Idolatry (Jakartan Slum)

Over a dozen times Omar has visited Jakarta. On each of these earlier occasions it had been the high-end of the city, the new, modern Jakarta that had been explored. When Omar traveled with his wife it had been particularly the case. A two hundred dollar hotel room had been taken on at least one recent occasion in the last twelve months, at the Millennium, a five star hotel on one of the busy thoroughfares.

Most Singaporean visitors to Jakarta followed the same course, exchanging their commercial hub for the equivalent in Jakarta. In Jakarta of course there were bargain prices The annual Jakarta Great Sale scheduled during the long school holidays was on at the time of this particular trip. 

We had lunch at Millennium on the second or third afternoon, the cost for two the equivalent of our room charge at the two star Kalisma Hotel a short distance away.

Rather unexpectedly, shortly after dinner on the first night, Omar had wanted to enter the slum quarter, on the inner fringe of which stood Kalisma. On previous occasions Omar had not ventured there; this time he had a willing companion. There was a kind of vague pretext that the venture was for the benefit of the foreigner, in order to show him Third World living and hardship, when in fact Omar plunged into the matter like a man who had left important unfinished business wait too long.

In childhood, after the family left the mosque where the learned Arabic grandfather had been provided quarters, Omar spent his formative years in not dissimilar conditions in the kampung that had stood in present-day Geylang Serai—pretty much on the spot where a mock-up Malay Kampung was constructed when Lee Kwan Yue was taking the new republic on its own fateful Great Leap Forward. Clean, ordered, bland "pigeon-hole" living had been Omar's fate subsequently, like for most Singaporeans of his generation.

Jalan Tubun on which Kalisma was located had been preparation for what lay beyond the main road. Some housing was retained on Tubun, usually of the better, more spacious kind behind high ornate fencing on larger allotments. Largely though this was a commercial strip that included timber yards, a church, two or three mosques, a hospital and cemetery.

The traffic in Jakarta was infamous of course, this particular area of Tanah Abang the worst in the city because of the large textile market. Volume of passage brought opportunity and drew all manner of hawkers, pedlars and fossickers to Tubun. At the make-shift stalls along the stretch from the river were old tools and appliances, shoes, clothing, a couple of rough shelters either side where painted women awaited customers, tyre and motor-cycle repairers. From their perch on the narrow road divider directly outside Kalisma a couple of men sold drivers face-towels. The traffic and heat oppressed equally in Jakarta. On Tubun the chaos of cars, bikes and scooters would be much worse without the young, self-appointed traffic wardens boldly stepping into the middle of the road and orchestrating with illuminated batons and shrill whistles.

The poverty on Tubun was in the ragged carters, the more ragged solitary homeless with their bundles, the barefoot children trooping along in the gutter against the traffic hurtling past inches away; above all in the bedraggled elderly, especially when they were found alone and seemingly abandoned. The elderly were either abandoned or else insisted on paying their way in their families with their own scrounging on the street. Tubun was unsettling, and more so what lay close behind it.

Omar’s move was abrupt and made without notice.

A wider, darkened lane initially lined with small rickety traders of various sorts where motor-bikes and adapted passenger scooters needed careful passage. Here the stalls that were still trading were mostly fixed rather than mobile, the business all local and not the passing of a busy dual motor-way. Many of stalls seemed to have given up the ghost, left behind by Tubun’s attractions. A number continued to trade small items—cigarettes, cold drinks, soap and sachets of coffee and shampoo. Small ramshackle food stalls survived, hairdressing booths and small trades. There was a tooth-puller without the pretensions of dentistry such as one had on Tubun.

The darker, less frenetic and cheaper back quarter that radiated off Tubun lowered the rhythms to relaxed domestic level. In mid-evening's sporadic street light the display of people and dwellings showed uncomfortably naked to an outsider—a White and a business-shirted Arab.

