The Tropical Sun - Belief, Love and Hate

by J. S. Philippe

  ~~~~~

  Harta realised that he might be able to slip away from the village for a good part of the day without being noticed. He knew his brothers wouldn’t knowingly let him go anywhere near the Bahoi village, so he devised a plan of action. First he needed to build up a stock of goodwill by investing lots of time helping with the big boat, without being asked.

  “Harta.. The lower boat deck is just about finished now,” Praba commented finally. “You’ve worked really well on it.”

  “I could try something different tomorrow,” he responded with diffidence. “Maybe I could catch fish.”

  “Alright,” replied Praba, impressed at the apparent change of attitude. “You’ve earned a break.”

  At first light the next day Harta prepared the morning sarapan for Melati and his mother. As his sister came out onto the porch, Harta informed her casually:

  “I’ve already eaten – I’m going fishing today.”

  “Have you asked?”

  “Praba says it’s alright,” he answered with a smile, picking up some fishing gear.

  His sister smiled her acceptance at him, before going back into the house to help their mother. Harta picked up some more gear from their kitchen and carried it all down to the smallest fishing boat. Paddling the boat out and around the edge of the mangroves he headed northwards. That was easy enough, he thought to himself.

  He kept paddling until he was well out of sight and then paused. Recently he had collected a lot of snake poison which he had mixed with Antiaris seed juice. Using some arrows with very sharp stone points bound tightly into the shaft, he made sure the poisonous sticky syrup was well soaked into the binding and behind the ‘V’ of the tip; if the arrow penetrated a crocodile’s scaly hide, he wanted to make sure the poison was not wiped off in the process. The tip of the needle-sharp point itself he carefully wiped clean of the poison in case he accidentally scratched himself. Straightening each feathered flight with his thumb and fingers, he placed the arrows strategically in the pouch hung inside the hull.

  After scanning the glittering blue bay waters and seeing no other boats, Harta started his journey into the mangroves, dark, rank-smelling and crocodile-infested. Many times in his mind’s eye he had rehearsed the route he would take and this was the part he found most daunting. He feared that some lurking monster would decide to attack the hull or the bamboo outriggers, tipping him into its deadly jaws.

  It was already building into a viscous heat when he reached the nipa palms. Downing freshwater and honeycomb, he prepared himself. In the small rattan backpack he carried a water container, more honeycomb, the bamboo whistle, twine and a sharp stone edge. Over his shoulder he wore his favourite bow and a quiver of the straightest, sharpest arrows he could make. At his waist he carried the pig-skin purse of poison and two bone daggers. In the boat he hid the second spear, his big bow, crocodile arrows, water containers, and his unused fishing gear.

  On dry land he came to the small coastal path, but this would be too obvious and dangerous to use if he wanted to sneak up close to Bahoi. After waiting still in the vegetation for a short while, listening and watching, Harta silently crossed the path up into higher, densely wooded land - taking care to leave no trail.

  By early-morning he had reached the tall strangler fig tree, and slipped his agile body though a narrow gap in the sprawling trunk. The original tree which the fig’s tendrils had smothered in its wooden embrace had long since rotted away, leaving a hollow centre housing all kinds of plant and animal life. Watching out for venomous creatures he climbed carefully upwards. Leaving his back pack and other gear in a cranny, he kept climbing. High up, through a small gap he now had an overview of the Bahoi village.

  He had been here before, but this time he was planning something different. He was trying to memorise the entire layout of the village - including the best entrance and exit points. He wondered what his older brothers would be telling him now? Was he crazy? Alone in the tree right now he felt the need for some brotherly guidance, and started a mental dialogue to help him focus.

  ‘I’m going over the river by that fallen tree – then through those rushes above the path.’

  ‘Watch out for crocodiles and snakes, little brother!’

  ‘Can I take my spear?’

  ‘Hide it and your backpack before you get to the village.’

  By mid-day, when the scorching sun was overhead, Harta had hidden himself in the partial shade between three large granite boulders over which scrambled a white jasmine vine just back from the beach next to the Bahoi village. On this beach, between some slanting coconut palms, the Javanese tribe kept their fishing boats. He had used every stalking technique he had been taught, and he felt as if he had just invented a couple more. His heart pounded and his mind raced with the exhilaration. Now he was close enough to see people clearly and even hear conversations!

  Harta’s Javanese had improved since Eko’s family had joined Likupang. A solidly built, young man of average height with thick curly hair was talking:

  “Kepengin iku rampung sadurunge nemu maneh.” - “He wants it finished before he gets back.”

