Another Return

Twenty-eight months later changes at Pinang Merah, Red Palm and the Malioboro area generally. The little baby girl at the losmen has a baby sister now and is a baby herself no more. The old ibu initially mistaken as the resident grandma remains herself and the old animist granddad outback same. The pair is in fact unrelated; it seems the former is a kind of long-term family servant—the laundry service here is her province and also most of the cooking; in her old age the cleaning of the rooms now falls to the duty manager. The old man is great uncle to Adhie who runs the place for the extended family and keeps out of the main house. (Almost certainly Adhie’s mother, a regular visitor to what was once her former home—a widow now—endures the old heathen on sufferance.) Adhie is father to the two girls.

            A new manager has been installed by the name of Tyo. (The former, Wahyu, an ambitious and prize-winning film-maker, was never going to hang around too long.) Sounding like a given name, Tyo is actually family name: the young man in his early twenties and purblind—holding paper and phone hard-up against his thick lenses in order to see. Recently returned from his English studies in Papua to his native Jogja because of some trouble here.

            Reports of few tourists lately; Malioboro is certainly far less crowded. And this as the hotels continue to rise and municipal works powering ahead. One side of Malioboro has been re-paved, seating added and new bus-stops built. The old buses too have been replaced by more sleek models, which seem to have immediately impacted behavior. You have to worry what another two and one half years will bring.

A couple of hours after arrival Pieter the Belanda, a make-up artist from Amsterdam, turned up at Pinang Merah with an interesting family history to divulge. Pieter’s grandmother was Javanese from the Eastern side of the island and married in early teens to a Dutchman. As a child during the war the mother experienced things that clearly left a mark upon her. The family had decamped to the Netherlands in the early fifties and when Pieter brought back his mother forty-five years later the woman could not enter the darker alleyways and needed to get off buses when the passengers pressed too close.

            The "mixed blood' back in Holland, as Pieter called them, are a sizable, identifiable group. Even Pieter who appears as Dutch as any of the figures in the paintings of the old masters can be picked by people with a keen eye; picked particularly by other mixed bloods. Manner and gait was the give-away Pieter suggested; the liquid, feminine walk of the Javanese one of the tell-tale signs. As an experienced and credentialed illusionist, Pieter has his own sharp eye that can quickly penetrate ethnicity and all its telling giveaways. The game in the glossy fashion mags was second nature to a man of Pieter’s history; a life-long study from earliest days.

            The becak driver Paijo is on his way back from his kampung out near Cilicap. Naya who has been teaching in Malacca for a few years in town. Amri and her painter husband Luddy hopefully will be met in the next few days too. For the dental work a decision to proceed  only as far as the simple fillings—with its peeling paint and rising damp Bu M.’s surgery does not inspire confidence for Xrays and more sophisticated procedures.