Among the Believers

by V. S. Naipaul

  We passed the Javanese-style house which had been shown me the previous day as the very first building of the pesantren. On the door someone had painted, in English, Ancient House. The walls were of woven-bamboo panels. In the middle of the undivided space were four wooden pillars with crossbars at the top to support the tiled roof. On three sides was a continuous bamboo platform, elegantly made: thick bamboo supports, thinner lengths of split bamboo for the platform, polished by use. Twenty-two boys slept on this platform. Against the woven-bamboo walls were many little cupboards painted in different colours. This was the original pesantren school idea: the village building where village boys came to learn Arabic and to chant the Koran after a village teacher.

  There was a lot of bedding on the bamboo platform. But what looked like a bundle of bedding in one place turned out to be a boy, and he had a white cloth wrapped around his head as a sign that he was ill. He had fallen ill the day before; the doctor was going to come that afternoon. It was unimportant.

  We stepped out again into the newer world of “interaction.” In the shade of the coconut trees they were still making beds: seven or eight men, of varying ages, sawing and planing.

  “Are you going to sell those beds? That was the impression I got yesterday.”

  “No, the beds are for us. We need a lot of beds in this place.”

  “Where did you get the money to buy the wood?”

  “That I don’t know.”

  “So these men are workmen? You pay them?”

  “They are from the village. And they are being paid.”

  “We were told yesterday that it was a cooperative venture. Taufiq said they were students and villagers and they were learning from one another.”

  The secretary was silent. We looked at the men sawing and planing. They, like busy workmen, didn’t pay us too much attention.

  Prasojo tried to save the situation. He picked up a mattock and said, “But this belongs to the pesantren, doesn’t it?”

  The secretary said absently, still thinking, “Yes.”

  I said, “What nice planes they have.”

  Prasojo said, “You would like to buy one?”

  But now the secretary was speaking. “What Taufiq meant was that some of these men had never made beds before. Perhaps they made chairs. Perhaps they built houses. They learned about making beds only when they came here. In that way they are students. I think that was what Taufiq meant.”

  Prasojo said abruptly, as though he had just worked it out, “The place is like a campus. But a campus where the students also work.”

  It was a campus, though, with a feel of the farmyard. Outside the girls’ dormitory (which Prasojo had wanted to visit the previous day) there were puddles, and in these puddles there were ducks and many ducklings. We picked our way through the mud, past the heaps of refuse, past the lines of washing. The fish pond was as green and dark as it had been before the cleaning. The Honda pump was still there, with the attached hose in the pond.

  We jumped down the wall at the back of the girls’ dormitory, and now, at this lower, dirtier level, in a farmyard smell, were village houses with village women who smiled and called out to us from the garbage that was spread about their yards and out of which their houses seemed to grow.

  “Do they work for the pesantren?”

  “They are villagers. If they have free time they work for the canteen.”

  The canteen was not far from the cow pens. The place here was full of villagers digging, cleaning, toting; and in the background was the chant of another Arabic class. The campus-turned-farmyard was now like a medieval manor farm, humming with peasant activity. And, as if called up by the thought, a line of medieval-looking villagers came in toting awkward lengths of wood.

  Prasojo, acting on his own, stopped one man. The man was broad and muscular and not young. Burdened as he was, he still had the Javanese politeness; and he told Prasojo yes, he would like to be a student. But he didn’t have the qualifications and couldn’t raise the ten-dollar-a-month fee. He earned five hundred rupiah a day, eighty cents; but he also got food.

  The Arabic chanting came from a new school building. In the verandah a group of happy, inquisitive women were stuffing mattresses with kapok, fluff from which flew dustily about.

  Prasojo talked with the secretary, and afterwards Prasojo said, “They have seventy teachers here. And they keep attendance registers, and every student has a record. The place is not unstructured at all.” Prasojo giggled. “It’s very structured.” The teachers were volunteers. At the end of their time in the pesantren they stayed for a year or two to teach; they got from eight to forty dollars a month.

