Living in the dirt
Chris Benjamin, 21/08/2007
Every conversation I have with Bumi is like watching a great foreign movie by the country's best Director, who you've never heard of because of his exotica. Bumi's stories are glimpses of another planet, another planet with each new story.
He paints a picture of life in a concrete quagmire of endless dead-ends with gangsters and witch doctors warring to out-bribe alien politicians, tells you it's called Makassar and you say, "Oh, Makassar, yes I think I’ve heard of it - it sounds familiar."
He reveals a city made of smoke that floats where pods carry people to markets in which kings eat fruit that smells like farts and you say, "Ah, Jakarta." His cinema-photographer eyes project images of burning boats and cross-ocean laser beams aimed at inter-biosphere smugglers and you fear for the life of their cargo, even though he’s sitting before you telling the tale.
Today’s fantastic voyage was to a sandy blue paradise for fishermen and their children renting snorkelling equipment to drive-by tourists in 1973. This is where and when Bumi was born, with his face all small and crinkly, brown and wide-eyed wonder at the implausibility of being plucked from his mother’s womb while she lay bleeding on a dirt floor silently and stubbornly refusing to cry out at the pain of birth.
From the beginning Bumi’s eyes pierced harder than any other, glowering while his father forced him to try football, glowing brightly at the chance to help the man count market money from mainland fish sales.
By age two he’d humbled his father by becoming a faster and more accurate bookkeeper, who also spoke better Indonesian, a skill his father exploited for price negotiations with mainlanders.
By age four he bored of accounting and took to engineering, devising a cheap and effective net floatation device out of two-litre pop bottles washed up along the shore.
Bumi’s father, a wiry man with surprising strength and audaciously self-granted authority, went looking for the boy late one evening after Bumi failed to come home for supper.
On the tiny island of Pulau, population 100, any lost child not found in five minutes was safely assumed drowned. Bumi’s father, Bam, was not overly concerned. Bumi was no likely drowning victim, the first four-year-old potentially smarter than the sea.
Bam found Bumi on the far sloping side of the island where no one had ever bothered to build or settle. It was simply too far away from the others. In recent years it had become a place where the women gathered to make clothing when they wanted to get away from the tourists.
Bumi was there, cursing a foul black streak the likes of which Bam hadn’t heard in all his years on boats, not from his own father or grandfather, nor any other man he’d known.
"Bumi! What’s wrong?" he shouted half in anger and half in concern, a magical mix of fatherly emotion that keeps us from being a threat to ourselves from a young age.
"I can’t get it tied!" Bumi retorted, pointing in frustration at a small tangle of netting he’d somehow dragged across the village, and 30 empty plastic pop bottles. "My fingers’re too small!" Too small for his brain.
"Why do you want to tie them?" Bam asked, his anger fading, understanding the immediate objective but not the broader purpose.
"You tie them at one end to make it float, then you can leave it and go play," Bumi explained. "Then you come back and you have fish. So then you have more time to play with me, Daddy."
Two clarifications here: 1) Bam was not an exceptionally hard-working man by the standards of Western civilisation at the start of the third millennium of measured time. But he did spend six hours a day at sea - six hours Bumi felt would be better spent playing with him.
2) Floatation nets have existed in various fishing cultures for centuries. Pulau’s ignorance of this methodology is in no way indicative of an inept or unintelligent people. In fact, Pulau’s more labour intensive methods were ingenious for keeping the men out of the women’s hair for six hours a day, and vice versa, and for making physically strong, hardy men for an island left naked in the exposure of rain and merciless sun.
Most human beings survive on tradition their whole lives, and Bam had much in common with most human beings, especially the men of Pulau Island. His son Bumi was among the rare few whose novel ideas change the way a species like ours lives, and indirectly change the way all life lives or dies.
Whether these changes are for better or for worse depends on which change you mean and from whose perspective you look at the results.
Like most human innovations Bumi’s idea had unforeseen impacts. From Bumi’s own perspective, the lighter workload and greater cash flow that resulted from his innovation (once Bam caught on and got to tying what Bumi’s little fingers couldn’t coordinate) led to a bigger, drunker, meaner version of his father. Bumi’s bruisings eventually became so frequent that he resorted to playing football, which gave him an excuse for being out of the house.
