The Rainy Season

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Flatmates Flee

I returned to a quiet house. The lights off, the rain eased; released its muffling embrace, relaxed its hypnotic drum, a bass beat upon the roof slowed to an ebb of tap, tap, tap falling from the leaves and eaves. A jet plane had vanished early Sunday morning into the cloud cover taking with it two EF teachers, my flat mates, Mick and Kelly. "They've made a runner," Don passes me a note. Mick's handwriting requests that Don inform management after Mick and kelly've had a day or two to get away. The words 'misinformed' and 'disappointed' emerge more than once. I've been gone all weekend with Eddy, scooting around Madura, checking out village markets and quiet beaches, old cemeteries and majestic sand dunes. Mick and Kelly had trouble just crossing the street.

Babies

Keisha took a four-month maternity leave. October 3rd, she gave birth to Keana, her first baby, a miracle birthing, a mere half hour at the clinic in Trawas, not far from her in-laws. She recounts the day’s events, nonchalantly, less ceremoniously than most mothers would, to a circle of her co-workers, cooing, eager to glimpse the adorable newborn. The one-month old girl, Keana, a tiny reddish creature with a thick mop of straight black hair seems to take after her father. Caddy remains unemployed. He sits quietly to one corner of the gathering. Keisha, bored, will return to work soon. At work she’ll complain a little, always with a good-humored shrug, how it’s never straightforward accomplishing paperwork in Indonesia. She wants to take Keana home to Prince George to meet her grandparents. Gary, who’s also married a local, shares with Keisha tales of compromise, how he has accepted several Javanese traditions and habits but how he must draw the line in certain cases. Gary is fifty, married to a woman half his age who fixes his daily tunafish sandwich, and who’s mothered his little girls, two and five years old. Each day Gary can be relied upon for a good laugh. He’s a cynical bastard and accepts life in Surabaya for what it is. He’s not here to change it but damned if he won’t see it for its often times backwardness and corrupt nature. I admire Keisha and Gary who've let go their western comforts for a simple happy life in East Java.

We’re each given the opportunity to hold Keana. I cannot hold back the tears. Gretchen smiles at me knowingly. The others do not understand. “Why are you crying?” they ask mystified. “She’s so perfect. It doesn’t seem possible what so many of us become - selfish, lying, cheating, full of anger, jealousy.” Keana’s eyes cannot yet focus. She lives in her own world. Her father is Javanese, her mother Trinidad-Canadian. Kayla will have to decide her own identity one day.

Hannah hesitates to cradle little Keana, especially after the newborn leaks onto Adeline’s lap. “Why doesn’t she wear diapers?” “She does,” Keisha defends, “but they’re cotton so they don’t always absorb it all.” A small debate ensues, the circle divided by their plastic or cotton diaper upbringing. “Well, I’m going to use plastic diapers.” Hannah’s expression is strangely self-revealing. She’s one month pregnant. Nobody in the circle attempts any interrogation. Hannah’s close friend Jonathon sits beside her quiet, smiling. Later, Hannah tells me the story, swears me to secrecy. “I won’t show for a while and I don’t want anybody in the company knowing yet.” Hannah has worked in Indonesia nearly four years, in Kalimantan, Jakarta and now here in Surabaya. She often spends a long weekend in Bali, as do several of the teachers, and has kept a relationship of sorts with a surf instructor at Kuta Beach. She did not think to marry this twenty-year old nor to have his child. A few weeks after our visit, Hannah will return to Bali, and the end of a long weekend of searching, meet the surf instructor and tell him the news. She does not expect him to support her or to father the child. A single mother, she will return to England where her parents will help provide her child a warm home and good education. Then one day she’ll return to Indonesia with her child.