  Such effort, such organization, to duplicate the village atmosphere, to teach villagers to be villagers!

  When we were going back to the office we saw Taufiq, his washing done, his plastic bucket and basins left behind. He had shed his red tee shirt and was in a fresh flowered shirt and pale-lilac trousers that were tight over his thick little thighs. His round face was closely shaved. He looked ready for the day ahead—perhaps even for meeting the minister for religious affairs. He gave us a big smile.

  He said, “The leader was expecting you to spend the night here. He personally prepared a place for you to sleep. But you went away. He was expecting you to stay for lunch. He had the boys catch the fish and everything.”

  Fish! I had thought those boys in the pond were cleaning the pond. It was what Taufiq himself had said.

  I asked whether I could get copies of the articles that had been published about the pesantren. I especially wanted the article in which Taufiq had spoken about the pesantren as “a learning community.” Taufiq said he would get me the articles, and went away.

  We waited.

  I asked the secretary, “You think he’s getting me the copies?”

  “Yes. He’s gone to the copying-room.”

  The copying-room! A modern copying machine here, where they were learning about Islam and working hard at being villagers!

  Taufiq came back with the copies, not only of the articles, but also of a letter he had just got from Australia.

  We went out into the yard again, to the car. A ragged little village boy went by, carrying an enormous green fruit on his back.

  I asked Taufiq, teasingly, “Is he a student?”

  Prasojo giggled.

  Taufiq said, “He is a villager and student.”

  Taufiq smiled. But the smile didn’t mislead me: Taufiq was speaking seriously. I was glad we were leaving, because in another five minutes Taufiq, with his high philosophical way with language, would have confused us again.

  In the car, going through the village, I looked at the letter from Australia. It was three weeks old and was from someone at a university. Had Taufiq really read the letter?

  “Dear Taufiq, Once again I must thank you for the time we spent together. It was all too short but I hope we can continue our dialogue in letters. As I reflect on my visit to you all at Pabelan I am still confused.… What is it that you would like the students to do when they leave Pabelan? … He has the skills to develop the village but what can he do for those with little or no land? What kind of Islamic principles has he learned at Pabelan to help him in this situation?… What does Islam tell you about Indonesia and what to do about poverty?”

  4

  The Rice Goddess

  And that was the problem. What message did Islam have for the villages?

  A week later I went back to Yogyakarta, to go with Umar Kayam to one of the villages below the volcano of Mount Merapi. Merapi had a long, easy slope; a wisp of vapour always hung about its cone, and sometimes the cone was lost in cloud. Lava made the earth rich. The wet soil that the men in the paddy fields ploughed deep with bullocks or lifted with mattocks was black and volcanic. The mud-walled rice fields came right up to the villages, so that from the air the villages—red tile roofs among green trees, shade in the tropical openness—had sharp, angular boundaries.

  To enter one of those
villages was to find more than shade. It was to enter an enchanted, complete world where everything—food, houses, tools, rituals, reverences—had evolved over the centuries and had reached a kind of perfection. Everything locked together, as the rice fields just outside, some no more than half an acre, fitted together.

  Every house, with concrete walls or walls of woven bamboo strips, stood in shade; and every tree had a use, including the kapok, new to me. There were many kinds of bamboo, some thick and dark, almost black, some slender and yellow with streaks of green that might have been dripped by an overcharged brush. These bamboos made beds, furniture, walls, ceilings, mats. But rice ruled. It was the food and the cause of labour; it marked the seasons. In the traditional house there was a small room at the back of the pillared main room; this small room, in the old days, was the shrine-room of the goddess Sri, Devi Sri, the rice goddess.

  Umar took me to Linus’s village, and Linus went with us. Linus was a young Yogya poet whose only income so far was from his poetry readings. Linus was a Catholic; his full name (he had an Indonesian name as well, but he didn’t use it) was Linus Agustinus. Linus’s mother was a Catholic; it was to marry her that Linus’s father had converted. They were a farming family. Linus’s father was the village headman. Since the military take-over this had become an elected post, and the headman had to see that the government’s projects were carried out—getting the farmers to plant the new rice, for instance. The headman, while he held his post, had the use of twelve acres of land; in Central Java that was a lot.