On the pitch, a white strip of sand on the south side, Bumi displayed the same ingenuity. He avoided touching the football as much as he could without being insulted by Didi, Anwar and Rachmana, the 'A’ players who hoped to get on a Makassar team someday and thus avoid the fishing fate. Yet his creativity changed play itself.
Under Bumi’s leadership football became 'Monsters of the Deep,’ a complex game of dodge-ball played with the feet, in which two of ten players are monsters but no one else knows who, and rolls of dice (acquired on the mainland Muslim black market) determines who is kicking at whom and which boys are under suspicion of having eaten their fathers. If only one of them really was a monster Bumi would have brought that boy home for a feast of fisherman! And kept him for a pet.
The boys had been playing this game everyday for a week when word got back to Bam through pesky Nur, who had a crush on Bumi, was tired of being ignored, and in her own strike of innovation decided to tattle on the boys’ sacrilege against football and the sea’s great creatures.
Bumi’s mother Win was innovative enough to choose that very moment to seduce Bam (thus saving Bumi) for the first time since the drinking began, which is how Bumi’s little sister Alfi was conceived. She became his only sibling and it was plain to all that Bam had drowned even the best swimmers among his sperm.
Alfi was born as crinkly and brown as Bumi, with even wider eyes, a broad space in between them and a thin extra lip. She didn’t speak until she was three, and very little after that.
It was said that she had the lowest word to lip ratio in the whole archipelago. If hers was the lowest ratio, Bumi’s soon became the highest as he told her everything he knew about the world, which was a lot.
His favourite topic was the mainland market, which he still frequented with his father. There Bumi went from failed boy genius at the centre of a father’s random chemical anger to a face in the crowd of wheeler-dealers. There the board-room tables turned round so Bumi could Chair and his father follow his lead.
Bam, not understanding the language of business, knew that all means of survival: clothing, fuel, medicine, art, jewellery, music and dance, storytelling, food and drink (especially drink), depended on his young son’s mind for numbers and his instinct for measuring grown men’s weaknesses.
And it wasn’t just Bam’s success at stake. If he could ride his son’s mind to a good market-day, he could afford to be more generous with his profits and all of Pualu’s families would benefit.
In return, they would be more generous with one another, and with Bam when he had a poor catch. Thus wealth was secured for all. In this way Pulauans were different from their millions of cultural brethren on the mainland, whose rigid hierarchy, developed internally and acculturated over millennia, favoured formalised terms of trade over sharing.
All the rituals and rhythms of life on Pulau depended on fish and the islanders’ ability to catch and market it. To a Pulauan, fish is more than food; it is survival, it is health, it is justice, it is ceremony and celebration, it is sustainability, it is life.
To young Bumi, fish was his ticket to the marketplace, and the marketplace was his gateway to the sprawling city of Makassar, his first discovery of life on another planet. The first of many.
In Makassar Bumi became Bam’s pride again. With big hand on little shoulder Bam would say in broken Indonesian, "Smart boy, my boy," proudly to other fishermen in the market.
To buyers he would chastise the boy for selling the fish so cheaply, but Bumi knew this was for show, so shoppers could walk away with that superior feeling of out-capitalising the capitalist.
In Makassar Bumi also began a love affair with buses. He and his father would scramble from the docks to the road and hail a small blue bus – with a motor! The first time, Bumi relentlessly pressed the luckless driver on the mechanics of the fast-moving vehicle, as fast as 40 mph through cross-town traffic.
"How does it work, Sir?" he asked.
Everyone in the cramped little bus gazed at the beautiful wide-eyed child quietly, awaiting an answer as eagerly as he, for the sake of truth and beauty.
In the eerie silence the luckless driver became listless, looked back and finally realised the child was addressing him.
"Wha?" he asked. The passengers tsk tsked and shook their heads at the oblivious brute.
"How does it work, Sir? The bus," Bumi asked again, patiently, as the fair-weather smiles returned to the passengers’ faces.
"Oh-ho," said the luckless driver, amused by Bumi’s pomposity. As if a small child could understand such big things. "The wheels turn," the driver said, "and that makes it go." The passengers groaned.
