Drive-by Saviours

by Chris Benjamin

  “Anyway, as for me I loved my two like they were ten, and they were both taken from me. Only one came back as a man, but that is a different story.

  “I forgive Yaty for re-marrying, and Bumi should too. I never thought he was coming back either.

  “You did what you had to do,” she said to Yaty. “But, he is back. And he is still their father. And technically, those children are children of this island.”

  “They are also children of Makassar, and Beti is a child of Toraja,” Yaty said.

  “I’m getting to Beti,” Win said through gritted teeth. Her son had chosen a lippy one. “Like I said, it is a difficult situation. Take Beti from his father, or Bunga and Baharuddin from their father?”

  “But Mathias is also their father,” Yaty said.

  “Please,” Mislam said, “let Ibu Win finish.” The other three old men and Bumi nodded.

  “Mathias has become like a father to them in some ways, so they now have two fathers,” Win said. “And I’m told maybe two fathers is better than one. Maybe two fathers is as good as a mother.”

  The men tittered and Yaty nodded.

  “Imagine if Bumi had not been there to help Baharuddin with his illness up there in Toraja. No one there seemed to know how to treat him.”

  “And here in Rilaka you know how to treat OCD?” Yaty said.

  Win looked to Bumi and spread her hands in a helpless gesture.

  “She means the dancing sickness,” Bumi said.

  She nodded and looked up at her ceiling. “We know it well,” she said. “Bumi’s grandfather and uncle both had it. Always dancing in circles, twitching so much with nervous spirits on the mind. Always paranoid about visitors, demanding to know their business.” She brought her gaze back down to Yaty. “We had to do some rituals and magic, and teach them how to ward off those kinds of spirits. They tried all kinds of medicines and eventually it was a sea plant that did it, from the corals. The uncle never lost his twitches but the medicine kept him calm, especially once we convinced him to stop fishing, stay home and be a storyteller. The grandfather mellowed with age too. I just hope the tourists don’t destroy that plant.

  “Just like in Toraja, we take care of our people here. No one goes hungry and no one suffers illness for long if we can help it. We welcome family, even mainlanders who become family. That’s how I got here. It’d be a shame to have to separate a family.”

  “Please,” Yaty said. “It is a shame, but somehow, some way, our family is going to have to be split. And if I can’t take Baharuddin, I know that his stepfather will come get him, and it will be terrible if that happens.”

  “We won’t allow you to take him,” Bumi said. He made a fist and tapped it on the kitchen table, gently, several times.

  “Don’t you want him to be with his sister and his mother?” Yaty shouted. “And his stepfather and stepbrother, they’re his family too!”

  Baharuddin chose that moment to make his presence in the doorway known. “We should all be together,” he said. “Daddy, Mommy, Sister, Brother Beti and Mr. Mathias.”

  HOW SHE WISHED THIS STRONG VERSION OF BUMI, THIS NATURAL leader, had existed before. A Bumi like that would never have had to face down the Indonesian Navy. A Bumi that strong would never have gotten himself into such trouble.

  And so she found that even she had underestimated the man, had assumed that he was strong but not quite strong enough, and that he could never get any stronger. And here he had survived the White Wilds of Canada and come back stronger, a white teacher in tow, on top of nine months in the shivering backyard of the mountains. He had faced down enemies everywhere, and come home safely.

  The worst thing about it was that his strength was backed by a mother-in-law she’d never known as a friend or ally, a mother-in-law who was rooted in an island and a people. They were all too much like Bumi, shattered and strong. They had all come through the worst storm in history and swum to a calm surface. The ordeal had made them fitter. These sixty hardy islanders wouldn’t let Baharuddin go without a fight.

  She had underestimated her love and her enemy. She had thought she was going to Rilaka on a mission of mercy, to prevent a slaughter committed by Mathias and his boys. Instead she had walked into a seductive trap. Surely island life was not as idyllic as the hype. Surely this version of Bumi was an illusion. Surely her son had not really fallen in love with his grandmother. All that cuddling and teasing and tickling had to be all for show.

  What started as a private meeting and closed-door negotiation became an all-day vigil. For six hours the islanders gathered to coax her there with cruel kindness. They smiled and shook her hand, said welcome home sister. But she had a home in the mountains, and it too was idyllic, coolness warmed by community, shelter from Makassar’s ideological tempest. If her two homes clashed it would be no unilateral slaughter. It would be a two-way bloodbath. She stood and told them she had to go back to Makassar. Robadise couldn’t know she’d been gone.

  A BOAT WAS OFFERED AND SHE PROMISED CASH, WHICH WAS accepted reluctantly. The Rilakans gathered on the beach to see her and Baharuddin go, waving them off and begging her to come again. Tears came to her eyes unbidden and unwanted. She pleaded to Bumi with her eyes.

  Bumi cried too, and gazed down at his son, who hugged his waist and also cried. Bumi kissed his boy on the hairline and said, “Please do come back and visit.”

  “I promise,” Baharuddin said.

  As the boat crossed the seaward horizon Bumi squinted through his tears to see the blurred silhouette of a small boy on a boat with his mother. Together they waved a sombre goodbye.

  BUMI DOESN’T HAVE A COMPUTER, SO HE WRITES ME REAL LETTERS. He gives me updates on Win and the old men and Michelle. He tells me she says ‘hi,’ but she never writes. He tells funny stories about wacky drunken tourists.

  The letters are gifts from another world, another time, another way of being. His stories are quaint and charming like James Herriot, exotic like Tolkien yet home-grown like Thomas King, and they make me wonder how so much of interest can happen within a few hundred square metres of sand and palm trees. His imagery depicts abstract notions of culture-clash, resistance, resilience, survival and renewal, and it inspires me to create such spaces in my own little world.

  He writes about Rilaka, the place of his birth and re-birth, while I work for Mexico, a place I’ve never been, but that somehow feels so familiar to me. He reveals a society sophisticated and humane, one that is recognizable even for those who have never been there. The moving picture he places in my mind is simple. There are no gunmen, no explosions and no miracle surgeons reconstructing celebrity faces between naked sessions with nurses, yet every word grips me, leaves me wanting for more good news. It’s hard to believe that there can be such good in the same world they show on TV — I’m always afraid that there must be a Shakespearean twist to come, in which all the characters die horribly. It hasn’t happened yet.

  Every letter ends the same: every month, just before he sits down to write to me, Bumi is visited by Yaty and their two children. Together they walk the sands of Rilaka and sit down on the far, sloping side of the island where no one ever bothered to build or settle, where the women sometimes go to escape the tourists. Arm in arm they watch the sunset while Bunga talks about her latest awards and achievements and Baharuddin shows his latest sketches.

  The image he leaves me with is the one he doesn’t mention, where Yaty and Bunga and Baharuddin return to the mainland for their long trek home with ready-made excuses for their absence, after he has waved them goodbye. He sits down in the moonlight and, inspired by the constant rhythm of the waves, writes me his latest symphony.

 

 

 
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