The Rainbow Troops

by Andrea Hirata

  Lintang's father had thought his son would give up within the first few weeks, but he was proven wrong. Day by day, Lintang's enthusiasm didn't fade, but rather it skyrocketed—he really loved school and his classmates, and he began to be addicted to unlocking the secrets of knowledge. When he arrived home, he didn't rest; he joined the other village children his age to work as copra coolies. That was the price he paid for the "privilege" of schooling.

  His father now thought of the decision to send Lintang to school as the right one. If nothing else, he was happy to see his son's bubbling enthusiasm. He hoped that one day Lintang could send his five younger siblings—each born one year after the other—to school and also free them from the cycle of poverty. So, as hard as he could, he supported Lintang's education in his own way, to the best of his ability.

  When Lintang was in first grade, he once asked his father for help with a homework question about simple multiplication. "Come here, Father. How much is four times four?"

  His illiterate father paced back and forth. He gazed wistfully through the window at the wide South China Sea, thinking very hard. When Lintang wasn't looking, he quietly snuck out the back door and ran like the wind, cutting through the tall grass. The pine tree man ran at top speed as swift as a deer to ask for help from people at the village office. Not much later, like a flash of lightning, he slipped back into the house and was suddenly standing attentively before his son.

  "Fffooh ... fffooh ... fourteen, son, no doubt about it, no more, no less," he answered while panting to catch his breath, but wearing a wide smile full of pride.

  Lintang stared deep into his father's eyes. He felt a pang in his heart, a pang that made him make a promise to himself, I have to be an intelligent person. Lintang knew that answer didn't come from his father.

  His father had even misquoted the answer he had gotten from village office's employee. Sixteen should have been his answer, but his father could only remember the number 14—the amount of mouths he was responsible for feeding every day.

  From that day on, Lintang's enthusiasm for school burned even more intensely. Because his body was too small for his big bicycle, he couldn't sit on the saddle. Instead, he sat on the bar that connects the saddle to the handlebars. The tips of his toes barely reached the pedals. Every day he moved slowly and bounced up and down greatly over the steel bar as he bit his lip to gather his strength to fight the wind.

  Lintang's house was on the edge of the sea. The house was a shack on stilts, in case the sea rose too high. The roof was made of sago palm leaves and the walls were meranti tree bark. Anything happening in the shack could be seen from outside because the bark walls were already dozens of years old and were cracked and broken like mud in the dry season. Inside, it was a long and narrow space with two doors, one in the front and one in the back. None of the windows or doors locked. They tied the frames shut at night with cheap twine.

  Both Lintang's maternal and paternal grandparents lived with them. Their skin was so wrinkly you could grab it in handfuls. Each day, the four grandparents bent over a winnowing tray to pick maggots out of their third-class rice, the only kind they could afford. They spent hours on that arduous task—the rice was that putrid.

  There were also Lintang's father's two younger brothers: a young man who wandered around all day because he was mentally ill, and an obsolete laborer unable to work because he suffered from inflamed testicles—a result of a nutrition deficiency. With these people, plus Lintang, Lintang's five little sisters and his mother, the long, narrow house was very crowded. There were 14 people total, and all of them relied on Lintang's father.

  Each day Lintang's father waited for neighbors with boats or skippers to give him work. He didn't get a percentage of the catch but was paid based on his physical strength. He was a man making a living by selling his bodily power.

  Lintang could only study late at night. Because the house was so crowded, it was difficult to find an empty space, and they had to share the oil lantern. However, once he grasped the book, his mind escaped the cracks of the leaning bark walls. Studying was entertainment that made him forget life's hardships. For him, books were like water from a sacred well in Mecca's mosque, renewing his strength to pedal against the wind day after day. He immersed himself in each sentence he read. He was seduced by the eloquent writings of scholars. He recognized the hidden meanings in formulas that didn't register with others.

