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.