Among the Believers

by V. S. Naipaul

  There were two men in the office. One of them was Taufiq. He was thirty perhaps, small, round-faced, with a tremendous constant smile, and an easy deep laugh. He denied that the office was an office. And that confused me right away, because there was a glass case with many folders.

  Taufiq then said that there was no office staff. Pesantren people took it in turn to be in the office, which was why—and this greatly amused Taufiq—to some visitors the office didn’t look like an office at all. Taufiq was in the office that morning as pesantren spokesman only because it was his turn.

  But what about continuity? Who looked after the folders in the glass case? Either Taufiq didn’t answer or I missed what he said. He introduced the other man in the office—a well-set-up young man, speaking English fluently—as a village leader, a village headman. This man wasn’t my idea of a village headman. And, trying to deal with all the puzzles Taufiq had already set me, I missed some of his explanations to Prasojo about there being no teachers in this school.

  I began to listen again when Taufiq said in his equable way, “We live at peace with nature.”

  The ecological concern rang an alarm: it sounded modern, but it had also been deemed Koranic, and for both those reasons it had been incorporated into the new Islam. And I returned fully to the conversation when Taufiq said that we were strangers, but we were welcome. We could stay for lunch, we could spend the night. It was the way of Pabelan: to be a Muslim was to serve your fellow man.

  I said, “Is that why you serve your fellow men? Some people serve their fellow men because they are their fellow men.”

  The village headman answered. “We are Muslims and we want to be good.”

  “What do you mean by good?”

  The village headman, holding himself erect, said, “Custom. Not causing offence.”

  It was a good reply, a Muslim reply: keeping to approved Muslim custom, not causing offence to Muslims.

  I said, “Is it good or bad to wear long hair?”

  Again he didn’t hesitate. “That isn’t a problem.”

  He had passed his Islamic test. He relaxed. He looked at me with a new regard. He said, “Are you an Arab?”

  “No. What makes you think that?”

  “You look like our Prophet.”

  Prasojo was outraged. “You can’t say that. Nobody knows what the Prophet looked like.”

  “Nobody knows,” the headman said, trying to steer now between blasphemy and discourtesy. “But he looks like what you would expect the Prophet to look like.”

  We looked at the map of the Indonesian archipelago on the wall. Pabelan was the centre of this map. To it ran red strings from all the districts of Indonesia—marked by drawing pins—that had sent students to the pesantren.

  Prasojo, perhaps playful, perhaps not, pointed to a very small northern island. “How did they get to hear about it up there?”

  “Let’s not talk,” Taufiq said. “Let’s go outside.”

  And leaving the headman in the office, we went out into the sandy yard. The cesspit smell, heavy in the office, lightened in the open air. Some boys and men, among them an old man with a black cap, were carpentering wooden bedsteads in the shade of a coconut tree.

  I said to Taufiq, “You say there are no teachers. Who taught them to make beds?”

  “They teach one another.”

  We went to the bed-makers. They, no doubt used to visitors, paid us no attention.

  Prasojo said, “What do you want me to ask now?”

  “Ask who pays for the wood.”

  Taufiq said, “People give us things. We sell things. We make furniture and we sell it. Some people in the village don’t even know I am with the pesantren. They think I’m a trader.” And Taufiq gave his deep little laugh; he liked the idea of the incognito, the puzzle.

  “Look,” Prasojo said. “Girls. And they’re quite pretty.”

  It was the nineteen-year-old eye. They were very young, the girls; and they were squatting in the sand around a biggish hole, picking up scraps of coconut root and dropping them into a basket. When we went to watch, they became languid, snapping off the limp pieces of coconut root delicately, without haste.

  Taufiq said, “They’re gathering fuel, to cook. It’s a cooperative.”

  Prasojo said, “How long do they spend picking up fuel?”

  “It’s Friday,” Taufiq said. “They have no classes.”

  Prasojo began to worry for the pretty girls. “You mean they spend all day?”

  Taufiq didn’t stop smiling. “It’s a cooperative.”

