Indonesia, Etc.: Exploring the Improbable Nation (12 page)

As he spoke, I noticed for the first time that there’s a specific language for different types of carnage in Sumba: buffalo and pigs are ‘slashed’ (
potong
: their throats are cut). So are chickens, if they are for the pot, though if they killed for the omens they are ‘parted’ (
belah
: split down the middle to expose their entrails). Dogs, on the other hand, are ‘beaten’ (
pukul
: actually closer to bludgeon), whatever the purpose.

It’s unlikely that the proposed marriage will be abandoned if the dog’s heart tells a sorry tale, but it does affect the price the girl will fetch. A bad omen means a possible split, and no sensible groom wants to pay too much for a woman who might go crying back to her own family. That’s a loss of property, theft almost; the groom’s side will use a telltale dog’s heart to beat the price of the girl right down.

Seizing on my interest, the men on the veranda launched into a role play of the impending battle of wills. In their make-believe negotiations, the dog’s heart speaks generously, and Pelipus demands forty head of cattle (buffalo, cows and horses). The two older men playing the groom’s side offer fifteen. Pelipus snorts in disgust. There’s no point him even responding to that. A long silence. Okay, okay, twenty, says one of the elders. ‘Right,’ says Pelipus. ‘Twenty now and the other twenty when?’ The total offer goes up to twenty-five. Pelipus mimes shaking out some sleeping mats. He invites his opponents to sleep: we’ve had a good dinner, there’s no point in discussing this any further. Let’s take a rest. What then, I ask? ‘By the morning they usually see sense.’

The guests had come and gone by the time I came back to the hamlet the next day. The sow and the piglets I has seen the previous day were still in the pen, but there were also fifteen buffalo, two cows and three horses. As per the script, a timetable had been agreed for the delivery of a further twenty beasts. Pelipus is a man to be reckoned with.

With the price of brides so high, you’d think that families would be happy to have a lot of daughters, but in fact that’s not the case. For one thing, the transaction is not as one-sided as it first appears. In this case, besides providing the omen-dog, the bride’s family had to come up with twenty women’s sarongs and twenty men’s waist-cloths (‘proper hand-woven cloth, not that market junk’). There are further obligations: bracelets of silver (or, in the best families, of ivory) and kitchen implements, plus a horse that is broken in for riding.

I knew that riding-horses were a lot more valuable than ordinary horses, the ones that are used in ritual sacrifice and cooking, but the ones that were in the pen looked much of a muchness to me. I asked the bride’s father which was the riding-horse. He pointed off to a spanking new motorbike parked near mine by the tree, all decked about in scarves and ribbons as though it were a champion steed in the ritual jousting matches that still take place every year. ‘In this village, we’re already modern,’ he said.

So selling your daughter is not all profit. And there’s something else at play too. When a woman gets married, she stops being part of her family and becomes part of her husband’s. So, automatically, do all her children. This ownership doesn’t end with her death. As I was soon to learn, corpses, funerals, burials and all the sacrifice that go with them contribute in perpetuity to the glory of a clan. The husband’s clan, in the case of a woman.

I once made the mistake of asking one of Mama Bobo’s sons if his mother would be buried in Tarung or in her native village, which is on another hill about three kilometres away. In a split second, three emotions swept over his face: confusion, then fury, then indulgence: What kind of question is that? How
dare
she? Oh, of course, she’s not really from here. And he explained as simply as he could. ‘It’s like we bought her, right? She goes in our grave.’

In the general chit-chat about marriage negotiations in Gaura, I mentioned to Pak Pelipus and co. that I had visited the area two decades earlier to watch the
pasola
, a form of jousting that has become a ritualized substitute for human sacrifice.

I pulled out my iPad, a shining jewel in the dark shadows of the veranda, and found the photo of the young Pelipus. The crowd pressed in; faces popped out of the doorway, young heads craned over old. None of these people had seen a touch screen before but within seconds Pelipus was flicking back and forth through photos of the past, zooming in and out, coming back again and again to his own image, like Narcissus staring into a puddle.

I asked how he had morphed from bold-faced eleven-year-old to elected head of Gaura village in just twenty years. He told me that he dropped out of school at about thirteen, when his parents died. ‘I turned bad. Cattle-rustling, thievery, you name it.’ It wasn’t until he got married and had a son that he began to hanker for the respectable life. ‘I dared to stand for election as village head and the people put their trust in me’.

Several of the photos elicited clucks of recognition from the older viewers, those who were already adults when the photos were taken. Flick, flick, Oh look! There’s so-and-so. Flick, flick, flick: Tsk Tsk, Hah! Remember him, he’s from Kodi! Flick, flick: a sudden deathly hush.

The picture that silenced the crowd was of a warrior with wild, curly hair and a fearsome moustache, a young man that I remember as the hero of that pasola long past. Even the children went quiet at his image; Pelipus lost his sneer. For a long moment, the scene hung.

‘Kurahaba!’ pronounced Pelipus at last. ‘He was the bravest of all.’

Kurahaba is no longer with us. He killed someone in a clan war in the mid-1990s, was jailed, and wasted away to his death. From their descriptions of the great warrior’s last months, I suspect he died of TB. But many on the veranda think his enemies put a curse on him. Curses are just another part of Sumba’s great network of exchange.

After Pelipus and his friends had explained how the marriage bargaining went in Gaura, it was my turn. What did the bride’s side have to provide in my country, the old men wanted to know. Well, the bride’s father has to pay for the party, I said. Yes, but for the dowry? I admitted that dowries were not really a feature of marriage in the West. ‘Waaaaaaah! Did you hear that?’ The current of surprise ran around the veranda and into the women’s quarters.

