Missing: My Favourite Pak. Last seen searching for a husband for me. If found, please return to Tower 14.

(Before the disappearance, this post was titled Midnight Introductions by My Favourite Pak).

*Pak: short for “Bapak,” meaning Sir. Literally means father; commonly used as a polite greeting for men.

Something quite upsetting has happened. My favourite Pak has disappeared. There’s a possibility he’s found someone else. He could, at this very moment, be opening someone else’s door.

The thought of this drives into my ribs.

I wonder whether he still thinks of me. I remember when we were happy.

Our apartment building has a rotating roster of doormen and women but he was my standout favourite. We developed a fondness and I always loved it when he saw me coming and bounded out of the door in his enthusiasm to open it and shake my hand. In a new country where home has little of the affection with which it is usually associated, there’s something to be said for someone you barely know opening the door for you and making it clear they’re really glad you’re home safe.

“Miss Alison, Miss Alison!!” he would call, and so would begin another bewildering but affectionate exchange between us with each of us striving to understand the other - me trying desperately to understand his Indonesian and him trying valiantly not to embarrass me by making it clear my Indonesian is not even remotely understandable.

Whenever he saw me with a suitcase he asked me how long I would be gone for and told me in an entirely unsleazy way that he’d miss me. I didn’t care if it was true because the way he greeted me on my return made me believe it was, and that was enough for me.

We shared milestones together: on voting day he proudly wielded his purple-dyed index finger and I congratulated his pride in his new democracy. After the bombings he told me hati hati and I listened. When I limped in with a fractured kneecap his eyebrows bunched as he listened to my bumbling explanation of my clumsiness (I didn’t mention the vodka). When our air-conditioning broke and I was almost delirious with the fever of a parasite waging wars in my digestive system, he sat me down in front of the lobby air conditioner and organised for our apartment AC to be fixed immediately (anyone who has lived in Indonesia and tried to get anything fixed, let alone quickly, will know what a feat of affection this is).

Sometimes if I was dressed up he smiled and with his eyes in the sky he said, “Miss Alison! Cantik!” (beautiful). In these unsexy Jakarta days, and particularly those following the Are you Pregnant Incident with the Star Mart Man^, Pak was a little ray of self-esteem sunshine.

So yeah, I really liked him.

But he wasn’t just a friendly door-opener, as I was to discover a few months into my time of living in his building.

One day my male flatmate Heartbreaker came home and through hysterical laughter told me he had just finished being lectured by My Favourite Pak. Apparently my gallant defender (Pak) had seen Heartbreaker with another girl and had cornered him in the lobby the next time he saw him. It is extremely uncommon for two people of the opposite sex to share a roof unless they are married or related, and my Pak had obviously assumed Heartbreaker and I were a couple. We were not. Pak wanted to know what kind of a man would do the wrong thing by His Favourite Tenant (I’m pretty sure this is what he called me behind my back). He wasn’t going to continue opening the door for some young blue-eyed Heartbreaker who was fooling around on me. Straining to take the allegations seriously, my flatmate spent some time explaining that he and I were just friends – really! - and the matter was resolved with a wary-eyed handshake.

In the weeks following this exchange, life began to get interesting in the Lobby of Tower 14.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single woman in Indonesia must be in want of a husband. In want of a husband quite urgently, actually.

It is an odd thing being a single woman in Indonesia. Particularly a single white woman, away from her home, her family, and seemingly oblivious to the fact she has become a rather horrendous freak of nature – single and quite utterly independent (!!) I have had taxi drivers swivel backwards to look at me, appalled, whilst driving at speed on tollways – simply because I have answered the inevitable question honestly and told them that actually, I’m not sudah menikah (already married) at my ripe old age. For a while I followed the advice of other similarly unattached white girls, and pretended to be married with a husband waiting at home. But I soon discovered it’s much more entertaining to tell the truth and watch the worlds collide.

