In The Footsteps of Stamford Raffles

by Nigel Barley

  I made my way across to the old Town Hall, now a museum. The small entrance fee would put him off. From the balcony up there the Dutch judges had watched those they sentenced hanged, impaled on spikes in the hot sun, mutilated, until Raffles had put a stop to it.

  It was a heavy, ungainly building, filled with heavy, ungainly furniture.

  ‘Furnitures,’ said my guide, unhelpfully pointing. Of course, I should have known better. The guards were his friends, possibly relatives; they had let him in free.

  ‘Come,’ he said, taking my hand and leading me to a row of portraits. ‘I show you all Dutchmen. Here is Daendels, the Dutch Napoleon. He built the roads and the forts and killed 10,000 Indonesians in forced labour. Here is Janssens. I don’t know much about him. Perhaps he didn’t kill anyone.’

  ‘Minto?’ I asked. ‘His portrait was brought here with salutes before he left for India.’

  I was being unfair. He had never heard of him.

  ‘Raffles, then. No Raffles?’ His face lit up and he began pacing up and down wildly.

  ‘Raffles? Yes, yes. We keep Raffles in the cellar. Wait, wait.’ He rushed back to the desk. There was a long discussion. ‘Ah … Is problem. The director has the key. He is absent. It is not known when he will return. Yesterday was independence,’ he said reproachfully. ‘No Raffles.’

  ‘Olivia, then? Mrs Raffles. Is she in Bogor or here?’

  ‘Oh, Bogor, yes. Bogor.’

  ‘But in the thirties her grave was here in Tanah Abang. There is a photograph of it there. Isn’t it just an empty memorial in Bogor?’

  He looked around frantically. It had been a mistake to ask in front of the guards. He was embarrassed not to know.

  ‘They move her to Bogor,’ he gabbled. ‘Impossible to move whole body so they cut off her head and move that.’ Like poor Francis Xavier. One of the guards started to laugh.

  ‘Oh yes,’ I suggested insidiously. ‘There was a story that when they cut off her head she started to bleed.’

  He looked offended. ‘No,’ he objected. ‘That’s not possible. That would be silly.’

  * * *

  ‘In speaking of Mr Raffles, you will think me, perhaps, biassed by his kindness to me; but really, setting this aside, and judging impartially from what I have seen of him, and I have now seen and marked him closely for three months, I do not hesitate to say, that I think most highly of him. He is a superior character — perfectly the gentleman — of the most polished manners — and of a suavity of disposition that I have not seen exceeded. This, perhaps, is his foible; he is rather too good-natured; and as a governor, might have had a squeeze of acid mingled in his composition with advantage. He is possessed of considerable information on most subjects; and is at once the gentleman, the scholar and the man of business.’

  – G. Addison, Journal

  * * *

  When the old Tanah Abang cemetery was bulldozed, they saved a small part of it as a park, the Taman Prastasi, and shifted some of the graves there. The outside was walled round with old Dutch gravestones, deeply carved in granite with the titles of their high offices. Broken stones had been formed into a crazy paving that jumbled ages and nationalities into a symbolic expression of death’s levelling effect. Reclining, mortal figures stretched out on the cool marble and granite. One returned my smile.

  ‘Yes,’ he grinned, ‘at last the Dutch are doing the Indonesians some good.’ He turned over and I could see his back quivering with laughter at his own wit.

  The interior had been colonized by the employees, and huts had been erected among the monuments to house a flourishing domestic activity of cooking and washing. There was a cornucopia of masonry styles, solemn urns and truncated pillars, flights of steps that led nowhere, blank-faced angels - even cornucopias. One incongruous element was what I took to be a hideous plaster deer until it moved. It was real and cropping the grass. A cast-iron bishop glared down from a skewed plinth.

  ‘A tree fell on him,’ explained the gnarled guardian.

  ‘Francis Xavier,’ I thought again. But no mutilation for this bishop, protected as he was by the sterner technology of iron. Then, through the clutter of crosses, I glimpsed a familiar shape, the great square tomb of Olivia with its circle of stumpy pillars, left when the roof collapsed. Raffles had originally buried her next to Leyden – in an almost literal act of laying down one’s wife for one’s friend. I had been told he was here but there seemed to be no trace of him, the place being usurped by the grave of ‘Monster Engel’.