In the narrow passage we soon entered two and one half or three metres separated the walls of dwellings either side. All the encounters here were touching distance.

One tried not to peer too closely. The day before Omar returned to Singapore he counselled that care be taken not to stare too hard, nor poke one's nose too far in explorations of those quarters.

There was nothing shocking or disturbing. Long-tailed rats were well-established; a small monkey that was sighted a few days later startled only momentarily. Chaffing and unkemptness, ragged and soiled clothing, general dishevelment in a domestic, communal setting did not seem like the blight it appeared on Jalan Tubun.

Hopelessness and desperation were not apparent. The cramped living quarters needed adjustment. The housing was all make-shift, weathered and grimed; jerry-built it used to be called in Australian. Most of the core building at least was sound enough; it was the lop-sided annexes and porches that produced the tumble-down effect.

Rusted tin, battens tied with rattan in lieu of nails—straightened old nails were sold on Tubun—plastic sheeting usually for screening the street and keeping out the sun. The warungs, the little roadside food stalls on Tubun, all used the same sheeting against the noise and dirt of the traffic.

Squares and levels had not been available for these half-pie builders—such implements came too late onto the general market (they sold currently on Tubun). Having fled the real estate bubble back home, all its consumerist values, none of this was very shocking. Omar had spent early years in such dwellings, and indeed the author too. Father’s old fibro bungalow built out the back of the block before the brick veneer was slowly erected was not dissimilar. Like Omar, a dozen years older, we too had a night-soil man, dark-skinned in fact quite like the people of this region.

There was much refuse, plastic and paper wrapping; if there was any food scraps it was cleared by the chooks. As on Tubun, Parfumeries surprised here, the product usually in aluminium cylinders and decanted into flasks women brought from home; seeing them, the absence of odour became apparent.

There was a filthy water channel. One could not call it a creek or stream. The water stood stagnant, littered from one bank to the other. Presumably the rains when they came temporarily cleared the garbage.

Large areas of Jakarta had been under water only two months earlier; the city famously sat below sea level. From the first President Soekarno's time there had been projects to remove the capital to another site, presumably with its current ten million inhabitants.

The dwellings turned their backs on the water, muddy rear access providing a garbage chute. The sight of the water may have been what prompted Omar to an exploration at that place. It was to be the first Jalan Tikus, Rat Alley, explored in the region.

Small, seemingly stunted figures, men, women and children, the elderly among them, sat indoors and out; others sprawled sleeping or resting, as often in Singapore, in the most unusual, grotesque postures. A few televisions churned the darkness with their colour. Back on the thoroughfare later a short distance off we came upon a police station, or community building adjoining the station, where a mounted TV facing the street had collected a dozen men leaning against cars and lamp-posts for a football telecast.

Make-shift narrow ladders led to make-shift mezzanines. There was no radio or music, even the TV's were muted; or perhaps the visual blanketed the aural completely.

Appropriately, there was no soundtrack to the passage through the slum. 

The narrow path followed the decline of the channel. Children were at play. There was no begging from them or anyone else until the end. When it came the begging seemed to arrive as an afterthought.

Desperation or despair was not apparent in Rat Alley. There must have been an unconscious expectation and readying for it. It failed to appear anywhere on that first acquaintance, or any subsequent.

Greetings and smiles were offered and returned when extended here. We had perhaps managed our exploration in a fitting enough manner, without too much intrusiveness. The absence of stricken looks of horror and shock may have helped.

Here and there through the streets men and women, elderly usually, sat on the dirty, broken pavement staring vacantly. One chap recently was caught in that attitude seemingly fixated on the base of the plastic barrel that stood between his legs.

The prohibition against alcohol could not be under-estimated. It was sold here and there from the plank shelving on Tubun and consumed somewhere out of sight. Within the alley-ways there was no sign, and none of its effects, neither public drunkenness nor the gaiety.