Dirty Santa

Jonathon has been several years in Surabaya. Whereas present continuous explains how I’m living in Indonesia, that is, for the time being and with a foreseeable conclusion. Jonathon lives here, present simple, a permanent situation, a habit, a fact. He shares a comfortable little home with his partner, Kresna, whom I meet at their annual Christmas party. It’s not in my character to host theme parties with organized games and decorations. Jonathon’s character, encouraging, supportive and sickly sweet in a patronizing born again Baptist kind of sense, shines at such occasions. I wasn’t sure I could handle a x-mas party, a house full of bule and season cheer. Tiki lights blaze on the front lawn. The double doors are open and we enter a tiled livingroom with a nice rug and a cozy sofa and plenty of framed pictures of happy moments. A Christmas tree stands in a corner, hung with bobbles and tinsel and a few Starbucks ornaments - very disturbing. Jonathon spends too much free time at the coffee chain. A turkey that Kresna had been baking all morning in his mother’s oven sits under cellophane wrap surrounded by containers of gravy and cranberry, breadrolls and cheeses, a salad, and soon several guests arrived to fill the table with dessert platters, mashed potato, butterbeans and two bottles of wine. I meet several new teachers and Jonathon and Kresna’s network of handsome gay friends, young bankers and doctors, the crème de la crème of Surabaya. I’m quiet. I share an ocasional dirty joke with John Wayne who shares my sexual sense of humor, his told with a Tennesse drawl, but otherwise I feel absent. Jonathon has accepted an upper middle class lifestyle, emulating the Chinese minority who employ the Javanese maids and drivers, and who frequent the clubs and cafes and shops tended by the natives.

I make small talk with most of the guests. I watch 16 month old Ayola run about chasing the hosts’ little pair of yorkies. Admiring, for the sake of small talk, some woven doggy vestments. I hold one up in queery, “is this a balaclava?” John replies, "no, a Yorky." I speak with Firgil and his wife Natasha whose second is due in May. Yoke shows up and I even pull a few words from her quiet lips, ask her if she figures she’ll ever have children. Seeing Hannah and Jonathon and John Wayne who've each been in Indonesia as long as I was in Japan is like watching my circle of friends back in Hiroshima. Naturally over the course of the party I am asked how I’ve been. "Ohh, not so good actually," I sigh but make it known it's not up for discussion - definitely not at a xmas party besides.

"How do you like Surabaya?" Oh, I don’t like it, I admit with a shrug. Conversation rolls on quickly and easily. John Wayne asks me the next day at a buffet lunch what I thought of the company. I'm honest, I confess my previous jobs were much more challenging and that my resume shall look confusing with this latest experience. John speaks about his responsibilities, for the school and for the company’s corporate education, a misnomer considering its public school classes. He speaks of his three undergraduate degrees, listing them without a breath in a drawl that's still new to me. He shares with great self-importance of having graduated highschool ranked 15th in the US for trumpet or was it tuba. He attended music school in a state college under full scholarship. He had worked hard, he said, every morning between this and that hour, he underwent such and such a routine task and on and on. He concludes however that he's distanced himself from the conceited cliques who laughed off his inability to improvise Jazz music. Impersonating humility, he says to me, “I just put my lips together and blow and have an ability to roll the breath and make a nice sound.” I feel uneasy absorbing his CV, wondering what he expects me to do with the information. It’s undignified to boast of one’s acomplishments to a new aquaintance. A kernel of thought winds its way, jumps from left to right and settles quietly. Why's he insecure? “I’ve wroked in Morocco, Mexico, Warsaw, Russia and France.” To believe his story, he has learnt and is fluent in each native tongue. He proceeds to utter something unintelligable in Russian or Polish, a phrase thrift in its vowels, generous in its consonants.

