Malicious Gossip

by Khushwant Singh

The Goan waiter turned round and made a noise of appreciation. “Hey Sheelva, you know Omar Khayyam?” asked the head waiter.

  “Yes, sir,” replied De Silva, “famous restaurant in Bombay.”

  Indonesian Fortnight

  I spent fifteen days in Indonesia on a study-cum-holiday tour. Before I went there, I knew hardly anything about the country except that it was very large, consisting of over 13,000 islands, had a teeming population of whom ninety per cent were Muslims making it the largest Muslim country of the world, that it won its freedom from the Dutch in 1950 and for fifteen years was ruled by a flamboyant and compulsive womanizer, Soekarno, who had bequeathed it a legacy of corruption unmatched among developing nations. Everyone I met who had been to Indonesia assured me that I would have a wonderful time: “Lucky You! you will see the world’s prettiest girls.”

  Soekarno Hatta is Jakarta’s brand new airport and, like our Indira Gandhi International, has still to get over its newness. When we arrived its airconditioning system had collapsed. It had no fans or ventilation. At the immigration counter were eight queues with over a hundred passengers each. The one I joined, hoping it would be the fastest moving, turned out to be the slowest. The official in charge studied every passport with scholastic concentration as if he intended writing our biographies. There was only one rubber stamp between three queue-masters. In between stamping passports, he took off time to smoke and chat with his buddies who seemed to have nothing to do except ogle at new arrivals. At the same time, those who were somebody or had friends at the airport sped past us into the arms of their relations. How very much like India!

  Conditions at the Customs counters were worse. Six channels marked red were for those who had dutiable goods. I queued up at the “nothing to declare” green channel. It was the longest and the slowest moving because no declaration was accepted; every suitcase was opened and thoroughly searched. Some were told to go back to join the red channels, others blatantly asked to share what they had in excess. An Indian friend told me, “Last year I brought ten kilos of litchis from Delhi. ‘Fresh fruit not allowed in Indonesia,’ the fellow said, then added, ‘give me half and you can take the other half.’ So I gave him his share and he let me take the rest.” Customs chaps in India are known to do the same kind of thing but not as blatantly as in Jakarta or with official connivance. It took us an hour to get past the Customs barrier with nothing to declare.

  Jakarta airport is a good fifty kilometres from the city centre with American-style toll gates. The first half is a broad dual highway on which it would be hazardous to travel under 100 km per hour. It has no cycles, three-wheelers or bullock carts. The second half is through the city and usually crammed with cars and lots of traffic lights. Nevertheless, traffic moves smoothly.

  Four hours after landing we arrived at our host’s doorstep. A very genial and larger-than-life Gene Smith, who we had befriended during his seven-year tenure in Delhi, and his India-born Dalmatian bitch, Trixie. She is now a fat, maudlin, toothless, old hag of thirteen (ninety in human age). Trixie dislikes everyone except Gene and his one-time Indian servant and sets up a piteous wail of resentment.

  Our discovery of Java began next morning when we took the road to Bandung, the famous city of Panch Shila. I read names of stores and buildings we passed: Ramayana Cinema, Hotel Arjuna, Boutique Bheema, Dharma Yoga Centre, Doctor Sita, many putras and putries. Only the succession of silver-domed mosques reminded me that this was a Muslim, not a Hindu, country.

  The first few miles out of Jakarta, either side of the road, has an endless succession of nurseries interspersed with furniture shops. Thereafter, homes line either side for hundreds of miles with paddy fields, coconut palms and bananas behind them. All the way from Jakarta to Bogor, up hills with tea plantations, it is a clean, green countryside with lovely villas standing amongst beautifully kept gardens ablaze with crotons, cannas, hibiscus, bougainvillaea and mussandas.

  In my hotel room in Bandung I wrote down my first impression of Indonesia. Inevitably I compared everything I saw with things back home. And in everything Indonesia came off better than us. Food in restaurants is cheaper and tastier; rents of houses lower; not one of our broadest highways bears comparison with their roads; vehicular traffic, many times more than ours, runs smoothly without any blaring of horns. There is no litter anywhere; villages and towns are as clean as any I have seen in Europe. What I could not understand was why a country so rich in trees had no bird life except chickens feeding along the road; no crows, kites or pigeons and hardly any sparrows. Have they eaten up all their birds? Hardly any dogs either. Muslims don’t like dogs. What about the world’s most beautiful women that I had been promised I would see? On the first day they eluded me.