  The young woman crouched on the ground worked on a fishing net. She had black hair about shoulder length and was quite pretty thought Harta. In an exasperated voice she replied to the man watching her:

  “He expects everything done before he gets back.”

  The man who had been leaning against a tree facing away from Harta, stepped over to one of the boats and bent over to look inside. Harta saw he had black stubble. He had a stern look about him partly because Harta noticed that most of the man’s right ear was missing. Harta wondered if his ear had been cut off in a fight. Wrapped around his waist was a grey-coloured kain cloth to which was attached a scabbard holding a dagger.

  “I’ll find a piece of wood,” he said, walking off towards the village buildings which were about thirty paces away, shouting back as an afterthought: “Aissa will help – I’ll get her.”

  Harta watched silently, as the woman carried on working and the man disappeared from sight behind a house. He looked around his position. For some reason, only now did he feel fear. Perhaps it was the act of overhearing a private conversation that made the people in Bahoi seem real. Indeed, it had finally dawned on him that if he was discovered the outcome would be disastrous, putting his family back in Likupang in great danger. He felt a cold sweat break out over his body as he realised how difficult it would now be to leave undetected.

  His thoughts were dramatically interrupted by the appearance of the girl he had seen before – the girl he had been thinking about so often and for so long. There she was walking in the same tattered sarong. Her long hair fell idly around her shoulders as she sidled along in a carefree manner towards the woman mending the nets. The day seemed airless. She was older than Sukma; he could tell from the sweet swell of her breasts and the way she walked.

  “Your brother wants these nets mended and the hole in that boat fixed,” said the woman. “Before he gets back.”

  “He demands too much from you,” said the girl called Aissa, as she knelt down on the sand in the shade of the trees and put her hand lightly on the young woman’s leg. “Father lets him get away with it.”

  To Harta, the girl’s voice sounded musical. He watched her intensely, studying her expressions and mannerisms, seeing the way she turned her eyes and raised her eyebrows. Her nose and mouth were uniquely pleasant, of a shape and manner he had never seen before, but yet of an indefinable rightness and familiarity. To Harta, she was a girl of mystery and magic. His earlier thoughts of danger were submerged, as he watched this new person named ‘Aissa’ that, unbeknown to her, so affected his life. She was so close and yet so far; there was so much he could never know about her. Maybe she was already a bride or promised in marriage?

  These thoughts were instantly overcome by the arrival of two men: the solidly built, youngish man and the tall one with a thick black beard, also with a knife-sheath attached to
a layered kain cloth around his waist and upper legs. Harta’s instant thought was for his bow and poisoned arrows. With consumate efficiency borne from years of practise, his hands smoothly and silently reached for the poison purse to dip an arrow head, then he nocked the back of the arrow onto the bowstring, pulling it back as it was raised. This close he would be sure of a hit - the choice was where on the body?

  The bearded man was now standing with his back to Harta, looking down on the woman and girl working on the fishing net. He dropped a short length of wood on the ground.

  “When you’ve finished that – use this for the boat,” he told them in dense Javanese.

  The girl called Aissa looked up at him.

  Burning with hatred and craving for revenge, Harta aimed.

  “The net will take both of us the rest of the day,” she said with a lilt of impudence in her voice. “Can’t you fix the boat, big brother?”

  An argument started. The man and the girl shouted at each other.

  Harta couldn’t comprehend what was said. His mind had burst into confusion and doubt. The loathing he felt towards the bearded man had been overcome by something far more fearsome. Harta lowered his bow. Madness! I must be mad! I will be murdering this man in cold blood - in front of his sister! And then what would happen?! They would surely catch me and kill me - and then go and kill my family! Rukma had told me that! Why didn’t I listen?!

  He blinked back the sweat that ran into his eyes, agonising at his own stupidity. Trembling with horror at what could have happened, Harta fought the demons in his spirit and put the arrow back into his quiver.

  Once he had regained his composure he was able to observe that now the two men were trying to plug the hole in the boat with the piece of wood. They used a short-bladed knife to whittle away at the wood until it fitted, and then started banging the wood into the hole. Harta looked again at the girl, Aissa, who was still kneeling on the ground apparently none-the-worse for the argument. He watched as she carried on calmly mending the net.