So, for my Pak, the revelation that I was indeed quite single and alone in this great big city, was a problem which he plotted to single-handedly solve.

The weekend following my Pak’s conversation with Heartbreaker, I arrived home after a Saturday night out to be greeted by my Pak. Now, we had some confusing conversations in our time, but the ones where I was slightly tipsy were by far the most entertaining. On this occasion, Pak was extra-specially excited to see me. I soon found out why.

Miss Alison, maybe you would like to meet my friend?

And in moments I was involved in an exceedingly awkward conversation with Pak’s ‘friend’ from Sumatra, who had mysteriously materialised out of nowhere. It’s times like these the language barrier can be really helpful. Just pretend you don’t know what’s going on, look utterly confused and call the bloody lift, quickly.

Another episode followed - one morning I returned from a run and Pak looked into my hideous sweaty face and told me excitedly that he something for me. Wait wait, Miss Alison, he said, and rushed behind the reception desk to pull out a piece of paper. He pressed it into my sweat-slicked hands and I read the scrawled name and number. His face was almost bursting with hopefulness and he said something along the lines of: That’s the number of another friend of mine. See, I’ve fixed you! There’s no need to be so ridiculously alone anymore! I’ve found you a man! You can make sense again! (It was in Indonesian, so I’m paraphrasing). Pak’s enthusiasm was so genuine I found myself nodding and agreeing that yes, perhaps I would give this mystery scrawled name on the paper a call.

(I did not).

It’s been a while since I had any midnight introductions by my Pak. Soon after these episodes he disappeared, presumably to the lobby of another apartment building. Perhaps he gave up on me. Perhaps he’s gone to marry-off another, more willing, single woman. I did appreciate his good intentions.

So this is a call out for anyone who might have seen my Pak (those of you in this 18 tower ghetto, perhaps one of you is having your door opened by him as we speak! Filthy ghetto hussies). Please let me know if he’s spotted. He looks a bit like a grown-up Indonesian version of Bart Simpson. Beaming smile. Bounding door-opening abilities. Last seen searching for a husband for me.

If found, please return to Tower 14. He’s the man who made my Jakarta apartment feel like home and I want him to wave me off one last time.

Hello mister! On the hustle in London and Jakarta - street selling for beginners

Once, in another life, I chased posh Londoners down the King's Road in Chelsea and asked them where they got their hair done. Then, I quickly became their best friend and convinced them to give me their credit card, or cash, or write me a cheque... and in return I would give them a piece of cardboard which entitled them to hair and beauty treatments at a salon of which they had never heard. I could usually complete this process in a matter of minutes. The job was 100% commission based so it was easy to be motivated.

I knocked on doors, I shouted across streets, I tapped on shoulders, I trotted up to groups of women waiting at the lights. Sometimes I intercepted them as they rushed to catch the tube to get to their morning meetings. Often I raised a little corner of my mouth and made my voice high and fizzy with giggles, and sold to men for their girlfriends and wives and daughters and mothers. In my finest hour I sold a series of 4 visits for a hair salon to a bald man. For himself.

I did this job in the thin dark cold of the sunless English winter; on days when the light would travel from very far off and tentatively peek over the city, on and off, for just a few hours.

Perhaps you know something about Londoners in the winter; perhaps you know that it is a time when their faces become hardened and grey and their voices become thin with impatience and shivers.

Londoners in the winter mostly do not like having a strange Australian girl of uncertain hair colour (it was a time of hair experimentation) running up to them and asking them questions about their hair as a ruse to begin her sales pitch.

Once, I was detained and searched by police after slipping into a law firm on the coattails of one of its employees, who held the back door open for me as he returned to work after a cigarette break. I was in the middle of pitching my sales spiel to one of the senior lawyers (who I might say, was very interested) when someone called security. I was made to feel very special: they called a female police officer especially for me. She arrived and snapped on a plastic glove. I lifted a brow and emptied my pockets, hoping for the best.

