Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage International) (24 page)

I felt there was a mystery or an embarrassment about Budi’s father. He might have been born in a second marriage. I thought Budi said something like that at our first lunch. I was waiting for him to say a little more, but he didn’t; and I didn’t ask. What he did say was that he wasn’t close to his father’s family, and hadn’t ever met his father’s father. He was a head judge in a town in North Sumatra; this meant he was of good family. Budi’s mother—the wife of the head judge’s son—wasn’t of such good family. Her father was a civil servant in the Dutch time, with the rank of major; civil service people had ranks like military ranks. Her mother came of a farming family and still sometimes went to the fields. But the post-independence society of Indonesia was socially dynamic. Budi’s mother’s younger brother—the uncle who was to be so important in Budi’s life—became a lawyer and a university professor.

The mystery or embarrassment that had marked Budi’s father seemed also to have marked his children. There were seven of them, and four had, socially speaking, vanished. There remained a brother who was a doctor; a sister who had married a man in the oil business in Kalimantan (formerly Borneo) and was rich, Budi said; and there was Budi.

He knew that his family had fallen. He carried that knowledge like a cross. He said, “My big family may be middle class, but my own family is low.” And: “I really come from a simple family, really.” And: “Not many people have backgrounds like mine. The common background is: during the Dutch time the family live in a poor situation economically; after independence the second generation live in an improved situation; and then in the third generation they live in a wealthy situation. My case is exceptional. My father’s family were very powerful, but in the third generation we were poorer than in the second.”

That was why for Budi the failure, two years running, to get into ITB was like part of the family calamity.

Twice a year, following old custom, Budi’s uncle, the lawyer, came to visit his elder sister in Surabaya. He found on one visit that Budi, then aged twenty, had no job and no university place. He took Budi back to Jakarta with him. There Budi joined an information technology college, and discovered that, though there was nothing in his background to explain it, he had a gift for computers. He lived with his uncle for four years.

“My life changed after that. I know how to dress well, and behave well.”

“Didn’t you know that before?”

“If I stayed in Surabaya I would never have the chance to visit a hotel. I would never have the manners of entry in a hotel dining room. And, maybe, I cannot speak English and I don’t know how to talk to people.”

“Do people here worry about that?”

“Lots of Indonesians worry about that.”

After the college he joined a computer company, a very famous one. He joined at the lowest level, but soon he began to rise and get awards; soon he began to travel for the company. Soon, through colleagues in the company, he got to know very important people outside. He discovered that the worlds of business and computers and political power in Indonesia ran into one another, were almost one and the same; the circle of power was really very small. He also discovered at this time that, in spite of his uncle, he was still paying for his father’s failure, and was a man without a family, without a group. He had left his uncle’s house and was living in a rented house with two servants, a couple. He was lonely. He had no social life to speak of. His very success—and the famous and powerful people he had got to know—made him aware of his own isolation. He could find no girlfriend matching his new situation. So, in a roundabout way, success began to turn his thoughts to religion.

“When I was getting awards from the computer company I began to think, for the first time, that I am something, I am special. When they moved me up to marketing I thought I was also special. But then I saw many other people who were better than me. And I began to think that in the world nothing can be said to be the best, because after the best you see, there will always be something better. So, based on that belief, I felt I needed God. In the Koran school you read again and again that God is the highest, but you don’t feel it in your heart.”

“How old were you at this time?”

“About twenty-nine. Not very successful, just improved, compared with common people. I felt this about God every day. Whatever I think I think
alone. I don’t even have a close friend in the company with whom I can talk about religion. For about four or five years I lived in a very contradictory situation. On one side I need God and religion very badly, but at the same time I am doing bad things that the religion forbids. I drink liquors. I drink beer. And I do other bad things, bad in a Muslim way. It always worried me, right after the act. But not drinking: drinking I consider minor. I know that the punishment for a little pleasure in the world is paid for by many years in hell.”

“Did you always believe in hell?”

“I always believed in hell. And everyone here believes in heaven and hell, or life after death, whatever their religion. I know that my sin was too big, that whatever I did I was going to hell. I know that my life was not balanced between good things and bad things.”

And then, at this moment of worry and doubt, came a business development. A colleague in the computer firm introduced him to the man who was going to be his partner. The colleague was the childhood friend of the partner: it was the world of connections from which Budi felt himself excluded. Just a few weeks after they had been introduced, the man who was to be Budi’s partner said, “Why don’t we do a business together?” He needed Budi because, though well connected and rich and knowing about all the contracts that were waiting to be picked up, he didn’t have Budi’s computer talents. In the technological age talent like Budi’s was a kind of leveler.

Budi made a quick decision. He decided to leave the computer company right away. After ten years with them, after all the awards and travel and first-class hotels, he gave them a day’s notice.

When he told his father, the old man, remembering the pennilessness he had tumbled into with his wretched furniture business, said, “Be careful.” His mother, beaten down by that pennilessness, and her own memories of her mother going out to work in the fields, said nothing.