  But even while we watched, the girls decided to call it a day. They stood up carefully, held their little baskets of coconut twigs against their sides, and swayed away.

  The sand in places was marked with white cord: volleyball courts. But nobody was playing. Here and there mattresses were being put out in the sun on mats, to air.

  Prasojo said, “That’s the girls’ dormitory. Do you want to go and have a look?”

  I wasn’t going to let Prasojo use me as a stalking-horse. I said, “It might embarrass them.” And we moved on to look instead at a group cleaning a pond. A length of thick hose was attached to an inactive electric pump; and boys with nets stood in the scummy, dark-green water sieving out leaves and other muck. The work was being superintended by a middle-aged man.

  Taufiq said, “He’s the man who founded the pesantren. In 1962.”

  Prasojo said, “You want to talk to him?”

  I said no; I wouldn’t have known what to say to him.

  We walked around to a boys’ dormitory. It was clogged with beds and suitcases. It was a dormitory for thirty-two boys, and some of them were there, lying on their beds.

  Taufiq said to Prasojo, “That boy is famous. His brother is a singer.” He mentioned a name, and Prasojo was impressed.

  Outside another dormitory some small boys were standing beside suitcases and other bags and parcels. They had their little black caps on, and this made them look fully dressed, as though they had just arrived and were waiting to be told where to go.

  Taufiq said, “We move the younger ones around every ten days or so. For the interaction. Here it doesn’t matter whether they are Javanese or Sundanese or Sumatrans. They’re Indonesians. You see that boy?” he said to Prasojo. “He’s from Timor.” Prasojo was interested. “Which one?”

  “Timor,” Taufiq said, and laughed. “Our newest colony. Soon we’ll be colonizing Australia.”

  Prasojo said, “You mustn’t say those things.”

  I said, thinking about the boys being moved, “But suppose they don’t want to move? You say there are no teachers, that it’s all cooperative.”

  “That’s right. It’s totally unstructured.”

  “But suppose they don’t want to move?”

  “Over there,” Taufiq said, pointing beyond the trees and a couple of volleyball courts, “we have a piece of land. We use it for agriculture.”

  I forgot about the boys. I said, “How much?”

  “Two and a half hectares.”

  A new building—which would have cost money—had musical instruments. But it was Friday and no one was playing. On a board were photocopies of articles in Indonesian and English about the pesantren. Three of the articles were in English. They echoed one another, especially about the “interaction” between the school and the community, and must have been based on a handout. One of the articles mentioned Ivan Illich—it seemed hard to avoid his name in a pesantren—and suggested that the Pabelan pesantren was a perfect example of “de-schooling.”

  Taufiq and Prasojo waited while I read.

  I said, “You say it’s unstructured and there are no teachers. How long do students stay here?”

  Taufiq said, “Six years.”

  “I don’t think I am understanding what I am seeing.”

  “Look,” Prasojo said. “A wall newspaper.”

  In a rough village shed with a dirt floor, the dust thick and hum-mocked with footprints, three boys were p
utting together the wall newspaper. The items were typewritten, the margins justified right and left: which meant that somewhere in this settlement of Javanese huts and houses there was an electric typewriter and someone who could use it.

  We passed an old hut with coconut-matting walls. An old man was sitting just outside.

  “Who is he?”

  “A villager,” Taufiq said, pleased I had asked. “And that’s a villager, too. Village, school, no difference.”

  I said, “Prasojo, I believe I’m getting a cold. I think we should be going back to Yogya.”

  Taufiq didn’t try to keep me. We walked back in the direction of the office. We stopped in front of some wooden crates on battens.

  Taufiq said, “This is where we keep our rice. The villagers give us. And when they want, we give them.”

  This was Taufiq, setting me puzzles even at the end.

  When we were in the car I said to Prasojo, “I think it’s a bad school. Why go to all that trouble just to do that? Why don’t they simply build a proper school? Is anybody there getting an education? Or are they just playing at being villagers?”