  The village was off the road to Pabelan, and Umar knew the area well. During the revolution—the war against the Dutch—the Dutch had invaded Yogyakarta, and the revolutionary army had moved out into these villages. Umar was in the students’ army at the time; they were billeted on the villagers.

  I asked, “Were you well organized?” Umar laughed at my question. “What do you think?” It had been a time of chaos; and it was hard, as it is in most places in a time of peace, to think of war in such a soft setting: such small and fragile villages, such vulnerable fields, requiring such care.

  Linus’s family house was of concrete, on low pillars, with a concrete floor. But it was of the Javanese pattern. There was a Catholic icon above the inner door. And on a wall was a leather figure from the Javanese puppet theatre: the figure of the black Krishna, not the playful god of Hindu legend, but the Krishna of Java, the wise, far-seeing man, and therefore a suitable figure for a poet’s house. In the bookcase were Linus’s books from school and the university, and also The Collected Poems of T. S. Eliot, a gift from the BBC: Linus had won second prize in a poetry competition sponsored by the BBC Indonesian Service.

  Glasses of tea with tin covers on top were brought, and a plate piled high with steaming corn on the cob, and then a plate equally laden with a kind of roll. It was the Indonesian ritual of welcome, the display of abundance. It called for a matching courtesy in the guests. No one wished to be the first to eat or drink; and it often happened that the tea, say, was drunk right at the end, when it was cold.

  One dish was brought out by one of Linus’s younger sisters, a pretty girl of ten or twelve in a frock. Then another girl, much older, came out to look at the visitors. Her face was twisted, her teeth jutted; her dress hung oddly on her. Her movements were uncoordinated, and her slippered feet dragged heavily on the smooth concrete floor. She sat on a chair in the other corner and looked at us, not saying anything; and then, after a while, she lifted herself up and went out with her dragging step.

  Some minutes later Umar said, delicately, “You may have seen that sister of Linus’s. She is not well.” She had fallen ill when she was young. They had taken her to a doctor, and the doctor’s assistant had given a wrong injection, which had damaged her nervous system. So the house of the poet, the house of the village headman, was also a house of tragedy.

  Linus’s mother arrived: the woman for whom the father had converted, and because of whom the family was Catholic. Umar got up, with a definite stoop, and did a shuffle sideways, a big man trying to make himself smaller than the small woman. And a stream of musical speech poured out of both of them before we all sat down.

  She was small and slight in the Indonesian way, and she might have passed unnoticed in the street. But now, detached from the Indonesian crowd, in her own house, and our hostess, her beauty shone; and it was possible to see the care with which she had dressed—blouse, sash, sarong (her daughters wore frocks). It was possible to see beyond the ready Indonesian smile (disquieting after a time) to her exquisite manners, and to see in this farmer’s wife the representative of a high civilization. Her face was serene and open; she held her head up, with a slight backward tilt; her bones were fine, her eyes bright, though depressed in their sockets, and her lips were perfectly shaped over her perfect teeth. Her speech—without constraint or embarrassment—always appeared to be about to turn to laughter.

  She and Umar talked for some time in this way, and it seemed they had much to say. But it was all part of the ritual of welcome, Umar told me later. They had used the polite Javanese language, which was different from the everyday language; and they had said little. Linus’s mother had said that she had had to go to the school of one of her children to get the child’s report; that was why she hadn’t been able to welcome us when we arrived. She was ashamed to welcome people as distinguished as ourselves in a place that was hardly a house, was a mere hut. And Umar had been equally apologetic about our intrusion, which was perhaps upsetting the harmony of her household. That was how it had gone on, apology answered by apology.