  “Togetherness,” replied Gene Smith in reply to my question about the dominant aspect of Indonesian character. After many years in India, Smith is now Director of the American Library of Congress in Jakarta. He continued, “You seldom see an Indonesian alone. They don’t go in for asceticism and meditation in solitude. They strive to get on with each other. Their ideal is Gotong Royang—mutual help, sharing of burdens and solidarity.”

  Mochtar Lubis, a well-known Indonesian scholar, has some very unkind things to say about his own countrymen in his booklet, Indonesian Dilemma. He starts by admitting that despite everything being wrong, Indonesians regard their country as the paradise on earth. There was once an argument among scholars over the nationality of Adam and Eve. It was clinched in favour of their being Indonesian. “They had nothing there except an apple tree and a snake; they did not even have clothes to wear and yet believed they were in paradise. Where else could they have been except in Indonesia!” The anecdote does not apply to Indonesia which lacks nothing. Everyone who has been there is of the opinion that with better (and more honest) management, it could become one of the richest countries of the world. Its land is fertile and just about every kind of fruit and vegetable grows in abundance. Unfortunately, its women are equally fertile and produce more mouths than the earth can feed. There is something about the rice-n-fish diet which makes men more randy and women more fecund.

  Lubis lists six negatives against his people: obsession with sex, hypocrisy, “buck-passing”, feudal mentality, superstition, indecisiveness, and aping others. The only positive, he acknowledges, is artistic temperament. All of Lubis’s negatives could apply equally to us Indians without the compensatory artistic quality.

  Obsession with sex, which Lubis so deprecates, seemed to me to have healthier outlets in Indonesia than we have in India. Molestation of women or “eve teasing”, as we call it, hardly exists because men and women mix as freely as they do in Western countries. Lubis quotes the popularity of the following song to prove his point:

  Where lays the forest hen her egg?

  In the roots among the rocks.

  Where do I wish to sleep?

  In the hollow between your breasts.

  That wouldn’t raise a censorious eyebrow in India: We are used to stronger meat.

  Many orientalists are of the view that Indonesia has become the most corrupt country in the world—far worse than India, Pakistan or Bangladesh. Educated, patriotic Indonesians are the first to admit the rotten state of affairs. Its leading poet, W.S. Rendra, has a poem entitled “Song of High School” about corruption in educational institutions. The poem was banned.

  The pupils are playing with their teachers’ clitoris

  How dare they;

  They dare

  Because there are no rules about anything any more.

  Everything is permitted. Everything is forbidden.

  Rendra (fifty-two) is not the best example of rectitude. Born and reared as a Catholic, he converted to Islam in order to get rid of his Christian wife and take a Muslim. He maintains a veritable harem of women. However, Rendra is as Indonesian as any Indonesian can be and as passionately against corrupt rulers as he is in his love for his country and women. To hear him recite his poems is a not-to-be-forgotten experience.
The best example of his poetic delivery is “Swan Song” in which he writes about a syphilitic prostitute, Maria Zaitun, thrown out of a brothel and a hospital, dying in the arms of her true lover, Jesus Christ. In another well-known poem, “Prostitutes of Jakarta, Unite”, he lets go against the all-pervading corruption in Indonesian society:

  The politicians and civil servants

  Are a tight bunch of pimps.

  Their congresses and conferences

  Wouldn’t go without you;

  You who must never say not

  Because of the terror of hunger

  And yoke of poverty

  And your long, futile search for work.

  Rendra is a cynic—cynicism is also a part of Indonesian character. In his “Pick-Pocket’s Advice to His Mistress”, he writes:

  Among them honour is like lipstick,

  Remember cunning above all,

  Secondly, courage

  And third, perseverance

  Fourth: resoluteness even in telling lies.

  This is how thieves live.

