Soon after 5 in
the Losmen under the swivel wall-fan & 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 for 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 contrast. Certainly never once was the like chorus heard there.
On the grass
beside the middle Haig blocks older lads had kicked a soccer ball. 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 & ball 2-3 times.
Laughter erupting from the gang in a number of registers. The ball or other
missile was 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 marble that had knocked
another clean across the lane and into the gutter had drawn applause and
whooping. 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. In the typing here a second. Good job man!
No strain and all
fluid rhythm. Early-mid sixties one would guess.
Now larger ventures and
a little flight, all within 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 during a visit to the country while the Shah still reigned.)
Possibly the maghrib call 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 brought an end to
play.
Two further matters going out for dinner.
The strange phenomenon of the rapid
dark here well before 6, only a few hundred kilometers south, had been
forgotten. There was almost no dusk worthy of the name in the South of Java.
Along Malioboro the hawker on the bicycle struck a 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 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 & guerrilla gardeners in Central Java centuries before the current
crop.
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