  Then on one magical night, under the twilight of the oil lamp and accompanied by the waves of the tide, Lintang's thin fingers paged through a photocopied version of an archaic book titled Astronomy and Geometry. All at once, he was immersed in the defiant words of Galileo against Aristotle's cosmology. He was entranced by the crazy ideas of the ancient astronomers who wanted to measure the distance from the earth to Andromeda and the Triangulum's nebulas. He gasped when he found out that gravity can bend light. He was amazed by the roving objects of the skies in the dark corners of the universe that may have only been visited by the thoughts of Nicolaus Copernicus.

  When he reached the chapters on geometry, Lintang smiled cheerfully because his logic so easily followed mathematical simulations of various dimensions and space. He quickly mastered the extraordinarily complicated tetrahedral decomposition, direction axioms and the Pythagorean theorems. This material was way beyond his age and education, but he mused over the fascinating information. He contemplated the information in the dim circle of light provided by the oil lamp, and right at that moment, in the dead of the night, his contemplation exploded and he observed something magical happening on the old pages in front of his face. Each number and letter squirmed about and then lit up, transforming into fireflies buzzing around him and then penetrating his mind. He had no idea that at that moment the spirits of the pioneers of geometry were grinning at him. Copernicus, Lucretius and Isaac Newton were sitting down beside him. In a very small, narrow shack of a very poor Malay family on the edge of nowhere far off on the seashore, a natural genius was born.

  The next day at school, Lintang was puzzled to see us confused about a three-digit coordinate exercise.

  What are these village kids so confused about? said the voice in his heart.

  Just as stupidity often goes unrealized, some people are often unaware that they have been chosen, destined by God to be betrothed to knowledge.

  Chapter 10

  Twice a Hero

  NOW, THIS happened during the month of August—always a bad news month.

  One problem after another struck our school. For years, financial difficulty was our constant companion, day in and day out. Plus, people always assumed our school would collapse within a matter of weeks.

  However, we were able to hold on, thanks to the winds of determination blown our way every day by Bu Mus and Pak Harfan. We came to see school as the best thing that could have happened to us—it was much better than becoming coolies, coconut graters, shepherds, pepper pickers or shop guards.

  The difficulties came in waves, but we never took even one step back—in fact we became more immune. We were living proof of the proverb "What doesn't kill you will only make you stronger." And while our class still had only ten students, after a few years of no new enrollees, we finally had some underclassmen—their numbers were small, but there they were.

  Yet there was no ordeal as difficult as this one.

  An old DKW motorbike with a sputtering exhaust pipe slid toward our school. Uh-oh. He's here again.

  The driver of the DKW was an older man with thick glasses and a tiny body, his forehead broad and shiny. The pulsing veins on his brow gave the impression that he often forced his agenda upon others. The fact is, people who are used to reproaching others usually lose their grasp on good manners. He was famous for his inability to compromise. One word from his mouth and an entire school could be shut down. As easy as a snap of his fingers, a school principal could be fired, a teacher could be kept from being promoted until the day of his or her retirement, or a teacher he disliked could be
exiled to an isolated island—one that didn't even appear on maps—to teach primitive children and short-tailed macaques. The sight of his glasses made all the teachers in Belitong tremble. He was, none other than Mister Samadikun—the School Superintendent.

  Previously, we managed to slip through Mister Samadikun's fingers when Harun saved us the first day by becoming our tenth student. Mister Samadikun was not happy when that happened.

  The truth is, Mister Samadikun had wanted to shut down our school for quite some time now—it was troublesome extra work for the officials in the administration office of the Department of Education and Culture. Those officials repeatedly pushed for our school to be banished from the face of this earth. Mister Samadikun himself once bragged to his superior, "Ah, let me take care of the Muhammadiyah school problem. With one kick I could bring them down. I wouldn't even have to do that—a strong wind could finish off the school. In no time at all, it'd be flattened to the ground."