  Every sunset, the Indonesian TV network relays the call to prayer with words of the azaan in Arabic and the Bahasa translation superimposed on them with a succession of Indonesian scenes at twilight time. Every little village and town has its silver-domed mosques and minarets. There is seldom a day when you are not stopped by groups of boys collecting donations to build a new mosque. At the same time, every street corner has its beer bar. No women veil their faces, and just about every girl learns to sing and takes part in traditional dances. Over ninety per cent of Indonesians are officially registered as Sunni Muslims to form the world’s largest Muslim community. Nevertheless, a visitor gets the impression that Indonesian Islam is different from the Islam one encounters elsewhere. My own impression after a fortnight of travelling across Java was that the people were basically Hindus who worshipped in mosques and some bore Muslim names. Despite the resurgence of the reformist Muhammdiya, founded in 1912, and its feminist counterpart, the Aisijiya, which between them run thousands of schools, orphanages and hospitals, there is something very Hindu about the Muslims of Indonesia. The explanations for this unique brand of eclectic religion lie in its history.

  It was in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that Islam spread from Malaya into Sumatra, Java and other islands. Only Bali resisted Islamization. Even in the rest of the archipelago, Hindu mythology and epics refused to be exorcized from the minds of the people. The Mahabharat and the Ramayana were no longer sacred texts, but they were basic material which moulded Indonesians’ minds. Names like Rama, Sita, Lakshmana, Arjuna, Bhima and innumerable other characters continue to be used; so do Hindu ways of life. Devi appears as the second name of many Muslim women: Fatima Devi, Razia Devi, Aiyesha Devi. A common name for a daughter is Putri. The Hindu-Buddhist substratum is acknowledged as aadat (habit or custom).

  A puritanical movement to rid Indonesians of their non-Muslim aadats began with the introduction of steamships and larger and larger number of Muslims going on pilgrimage to Mecca. They returned home to form a body, Kaum Muda (new faction), which soon became a major force in the country. They were not fanatical propagators of blind faith (taklid buta) but of ijtihad (new interpretation) and akal (rationality). Despite opposition from the Sultans and the aristocracy, the movement, later known as the Muhammdiya, became the most powerful Islamic force in South-east Asia.

  When Indonesia became independent, it had to decide whether it would be a Muslim state (negara Islam) or a composite state of different religious cultures united into one nation (bhumreka tunggal ika). At the crucial moment, the Javanese spirit (abangah) prevailed. I was told that Sufi orders (kebatinan) flourish, but in all the thousand or so roads that I traversed, I did not come across a single dargah or a mazaar. Worship of tombs, which is an essential feature of Sufism, is totally absent in Indonesia.

  What is undoubtedly unique about Indonesian Islam is that unlike other countries which came under the sway of Islam, Indonesia did not reject its pre-Muslim past but made it an integral part of its new faith. Much of the cultural conflict and crisis of identity amongst Muslims of Pakistan, India and Bangladesh comes from their reluctance to assimilate their pre-Muslim past.

  Indians’ presence in Indonesia is as old as Indonesia. When passports and visas were first introduced, about 20,000 families resident in Indonesia were identified as Indian—the largest number being in Sumatra and of Tamilian origin, followed by Sindhis and Sikhs. Tamilians, who came as labourers, remain comparatively poor. Sindhis are largely in the textile business, Sikhs in the sports goods industry and in dairy farming. Indians can be seen all over the country with sizeable concentrations in Medan (which till recent times had a Khalsa school), Sourabaya and Jakarta, which still has a well-attended Gandhi Memorial School run by Sindhis. Jakarta has two gurdwaras shared equally by Sindhis and Sikhs.

  In the last two decades, several industrial houses, including the Birlas, Tatas, Sarabhais, Godrejs, Raymonds and Bombay Dyeing, have set up ventures producing a wide range of products—textiles, chemicals, cooking oils, rubber and dye-stuffs. The balance of trade, however, remains heavily in favour of Indonesia; we buy more than twice as much from it than it does from us. The most concrete example of Indian presence in Indonesia is the Bali Oberoi Hotel on Kuta Beach, some ten km away from Bali’s capital, Denpasar. It used to be a run-down country club before two Balinese businessmen tried to convert it into a hotel. They approached Rai Bahadur M.S. Oberoi to help them run it. The Oberois have made it into one of the most elegant and exclusive hotels in the Orient. What must once have been a wilderness by a turbulent sea has been turned into a much-sought-after luxury resort in the Orient.