  “You can’t say that. You can’t spend fifteen minutes in a place and make up your mind about it.”

  “We didn’t spend fifteen minutes.”

  “I don’t think you understood what you saw.”

  “That’s what I feel, too.”

  “People didn’t make beds at my school,” Prasojo said. “They didn’t make them and sell them. That’s a new idea.”

  I said, “I did woodwork in my school.”

  “You did?” He went silent.

  We crossed the dug-up riverbed with its litter of black lava rocks: one of the lava channels of the Mount Merapi volcano.

  I said, “Have you heard of an English writer called Charles Dickens?” I felt it as absurd, asking this as the Javanese rice fields rolled by. “Well, in 1837 or 1838 Charles Dickens wrote a novel called Nicholas Nickleby, and he described a school like that. It was run by a man called Mr. Squeers. He believed in learning by doing. Botany—go out and garden. Biology—go out and brush down the horses.”

  “I have heard of Charles Dickens, but I haven’t read Michael Nickleby.”

  “Nicholas Nickleby. I would hate to be forced to stay in a place like that.”

  “It would be criminal if you went away and wrote that. Nobody’s being forced to stay there.”

  “I didn’t mean it like that, Prasojo. I meant if I was a boy, and my parents sent me to a place like that, I would hate it.”

  I had offended him; I had strained his Javanese courtesy He believed in the pesantren system, as a Javanese system and a Muslim system. He hadn’t been to Pabelan before, and perhaps he was as puzzled as I was by what we had seen and what Taufiq had told us. But he respected the reputation of the place.

  A little later—Yogya getting near, billboards appearing—he returned to the subject, but obliquely. He said, “What would you say is the difference between education and knowledge?”

  And for the first time, thinking around that sentence of Prasojo’s, I thought I could see what Taufiq might have been trying to tell me.

  But it wasn’t the kind of discussion I liked. I said, “I don’t know if I can answer that. It is a false question. Education and knowledge aren’t always different things.”

  He pretended to understand. As we entered Yogya in the midday heat—the scooters and the smoking buses, the Dutch-style bakeries, the advertisements for Indonesian clove cigarettes, the cycle-rickshaws with their high saddles at the back (the strain of these rickshaws less on the calves than on the arms, from the pressure the rickshaw men constantly exerted to hold down the front part of their rickshaws)—as we entered Yogya, Prasojo pretended to play with what I had said.

  But when the car stopped at the hotel he couldn’t restrain himself. He said, “I didn’t want to be a guide, you know. I ditched school for a week to be with you. My teacher thought it would be a good idea for me to be with you. And it was because of that the headmaster gave his three stamps.” And unexpectedly then, with this attack, he threw in an apology. “I am sorry I took you to that batik place this morning. You didn’t ask to see batiks. It was a waste of your time.”

  I held his arm, offering in this way my own apology. And he let me hold his arm for a while, before he opened the car door.

  But wasn’t the idea of the village educational commune—if what I had heard was correct—no more than the idea of the community of low skills, an abuse of the poor?

  A little of the mystery was cleared up in the evening, when we went to a gathering at the house of Umar Kayam. Umar had been named by his parents after the Persian poet, but in Indonesia he was a name in his own right. He was a big, attractive man in his late forties, a teacher at the university in Yogyakarta and also a writer; Prasojo held him in awe. And Umar and his friends—one of whom had studied at Pabelan—took Prasojo’s side.

  They said I had misunderstood Pabelan. I had gone on the sabbath, when there were no classes; and I had been misled by language. There were teachers at Pabelan. When Taufiq had said there were no teachers he had probably only meant that there were no religious teachers, nothing like an ustad, whose word in the old days was law. Pabelan was mainly religious and Islamic, but it taught other subjects as well; it had a library and a laboratory. The attempt to establish a school like that in a village, using village resources, was new.

  I said, “But, Prasojo, didn’t Taufiq tell us there were no teachers and that the place was unstructured?”

  “Perhaps Taufiq didn’t know too much. I told you, you were being too quick to make up your mind. You are free to do that, of course. But you were too quick.”