  After the men finished the repair they both walked back into the village, leaving the girl and woman on their own again. The young woman spoke with her head down:

  “Aissa, please be careful,” she said mornfully. “If I spoke to them like that I’d be beaten so badly I couldn’t walk.. It will happen to you one day.”

  Getting lightly to her feet, the girl replied nonchalantly:

  “He’s too scared of father.”

  She performed a skipping walk that took her much closer to Harta’s hiding place. She casually reached up to break off a stem of the jasmine vine. The act of pulling the stem to break it caused some of the riper jasmine flowers to fall down around her and land as white snowflakes on her black hair. Harta stood motionless, pinned against a boulder in the shade. The hot air seemed difficult to breath. He looked at her through the bees that buzzed harmlessly around the blooming jasmine vine. In the shade of the vine, she smelt a perfumed flower and turned to pull off another stem, and froze.

  In that desperate moment as they stared at each other, he put his trembling forefinger to his lips, silently pleading with her to stay quiet. His other trembling hand accidentally moved the vine causing more white flowers to fall. She breathed in and started to open her mouth as if to scream, but hesitated as the delicate flowers gently floated down between them.

  Slowly her lips pursed together and her eyes quizzed him as if to say ‘Who are you?!’

  Her response brought tears of relief and he tried to mouth his name, ‘Harta’. She stared as if in utter disbelief, first at his face, and then her eyes scanned his form, outlined in the dappled shade against the grey granite boulder behind him. Her eyes returned to stare again at his face. She had seen his weapons, but seemed to assess that he was no threat to her.

  She turned her head away briefly to look at her companion still seated on the ground mending the net, and then glanced towards the village before looking at him again. After another lengthy moment, she whispered urgently:

  “Pindhah!” – “Go!”

  Understanding her meaning, he nodded. Slipping sideways, he quickly backed out between two of the boulders and they lost sight of each other. Now he was back in the rushes above the path. Making as much haste as he dared, he retraced his route back to the crossing of the river behind the fallen tree, all the time expecting pursuit or a hail of arrows – but nothing happened.

  Back at the base of the strangler fig he paused for breath in the undergrowth, listening. He was tempted to climb the tree to look back at the village, and to look back at Aissa. But that would be tempting the generosity of the spirits; they had already granted him and his family the blessing of an escape. The encounter had already been seared into his consciousness.

  Picking his way back towards his boat hidden in the nipa palms, Harta reflected on the crisis. Truely only Aissa had granted the blessing. She could easily have called out - yet she chose to set free an armed stranger! Anxiety gnawed at him and he prayed that she would keep their secret; he knew that this would be her decision and there was nothing he could do about it now. But at least there was one thing he could do; he determined to find a piece of fabric on which to draw a map when he got back to Likupang.

  It was mid afternoon when he reached the boat and started to paddle out of the channel. The water level was lower and the passage more difficult. Several grinning crocodiles lurked on the mudflats and a couple slid into the murky waters as he passed. Gritting his teeth, he kept up a steady careful stroke. He eyed the outriggers on each side as they trailed through the water, half-expecting at any time the bamboo to be clamped in monstrous jaws. He glanced at his bow and poisoned arrows, and then again at the outriggers.

  Eventually he arrived at the widening exit to the broad bay waters as the watching sun neared the horizon. Before setting off back to Likupang he turned the boat around, looking back into the channel where a large crocodile was still visible on a mud bank. He wanted to know something.

  Picking up his bow Harta loaded and took aim, releasing a large stone-tipped poisoned arrow which flew straight and true, lodging cleanly into the neck. The beast hissed, rose on its squat legs and made for the water. Harta sent another arrow on its way which struck the sweeping tail just as it splashed out of sight. He loaded a third arrow but there was nothing to aim at.

  The water surface was hardly disturbed. He waited.

  On the surface a ripple started, until a scaly tail broke out and slapped back in. A short while later began the thrashing. At first it looked like one crocodile rolling and ripping, but then he saw at least two scaly tails break the surface as the foaming waters turned red. In revulsion, he launched his third arrow into the middle of the carnage.

  Harta paddled past the mangroves near Likupang where he could see his mother and Melati standing on the beach, waiting. His brothers were preparing a boat to launch. They all stared at him and he knew a punishment was inevitable. He had no fish. They had trusted him and he had deceived them.

  He must confess to his deceit – but only that he had gone to climb the strangler fig tree. He could never tell them about Aissa! Leaving all his gear in the boat, Harta stepped out onto the pebbled beach at low tide with the setting sun behind him, and walked meekly towards his family.