  ‘Leyden,’ asked the guardian. ‘Is he here? Dutch?’

  ‘No, English.’ It had never occurred to me before how much misunderstanding that would have caused in Java. ‘He was the pacar, the lover, of Raffles’ wife, so he buried her here.’

  ‘English men let their wives have lovers? Did he not beat her?’ He flashed wide-eyed amazement.

  ‘No. It was different – poetry, flowers – no sex.’ I wondered about that for a moment. How urbane had Thomas Raffles been?

  He laughed. ‘No sex? What sort of lover was that?’

  ‘It was,’ I hazarded, ‘like Bung Karno with his first wife, Utari. No sex. Kawin gantung – a “hanging” marriage.’

  ‘Like Bung Karno? Well in that case they have a list of names in the office.’

  They were all sympathy. ‘A relative? Family, maybe?’ To look for a family tomb was an honourable thing, a holy thing. It would bring much virtue. The list was long and not in any particular order. Patiently they went through it with me. There were similar names, but none quite right. It seemed he had disappeared forever beneath the bulldozers. They hugged me, offered their condolences and looked as shamefaced as though I were a freshly bereaved mourner who had seen them filching flowers from the grave. They were really very sorry.

  * * *

  The English were much amused at Dutch preoccupation with position and formality. Regulations governed the wearing of shoes and clothes and the carrying of umbrellas. When Raffles’ carriage passed, as heir to the Dutch Governor-General, all other vehicles had to stop and their occupants alight. In Sukarno’s day, some of the most bitter arguments of Indonesian intellectuals would be about whether they should wear hats and sarongs.

  The Java Government Gazette best expresses the new ethos. It is a mixture of public announcements, news from Indian and British papers, law cases, descriptions of social events, advertisements for drink, novels and slaves, execrable poetry, Irish jokes and lunatic letters.

  HAT CONCERN

  ‘A correspondent informs me that the taking off of hats upon the public road has now become the subject of dispute in the Eastward; and that even putting on one’s hat a little too soon, after taking it off, is considered as a very gross insult for which one is liable to be instantaneously brought to an account by the infliction of a dozen stripes with a horsewhip on the spot. Since, then, the taking off of hats be deemed a matter of such vast importance, and since a poor ignoramus is likely to be thus severely dealt with, for not holding his hat in his hand for a certain length of time; it would perhaps be an acceptable piece of service to the public at large, were the precise quantity of time necessary to elapse, before it is proper to put on a hat, that has once been taken off, mathematically defined and ascertained. My correspondent says that an arithmetical table should prove highly useful, in enabling the lower orders to regulate their conduct towards different ranks of Society, without the hazard of giving offence …’

  – An Enemy of Folly

  * * *

  I arrived back at the house hot and careworn. The area was awaking from its long afternoon doze. Between five and six, many people get back from work. They have a bath and begin to drift around the streets, the men changing from trousers into sarongs to mark their leisure.

  If you go up a tall building in Jakarta and look down, you see the roofs and electricity cables tangled with lots of little white squares like postage stamps. They’re not stamps, of course, but kites and, above all, this is the time for littl
e boys to gather on street corners to fly kites. They’re simple affairs, a square of plastic bag stretched over a springy bamboo frame. You can buy them anywhere for about 30p. The string is attached to two points on the frame so that by pulling it you can flex the whole thing and work the kite upwards on the slightest gust of wind. The other end of the string is rolled round a tin can. Fathers and big brothers hover around to give advice and take over in moments of stress. In Malaysia they have international kite-flying championships. In Thailand to ‘fly one’s kite’ is to masturbate, but there seems to be no need to grope for sexual symbolism here.

  It’s all a rehearsal really for the manly pleasures of blatantly phallic cock-fighting and pigeon-racing that a boy will be expected to graduate to in maturity. But you only have to look at the fathers’ faces to know that on the end of that piece of thread tied to his kite, miles away across the city, is a little boy who will never forget the glory of his moment of victory.

