Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage International) (20 page)

And too many things had changed. The village life had changed. There was no longer the music, the nightlong shadow theater with the well-known characters and stories. Even the rice had changed. “The old traditional rice was full of savor and taste.” He made a gesture, taking his fingers to his nose. “The new Filipino rice—you can’t eat it in the evening if you cook it in the morning.”

Somewhere in those fields his mother was working. Somewhere in the house his invalid sister was living out her day.

We began to drive back to Yogya.

He said, “The village is in crisis. The urban process is happening here too. They already divide the rice fields for their children, and the fields become very narrow. Many young-generation Javanese do not have rice field. They look for a job in the city. My mother is the last generation to live and work in the village. The young generation who stay in the village and work in the rice fields usually are not educated. The educated people who work in the towns and live in the villages become commuters.”

And rice work was now a torment; the cycle had speeded up too much. The old rice took four and a half months to ripen. The new rice ripened in three months.

“Now after sunset the farmer is tired and only wants to look at TV. In the village there are no longer enough gamelan instruments. They don’t have enough money to buy. Their money goes to educate their children and on health.”

He telephoned me at the hotel late that evening. It was something I had asked him to do, so that we could have a last talk before I went back to Jakarta.

He said there was something he had forgotten to tell me. He had had an important message from Siddhartha not long before. It was one of those
messages tapped out—
tuk, tuk, tuk
—on his friend Landung’s palm, and read later by the lady from the mystic circle. Life on earth was only a process, Siddhartha had said. The true process, the true life, began after death. “Process”: that was the best Linus could do: the word used by Siddhartha was hard to translate. I felt that the word might have been a Javanese word, like those Linus was well-known for using in his poetry, words that limited his appeal, but which he used for their accuracy and their emotional charge.

When I got back to Jakarta I found a letter which Linus had sent me more than two weeks before but which I had not had. It was a letter which (partly because of the language) I would not have understood without having met him. It was about the stresses with which he lived, and also about his spiritual teacher, a man of sixty-five in the next village, a Javanese-Christian-Reformist mystic. It gave a further twist to what he had told me.

His dream of Siddhartha and death worked on me during the night, and in the morning I awakened to a clear knowledge—almost as to something about myself—of the pain Linus lived with, family pain, pain as a writer, pain for all the things of Java and his village which he saw being washed away. I saw at the same time that—unlike Mariman Darto, the young Muslim, who had found a kind of support outside his village with CIDES, however illusory that support might be—Linus could live nowhere else but in his village and in his house. It was the only place where he could find all the things and relationships that gave savor and point to his life.

7
 

L
UKMAN
U
MAR
was born in 1933 into a poor farming family in Padang in West Sumatra. He was the last of six children. Life, already hard, became much harder with the Japanese occupation in 1942. More than fifty years later Lukman remembered how in 1943 he and other boys of his age had been made to carry stones from the river for the airport the Japanese were building at Tabing, a few miles north of Padang.

Some years later—perhaps after the end of the war, though exactly when wasn’t clear—Lukman’s father left his family to go and open a piece of forest and turn it, in the immemorial way of Sumatra, into a rice field. The father didn’t return; and though nothing was said directly, it is likely that he had started another family. A second marriage, a second family: in Indonesia, as in other Islamic countries, it was a familiar story. The adventure had religious sanction, but the consequences never ended for the two families. It made for a society of half-orphans, in a chain of deprivation and rage: an abandoned child often became an abandoning parent.

Lukman’s mother, when she was left alone, earned a livelihood by making and selling Indonesian sweetmeats. Lukman helped with the baking and the serving; he also, in the mornings, hawked the sweetmeats about the village
before he went off to his school. He could have gone to the Dutch school—he had passed the entrance examination: a teacher in the primary school had made him go in for that—but his mother didn’t want him to go to the Dutch school. She wanted him to go to the Muslim school. At the Muslim school half his time was spent on religion, half on general subjects.