Once, I made the equivalent of 700 Australian dollars in a single day of this foolishness.

Once, I did this job with pink hair and bad skin. (This job of making people give me money because they believed I knew best how to make them beautiful). Let me add that I am not one of those cool funky types who wears her hair pink because it looks cool. I was more the colour-gone-wrong type of orangey-pink disaster. However, with pink hair, I still sold.

I tell you all this by way of saying that I know a thing or two about how to sell. And by way of explaining why I now totally get why things are the way they are on the streets of Jakarta.

It is one of the most inspirational and maddening things about living in this city: the entrepreneurial spirit of the people who have made this place their home. In Jakarta, everyone is on the hustle.

Arriving into the airport, you’re greeted by a cacophony of airport tycoons – everyone has what you need, in fact they have what you didn’t even realise you needed (but you do, you really do!)

Every morning leaving your apartment into the embracing heat of the day, you are a consumer immediately. Oooojeeeeeek croak the motorcycle taxi men from across the street as you walk past, looking down. If you accidentally look up, they are already swinging legs over motorbikes and chugging over to you. And when you do want to catch a motorbike, you need only to raise your index finger and there is one by your side by the time you’ve dropped your arm. On the streets of Jakarta, things happen quickly.

As a fellow hawker, I know what they’re playing at. I recognise this behaviour as one of the golden rules of selling: always assume the sale. Whether you’re selling a bald man a haircut, or offering a ride to someone who has just stepped out of a taxi – you just need to assume that your customer wants and needs what you’ve got, and they will in turn assume that they want it too. (I must want this, it seems ridiculous not to want it. Why would I walk to the end of this street when I could get on the back of a motorbike?).

But it’s all sales. Jakarta hawkers know their rules for sales success and this one ties in with another important one – “work your numbers” - ask as many people as you possibly can and eventually someone will say yes. This selling tool is in full use among Jakarta’s modes of transport, where a strange “opt-out” system has been developed. In most cities of the world, you must seek out taxis – and they are often elusive and annoyingly stand-offish (exhibit A: Kings Cross in Sydney at about 3am, changeover time). This is not at all the case in Jakarta. In Jakarta you spend your days refusing the services of all kinds of modes of transport – taxis, ojeks (motorbike taxis), bejajs (tuk tuks), anggots and mikrolets (combi-vans). You feel as though someone needs to sit all these drivers down and say – “hey, you know what might make a bit more sense? Instead of you always asking me if I need you, perhaps we could do it the other way around and I can hail you when I need you... as opposed to un-hailing you, constantly, all day and every day.”

Not to mentioned the rehash and double your cash (upsell!) – if you’ve sold one, sell more. You need 2 or three sarongs, 5 or 10 DVDs. You do, don’t you?

The untiring and entrepreneurial spirit of Indonesians, if particularly evident in the Jakarta, is found all over the country. If there is a need here, there is a bustling queue of people ready to service it. Often the need aspect of this is faint. But sometimes it’s nice to know you’re going in the right direction down a one way street, because there’s a 12-year-old in a threadbare t-shirt collecting Rupiah for the service of pointing you in the direction of traffic (the direction in which you’re already headed). What would happen if these people weren’t there?! Mayhem surely. It’s like a pat on the back – yep, just keep going, you’re going the right way! If only we could have this sort of reassurance in everyday life.

These are some of the best, most ambitious sales people I’ve ever come across. Poverty exists in a flurry of activity. Markets brim with people toiling away – cutting the heads off still flip-flopping lele (catfish), packing bright yellow fish into little banana tree bark compartments like tiny little coffins, shelling and shredding coconuts; always always busy hands. People are not poor because they’re lazy. Try pushing around a cart of food and cooking materials all day and all night and finding the energy to call out your sales spiel; or riding a bike whilst balancing gas cylinders or great tubs of water; or balancing your wares over your shoulders and bounce-jogging them around the city in your own outdoor-market selling space. It is hard to conceive of how exhausting this work must be.

