Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage International) (21 page)

She goes (braving everything) to spend time at her sister’s. The first day, in the afternoon, when the sun is really hot, she sees an old man working in the garden, cutting the grass with a long curved knife—she is such a town girl, and so sheltered, that (somewhat unbelievably) she has never seen people cutting rice, and doesn’t know that the old man is using a common reaping knife. So, like a child, she looks on with fascination at the old man, so wrinkled, running with sweat, but working on steadily with his long knife in the afternoon sun. She asks her sister about the old man. The sister says he works as a gardener for a big company in the mornings; then he comes to work for her. One day the girl takes the old gardener his lunch. She talks to him. She learns that he is sixty years old, and is living alone in the city, in one poor room; the wife and four teenage children for whom he is working are far away in the village.

I said to Dita, “Didn’t she see people like the old man before?”

Dita said, in her judicious, un-blaming way, “It’s rather impossible. You see them, for example, from a bus—you see people working on the road or sweeping the road. We know that their homes are far away, and they are working here for their families. I don’t know why the narrator didn’t notice that before.”

Now the narrator is tormented by the thought of the old man, who not only has to work hard in the sun every day, but also has to live alone, away from his family.

Dita said, commenting, “Family is everything for us.”

The narrator sees what a small thing the heat is, and how wrong she was to complain. It is the resolution of the story, the moral, the one touch of dew in that issue of
Kartini,
to balance the cry of pain on other pages.

I had thought that Dita was held by the story. But at the end she let it go very easily, and said, “It’s a very simple story.
Femina
maybe would have been more interested in why the girl is so indecisive, and so frightened of going out. Here the girl says it’s only because of the sun.”

Femina
was the rival, middle-class magazine. Lukman Umar, with professional severity, had not taken its name. But at
Femina
he was never far from
their thoughts. They said, though, that they were the very first women’s magazine in Indonesia. They had started a year or two before
Kartini,
and Lukman Umar had been one of the early distributors. And they too had a success story to tell. Their first issue—after six to eight months of planning—had sold fifteen thousand copies at 250 rupiah, then worth about twenty-five cents; the second issue had sold twenty-five thousand, the third thirty-five thousand. When sales reached fifty thousand, the competition,
Kartini,
appeared. And Lukman Umar had shown his flair: he had not tried to imitate the successful middle-class paper; he had followed his instincts and created his own, an extraordinary mixture of the sensational, the religious, the emotional. Now, twenty years later, the current was running his way.

Mrs. Mirta, elegant, slender, at ease in many languages, was one of the two founding editors of
Femina,
and also the daughter of the scholarly founder of the press that owned the magazine.

She said, “I should tell you that for quite a lot of people
Femina
is so Westernized.” Though that wasn’t how she had thought of it. “What I was trying to give when we started was a more pragmatic way of looking into things. Giving people alternatives. An outlook that is more open, and not based on traditionalism.”

Things were now more clouded; traditionalism and pragmatism had different associations. The changes that had come to the limited colonial society after twenty years of independence, the opening out of everyone’s world, had made a woman’s magazine possible, and had appeared to show a clear way ahead. But now religion, the stresses of the half-converted country, and the great new wealth had given an unexpectedly backward twist to things.

Mrs. Mirta, describing the potential audience of her magazine, said, “They are simple people with money. They are not nouveau riche, though some are. The setup of Jakarta society still has the same values. Their intellectual scope is the same.” It was easier for Lukman Umar to speak to that audience. He was a graduate of the Muslim university, and he knew his audience well enough to publish a successful religious magazine. “He’s more Indonesian, more familiar with the roots of the people. So he’s got more readers. His way is not pragmatic, but more emotional.”

In
Femina
the agony page was called “
Dari Hati ke Hati,
” “From Heart to Heart,” and was a serious advice feature. “Oh Mama! Oh Papa!” was the corresponding feature in
Kartini.
It offered no editorial advice; and Mrs. Mirta said the stories it played up were “more sensational, not discreet,” on
the lines of “My mother-in-law suppresses me.” (It wasn’t clear why that complaint was indiscreet, but I didn’t ask; and the moment passed. Perhaps Mrs. Mirta, with her own high standards of behavior, thought that domestic complaint, when it became a wallow, not really requiring help, was unacceptable.)

She turned the pages of a recent issue of
Kartini.
“Here is a film star who goes on the
hajj
.”

The pilgrimage to Mecca: such an important religious obligation wasn’t something I had associated with this kind of journalistic treatment: a photo feature: glamour, dark glasses, travel, companions, fashion, the lightest and whitest clothes for very hot weather, religion at the end: a version of the
Canterbury Tales.
Had it always been like that? I asked Mrs. Mirta whether this kind of pilgrimage feature was something
Femina
would do. She said yes; it depended on the actor. And I thought much later, considering my Indonesian notes, that this might have been another area where Lukman Umar, with his greater religious security, might have been first.

“But,” Mrs. Mirta said, “we won’t do this.” She showed a feature about a condemned prisoner, with pictures of his execution and his coffin afterwards. “We won’t do that.”