In Rat Alley and all the other alleys there was no sinking of spirits apparent. Against expectation, first time visitors to slum areas were commonly struck by that more than anything else: the smooth orderly living in settled rhythm. On the contrary, rather than anything down-hearted, there was ease and relaxation, laughter and playfulness on the first night within the alleys, and on every subsequent visit.

A foreigner offering the courtesy of even the most meagre greeting and enquiry in the native language always smoothed a passage. For someone who grew up in an alien cultural setting the matter was clearly understood. Here weather-beaten dark faces showed their inner light all along the row shared with the rats. Pity was misplaced there; in fact it was one’s own  resilience and courage that came into question in that place.

The lasting memory within the row on the first evening was of the children's play.

Likely the narrow lane took numerous twists and turns ahead beyond the Maypole where we turned back again. As an introduction we had ventured far enough. Jakarta sprawled over a large area, all the old housing low-level. The two main vectors had been discovered almost immediately running parallel to each other beside Hotel Kalisma—the river and rail-line. Gambir, the main city station built by the Dutch for the link to the port, stood a short distance away. Rat Alley was by no means the most precarious living in this city; the rail-line was lined with much more flimsy shelter for new arrivals, where goats and sheep were kept in the adjacent yard.

The ages of children in particular here was easily underestimated. The little band here could not have been much beyond the six or seven year cohort.

In this case the leader of the group seemed to be at the lower end, a little dark lovely in green dress. Beside the tall iron pole where the group congregated six or seven others squatted in a tight bunch. The presence of an outsider failed to distract. In more than a fortnight in Tanah Abang, no other White had been sighted beyond the Mall precinct. No-where in the vicinity of Hotel Kalisma one kilometre off; certainly no-where along the narrow lanes and alleys in-between.

None of the children in the group at the pole gave the Bule, the White any attention. Only one brief glance was raised by the leader in the green.

The girl marshalled attention in the circle with the spell she was brewing.

Nothing struck more deeply that first night in Jakarta than seeing the familiar children’s game that captured the little group away from the adults. This was far more striking than rats, monkeys or anything else. 

Over twenty-five months in the communities on the equator the extensive kinship of traditions and customs had been proved many times over. Still, to come upon in a Jakartan slum immediately adjacent the new shopping malls and the promised future this particular game from a playground of fifty years before seemed remarkable. 

There was great competition among kite-flying young boys here who gathered evening on the grass in front of the local hospital. Pigeon racing was popular among the next age group. One came across infants blowing on little coloured windmills; on children adapting cardboard boxes for play. There was no lack of energy or imagination in the rat-infested slums.

The tall free-standing iron pole clearly had been chosen and claimed. Children from distant playgrounds fifty years before had adopted the same kind of magical centres for their base of operation. These poles, stalks and trees stretching upward never ended within sight.

Each child here had extended a foot into an inner circle they had created. Plastic sandals of a variety of colours arrayed like the petals of some hybrid, exotic flower.

Leading girl in green was fingering clock-wise each iridescent bloom, which in the gloom seemed to glow brighter.

Eeny, Meeny, Miney, Moe.... 

A Bahasa version that would have substituted something for the old English “Nigger's toe” in the play elsewhere.

The children watched the finger ticking round the circle like the hand of a clock. In their homes there would be few clocks, nor would their fathers wear them on their wrists. Beside the pole they had made their own. A game without beginning or end, like the eternal clock.

Omar had one minor piece of shopping needed in Jakarta. In retirement, Omar had trialed various small ventures, as much in order to keep active as anything else. A year or two ago he had bought a consignment of kerudong; tudongthey were called on Java—female head-scarves.

Omar had not been able to move them from his small shop in Geylang Serai. What was lacking was proper display. Two or three manikins were needed, heads cut off at the shoulder. The market at Tanah Abang was the place. There would certainly be traders there in the manikins that on every side displayed the wares in the market. Hangers, rods, manikins—they had to be available somewhere within the stalls.