I asked Budi what he thought was the source of his computer gift.

“I do not know. Maybe it was my destiny. In my business lots of people fail because in the first place you need innovation. It’s actually like dreaming. For example, like in a hotel here, while I’m eating I’m thinking of automating the process—ordering the menu, perhaps. I saw that in Europe. The waiter comes with a computer, pushes a few buttons according to your instructions, and a few minutes later another waiter brings the order through. Automatically you get the bill from the waiter who took your order. So I’m sitting here, eating and talking to you, and also thinking how
to create the software for that. I am also thinking you could apply that kind of concurrent engineering to many other business sectors. My mind is working like that all the time. I could apply that to railway wagons, or stock in a warehouse.”

It was not long before the partner introduced Budi to the religious teacher.

“The first time I met him he was in a very simple house which was also a mosque. It was his own house, in Bandung. My partner took me. He was going a week later to Mecca, and so we asked the teacher for his blessing and advice for my partner on the pilgrimage. The first time I saw him I don’t believe him. He is very young. Then, after I discovered how deep his knowledge is, I never underestimate young people any more. He spoke to about ten people in his house. They sat on the carpet. A simple carpet. He said the secret of life is: Let God decide what’s good for you. He didn’t mean that we should give up, but that whatever we did we should do to the very best. You have to assist your destiny, but you can’t go beyond it.

“The first meeting lasted one hour. I thought he was very interesting, but I wasn’t converted yet. Several months later my partner offered me a proposal to invest several thousand rupiah to build a mosque that would be coordinated by the teacher. My partner said that everyone should pay for two square meters. I hadn’t seen the teacher since our first meeting. My partner invited me to the opening of the mosque while it was still under construction. I met the teacher again. I saw how the simple house had been converted into a beautiful mosque.

“Altogether I met him about thirty times. I don’t learn the details of the religion from him. I needed someone to do other things: how to balance between living in the world and the afterlife, only very heavy things. People appeared to think that he had a supernatural power, but I don’t believe that. I saw the evidence—the little house becoming the big mosque—but I don’t believe it. I believed more in his teaching: Let God decide what’s good for you.”

The teacher had been seven times to Mecca. He had never paid. Someone always paid for him. And something like that happened to Budi, after the teacher said he should go to Mecca. He didn’t have the money, but when he told his partner the partner paid.

On Saturday we went to Bandung to see the teacher. We went there by a CN-235, which was an earlier and smaller plane built (with Spanish collaboration)
by Habibie’s aerospace organization. In the first-class waiting room at the domestic airport the chairs were carved and gilded; I imagined they were like the chairs Widarti Goenawan said
Femina
didn’t like.

It was a short hop to Bandung, but the little CN-235 was very late. The day which had appeared so long, so full of promise, began to shrink. Nerves began to go. And then the plane itself, which was really very small, was very warm while we waited on the asphalt; the paneling was like rough carpenter’s work; and it was so noisy and trembly when we took off that I wondered why, since many of its vital components would have been imported, such a plane had been made at all.

Budi said, “I am proud that it flies. Don’t ask me about its economic viability and so on.”

And Bandung came up so quickly now that at the end, after all the strain, I felt something like that too.

Budi had said that his partner was working at Bandung that Saturday and would meet us at the airport. He wasn’t there. We saw him later, quite by chance, in a new four-wheel-drive packed with his family. This was on one of the now crowded avenues of the Dutch-built hill station, where colonial-style administrative buildings and small residences were being altered and extended for commercial use, and where shade trees had grown old, scant-leaved, with swollen trunks (whitewashed at the base) making pavements uneven.

The partner stopped readily for us, but he was unabashed. He said simply he had forgotten to meet us. The moment passed; Budi appeared not to have noticed; but I felt that in his too-quick friendliness for me, a visitor, possibly without credentials, he had overreached himself, asking his partner, an important man, to meet us at the airport. The partner was friendly but un-noticing with me. He was short and stocky and blunt-featured; he would have passed in an Indonesian crowd. He was a year or two younger than Budi, and Budi said he was already worth thirty million dollars. His family in the four-wheel-drive were elegant, with a maid for the children; his wife was pale, with sharper features, and an almost Indian beauty.

We began to drive up and up, to where the teacher was, on the edge of the town. We passed the old landscaped grounds of the Institute of Technology, still Dutch-looking: built in 1918, famous as Sukarno’s old school in the 1920s, and ever since then the focus of so much Indonesian ambition. The Salman Mosque on the campus was where Imaduddin had reigned as preacher in the 1970s; it couldn’t be missed. Partly because of Imaduddin it had outgrown the colonial Dutch intention; and, as if in deliberate contrast with the colonial restraint of the setting, it was now a big
concrete building in very bright colors. On one shady road we passed a brisk line of matriculates in white clothes, and with a kind of comic hat. Budi, whose dream at one time had been to be a matriculate like that, didn’t know the origin of the clothes; and perhaps they might have been a transplanted Dutch tradition.