, Teruslah bermain bola”

“Budi (a common Indonesian name), keep on playing ball.”

The banners have been taken down now and replaced with ads for whitening creams and cigarettes. But every so often I’ll walk down a broken street and see an old ripped poster on the side of a street stall - one of the red posters from before the bombing. “Mau?” it asks, provocatively. And the sight of it will tighten my chest with sadness.

Budi, Teruslah bermain bola

On choosing the wrong boy, even in an Indonesian music clip.

I have a proposition for you, the blond boy said down the phone. Are you free this weekend?

I responded with a tentative “I’m not going away,” (I had vague plans with Harvard, a promisingly tall dark-haired American boy).

“There’s an Indonesian music video-clip shooting this weekend and they need a bule guy and a bule girl and I’m wondering if you want to be my wanita (woman)?”

I was listening now.

He continued: “the storyline is that there are two girls fighting over me.”

And I was sold... I'm a sucker for art imitating life. Life of course being that in Indonesia, white boys are like superstars and no matter how average and ordinary looking they are, they will still have spectacularly gorgeous young Indonesian women falling all over them. And white girls like me, in the background, feeling decidedly confused.

In any case, the thought of the comedic value of appearing in an Indonesian music video clip for a love ballad was unbearably giggle-inducing and promised some comic relief to Jakarta life.

Of course, first I had to meet the director, a yellow-fingered kretek-smoking creature who worked for one of the local TV stations. He picked me up in his Toyota Kijang under the usual confusing circumstances which inevitably resulted from my extremely incapable grasp of the Indonesian language. When we eventually found each other, he took me to have lunch with another of the directors, who proceeded to explain the plotline of the video clip. Through the haze of cigarettes and a language I don’t really understand, and with the aid of food props - krupuks, packets of crackers, bottles of soy and chilli sauce were arranged and rearranged in an enactment of what was to be the storyline - I was able to gather a few snippets of what was going on. The plot seemed to have changed into something much better – it now seemed that I would have the two boys fighting over me, and I would have the privilege of rejecting the blond boy, on film, for posterity. The plot was that the blond boy was going to be a new dashing (white) suitor on a faded blue scooter, trying to win me away from my Indonesian boyfriend (the lead singer of the band) who would inexplicably be riding in a hot red convertible BMW. It seemed that the lessons of this fairytale were a little mixed up, however at this stage I was confident that the storyline had me choosing the Indonesian boy in the hot red BMW.

“Can you bring me your portfolio?” One of the directors asked me in Indonesian toward the end of our lunch meeting.

“Uh, I don’t have it with me...” I replied, and then trailed off in the hope that the language barrier would somehow convey that I had an extensive portfolio of impressive work, which I had unfortunately left at home in Australia. This seemed to do the trick. At least, he traipsed me around to various corners of the TV station to meet seemingly random people, then took a number of photos of me on his phone, and eventually sent me on my way with instructions to be ready for the film clip on Sunday morning.

So the day came and we were in the car with Pak Deddy on our way to film the music video clip of an Indonesian love ballad by a band called Rupiah. The blond boy and I had listened to the song the night before and fallen over each other in fits of giggles at the prospect of pretending to be in love. Now the song was playing all day long and we were supposed to keep straight (adoring) faces locked on each other.

I was made up by the hair and make-up stylists to the Sinetron stars* who spend the day constantly trotting up to me in between takes and fluttering around me with combs and powder puffs and sticky lipsticks as I sweated away all their hard work under the hot Indonesian skies.

The day passed in a blur of confusion and giggles and ridiculous moments.

The blond boy was hungover and spent much of our free time sleeping on the couch, so I mucked around with the boys from the band, who were all entertained by the fact that I was very white and and very big and very blonde and barely spoke any Indonesian.

The blond boy - he is your husband? They asked me a number of times in Indonesian and English.

No.

Boyfriend?

No

Are you sure??

Laugh. Yes.

“Saya cinta kamu” (I love you) a text arrived from one of my new band-member friends during a break from shooting. I looked at him sitting on the couch across from me, phone in hand and both of us erupted into snorting laughter.