  If you like them broad-nosed, high cheek-boned and sensuous-lipped, overlook their being somewhat poorly endowed with bust and bottom, a little stocky and bow-legged, then you may give praise to Allah (or Bhagwan if you are in Bali) for having created them. Not otherwise. I have seen prettier Nagas and Mizos in the same mould.

  Since I had been told that I would see the most beautiful women of the world, when I arrived in Jakarta my expectations were high and I looked for breathtaking beauty in every woman.

  By the end of my visit I was a little disappointed. Perhaps I didn’t get round enough to the right places where beauties congregate; cocktail parties, night clubs, dance halls. I did manage to have a glimpse of Jakarta’s red light areas, Jalan Krakatan and Jalan Blora. It is in the streets around here that prostitutes take the evening air and look for clients. Jakartans have charming pseudonyms for them; Kupu Kupu Kalan—butterflies of the night, or the more compassionate Wanita Tuna Susil (abbreviated to W.T.S.) for ladies lacking in decorum. The few I saw looked like a mix of Javanese, Balinese, Filipinos and half-European. The more remarkable feature of Jakarta’s night life and one which no visitor can avoid is the prevalence of homosexuality. After sunset young people clad in alluring feminine attire can be seen at many major road intersections and by traffic lights. Visitors are advised not to let down their windowpanes as these youngsters can be extremely demanding. They are transvestites known as Bunds. The few I saw were more attractive than any of the women I met and houris compared to their Indian counterparts, the hijdas, who can be as aggressive as they are unattractive.

  It would not be fair to end my Indonesian diary on this prurient note because I did in fact thoroughly enjoy myself and was most impressed with the beauty of its landscape and courtesy of its common people. I could well understand Rendra’s sentiment in comparing his mother to his motherland:

  You are Indonesia!

  You are the rain I see in the countryside

  You are the forest round the lakes

  You are the calm lotus of meditation.

  The following experience in Indonesia qualifies as the last item of this diary:

  One warm afternoon we stopped by a roadside coconut stall to slake our thirst. Indonesian coconuts have much more milk than ours and by the time we had drained them to the
dregs, our bladders were full to overflowing. We proceeded on our journey hoping to find a deserted spot by the roadside to empty them. There is no such thing as a deserted roadside in Java. As in Kerala, both sides of every road have a succession of houses, mile after endless mile. We decided to pull up at a restaurant and ask for the loo. Our ignorance of bhasa landed us in more trouble. We thought the word susu had gained international acceptance and impatiently asked for it. We were presented with glasses of iced milk—that is what susu stands for in bhasa. Ultimately, we had no choice but to get close to a wayside tree and pretend that no one was looking at us. When faced with this problem in Indonesia, I would advise you to use the other internationally accepted word pee pee.

  Polonaise

  The one and only time I went to Poland (1962), Comrade Gomulka was Secretary-General (a Marxist euphemism for ruler) of the Communist Party. He had been in the saddle four years and had another ten to go. Warsaw had been rebuilt but still smelt of sawn timber and fresh paint. The number of women over forty exceeded men by almost 2-1 and the majority of them were widows. I was told that soldiers of the Wehrmacht fancied large-sized, fleshy Polish women to help them get over battle fatigue. In the week I spent in Warsaw, I met only one diminutive, pretty, Polish lass—she was the wife of an Indian, Bakul Khole.

  Twenty years ago the Poles were a very overworked people. To rebuild their country from the rubble to which the Nazis, Russians, and the Allied bombers had reduced it, every adult worked two shifts. No one seemed to have much time for leisure or relaxation. It was twelve hours of slogging and lots of vodka tossed down in quick time. I had never seen as many drunks sprawled on the roads as I saw in Poland. Children going to school passed by them as if it was a common sight for them. There were other things that attracted the visitors’ attention. Although Comrade Gomulka and his commissars ruled the country with an iron hand, there was little enthusiasm for Communism among the common people. The most popular jokes were about the Russians and their Polish henchmen. And despite Marxist indoctrination that religion was an opiate, the people seemed to have developed a taste for laudanum by flocking to churches. On roadside shrines there were fresh flowers at the foot of crucifixes and rows of candles lit the faces of Madonnas.