Further to the West
The translation of Budiarto Danujaya’s Indonesian short story “Semakin dan Semakin ke Barat” by Tjahaja.
That man was my childhood. A sun-drenched childhood in the dry rice paddies of the passing bird season, when a mosaic of earthen cracks boiled bodily fluids through the soles of our bare feet-me, my little brother, and his children. A childhood drenched in sweat because of connecting, tying, and sticking bamboo poles a dozen meters high to anchor bird-catching nets. I spent my childhood running back and forth to ward off gulls, terns, chickens, grouse, and the occasional heron or white heron in the late afternoon, so that they would turn and fly into the tens of meters of net we had stretched along the rice paddies. (Well, the heads of those unlucky birds were stuck in the net up to the neck, floundering around in vain trying to escape, until finally, with a faint gasp, they hung like a shuttlecock stuck deep in the net after being smashed by the famous King Smash.)
Forty years ago, the Kapuk area was still a stretch of fields, rain-fed rice paddies, ponds, swamps and scrub on the outskirts of Jakarta, the very edge of the city. Interspersed between the wide, open expanses were small villages of mixed or entirely Betawi communities. In the bamboo hut directly opposite my house, a burly man as tall as a door…