I joked that I wished someone had read the dog’s heart before my wedding; I might never have married at all. There’s a sigh of relief: ‘So you bludgeon dogs there too?’

And then, after much discussion: ‘But if there’s no dowry, why isn’t
everyone
divorced?’ Good question. On the one hand, these ritual exchanges create webs that tie people together and weave them much more closely into their communities than any of the sign-a-paper-and-give-a-party ceremonies of the ‘modern’ world. On the other hand the new wave of educated, urban Indonesians who make up the bulk of my pool of friends in Jakarta have a lot more freedom to choose their partners as they please, and leave them if they must. There are pros and cons to both systems, I think. It’s where they rub up against one another that things become most difficult.

Squeezed uncomfortably between these two worlds was Delsi, who lived in a witch’s house in a village perched on another outcrop that rose out of the sea of Waikabubak, this one just above the hospital. The first time I entered the village, two young boys were battling it out on the rough ground between the village graves. Their chosen weapons were turnip-shaped wooden spinning tops. The trick seemed to be in the launch: the boys both spread starfish wide, teetered back on one leg, then launched forward, only releasing the top when their arm was full-force straight. The idea is to knock the opponent’s top off kilter, so that it wobbles and falls while yours still spins proudly upright.

Dewa, the youngest of Delsi’s four siblings and the only boy, was the clear master of the tops. A charming child with a shy smile and a quiet curiosity, he coached me patiently for a while, but I am no spinner of tops. He was rescued from despair by Delsi, the eldest of his sisters. She invited me up onto the veranda for coffee, and launched into a discussion about Indonesia’s place in the world and its prospects for the future. I was not surprised to find intelligent women in a traditional village, of course. Although it is men who do most of the chanting, posturing and even public negotiating in Sumba, women run complex family economies and are responsible for ensuring that everyone fits snugly into the local cosmos. Even so, I was surprised to find someone quite as worldly as Delsi.

She and Ira, the next sister down, were both in their early twenties, both high-school teachers. Delsi played the responsible eldest sibling, discussing politics and education policy in measured tones. Ira was the good-humoured rebel, impaling each new idiocy proposed by the government on her sharp wit. They had studied in the provincial capital Kupang, a two-day boat-ride away, and they still Facebooked college friends from other islands on their cell phones.

Delsi’s family eventually provided me with a second adoptive home in West Sumba. Sometimes I’d go to the market ‘down below’ and stock up on unidentified vegetables. Then we’d squat together around the smoky cooking pot in the women’s quarters of Delsi’s house and the girls would teach me how to cook papaya flowers so that they were not too bitter. In the evenings we would sit talking of this and that while their widowed mother Mama Paulina knitted doilies and I sewed up my fraying clothes. Delsi gave me advice on the latest in Indonesian fiction – short stories, especially. Ira’s thing was music. If we were feeling lazy, we’d sit out on the veranda watching DVDs on an ageing laptop.

All over Indonesia, strangers address one another using kinship terms. The most common for a woman is
Ibu
, ‘mother’, often shortened to
Bu
– it’s also the most respectful. Regional variations are friendlier:
Mama
in the south-eastern islands,
Bunda
in the north-west. The male equivalent nationwide is
Bapak
, ‘father’, almost always shortened to
Pak
. These terms can be used alone, combined with people’s names, or even combined with their occupation. It’s fine to introduce the teacher simply as ‘
Ibu Guru
’ – Mrs Teacher. It’s very handy if, like me, you’re bad with names. Even handier: many people (especially in Java) remind you of their names constantly, because they use them instead of personal pronouns. ‘Elizabeth will come and visit Mama Bobo again tomorrow,’ I might say to my friend.

Children speaking to adults will sometimes use the familiar
Tante
and
Om
, Auntie and Uncle, a hangover from Dutch times. Adults who want to express friendship might use the terms for siblings:
Kakak
or
Adik
. These are gender-neutral – they can mean brother or sister – but they are age-specific. Kakak is elder, adik is younger; using them is freighted with judgements about the age of the person you’re speaking to. It’s slightly traumatizing at first to be called ‘elder sister’ by an old lady who looks like a shrivelled prune, but it is meant as a mark of both friendship and respect.

One evening, when Mama Paulina (who is, in fact, younger than me) called me her elder sister, I asked how much we would earn when we sold our girls. Paulina’s second daughter, Ira, twinkled: ‘A LOT!’ Apparently, adat dictates that a daughter of good family must be worth at least as much as her mother was. ‘And she – ’ Ira nodded at her mother – ‘fetched a hundred of these’. She stretched her arm out to full length and tapped her shoulder, indicating the length of those buffaloes’ horns. A hundred long-horns per daughter, and four lovely daughters. A fortune. ‘Wow, and then it will be just the two of us left in the kitchen and we’ll be two very rich old ladies!’ I said to Paulina.

We all laughed, but Delsi quickly came over all sensible. ‘Actually, it’s a real headache.’ And she was right. Because really, who wants to pay one hundred long-horned buffalo for ‘modern’ girls, girls who have studied in Kupang, who read books, who think that slaughtering buffalo is a waste of capital? And yet if they don’t pull in a bride-price, the girls will be betraying the clan which supported their expensive, modern education. That would bring shame on Mama Paulina herself.

Perhaps this is the central dilemma of modernization in collective societies: the all-encompassing security of a shared culture gets sold off in exchange for individual fulfilment.