Back in Jakarta, in the kampung: a back-alley realm of bicycle cabs. It’s the wet season, with bursts of torrential rain and fierce lightning storms.
The soto vendor is a devout Muslim, 49 years old, Javanese, and fair-skinned, with an encyclopedic knowledge of Jakarta’s nightclubs; the tailor is down the alley, stationed at a roadside cart; and the fried-rice vendor works evenings by the jackfruit tree.
The city is growing. Garish paint, silver and blue, splatters across bridges. Sidewalks are crumbling, canals are polluted, and yet one finds numerous sanctuaries, carved out of the rotting fabric, places of escape and extreme air-conditioning.
Life teems on the roadsides, while middle-class denizens, with larger bodies and bulging bellies, take refuge indoors. Cafes have English menus only, the national language deemed inappropriate. The affluent of post-colonial Jakarta embellish their sentences with the imperial tongue. A “modern” cafe would never play dangdut, the working-class music of Indonesia.
I was here during the fasting month, and I also fasted, waking before sunrise, searching the streets for food and coffee, in a curious landscape of bats and straggling late-night figures.
Once, after fasting had ended, I was writing in a doughnut shop, which was suddenly attacked by a gang of boys with firecrackers. The staff hurried to lock-up, pulling the metal curtains, sealing the shop, which became a bunker, pounded by explosions.
Time is elastic. Buses heave from station to station. Smartphones summon motorcycle taxis. Men smoke clove cigarettes and the mosque calls at dawn. It’s raining. There’s no alcohol at the convenience store, but aphrodisiacs are sold at numerous roadside carts.