Later she again appeared to be meeting Lukman Umar halfway. “Our magazine is mostly known for its cooking and career advice. When we started people said: ‘You are presenting dreams.’ I thought dreams were important: life shouldn’t be drab. But now everything has become flashy because everything is flashy. It’s the Western commercial aspect that’s being stressed.” Commercial, as against cultural. “We have to rely on advertising now. We didn’t have advertising when we started. The whole Indonesian economic system hadn’t been set up.”

In spite of everything that was said, or could be said on both sides, about pragmatism and emotionalism or Westernization and traditionalism, the difference between the two magazines might have been no more than the difference between two generations, at a time when history in Indonesia was moving fast.

Mrs. Mirta’s father, the founder of the press that owned
Femina,
was born in Sumatra in 1908. This was at the zenith of the colonial time: just five years after the Dutch had completed their conquest of Sumatra, and four years after the death of the historical Kartini, the Javanese princess who—like Josephus with the Romans after Masada in the first century, or like Garcilaso, the half-Inca, with the Spaniards in the sixteenth century—had
sought to make her peace with the Dutch as if with the forces of history. To any Indonesian born at that time it must have seemed that colonial rule was the future. Yet Lukman Umar, born only twenty-five yean later, was to see as a child, with the Japanese occupation, the sudden overthrow and rooting out of colonial Dutch rule.

Mrs. Mirta’s father, born into a “strong” Muslim family (as they told me at
Femina
), but making his way in a colonial world, declared himself a “universal humanist.” When that world began to break up, Lukman Umar’s mother, very poor, but with her own sense of the fitness of things, wanted her son to go to a Muslim school and not a Dutch one. Both men had an early life of struggle, but the stresses and possibilities were of different eras. Lukman Umar, the son of a poor farmer, had stories to tell of being made by the Japanese to carry stones for an airport at Tabing, of hawking his mother’s sweetmeats in Padang, and selling peanuts in Jakarta. At
Femina
I heard that Mrs. Mirta’s father, the son of a high government official in Sumatra, lived as a child in a kampung close to a forest and walked to school through this forest, which was full of tigers.

This child, when he grew up, went to colonial Jakarta, worked in the government publishing house, became a writer and scholar, and married a Sumatran lady of the nobility. With the Japanese occupation his world changed; all its colonial assumptions blew away. He became head of a commission for the modernization of the Indonesian language—the Japanese showing themselves as more than occupiers, showing themselves as the most ruthless and intelligent de-colonizers.

So while Lukman Umar and his eleven-year-old friends in Sumatra were doing forced labor, Mrs. Mirta’s father, in his mid-thirties, was working for the Japanese at an altogether different level, bringing the Indonesian language up-to-date, and doing it so well that the Dutch language, the language of power for two centuries, was in a few years almost completely eradicated. A pre-Dutch, pre-colonial past was stressed by Sukarno; and the visitor to Jakarta today sees more Sanskrit than Dutch in the names on big buildings. It might be said that Mrs. Mirta’s father in those years of the Japanese occupation was doing work that would in thirty years or so make both
Femina
and
Kartini
possible.

Later, with independence, when Mrs. Mirta’s father had established his press, there was trouble with President Sukarno. In 1963 the press was seized, and other family assets in Jakarta. Then the press was given back. There was a story at
Femina
about how this happened. Mrs. Mirta’s brother, who had been running the press, had married into a family of the Javanese nobility. Sukarno knew this family; a son had been killed during the war
against the Dutch. When Sukarno saw the mother one day he said, “What can I do for you?” She said, “Just give the printing plant back to my son-in-law, so that we can buy milk for the little child who is my granddaughter.” So the plant was given back.

It was Mrs. Mirta’s brother who in 1972 thought of an Indonesian magazine for women. The family press, which had become the first in Indonesia to print color, was doing magazine covers for other people; and the idea came to him that he should be doing his own magazine. He talked to his sister, and she talked to a friend, Widarti, when they met at the shopping center.

Widarti was a lecturer in Indonesian literature. Her work didn’t give her time to read new books or consider new things, and she had grown to feel that she was giving her students stale knowledge. Widarti’s husband, Goenawan Mohamad, was editing a very successful weekly newsmagazine. So Widarti was feeling very much left out of things, and was receptive to the idea of the magazine for women.

Widarti’s background was like Mrs. Mirta’s. Widarti had gone to one of the best Dutch schools in Jakarta. The only Indonesians admitted were the children of the nobility, or the very rich, or civil servants; so in a class of twenty-five there might be only five Indonesians—as the school photographs would show. Widarti qualified because her grandfather had worked for the government.

She and Mrs. Mirta decided, during the months they spent thinking about the new magazine, that they should treat their readers as friends and equals. They should share the knowledge that privilege had put in their way, but they should not talk down. They should get the trust of their readers; they should avoid gossip and sensation. But Widarti and Mrs. Mirta couldn’t deny their background; and their knowledge of the world was one of the strengths of the magazine.

Widarti, explaining the success of
Femina,
said at our first meeting, “We have better taste. We know how to dress in Western style better than the other papers. When we have a fashion page everything has to be fitting. Even for house decorations we know that less is more beautiful. We understand we live in tropical countries, so we don’t need thick Persian rugs or thick draperies. The other magazines imitate the Western papers a hundred percent, or they add something which is improper.”