The Parade

The people down by the rail-line at the crossing come along pretty much like their counterparts of what? 150 - 60 years ago in the ever-expanding North American states to watch the great iron beast power by. Tonight a little boy up on the wheeled fencing was shaking the top rail and leaping up and down on the bottom as the night wagons to Jakarta were pulling in to Tugu. As Ni suggested in her example late last year on the JKT - Bandung for the first time in her life, a great many people have never had the opportunity to travel on the giant behemoth that traverses the entire island. 

         For the greater part of the day there was no intelligible answer for the vacancy on the streets. Almost none of the stallholders on Malioboro had come out, leaving the usually bustling thoroughfare quite ghostly. Even Mas Willy had failed to show for his shift at Red Palm, Mas Tyo of the morning initially unable to explain why. Eventually, the mystery was solved: it was the Sultan’s birthday, the local Yogyakarta royal. On the same day there was a new prince in the house of Windsor, but not everyone in Jogja knew that.
         At Semesta in the evening for supper the amputee in the yard showed up close as in fact a young lad perhaps still in the first half of his twenties. Looking from the table in the dark and under the shadows of the trees, the chap’s gait in particular had suggested an older, more robust man. With some light catching the face, one wondered whether it could possibly have been another just happening to have lost that same portion of his left limb. 

         There must have been an added streetlamp now that somehow robbed this young man of all his former presence. It took quite a time to see again those swinging hips and confident tilt of the head, awaiting the rupiah from the cashed-up patrons parking.
         And while we are on gait, gesture and manner, let it be known, those fine fattie girls at Ayam Pedas could never cross the floor in Sing. as they do here. Neither in Melbourne, nor many other locales. 

         Call them fattie, if you will, more than a little rotund certainly; but they get by pretty well here, easy to tell. They are appreciated and often get asked—like that confident young lass of the same proportions in the padang place on Sabang, in Jakarta, where the older fellow hung at the register chatting her up properly, until he could pass his number. 

         Beautifully managed hidden allure, a flowering ardour ready to blossom from beneath those layers of thin, glossy fabric. Catwalk girls swing their legs strongly one in front of the other in the fashion shows; these short, more rounded lasses twist and swivel as they go, reminiscent of some kind of mechanical or industrial spindle, coiling thread perhaps. 

         The longer glide down the street in another body type is something else again, captivating in an altogether other way in Java. This Botero-proportion bustle and swish was a thing of its own precious kind.