  One concrete thing had come out, though. Umar mentioned it afterwards, when we had left the house and were walking through the village. Linus’s mother was worried about Linus. He didn’t come to the village often; he stayed in his little house in Yogya; he wasn’t married; and he didn’t have a job. And she had a point, Umar said: Linus was twenty-eight.

  I said to Linus, “But isn’t she secretly proud that you are a poet?”

  Linus said in English, “She wouldn’t have even a sense of what being a poet is.”

  Umar said, “There is only one way Linus has of making her understand. And that is to say or suggest that he is being a poet in the classical tradition. But that would be nonsense. She would reject it as an impossibility.”

  For someone like Linus’s mother, living within an achieved civilization, poetry was something that had already been written, provided, a kind of scripture; it couldn’t be added to.

  But something was about to come up for Linus. A Yogya paper had asked him to do a cultural page, for twenty-five dollars a month. It was a short bus ride to Yogya, but the life that Linus was trying to make for himself there—poetry readings, newspapers—seemed a world away from the tight, rice-created village.

  The shady village lane twisted. The earth was lava-black, and swept. The gutters were full of racing water—without water there can be no rice. The mosque was a plain shed on low pillars: no dome, no special roof. Islam didn’t come to Java as a civilization; it came only as a faith, or a complement to the old faiths; it used what was already there. The mosque was open; inside there were a few bamboo mats, nothing else. A few steps away, at a bend in the black earth lane, was the Catholic church, a plain shed like the mosque, but with a corrugated-iron portico over the concrete steps and with a cross at the top.

  The mosque was open, as mosques should be. The church was locked. It wasn’t much of a lock, though. Linus broke a twig off a hibiscus bush, pushed the twig into the keyhole, and turned. The church was almost as bare as the mosque. It had a crucifix. High up on the walls were three small framed pictures of the stations of the cross. The glass was flyblown and cobwebby; the pictures had lost their colour and two had slipped in their mounts. The wire netting at the top of the wall, just below the eaves, was torn in many places.

  Christianity had come to Indonesia not long after Islam. It was the religion of the colonizing power; but, like Islam, it had also come to
the villages as a complement to the old faiths. And it was Islam, as the formal faith of the people, that had served Indonesian pride during the Dutch time. Not far away—the village was small and the walk was short, but it was like a walk through Javanese history—was a house with a board that said it was the office of the Muhammadiyah. This was a reforming, nationalist Indonesian Muslim movement that had started in the Dutch time; it was now said to be “conservative.”

  A small village, a short walk; and now—in this village of perishable buildings—centuries were added to history. We walked through the village to the house of the Muslim koum. Umar Kayam translated this as “elder,” and he gave me some idea of the koum’s duties. He was called in by Muslim families on important occasions—a birth, a funeral, an anniversary, or simply when a family wished to have a religious ceremony; and he performed then the salamatan ritual. This ritual had to do with the consecration of food and the distribution of the consecrated food. From my Hindu childhood I recognized the ceremony as a Hindu survival, and I thought of the Muslim koum as a kind of successor to the Hindu priest.

  It was a surprise to find him living in a hovel at the end of the village, just next to the rice fields, his house decayed, the inner room dark, junk in the verandah, the bamboo walls sagging, the whitewash turning to black some way above the black earth.

  He didn’t invite us in. He came out and stood in the front yard, on the damp black earth, in the shade of trees. He was in shorts and a white tee shirt. His wife, not introduced to us, stood in the verandah and watched. He looked more a farmer and a peasant than a priest. And it was a further surprise to learn of his other duties: as koum he washed the bodies of the Muslim dead and shrouded them for burial. In himself, then, the Muslim koum combined the ritual duties of priest and untouchable. He embodied—and in an extraordinary way, this man of ritual—what had been preserved of the Hindu system of caste.

  He was sixty-four, small, muscular, and still sturdy, his brown skin shining with sun, with only a looseness of skin around the knees to hint at his age, which showed more in his face. His cheekbones jutted like shelves; that, and a paleness of forehead and his flat hair, suggested that he wore a heavy hat while at work in the sun.