I'm acting in their company, a character of myself, composed of measured quantities of specific traits, trying to pull myself from a dark withdrawn sense of loss. I’m careful not to step on anyone’s toes, behave relaxed and a little ‘gay’ but never ‘camp’. I do not bring up the topic of work and do not instigate any conflicts. Though the odd bit of gossip or snide judgement does put my back up. I have to wonder what bits of fluff they have to say to one another of me. Very curious. I tell Jonathon not to take it personally that I’ve erased him from facebook, that he’s been 'defriended' in facebook parlance. I do not share my intolerance for people who update their 'what are you doing?' every few hours. Hannah cautions me that Jonathon was upset - and Yoke too - so I'm forced to reinstate the man among my facebook contacts. It's not easy and there remains a lump in my throat trying to digest the vision of mini starbucks paper cups as xmas tree decorations; first, the very thought of their manufacture, compounded moreover, when discovering that one among us has purchased said atrocities.

Somebody posts a few pics of the party, tags my name. I hardly recognize myself. It’s not me, it’s a an empty shell. Late in the evening when most of the guests have gone, Tomm arrives. We’ve met a couple times but he works long late hours and only checks in with me sending the odd sms, ‘how are you?’ and when I respond it's like talking to myself. Back home we'd call him a player. He comments one evening - we've spent all of five hours building a friendship - or something - that I'm always angry. I mention Lambang, that he'd been dishonest with me and that I didn't want to continue his and my friendship if I was merely an ATM for him. Tomm and I sit on a sofa away from the last of the party attendees. “Tomm, I need more.” "I know. You said that before." "Well?"

Tom drives me home. “You’re leaving in what, six months, Kevin. How can I get involved with you? I will have my heart broken.” Sweet words but utter BS. In a text message I write He replies I'm being unfair, that we could have lots of fun times though not as boyfriends. I never once brought up the b word. I said I wanted to spend more time together than a once a month coffee break in a crowded shopping mall food court and a once a month shag.

Rumah Sakit

My sister read between the lines, as they say, of my travelblog of Sumatra and she understood that I’d contracted a STD. She sent an urgent message that I seek treatment before it was too late. An attached url with medical definitions warned of secondary and latent phases that might lead to blindness and other serious injuries. I ask Eddy to help lift me to the RS Internasional. I could go by taxi but I want to have a friend’s support. Perhaps because he’s never been to a hospital or perhaps because he’s nineteen and lives at home and has so few responsibilities or thoughts beyond internet sex, sibling rivalry and web design, he fails to provide the support I'd wanted.

It wasn’t his fault the doctor treated the young foreign man inhumanely. She asked him to step inside the inner office and asked to see what physical presence there was of the disease. And he was unsure how to discuss the topic. He bent over as directed. She fingered a little with her latex glove then asked the westerner to pull back up his trousers. She left the room and closed the door on him. He heard her remove her glove and wash her hands before she asked him into her main office. She didn’t say a thing. She asked if he wanted a full STD check at a cost of a week's salary. Eddy and his friend, the bule, wait in a spacious lobby until two young nurses directed them into a room to have the shot done. He asks Eddy to follow him inside. He's hesitant. Is he embarrassed? I don’t know. His foreign friend tries to explain how uneasy he feels subjecting his body, his personal history and well being to people with whom he cannot communicate. He's handed the bill, over three times what the doctor had explained. The receptionists do not care.

I snatch the receipt from the woman and storm off down the corridor and wrap at the doctor’s door. “Ma’af,” I call. I did not address her doctor. She opens the door and I lay into her, I'm shaking. She explains there was a consultation fee I had to pay. There was no consultation, I snap at her. You said nothing to me. She must have sensed my humiliation or her own awkwardness, not just the language or cultural difference. What was a female dermatologist in a Muslim country expected to do with a white homosexual male? But I make no excuses for her. Her English was fine and if she needed more explanation or needed to ask me any questions I would have provided the answers if it would have improved the prognosis. I was asked to return in the evening to collect my results. That evening, however, Eddy's unavailable. Again, I can take a cab but I want a friend’s support and I cannot think of anyone else to call upon. Eddy texts me that he's waiting for a bike. I can come pick him up, I reply. No, no need, he defends. I wait. An hour and a half later he writes he’d fallen asleep, he felt some fever and could not lift me. That afternoon he’d spoken about a bule visiting from Washington DC, spoke of how excited he was to finally meet the man after so many months of internet chat, and have the man’s big white **** inside him.