I became a street hawker in London because I had holes in my shoes and was living off cornflakes and hiding from my friend’s landlord so I could sleep on his couch. I thought that was motivation enough. But imagine leaving your family behind in your village and moving to Jakarta so you can earn a tiny bit of money to send back home ... for so many people, it’s a way of life.

Once, I used to wonder whether all the selling would ever stop – the croaking sales calls, the beeping horns, the irritating repetitive ice cream song, the ‘hello misters’ ... always, everywhere, someone is calling and asking and wanting from you.

And then I remembered with a flashback to the streets of London ... that was me, once.
___

* Keen readers may recognise that at the beginning and end of this post I’ve borrowed the style of Morris Gleitzman’s lovely and awfully sad book “Once.” Read it. Read it privately, unless you’re a fan of sobbing in public.

A year above uncertain ground - resolutions, regulators and failing to establish neutral buoyancy

2009 began and ended in the ocean. It began on a beach in Rio and ended in the sea off a little island in Indonesia. In Rio I wore white for peace, and as the world took its first few breaths of 2009, I made a wish and threw flowers into the water for Iemanja, the Goddess of the Sea. I remember wishing, and I remember throwing the flowers so that Iemanja would grant me her blessings in return. But I have no idea what I wished for. It’s funny how you can ask for things and then you can’t even remember whether you were given them or not.

2010 began with a swim off a little island in Indonesia that you can walk all the way around. In the water with a Bintang in hand, I wore a black bikini, or perhaps it was the one with red polka dots, I’m not sure... the colour is only important to the extent that it wasn’t green. Indonesia also has a goddess of the sea - Nyai Loro Kidul - and green is her colour. People who dare to wear green risk being dragged under the surface and out to sea, never to be seen again. And that was not the new beginning I was after.

So here we are, safe from sea goddesses, a few days into a fresh-smelling year. New beginnings are a good time to be hopeful and ambitious. To giggle at how ridiculously you’ve behaved and to hope you can keep it going for another year. To seize on opportunities to be well and truly, completely and heart-fully, free of old spent love. To be self indulgent and think about all the things that have happened, and try to establish a few things you may have learnt.

The past year has been one of extremes. I’ve lived in a country where the air is always either slippery with heat or dry with artificially conditioned air; where the world is either blaringly loud or eerily quiet; where spaces are either packed with people and rubbish or entirely empty but for the resounding prayers; where the sky is either resolutely dry or entirely unhinged. And when it’s raining then it’s pouring.

This year a lot of things happened under the pelting of hard-surfaced raindrops, and some of them were chest-leapingly wonderful.

This year I learnt that actions of affection, when made truthfully, feel like you’re operating the machinery of life.

This year I discovered new sweat glands and gave them a very good work out.

This year I felt the floor shift and loosen beneath my feet and I looked out of my 28th floor apartment to watch the Jakarta skyline move pendulously from side to side. This year I learnt what you’re meant to do when the tectonic plates misbehave.

This year a friend - an old friend whose path had since separated from mine, a lovely friend with the most simple, happiness-hunting intentions – passed away. He passed away unexpectedly, very far away, in a manner that was quiet and undramatic. With distance, I felt the sadness of this in a pure sort of way. This year I learnt how easy it is to let people drift in and out of your life without consciously choosing to set them free or hitch them tighter. One of my resolutions is to deliberately choose the people who surround me – to leave some people in 2009 and the years preceding it, and to draw others in tighter, lashed near me as we head into 2010 and beyond.

This year, fittingly, I breathed underwater for the very first time. I learnt to dive just days after the Jakarta bombings and I remember feeling like I had found a trapdoor to another dimension. And I remember how freeing that was.