When we were filming I tried to channel all my non-verbal communication skills to work out what the hell was going on, and to attempt to be in remotely the correct position, with the correct look on my face. I was mostly unsuccessful.

“Ok Alison come here, now go there,” they ordered, often taking my arms or my hips in their hands and leading me around.

I spent most of the time squinting my eyes in bewilderment, trying to work out what was supposed to be going on as far as the storyline was concerned.

“Get out of frame, out of frame!!” They yelled at me.

“Ok, now in frame, in frame!”

Ack! Where was “frame?”

“Smile smile!”

“Why are you smiling? You’re not happy!”

I’m not happy? (But I have two boys fighting over me?)

The scenes seemed beyond ridiculous – one in particular had me sprawled on the edge of the pool, wearing a dress and high heels. The shot was set up in such a frenzy that before I knew what was going on, I was following one of the director’s hands with my eyes, by way of conveying my contemplative mood - gazing thoughtfully into the pool, across the pool, above the pool, and away into the distance, just to the right of the camera. All the while the blond boy was over in the corner, eating fried chicken and giggling maniacally at my poolside acting efforts.

In another scene the blond boy and I were in a bar having a drink, with my other suitor watching from behind, in a jealous rage. I didn’t even realise the other boy was behind us until the cameras were rolling and I was directed to look from the blond boy, to behind us, where the Indonesian boy was in full blue-steel Sinetron mode, scowling at me. Swallowing giggles, I was then directed to look back at the eye-twinkling blond boy, who was flaring his nostrils in restrained laughter at my puffed-up Ibu hair.** Then we had to clink glasses and pretend to be toasting something... “To blow jobs!” the blond boy announced loudly, and I snorted and felt the drink dribble out of my nose.

In yet another ridiculous scene I was riding with my Indonesian boyfriend (the lead singer) in a hot red convertible BMW. This boy was 23 but looked about twelve and was tall enough to be eye-to-eye with my nipples. I was asked to run my fingers through his hair and look at him adoringly - “like you’re my girlfriend” he said helpfully – and the entire excruciating time I felt like a pervy old lady taking advantage of some unsuspecting boy.

It was whilst shooting one of the final scenes that I realised something was remiss with the plotline. The blond boy and I were in a bar, locked in an embrace... and then we wandered off together, out of the shot.

“What a minute,” I said as we were walking off arm in arm, “am I choosing you??”

“Yep, looks like it,” the blond boy said, puffing out his chest.

“But I want to choose the Indonesian boy in the hot red convertible BMW!!”

I was appalled that I hadn’t even noticed I had made the wrong choice until it was already made and I was in the middle of it, stumbling over the camera dolly tracks as we walked off together out of frame. Sigh.

Lesson: Sometimes, when you don’t speak the language and you have no idea what the hell is going on, you just need to allow yourself to be pushed and pulled and directed around, while doing your best to stay out of frame when you’re not supposed to be there, and not ask too many questions about why you’re choosing a particular blond boy.

The music clip has yet to be released and it still elicits a cringe when I think of what the end result may be. I’m quite sure I will look for the most part bewildered and a little panicked ... and one scene will most likely show me with a drink coming out of my nose due to restrained giggles.

There will also be some stellar moments of me on the edge of a pool, looking off camera distractedly, trying to follow a random hand being waved through the air.

As a side note – Pak Deddy contacted me a number of times following the filming of this music clip, telling me that he wanted me to audition to be the host of a monthly jazz show at the TV station where he worked. I have since stopped answering these calls and dyed my hair brown.

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*Sinetrons are the melodramatic soaps on Indonesian television – the Indo version of Brazilian novellas, much more melodramatic than Australian soaps.

** Ibu hair is popular amongst well-to-do older Jakartan ladies, and involves the entire top section of the hair being puffed up in a wall stretching to the sky, secured with copious amounts of hairspray. I was also lucky enough to wear a side pony in another scene – it was a day of great hairstyles.