  In my fantasy, after those arrogant statements, Mister Samadikun and the highlevel education authorities made a toast, clinking each other's glasses filled with sugar palm milk. Sugar palm milk usually came as a bribe from teachers who wanted to be promoted to principal or transferred out of isolated areas, or for their school to be deemed a model school.

  So Mister Samadikun created an elegant and diplomatic condition to shut down our school. The condition was ten students, a condition dramatically fulfilled by Harun at the last minute. Mister Samadikun was extremely irked by our school, and especially by Harun.

  He wasn't just irked by us because of the pressure from his higher-ups. He was personally responsible for making sure we took our exams at another school because they considered our school incapable of administering its own examinations. In other words, we were extra work for him. He also was unhappy with us because we didn't have any awards. In today's competitive education system, schools like ours could render the entire system inefficient. In that case, Mister Samadikun was right. But doesn't the future belong to God?

  Bu Mus was as white as a ghost when Mister Samadikun arrived for the surprise school inspection. To make matters worse, she was by herself. Pak Harfan had been out sick for the past month. The traditional healer said he was sick because his lungs inhaled low-quality chalk dust for dozens of years.

  Mister Samadikun peeked into the classroom. As soon as he saw the completely empty glass display case, a belittling expression came across his face, as he was used to seeing achievement trophies in the display cases at other schools.

  Because she was so nervous, Bu Mus made a fatal mistake before anything else even happened. "Please come in, Pak," she said politely.

  Mister Samadikun glared at her and snapped, "Call me Mister!"

  It was common knowledge: He didn't want to be called Pak Samadikun. Maybe it was an influence from his Dutch teachers, or perhaps it was to maintain his authoritative image, whatever the reason was, one thing was clear: he wanted to be called Mister.

  Mister Samadikun took out the facility inspection form. He sneered and shook his head repeatedly to make his disappointment known. In the column for chalkboard and furniture he was forced to add a new choice: below E) Bad, he added F) Extremely Bad. In the column for national symbols—photos of the President and VicePresident and the Garuda Pancasila state symbol—and the columns for first aid kit and visual aids, he was forced to create an additional choice once again—this time it was: F) Nonexistent. In the toilet and lighting facilities column, he added F) Natural.

  And then came the column for student conditions. He drew a long, deep breath and looked at us—most of who were not wearing shoes and wore grubby clothes missing buttons. Mahar's shirt was completely buttonless. Mister Samadikun stopped dead in his tracks when he saw Lintang and me wearing slingshots around our necks, and tsk-tsked in an upset manner at the sight of guava fruit stains all over Kucai's shirt. Therefore, in the columns for condition and completeness of students, the choice F) Extremely Bad wasn't sufficient enough to describe us. He added yet another choice of his own: G) Pathetic.

  Mister Samadikun asked, "Who has a calculator, compass and crayons?"

  Not one of us answered. Mahar looked at me and raised his eyebrows. We were already in fifth grade and we didn't even know what those things were.

  Mister Samadikun turned to Bu Mus. "Bu Mus! I have never seen a classroom as appalling as this. You call this a school?! This place is no different than a livestock pen!"

  Backed into a corner, Bu Mus became even paler.

  "Your children look like mouse deer hunters, not students!"

  Bu Mus took the insult, but it was clear that it did nothing to diminish her pride in us.

  "There's no other choice, this school must be closed!"

  Bu Mus was shocked. She could sit back and take the insults, but there was no way she would let her school be shut down.

  "Impossible, Mister. We've been studying here for five years."

  Bu Mus was truly courageous. Never before had a teacher been brave enough to challenge Mister Samadikun.

  "What about these village children?" Bu Mus continued.

  Mister Samadikun was furious. "That's your problem, not mine! Move them to other schools."

  "Other schools? The closest public school is all the way in Tanjong Pandan. It's impossible to separate these small children from their parents. They can't afford to go to school there. The PN school is nearby, but they are not willing to accept children this poor."