I wrote this about what I found: diving is like descending into a magic eye picture; as you slowly slide under the surface, the awkward weight of the equipment fades away and the chaos of the earth-bound world is slowly squeezed out. The pressure of the water envelopes you and the atmosphere thickens into a thrilling embrace. You’re suspended around layers and layers of fish- little darts of colour rushing and wallowing, chasing and nipping each other, shooting spurts of yellow shit behind them. Everywhere you look there are great civilisations under the sea, factories of activity, fish coming and going, currents pushing and pulling like invisible conveyor belts, and all around there are the sounds of little crunches and pings as coral cracks and fish munch. There are caverns and outcrops and on the bottom of the sea sit lavender mounds of enormous clams and spiky yellow cactus plants. There are giant sea turtles and cuttlefish and tiny, delicate dancing shrimp. You swim alongside your dive-master and she points urgently behind you - directly behind you – so you swing around and *squeal* into your regulator at the sight of a dugong moving determinedly through the blue abyss beyond, its square face nudging the currents. You clap your hands at the sight of an eagle ray swooping above you, and emit little yelps of glee at being caught in a storm of multicoloured fish, little flecks of life darting and drifting in every direction in suspended fish schools, with rebel castaways zooming past your ears and through your legs.

It’s all you can do to keep breathing (because if you don’t your head will explode, or something like that – I learnt it in the course). You just keep drawing the enriched air in and out with excited gasps and hope that you never have to re-enter the world above - the only evidence of which is the shafts of shifting light searching for the bottom of the earth. You’ll try (and mostly fail) to establish neutral buoyancy – a beautiful state where you are perfectly weighted so can stay still in the sea and move without fuss from one place to another. Neutral buoyancy involves weights around your waist and then filling your jacket with just the right amount of air... you can even move from place to place simply by the intake and exhalation of oxygen from your tank – filling your lungs will make you rise, and then letting it out will make you lower. It's a delicious prospect. You’ll watch others do this with impeccable precision while you flail about ridiculously, shooting up and down, high and low. It should not surprise you in the least that you have trouble establishing and maintaining neutral buoyancy.

I remember when I dived for the first time, an hour underwater passed in moments. When we returned to the surface it seemed like madness to re-enter this world, with all its gravity-entrapped bumblings and unpredictable, awful possibilities. On the surface, with my inflated jacket bobbing me afloat and another dimension stretching deep below my flippers, I felt all the weight of my equipment become real again. I felt the urge to follow that glinting light - past the teeming fish families in their underwater villages - deep into the caverns of the earth.

This year I learnt that sometimes life is hard above an uncertain ground.

A few days ago I did my first dive of the decade and this time it felt different. I breached the sea surface, swelled my floatation jacket and leaned back to turn my face to a friendly shining sky, arching over a renewed world.

Later, the clouds would bunch and pick up the yellow of another ending day and then settle over the ancient volcanoes that carved out the landscape so many lifetimes ago ... and there I was, floating in the middle of it all after an hour of breathing underwater.

This year I learnt that we live in a world of wonderful possibility.

And for 2010, I wish the most wonderful things for all the amazing people in my life, who I’ve just hitched a little tighter.

---

The Brazilian author, Jorge Amado, wrote:

The ocean is large, the sea is a road without end, waters make up more than half the world, they are three-quarters of it, and all that belongs to Iemanjá. There she combs her hair (beautiful slave girls come with combs of silver and ivory), hears the prayers of the women of the sea, unleashes storms, chooses the men she is to take on the bottomless journey to the depths of the sea. And it is here that her feast takes place. Because the night of the feast of Iemanjá is a thing of beauty. On those nights the sea is of a color between blue and green, the moon is always in the sky, the stars accompany the lanterns on the sloops, Iemanjá slowly spreads her hair out toward the sea and there is nothing in the world as beautiful (sailors on big ships that travel all over always say) than the color that emerges from the mingling of Iemanjá's hair with the sea.