In 1955, when he was twenty-two (and—just to give a context and a reference—about two years after Imaduddin from North Sumatra had got to the Institute of Technology in Bandung), Lukman Umar went to Jakarta. The family—and this would have meant various branches of the extended family—didn’t want him to leave Padang. In Minangkabau custom a husband is bought by a wife, not a wife by a husband; and though Lukman Umar didn’t say, it is possible that the family were hoping to get something from his marriage. His mother, however, wanted Lukman to go to Jakarta to carry on with his studies. She pawned her land certificates to get the money for the fare; she had inherited a little land and rice field from her parents.

In Jakarta Lukman Umar stayed with a relation. For a month, making use of his talent as a hawker, he sold peanuts. With the money he made he went to Yogyakarta. He stayed in very cheap rooms, costing 100 to 125 rupiah a month, something under a dollar; and he moved many times. He wrote the entrance examination for the Muhammadiyah university, the Indonesian Islamic University, and did so well that he was offered a scholarship.

At the university he saw a business opportunity: he saw that students needed lecture notes. With the help of some of the university lecturers he began to publish their lecture notes. That led him to the selling of books and paper, handling goods on consignment. From that a magazine agency and book-distribution business grew. In this way, without capital, he was launched. He called his agency Ananda Agency (
ananda
meaning “beloved son”), and it was dedicated to his mother. The business grew very fast. He was able soon, with the help of God, as he saw it, to lease a house which he also used as his office; later he built a house for himself. It was just as well that his business grew like this: there were twenty-five people of his mother’s family in Padang that he was now looking after.

He became a publisher in his own right. In 1973—his publishing ambition now reflecting economic and educational changes in Indonesia—he began to work on a fortnightly magazine for women. It was to be called
Kartini,
after the short-lived Javanese princess—born in 1880, and dead in childbirth in 1904—who, in the discouraging circumstances of colonial Java, spoke up for the rights and education of women. The first issue of
Kartini
was published towards the end of 1974, and was an immediate success.

Lukman Umar thought it was Allah’s blessing. But it was also his publisher’s instinct, his flair, his truth to his own emotions. Just as politicians and writers have their own way of dealing with the demons of their early life, so Lukman Umar found in
Kartini
the perfect way of transmuting and sublimating the pain of his early life. It was a magazine pitched at the lower middle class—no one had done anything like this for them before—and it was known for its emotionalism. The combination had made
Kartini
the most popular magazine in Indonesia, with a circulation of 160,000; it was now published three times a month. The emotionalism was not artificial, the work of consultants; the publisher had only to look inwards, into his own heart, to know what would find readers.

One of the famous features of
Kartini
was its agony page. It was called, in English, “Oh Mama! Oh Papa!” The idea must have been Lukman Umar’s, because when I met him he said, through an interpreter, that for him the English words stood for a cry from the heart. The originality of the feature was that it just gave the story. There was no aunt to comment or to give advice; readers did that. The device was simple and trouble-saving, but the effect was powerful. Private trouble wasn’t being idly exhibited; it was given importance—the “emotional” title of the feature ensured that—and it was shared with a community; there was no wise person above it all.

More subtle (and more Indonesian) was the feature called “
Setetes Embun,
” “One Drop of Dew.” The words were mysterious, but Dita, the woman journalist who translated bits of
Kartini
for me, said in a matter-of-fact way that the language was symbolic and would be understood as such. Dew might stand for tears or for beauty or for kindness; every reader would interpret the words in her own way.

The “One Drop of Dew” story we looked at was called “In the Fierce Heat of the Sun.” The narrator is a girl who is the last of seven children and is very spoilt. She can stand no hardship; she is frightened whenever she has to leave the house and go somewhere; she doesn’t like making any decision.

I said to Dita, “Isn’t this girl overdoing things?”

Dita said very seriously, “This is a person without confidence. I know many people like this.” A friend of Dita’s, from an over-protective family, was like the girl in the story; she wanted other people to make every kind of decision for her.

In the story the narrator is especially tormented by the heat of the day. It is one of the reasons why she is afraid of doing anything or going anywhere. She is worried about getting too tired. She gets a headache when she goes
out into the sun; she can even become sick. To go anywhere in the city means running out in the sun to get a scooter taxi. When she does get one it is crowded, and people jostle her. Sometimes, when she’s going far away, she has to take three different scooter taxis, and then she feels she is the unluckiest person in the world.