The Cities of Java. (1463 words)
Part 1 - Jakarta
Jakarta is a
huge sprawling city of over ten million. Twice the population of all of
Scotland, if you can get your head around that. It’s hot, humid and except for
a few open areas, claustrophobic. My mother-in-law’s house is in an adjoining
city called Tangerang in an area known as Ciputat.[1]
After spending
a lot of time in Ciputat on and off over the years, I suppose if I was being
generous, I would describe it as ‘vibrant’. Much of it is a congested, untidy,
tightly packed jumble of rough potholed streets choked with market stalls and
street vendors. Private cars, taxis, scooters, trucks and hand carts all weave
in and out. There are no pavements, so the foot traffic mingles with the
vehicles, old ladies carrying their shopping, bandy-legged old men going about
their own mysterious business, children going to and from school, men hanging
around smoking clove cigarettes, women buying food from grocery stalls, merchants
pushing their carts, street sweepers, beggars, everyone is here, living their
life on the street.
At busy
junctions, skinny men make a living as volunteer traffic controllers and
parking attendants. When a car is waved into the road, the window is opened a fraction,
and he is tipped a few thousand rupiah. There are no traffic lights or road
markings, cables that are usually buried in British streets hang from poles,
clustered in incomprehensible tangles. The heat, the fumes, the noise, there
must be people that spend their lives on these streets, perhaps only going home
for a few hours of rest before coming back to the bustle before dawn.
When it rains
heavily enough, the streets flood, and the rubbish and rotting vegetation is
washed away, or at least rearranged. Sitting in the back of a taxi, on the way
to eyang’s house I see a jumbled world of the old and the new. Very little of
this must have been planned. If there is a bit of free space here, someone
erects a market stall, or the ojeks park their scooters there, or it’s used to
burn rubbish. It’s like half of Ciputat is standing room only.
The congested
heart of Ciputat is the market. What is seen on the outside almost defies
description. Market stalls are so tightly packed and so close to the road that
there is not one inch of space left for anything else. I’ve never been inside,
but I’ve been in markets like it. What you see is just the tip of the iceberg.
Inside is a network of warrens, shops and stalls, with produce and wares
stacked to the ceiling in tottering columns. In nooks and crannies sit the
stall owners, on their phones when not serving customers, sat beside a fan
circulating air that tastes like it has passed through a hundred lungs before
it has entered yours.
This is a part
of the world tourists will never see unless they come deliberately looking for
it. Ciputat is deeply buried in the urban sprawl of Jakarta and the market is
doubly buried inside Ciputat. It’s not the sort of place tourists would ever go
to, it’s not for them after all, but if they did, they would see an authentic
bit of south Asian life, raw and unsanitized.
The middle
class of Ciputat dwell in gated communities known as Kampung Areas (Village
Areas). Eyang (Indonesian for grandma) lives in one of these. There are
a few small shops at the entrance and one of the ubiquitous Indomarets where we
can buy ice creams and sweets. These places are always clean and well air
conditioned. Like a well-kept Tesco Express.
Her Kampung is
about a hundred houses in size if I had to guess. There are some small shops, a
mosque and all the usual signs are up. Advertisements for the same things you
see all over Java. “Doktor Gigi” (Dentist). “Ketok Magik” (Car body repair,
ketok signifying the sound of the hammering. It is always done in secret too –
hence the magic part). “Cuci Steam” – Car jet wash. “Warung” – small
home restaurants. “Warteg” – small internet cafes.
There are no
white people here at all. Just me and the three kids, adding up to 2.5 bules
(Indonesian for white person, literally “albino”). I’m used to standing
out in Eyang’s kampung though and it is well known that Ibu Emi has a bule
son-in-law.
Eyang’s home
is nice, one of the better ones in the kampung. It has a tiny patch of garden
at the front, between the door and the gate about five feet square, a small
yard for drying clothes and just enough space beside the garage to park a car.
The kampung is less tightly packed than the street, but not by much, as labour
is cheap and there is no concept of planning permission people tend to build
their houses to fill every inch of their property. The dirt packed road outside
is wide enough for one car only and the sewers on either side have only
recently been covered. It is perfectly possible for small children to fall into
these ditches and have to be fished out again.
Inside, like
most Indonesian houses it has white tiled floors, a central hall, a living and
dining area, and an area off to the side where the TV is sits. The three
bedrooms and bathroom all hang off this one room. It used to be a bigger house,
but eyang split it in two and rents the other half. Indonesians do not burn
incense, and so the strongest smell in the house are insect repellent.
Having
recently returned from Sepa Island however, we were not currently staying at
eyang’s but at my wife’s brother’s house in a nearby kampung. A more modern
dwelling, it’s most interesting feature (to me anyway) was the Heith Robinson
contraption that Om Roni had created at the back of the house to filter the
water that rose out of the Jakarta aquifer. An engineer, Roni was always tinkering
with it, keeping it at peak efficiency. Water features are not unusual in
larger houses, usually in the centre of the building, sometimes in a small
courtyard, they are there to keep the house just a little cooler.
The kids were
tired so watched TV all morning and afternoon, but in the evening, Ida had a
date to meet some friends, so we all took a Bluebird taxi to Mall Kota
Kasablanka.
We ate at Sate
Ayam Ponorogo Nyam Leng on the eighth floor. Like many places in Jakarta
while the mall looked pretty hip and trendy to me, the food court was arranged
in a recreation of street vendor stalls back down on the ground.
Ida met with
her primary school gang and after we had eaten; to keep the children amused I
took them to a nearby toy shop. After a while we decided to go back to where
Ida and her friends were when I felt myself sway. Was I feeling some sort of
delayed sea sickness from the return trip from Sepa Island? A repeat of an old
inner ear problem?
I saw Ida
coming towards me, making corralling gestures with her arms. ‘It’s an
earthquake! Where are the kids?’ I must have looked a little puzzled as next
she said, ‘can’t you feel the building moving?’
I wasn’t sure
what I was feeling but looking around I could see a chain of fairy-lights
strung around the food stalls gently swaying as if in a breeze. I felt a
movement, sharply and very obviously this time, that made us all sway gently.
There were no
alarms, no announcements, just people calmly heading for the escalators. When
nothing else happened, we all went back to where we had been, and the ladies
finished their meal. After that, we went to hang out in a ground floor coffee
shop “as a precaution”.
Ida chatted to
her pals for the rest of the evening, and I spent my time entertaining the kids
as best I could. I was happy with these duties, knowing that my wife might not
see these friends again for several years. There is no pub culture in
Indonesia, as you would expect in a Muslim country, so Ida and her friends are
of the coffee shop generation. They sat and drank their lattes and teas little
different from a group of friends back in the UK, but in tropical weather and
with the occasional earthquake!
[1] A note on this! - Jakarta
size – they redistricted, and it went down from 14 to 10 million. Eyang’s area
of Ciputat is in Tangerang which is now a separate city. A bit like the Bridge
of Don going independent or something.
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