  For kite-flying is a serious business, men’s business. It all starts when one kite gets up above the first-floor roofs and the dangerous snagging wires to climb hundreds of feet into the evening air. It issues a silent challenge to all the other kites of Jakarta. From all over the city you see them working their way up towards it. When they are close, a fight begins. The string at the tail of the kite has been dipped in glue and rolled in crushed glass or plaited with razor blades. With experience you can pick just the right point to come up below your opponent, spin your kite with a twirl of the finger around the spot where his string must be and slash downwards. The severed kite crashes back to earth and skitters down the tiles and gutters maybe miles away – adding itself to the cosmic dandruff of the rooftops. The kites whirl and dip as each tries to get the advantage of the other, plunging down towards the houses, suddenly jerking upwards to throw off pursuit. The boys know their opponents. ‘That,’ says one, ‘is a rich part of town. That boy can afford the fancy, shop-bought thread with glass woven into it. It cuts better. It makes him more dangerous.’

  Pedestrians and vehicles dodge good-naturedly under the strings across the roads. No one complains as they would in England. When their sons are locked in battle, the fathers can hardly keep their hands off the thread. When their sons win, they whoop, hug the boys, run up and down with them laughing.

  As the sun begins to set the mosques send out their call again, one voice battling with another in the evening air. The kites are hauled down one by one, a victor over the other side of town holding on longest, savouring his triumph, dancing in the night sky.

  The Great Garden

  ‘Soon after the capture of the island, and when Lord Minto had gone to Bengal, Mr Raffles removed from Ryswick to Buitenzorg, the country residence of the former Governor, distant forty miles from Batavia and here he kept a most hospitable table. He went to Ryswick every week to attend the council, consisting of General, then Colonel, Gillespie, Commander of the forces, with Mr Muntinghe and Mr Cransen, Dutch gentlemen, who had held high situations under the former government. At Ryswick he remained a day or two, according to circumstances, and occasionally saw company there; but the climate at Buitenzorg being so far superior, he was always anxious to return, and seldom lost much time upon the road, performing the journeys in four hours. He was most attentive to members of the former government, who were constant guests at his table.’

  – T. Travers, Journal

  ‘Buitenzorg – er, Bogor – what’s the best way to get there – by train or bus?’

  ‘By taxi,’ said Agus irritatingly.

  ‘That’s a silly waste of money.’ This – surprisingly – from Beni, or perhaps Rudi. ‘I will give you a lift to the bus station. You catch a bus from there, two or three thousand rupiahs only. It takes just forty minutes. You can be back tonight. Lots of people who work in Jakarta live there. The bus station is very near the garage where I must take my car for ketok magik, “magic knocking”.’

  I waited until we were on the way.

  ‘Magic knocking?’

  ‘Yes. Do you not have it?’ He looked surprised. ‘If you have an accident and your bodywork is damaged, the best thing is to have it mended by magic. It started in Blitar. You know Blitar, Bung Karno’s village? There is much magic there. Bung Karno was full of it. Anyway, you have to be careful. In Jakarta there are many frauds, people who pretend to repair bodywork by magic, but they use big magnets to pull out the dents.’ It sounded unlikely.

  ‘What exactly happens?’ At the back of my brain, I could hear Raffles asking the same question as he strode about his new island, gathering the information he would later publish in his History of Java; information on how to make a knife, how to pattern a cloth or grow rice, how to extract poison from the upas tree. He must have been an irritating guest. He wanted to know everything. He believed everything was knowable.

  ‘Well, I will tell you what I have experienced. When you have an accident you take the car there. He is a good man, a pious Muslim, so you have to be careful what you say. It is demons who do the work. He has control over them.’ He blushed and laughed. ‘You put the car in a shed, or maybe you just cover it with a tarpaulin. Then the man prays and you hear this banging, right away. After an hour your car is repaired and it’s not like a normal garage. The paint is still good. You don’t need to paint the repair. It’s just as if nothing ever happened. But they can’t mend broken bits, lamps or glass. You have to buy a new one.’

  ‘It must be expensive.’