  Mister Samadikun got all worked up, his chest huffing and puffing. It was as though he was going to blow up at the daring words coming from Bu Mus' loose mouth. On the other hand, Bu Mus' attitude showed that she was willing to sacrifice anything for the sake of her students. We wanted to take her side, but we were frightened. We could do nothing but sadly watch her—except for Harun. He smiled the whole time; he had no idea what was going on.

  "We have already met the ten student requirement. If it's only a matter of the first aid kit, we can ..."

  "It's not just that!" Mister Samadikun cut her off. "It's also Harun!"

  Bu Mus was stunned, her face was now red; he had touched a sore spot. The subject of Harun had always been sensitive for her. She never hesitated to put herself on the line for him. Unlike Bu Mus, Harun was very pleased his name had been mentioned.

  "And what about Harun?" Bu Mus asked defensively. "He can't go to school here. It's not the appropriate place for him. He has to go to a special school! On Bangka Island!"

  Bu Mus tried very hard to keep her cool. We knew how very much she loved Harun, but we also understood that Mister Samadikun had made up his mind, and that sealed it. Mister Samadikun was very powerful and Bu Mus was just a village school teacher. In this power struggle, with the difference in status being so great, we were sure to lose. Bu Mus' face got puffy. "Mister," Bu Mus said weakly, "this school is the best place for Harun. He is very diligent in his school work and very happy so study with his friends. Please, don't send him away."

  Mister Samadikun was motionless. "Study? Did you say study? He doesn't even have a real report card, what could he possibly study?"

  Harun indeed received special treatment. When we moved up a class, so did he, even though he didn't have an official report card.

  Bu Mus was silent, although at that moment she really wanted to explain to Mister Samadikun that Harun had developed so well during his time at the school, that Harun had found happiness with us. But her mouth was locked. She didn't understand psychology, but she did believe that being in a normal environment was what special children like Harun needed.

  Mister Samadikun called Harun. Harun got up and eagerly approached him. He tried to greet Mister Samadikun in a friendly manner. His smile stretched out over his humorous face. Prejudice was something unknown to Harun. This very simple child did not know that he himself was the source of a hot dispute, and he also didn't know the fate of our school lay in his hands. If he left, we would have less than ten students in our class. Accor
ding to the regulation, at least one of the classes had to hold more than ten students. The classes below us all had less than ten. So if our class lost one student, we would have to hit the road.

  Suddenly, without being asked (and while trying to lean on Mister Samadikun's shoulder) Harun told his timeless tale about his three-striped cat giving birth to three kittens on the third of the month, even as Bu Mus tried very hard to stop him.

  "Alright, let's test what Harun has learned over these past five years."

  Mister Samadikun noticeably stressed over these past five years because he wanted to deny Bu Mus' hard work with Harun and attack Bu Mus by showing her the school wasn't suitable for Harun. But, by far, the worst of his intentions was to look down on Harun. At the same time, Harun, with his pure heart, remained blissful. His face sparkled with pride because he was going to be questioned—he felt important.

  "What are your aspirations, Harun?"

  Harun looked at Mister Samadikun very seriously. He didn't answer, but smiled secretively. For him, the question was like an amusing game. Mister Samadikun soon became aware of the fact that Harun didn't understand the word aspirations. He looked at Bu Mus victoriously. His eyes said: Your beloved student Harun doesn't even know the meaning of aspirations!

  "What he means is, later, when you grow up, what do you want to be, Harun? Do you want to be a doctor, engineer or maybe a pilot?" Bu Mus helped Harun gently.

  "Ooohh," Harun said, sounding like someone snapping back into consciousness after a weeklong coma.

  "Thank you, Ibunda Guru," Harun said as he raised his head to look at Mister Samadikun. His eyes shone brightly, but then he lowered his head again. It was as if after he knew his answer but was ashamed to say it.

  "What do you want to be, Harun?" Mister Samadikun asked again.