Eddy took me to the hospital the following day. My results are negative. Eddy drops me off at work. I hand him 100,000Rp which would’ve been a little more than the taxi fare for the two trips. He accepts the money, naturally. He doesn’t have an income. But I realize that Eddy and I do not share a friendship, or perhaps it’s simply a kind of friendship I’ve never forged before.

Serenity Prayer

Gretchen sent an alarming email. She wrote Teghan that she was at the end of her rope, said thanks for all her help and her friendship but that Teghan wouldn’t hear from her anymore. A nervous Teghan forwarded me her friend’s message, asked my opinion, my advice. Gretchen has suffered depression for many years, has overcome alcohol addiction, escaped troubled marriages, lost contact with her sons and learned the hard way how to cope with life’s struggles. She and Teghan had become close friends in the past year. I only met Gretchen a month or more before her contract ended.

I admired Gretchen. I enjoyed our chats. I can’t say that of many co-workers here. She volunteered at an orphanage in town, said she loved spending hours holding the babies. On one occasion she organized a trip to Taman Safari. She raved about the baby orangutang. It was paramount before she left Surabaya that she paid one more visit with the wee ball of brown fir. On another occasion after a long afternoon walk through the city markets, relaxing back at home, she’d shown me a little black book that AA members receive to help them find back some control in their lives. She’d talked about a volunteer teaching job she’d taken up in India, her travels there, including Dharamasala and her subsequent attention to her spirituality. I was shown pictures of her sons and pictures of her self a couple years earlier when she was still a body builder.

On our few visits, I found it curious to hear Gretchen comment more than once that she’d had enough of life but added faithfully that God was not yet done with her. We spoke about happiness and chemical imbalances and touched on the s word, but I didn’t suspect she was suicidal. She seemed a strong person. A week passed. Gretchen had still not answered Teghan. I emailed Gretchen, asked how her new job in Nanjing had been going. She replied the next day - thank God - that she was back in the States. The job in Nanjing was horrendous. Nobody had met her at the airport in Shanghai as planned. She’d had to figure out the trains on her own.

I’m reading a book. I’m following Sardar Singh around the Golden Temple in Amritsar. Then I’m daydreaming. I'm back in eighth grade and Rebecca’s talking to me about my mother, how she finds her, my mother, rather intimidating. We’re thirteen years old and I should be at swim practice but I’m skipping it once again. Then I’m back in this room reading. I’ve traveled the world and’ve crossed nearly two decades in less than a minute. And tears begin to well in my eyes, unexplained, woeful, a measure of my smallness, a glimpse of the world’s, of life’s unlinnear, unfathomable beauty. Time is relative. I was born yesterday and shall die tomorrow. And I find days full and empty, moving and remaining.

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Additional photos below

Photos: 37, Displayed: 35

Photos

gathering muck, Camplong, Madura
Madura is an island off the Surabaya coast with its own culture and language. It is famed for its bull races, karapan sapi.

visiting Keana
my co-workers gather to admire Keisha's newborn

Camplong, Pulau Madura
(pronounced Cham-plong)

bubur mutiara, Pamekasan
honestly i don't know what this was but it tasted delicious

Lebak, Madura
amazing beachscape

Comments

[RIRIN]

Hay u orang pamekasan y.kenalan dong.he he he....

[aadil habeb]

indonesia
slamuwalekum....pagimana kabermu semua..ensyaallah baik aja...aku aadil dary saudia arabia.....aku suka banghet si daerah madura ,,krna orang madura kay manisssssss...yang lapi aku suka daerah bangkalan, di tanjungbumi....aku suka banghet lihat madura...ensyaallah kapan kapan aklu mau main ki indonesia........

[Cak andri]

indahnyapemandangan di Desa yaaaaaaa....,.,,.......?????