  But wasn’t it also that at Pabelan they had told me things they thought I wanted to hear? When Taufiq and the village headman had thought I was a Muslim, possibly even an Arab, they had pushed the Muslim side. Later, assessing me differently, Taufiq had used, perhaps too loosely, modern-sounding words: “cooperatives,” “no élites,” “unstructured.” Perhaps it was only Javanese courtesy—there were Indonesians in Jakarta who cursed it—that had confounded me.

  Much of the talk at Umar Kayam’s was about the Javanese village. There was a new strain of rice. It grew twice as fast as the old and gave two crops a year. The food was necessary, but the two crops were breaking up the rhythm of the old life, interfering with the festivals and the puppet dramas that were so important to the Javanese. There were too many people, and the extended family was going: relatives were no longer called in to cut rice and get part of the crop in return. The ritualized community life Prasojo had spoken about with such feeling was breaking down. And the Islam of places like Pabelan was part of the response to this breakdown.

  PRASOJO was nervous about it, but we went back the next morning to Pabelan, to see what I had missed.

  I had missed the high gateway at the entrance to the village lane, the welcome sign. The coconut trees and the red-flowered royal poinciana trees and the tiled roofs of the school compound made a more picturesque impression. There were fewer students about. The porch of the mosque building was empty. Through an open door at the back of the office I saw some girls sewing. They said they were making a welcome banner for the minister for religious affairs, who was due that day. Then they giggled and ran.

  The man in the office that morning, as secretary and spokesman, was smaller than Taufiq and wore a black cap. I felt that he, too, was going to confuse me. We could hear an Arabic class going on, young girls chanting responses to a teacher, but the man in the office said that classes hadn’t started. I asked whether the students were in the fields. It was a provocative question, but he gave a serious reply. He said the students went to the fields in the afternoon. I asked where Taufiq was.

  “He is washing.”

  “Bathing?”

  “He is washing clothes.”

  “Does he wash a lot of clothes?”

  “He washes a lot.”

  It seem
ed the kind of thing Taufiq would like to do in the pesantren. I said, “I want to go and see Taufiq doing his washing.”

  We walked around to a lane at the back. A concrete gutter discharged dirty water from a house into a sodden black ditch.

  “What is that?”

  The office secretary said, as though it was an English-vocabulary test, “A water channel, a canal.”

  “Is it a school building?”

  “It belongs to a villager.”

  Next to that was a row of concrete bathrooms, and in front of the bathrooms was a series of open, half-walled washing places. In the lane between bathrooms and washing places I saw Taufiq with a red plastic bucket: Taufiq plump-cheeked and as merry as ever.

  He said, “Good morning. How nice to see you again. I knew you would come back. But you must excuse me now. I have to do some washing.”

  Just beyond the bathrooms some boys were cutting the hair of other boys. One boy of eighteen, with a towel over his shoulders, was waiting to get his hair cut. He came from Sumatra and was going back to his village soon. He said he intended to do good for the village. This was correct and polite; but I wanted something more specific. He thought and said he was going to be a teacher. He couldn’t say more.

  Prasojo and I and the secretary turned back. We saw Taufiq again, just his head and shoulders above the concrete wall of a washing place. He was in a red tee shirt. He gave us his smile and said, “I am doing my washing.”

  I asked the secretary, “Does he do a lot of washing?”

  The secretary understood the drift of my question. He said, “It’s his own clothes he is washing.”

  We came to the new building where the girls were chanting Arabic. Their tight head-covers, denying them hair, gave them all blank Mongoloid faces. The class was almost over; the teacher was stacking up copybooks. It sounded as though every line of this last part of the girls’ chant began with Allah, but Prasojo said this was wrong.

  I said to the secretary, “Taufiq told me yesterday there were no teachers here.”

  The secretary talked in Indonesian to Prasojo as we walked. Prasojo translated. “What Taufiq meant was that he was a teacher, but at the same time he learned from others, people like the leader. So he was also a student.”