Grand Indonesia Shopping Town. The West Mall holds Kinokuniya on lower ground. Entry-point from the street at the first corner: UOB tower right, Mad for Garlic, Coffee Bean next door (Sing’pore chain) and straight along the concourse to Arjuna Lobby, where the day before the rising political star was sighted. Along Jalan KS Tubun lots of street-stall holders pasted his picture. Jokowi! Thumbs up. The young widower Irwin at reception at Hotel Kalisma confirmed the same: a good man, works hard. Then Governor of the capital; since President.
Without need of the Jak Post there would be no need for the mall. Coffee can be dispensed with; newspaper was harder, especially for a foreigner in need of pointers.
The only other café in the quarter was on Jalan Slipi, not far up from Abraham’s Cyber, modelled closely on the American chains. The heat was the other factor. One could buy at Kinokuniya and take the sheets around to one of the warungs roadside. But the heat.
Lots of stall-holders read their newspapers undisturbed. Much harder for the new-comer.
Starbucks was one level up from the bookshop. You needed to pass it on the way out. Sometimes pretty smiling girls all in a row at the tables. Checkmate in not so many moves.
Irwan at Kalisma did say an alternative purchase point for the Jak Post was any “drugstore” attached to one of the five star hotels. (Kalisma was two star.)
On the back street coming along that morning a woman walking in the gutter against the traffic held up two fingers at the approaching cars. On the footpath half-concealed her little boy skipping carelessly.
— Mister. Mister, his mother prompted.
Too late. The quarry had passed.
Children of course were more effective beggars.
The elderly, the aged and senescent could stab even more deeply. The night before after the Cyber a chap was met wheeling what could only have been his mother, a deaf-mute it seemed. When the woman opened her mouth a voiceless plea was signed by pink tongue and palate. The shape produced was wrong somehow. This woman only used her mouth for feeding. That was how it appeared in the dark gutter of Jalan Slipi. Mid-late fifties, but prematurely aged, commonly noticeable on the streets of Tanah Abang.
The lad half her age. With his hands on the arms of the narrow wooden cart the palm could not be presented. It was not needed on this occasion. Mister had stopped of his own accord.
It was the cart itself more than anything. Elderly blind men and women were commonly led along for begging; deformed and misshapen elderly sometimes. This style of cartage had not been seen previously.
The woman would not get a coffin when her time came; or if it happened by some fluke it would not be more commodious than this cart. The sides meant she needed to tuck her elbows and joining her hands together resulted. Legs may have over-hung at the end.
At the upper end below her son her head rested on the slats. The barrow took a thirty degree angle at the handle end; impossible to guess its original purpose. It suited this pair well enough.
Mother was not good on her pins; luckily she had her dutiful son.
All the girls and lads in Tanah Abang appeared dutiful. As well as the communitarianism and brotherhood in Tanah Abang—Land of Brothers—filial and other relationships showed firm. How could hardship be endured otherwise?
The mother extended her hand. A fiver for her. More than enough for a street-stall dinner for that night at least. In that of course the lad’s hands now off the handles. If she was deserving, the lad was equally so for active pity.
A two. Understandably received less graciously.
Conversion found a measly sixty cents. Alms of that level had been returned in Singapore, and certainly Melbourne. Partly it was a matter of still struggling with the outsized figures. Two or three noughts could always be comfortably deleted in the third world.
Starbucks three days running. No special vouchers offered as yet. The lass at Kinokuniya suggested the day’s JakPost ought to be in at lunchtime. Few tables across young early twenties Indon lad taking a shot of his and his gal’s donuts. The market penetration was phenomenal.
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