"What makes the wheels turn?" Bumi asked. "And how does that make it go? And why is there smoke? And why does it stink?" The passengers laughed. "And why are there so many and where did they come from? Where did the trees go?"
The passengers’ heads slowly pivoted in unison to gauge the luckless driver, whose eyes were fixed to the side of the road while people signalled for a ride unheeded. He was completely silent, and the tension was unbearable for the passengers.
Finally Pak Syamsuddin, a young schoolteacher, broke the silence. "Have you never been on a bus before?" he asked.
"No, Sir," Bumi said. "Only on boats."
"Motor boats?" Syamsuddin asked.
"Yes, Sir. Fishing boats."
"Well, the principle is not so different." It was the first time anyone had used a word as big and weighty as principle when addressing Bumi. He had never fully considered the principle on which a boat worked before. They were just there and moving away from one shore and toward another endlessly, since his birth and surely forever before that. He finally asked, "What principle is that?"
Syamsuddin explained briefly about Newton’s laws, friction, and the energy generated from combustion. Bumi’s eyes grew even wider in wonder. Syamsuddin asked Bumi if he understood.
"So, you make a spark, light the fuel to turn a wheel or propeller, which uses friction to make a force in one direction, sending the vehicle in the other?"
"More or less," Syamsuddin said, duly impressed but not wanting to give the tiny child a bigger head than he could carry on his small shoulders. "Eventually you’ll learn all this in school."
Now here was perhaps the only Indonesian word Bam knew and Bumi didn’t: ‘school.’ Bam had never been there, but he had learned from conversations in the market about a litany of little Indonesian villages that had been taken there against their will. Government officials would come to town and take away the children so that they could go to school and become more civilised.
Bam, who had been proudly and quietly listening up until this point, interjected. "He’s not going to school," he said. "He’s smart enough already." The way he said ‘smart’ sounded more like ‘weird’ to Bumi, and yet still the word rang with pride. "We need Bumi to help us sell fish in the market and keep track of numbers."
"What’s school, Daddy?" Bumi asked his father in Indonesian, a language he had originally learned from his mother. She had grown up on the mainland, met Bam in the market, moved to Pulau, and had never gone back.
She painstakingly shared her Indonesian language skill with Bam to help him communicate better in the market. Those in Makassar who were of Makassarese or Javanese descent could not clearly understand his own language, Buginese.
But since Indonesia became a nation and Indonesian a language in 1945, there was that one common language that everyone was supposed to know.
Through diligence on his and his wife’s part Bam learned to get by in a second language when he was 17 years old. But now with the addition of the boy wonder he rarely used that uncomfortable, awkward language, that somehow flowed like saliva from the boy’s tongue in ongoing conversations with his mother.
But with Bam and Bumi, Buginese was the language, and there on that bus was the first time Bumi had spoken to his father in Indonesian, in front of Syamsuddin the Teacher, a luckless driver, and 12 other passengers gaping at the brilliant little boy with an insatiable intellectual appetite, who didn’t know what school was.
"School," Bam explained in Buginese, having left his comfort zone and wandered into a need for diplomacy, "is where children go to learn how the world works, so they can have a job in the city, pay taxes, read books, and drive in cars."
Bumi didn’t know what taxes were but school sounded like paradise! No one he knew in all Creation knew how to read, although his father had a fine collection of Encyclopaedias he had received, with every intention of learning how to read, in exchange for a large load of fish.
Bumi had looked through all the pictures from Z to A without knowing to read in the other direction. He loved looking at pictures of alien shores and foreign sands, but on each new examination the unbreakable code before him frustrated his hyper-synaptic hungry mind.
Imagine the opportunity to crack that code, and uncover the secrets to the clockwork of the world. Imagine driving in one of these magical vehicles, mastering and exploiting the mystical forces of combustion, friction, and inertia.
Driving endlessly through this alien experience, in this city! Living in this city! With great geniuses like Pak Syamsuddin the Science Teacher, and great befuddled characters like the luckless driver.
As Bumi regaled L’il Sister with stories of the sites of Makassar he imagined what it would be like living there, the same way the terminally ill imagine heaven.
He especially loved telling tales of the disenchanted, the raggedy poor and their woefully wounded eyes, more alive than the rest of their bodies, but alive with pain and longing. People in such dishevelled states didn’t exist in Bumi’s regular world, and his novel mind absorbed it all, the pain, the awe, and he started seeking solutions.