Direct from the airport bus we made for the building when Omar suddenly sighted it. Seven or eight storeys and literally hundreds upon hundreds of small stall-holders meant a needle in a haystack search. One person said over there; another the opposite direction. Omar's Bahasa Indonesian was not faultless. As an RI boy—Raffles Institution—English had become Omar’s most accomplished language.

         More than once hunger and weariness had brought a premature end to the searches within the halls of the Tanah Abang Textile Market. Finding the food stalls themselves had presented a task. For the first couple of days small, unappealing food courts were all that we turned up within.

         Eventually the first supplier was found. The first suggested another when Omar was unhappy with the wares on offer. Over there, left, right, behind the lifts, you can't miss it.

         The barriers between were innumerable tightly packed stalls filled with product, milling crowds added.

The first stall kept full and half-length manikins; nothing smaller. (Subsequently this proved incorrect.) In the other place there might be something. At first the other place proved a mirage, impossible to find before weariness and hunger overcame. A second accidental round at the first stall then turned up heads cut off at the shoulders, and in two sizes.

For some reason Omar was dissatisfied. The form he indicated; too elaborate seemed the suggestion.

There was some uncertain confusion at the time.

These made-up manikin heads were a light brown colour, a fair approximation of the tone the Malay women in Geylang Serai, back in Singapore, achieved after whitening soaps and creams. Eye-brows on the manikins were carefully shaped and lined, glossy-bright lip-stick applied. The Caucasian nose-jobs here were beyond the means of the class at Geylang, but that was being finicky.

Even women in their sixties and well into their seventies arrived at the coffee places in G. Serai in precisely this form. Not all, but certainly a fair proportion; certainly the fashion conscious, of which there was no shortage.

Omar wasn't buying. The price was ten or fifteen thousand rupiah per piece; little more than a Sing' dollar. Transport back in the plane would be a problem, but Omar thought he could cut each piece down if needed and re-glue back home.

The problem was the form.

Eventually the stall-holder produced from some corner blind, cadaver type pieces: a finely chiseled feminine form covered in a face-mask of marble-white, as in the TV advertisements for beauty products.

Unless the colour might be the problem, this immediately raised hopes. However, still no good for Omar.

On the second or third day of the quest the second stall was accidentally stumbled upon, run by a Chinese women who gave Omar short shrift. Two or three piece purchases were of small interest.

Finally Omar made the purchase of the half-brown manikins that had been handled a number of times previously. Three manikins would be sufficient for Omar's purposes at his shop. All attempts at bargaining were met with disdain by the seller.

The explanation came later, once the purchase was finally made and as Omar began thinking of transportation. 

Colour and slightly reduced size had indeed discounted the white manikins. The larger issue however was the human form itself; the reproduction.

The artful reproduction of the human form was disdained in Islam. Prohibited by traditional, conservative Islam.

As in the case of early Christianity, Islam prohibited idolatry in any form. Even for the greatly revered Prophet this was the case. No idol worship. 

Mohammad was a messenger; greatly esteemed of course, but a messenger. In the mosques, Omar explained, there could not be any kind of representation of the human form.

The spirit, the beyond, everlasting life, eternity; not the temporal human vessel, the envelope of skin and bone.

            One recalled the standpoint of course; and something similar in the attitude of some Christian groups. There was in youth the confusing distinctions between Orthodox and Catholic iconography.

The leap back to ultimate concerns struck unexpectedly. Modernity, contemporary arrangements in the West, had of course left all that far behind; far back in the past numbers of generations ago. A shopping expedition with Omar gave abrupt recall.

Stepping out each morning between the malls and adjoining slums here, passing directly from dirty, broken pavement, ragged stall-holders and the life of vagrants, to the draped manikins in the jewel-like shop-fronts, the shoppers who had acquired the cuts and colours and many of the postures of the figures in the windows, the argument against idolatry and its chief propositions resonated weeks ahead.