Play (Jogja Again - 2015)

Soon after 5pm in the tight Losmen room under the swivel fan hanging on the wall and louver windows bed-side, the children’s play from the vacant lot beside the vegetable garden. Light young voices rising from the improbable past that immediately finds one straining after them. There are no plastic slides or horses here, nor maids supervising or parents with cameras recording. On the local bus from the airport a shyly smiling little girl had an uncovered grazed knee, poor thing. Near forty months in Singapore provided the striking contrast. Certainly never once was the like chorus heard there. On the grass beside the middle Haig Road blocks older lads had kicked a soccer ball among too large a number for the confined space. Occasionally a father or grandfather with child sharing a ball of some sort. There was a pair of siblings who came onto the paving with rackets and ball two or three times.

         Laughter erupting from the gang in a number of registers. The ball or other missile is soundless, but the ricochets and unexpected deflections are immediately recognizable. How long one had not heard the like. Along one of the narrow gangs earlier in the afternoon a missile-marble that had knocked another clean across the lane-way and into the gutter had drawn applause and whooping from the keen spectators. Brilliant strike! The powers in the rich northern enclave have little idea what they have produced in their much vaunted republic.

         Five-thirty brings a short little ditty perhaps spontaneously composed. A couple of hours ago there had been a call from the masjid directly across the narrow lane. In the typing here a second…. Good job man! No strain and all fluid rhythm. Early-mid sixties fellow one would guess. Now larger ventures and a little flight given all within good bounds. This reminded in turn of Faris’s report last year that it was the hearing of prayer in his case that had carried the Arizonan the last part of the way to Islam. Iranian prayer in this instance during a visit to the country while the Shah still reigned. Possibly the maghrib call just then was the signal for the children to return to their homes. In the neighbourhood down on the great southern land it had been the street-light that had brought an end to play.

         Two further matters going out for dinner. The strange phenomenon of the rapid dark here well before six, only a few hundred kilometers south, had been forgotten—there is almost no dusk worthy of the name in the south of Java. Trooping along Malioboro the hawker on the bicycle ringing out his notice with a stick of some kind struck a three inch diameter PVC pipe that he has strapped to his handle-bars. (Somehow he managed a pleasing rhythm the same as the year before.) The improvisation was a fitting counterpart to the larger storm-water pipe in this case sitting on a ledge beside the entry to Masjid Nurul Huda that had been split down the middle to create a flower bed. There were hippies, greenies and guerrilla gardeners in central Java centuries before the current crop.