  ‘No! That’s the point. It’s much cheaper than going to an ordinary garage. But they give you a precise price. 2,479 rupiahs, say, and you have to pay that, not one rupiah more, not one rupiah less. You can imagine. Nowadays, you can’t easily get less than a fifty-rupiah coin, so you have to go round the antique stalls in Jalan Surabaya looking for old money. It’s a bore. Then there’s the business of the conditions.’

  ‘Conditions?’

  ‘Yeees.’ He bobbed and ducked to see round me. I shrank back in my seat, thinking I was blocking his view of the road but it was only the backside of a woman he wanted to appraise as she gyrated down the street.

  ‘Wah! Nice! There are some things you’re not allowed to do if a car’s been repaired with magic. Often, you can’t take it out on your birthday. If you do, you have an accident with exactly the same damage as before. That’s what happened here. I took it out on my birthday. Two days later – this.’ He nodded at a dent in the wing. ‘That’s why you have to be careful buying a second-hand car in Indonesia. You don’t know whether there are conditions attached to it.’

  There was a crackle of automatic gunfire. I looked out and saw soldiers, crouched in a field, firing at targets, an officer shouting at them with empty rage after the fashion of officers. One stood up and hung his head. Shame. The Malays are sensitive to shame. Raffles had noted like a proud father, and should never be humiliated. In the nineteenth century shame was an important element of the claim to full humanity. The black races, it was believed, were congenitally incapable of shame, since black skin did not allow them to blush. Malays could. They were proper people.

  We drove round a military base and up to a gate. A sign said ‘Ketok Magik’. At the end of a dirt road was a cluster of buildings with several wounded army trucks parked in front, leaning over at angles. Even the vehicles showed shame. Beni went off to find someone. On the wall were sets of ‘before’ and ‘after’ pictures showing twisted wrecks restored to wholeness by the power of magic.

  A man in a hat and a sarong came out and looked at the crumpled wing of Beni’s car. He sucked air noisily between his lips in the manner of mechanics all round the world and shook his head. In England he would have said, ‘You’re in dead trouble there, mate.’ He touched the car gently, as a doctor would a sensitive wound. A look of pain crossed his own face, a look of sympathy with the machine.

  ‘I can’t help,’ he said. ‘Look, I’ve got this contract with the army. A big truck takes a lot of prayer and army trucks are extra tough. You have to
pray harder. I’m busy all week.’

  I offered a cigarette.

  ‘Tell me about ketok magik,’ I said. ‘Who does the work? Is it demons?’

  Beni groaned and blushed. The man looked at me sharply.

  ‘I’m a good Muslim,’ he said bridling. ‘I just pray to God. I don’t know anything about demons. If God wants to use demons, that’s up to Him. But it works so it must be His will. This is genuine. I’m from Blitar, Bung Karno’s village.’

  I tried to look impressed. ‘How long would it take to mend this car?’

  He appraised carefully. ‘Maybe one hour, maybe two. It depends …’

  ‘I’d love to see it,’ I said. ‘We don’t have things like this in my country. We don’t know how to do this.’ He wavered. ‘Could you show me? I’d be really interested.’

  ‘Weeell … Let me think …’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Well …’ He rubbed his chin and blew out air. ‘No, sorry. Look, I’d like to help but there’s a truck in the shed now. I’ve got more waiting. I can’t do this till tonight. Come back then. I’ll let you see everything.’

  But when we returned that night, pockets tinkling with ancient coinage, the car was already fixed. The demons, it seemed, had knocked off early. The mechanic had gone to the mosque to recharge his divine batteries. Beni/Rudi shrugged and laughed.

  ‘These are Javanese demons. Like Javanese people, they are lazy. It is not enough to pray to them. They have to be whipped.’

  * * *

  ‘The official documents, already published, give a full, clear and satisfactory account of the zeal and ability evinced by Mr Raffles in the administration of Java, whilst few, perhaps, are aware of the application and attention which he devoted to his public duties. With a constitution already impaired by climate, everyone was astonished at the exertion and fatigue he underwent; and the Dutch, who were altogether unaccustomed to witness such activity of mind and body, were unable to keep pace with him.