On Pulau women had babies when they were as young as 14 years old; on the streets of Makassar Bumi saw girls as young as seven with crying babies strapped to their bodies with their hands out and mouths mouthing softly and urgently, "Please."
Their little hands would creep in through the windows of the little blue bus, opening and closing slowly until they found money or a window started slamming shut. Their withdrawal was always sudden and lighting quick.
On the streets of the market were always wounded men, with missing limbs, or large open burns that never healed, or cuts to their faces, arms, torso or legs.
Bumi would often approach them with his little boy curiosity and ignorance to societal standards of fear for the abnormal and especially the painful. "What happened to your head?" he asked.
"A Japanese soldier’s sword," Pram answered, embellishing slightly for the sake of a child’s awe. It had really been an Indonesian soldier’s kitchen knife that entered his head under the right ear on an upward trajectory, removing the ear and destroying part of his brain stem, as he fled the scene of an adulterous affair uncovered from head to toe. The assassin was his close friend Ananta, the husband of the love of his life.
"It was a miracle I survived at all. Sword went right in here." He said this pressing the tender spot between his jaw and the spot where his right ear used to be. "Took out my ear and a piece of my brain."
"Did he getcha from behind?" Bumi asked, knowing of the Japanese invasion from his grandfather, who was put to work for the foreign soldiers and given very little to eat. He had survived starvation, torture, extreme physical labour and disease to tell the tale, but now only children would listen to him.
Pram was, like most adults, taken aback by Bumi’s astute power of deduction. "Uhh, yes, he attacked from behind. That’s what Japs are like you see, you can’t trust ‘em! I was guarding my post late at night. Little did I know that on the other side of the base my friend Ananta had fallen asleep. The Japs snuck in there. But just to be cruel, one of them snuck up on me from behind my post and slashed my ear with his samurai sword."
Bumi cocked what was known on Pulau as his ‘eyebrow of scepticism.’ Something about this story didn’t jive with the reality Bumi knew, a reality painted more by shared stories than personal experience.
"Why didn’t he kill you? Wasn’t he afraid you’d run and tell your friends?"
Pram had caught on that this boy was special; he was smart enough to know when he was outsmarted. "That’s exactly what I did," he said, dodging the question the way he should have dodged Ananta’s kitchen knife.
And, as anticipated, Bumi’s rapid-fire mind was on to the next question, all old inconsistencies forgotten as new ones were created in their wide wake. "How did you outrun him right after you lost your ear? Weren’t you dizzy?"
"Adrenaline," Pram answered smartly.
"What’s that?"
"It’s a chemical your body releases when you’re in danger that allows you to outrun your enemies."
Bumi sucked his teeth and shivered at this exciting new tidbit, as a passing Chinese woman, big and dressed as the sun, dropped a coin into Pram’s grateful cup.
Bumi’s next question was temporarily annihilated by this replacement: "Why did she give you money?"
Pram’s braggart joy faded as he remembered his current stream of reality, already feeling hollow-hearted for that exaggerated fantasy of how it could have been. "Because I can’t work," he said.
"Why not?"
Pram paused, thinking things through, the way he never used to when he was young, romantic and brazen. Finally he explained it thusly: "Because the adrenaline has worn off, and now I’m dizzy. And forgetful. I don’t hear so good unless you shout the way you do, Little Boy. Most people don’t have the patience. There’s just nothing left but old stories."
"You could become a storyteller," Bumi said, thinking of his uncle Karsi, who was such a good storyteller he was no longer expected to fish. Yet he still told the best fishing stories, and no one minded his eccentricity, his constant twitching and extreme superstition.
But Pram just laughed at the suggestion. Then, seeing Bumi’s eyes dim, he explained, "No one wants to hear my stories, only young children with no money to pay."
As it happened Bumi had several hundred rupiah in his pocket from the afternoon’s fish sales, the better part of a day’s income. Bumi reached into his pocket and pulled out 200 rupiah, as much as he dared to deny his father, and gave it to Pram, saying, "I can pay you for your story."
Chris Benjamin, until returning to Canada recently, was the development correspondent for The Statesman.
