Conversations with Grab Drivers

Yes, I am still banned from using my motorbike until the bones in my shoulder heal. And so this leads to daily conversations with the Grab Car drivers as I get a ride into town for coffee and then back home again when I am done doing whatever I can find to do on foot in town. 

Grab driver questions always follow the same basic pattern: Where are you from? Do you have a wife? Do you have children? Your Indonesian is very good, how long have you been here? Do you have a villa here? Where have you been in Indonesia? Have you been to Java? Where have you been in Java? 

I always list the cities beginning with Jakarta, then Jogyakarta, and ending with Solo. 

Oh, Solo!

Yes, I like the Solo.

And before I can say why, they always answer for me--

Yah! The people there are very friendly! 

How does it happen, I wonder, that Solo ends up being universally considered as very friendly in a country where every place is very friendly (excepting, perhaps, Jakarta)? Why is it very, very friendly? 

Well, I don't know. From their point of view anyway, I don't know. From my point of view, I thought it very friendly because I was treated there almost like royalty. This felt discomfitting at first, but then also curiously pleasant. Perfect strangers would insist on shaking my hand. People would open doors for me, or press elevator buttons (as if a foreign person might not understand how the buttons work). School children would run out to the street and surround me as I walked by, babbling 100 questions all at the same time, some proudly practicing elementary English. One little girl insisted on holding my hand as we all walked along. 

So how can one not like Solo? 

But Grab drivers are very friendly too. There are some who remain silent as we drive, but most of them want to talk. I find myself still sometimes taken off guard, even after all these years, about what seem, to a bule, anyway, to be invasive questions. Where is your wife? Oh, no wife? Why don't you have a wife? 

But they mean no harm. They just want to know. Family is very important to Indonesians. Parents, wife, children. Living or dead? And so on. 

And so it goes. If nothing else, it breaks up the boredom of being stuck in the ever-increasing traffic here. Even so, I am looking forward to the hope of being released from my motorbike restrictions--maybe today!, as I will go this afternoon for my third shoulder x-ray to evaluate the current situation. 

Keep your fingers crossed for me, folks.

Reason

"We have put ourselves in danger by gathering here..., "the Major began. "According to quarantine regulations, it is forbidden for more than two people to meet at a time." 

"We are in God's hands!" said Majid. "You mustn't fret; our destinies are already written, and it is not for us to worry about what is to come!" 

-------

The lunatic clerk then recited several other verses to the effect that there was no refuge beyond Allah. These were the same verses that preachers and holy men would inevitably cite whenever any outbreak grew large enough, so all Muslim doctors and quarantine officials were perfectly familiar with the words...

--Nights of Plague, Orhan Pamuk

A bit of deja vu here from Nights of Plague. I well remember those brave but clueless true believers who would sometimes appear on American TV broadcasts or Facebook posts--standing unmasked on the city street and bearing signs that read "God is my protection" or some like slogan. Parents, grandparents, children. To wear a mask was to be without faith, and without that, they would rather die. And some did.

Of a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of persons. 

This brings to mind an old joke shared by the pastor at one of the churches I attended back in Portland. 

There was a man shipwrecked and floating about in the wide blue sea. The man spent day after day fervently praying for deliverance from God. Then one day, he heard a whirring noise overhead and noticed a wind moving across the still surface of the sea. It was a helicopter overhead, the blades stirring the wster. Two men at the open door lowered a ladder toward the man in th sea. Instead of reaching for the ladder, the man wildly waved them away. 

"Grab onto the ladder," the men shouted. "We are here to rescue you!" 

"No, no!" the man replied at the top of his weakened voice. "I've been praying for deliverance, and God will surely soon come to my aid."  

Moral of the story? Well, maybe this: prayer works, if you don't decide in advance what the answer ought to look like.

God gave you a mind. Use it.

Memories of the Quarantine

"Your excellency, quarantine provisions are usually rendered ineffective by the same people who refuse to take them seriously. And in the end, those people die too." 

--Nights of Plague, Orhan Pamuk

This novel does bring back memories of COVID measures, memories that seem to have been suppressed somehow--not, perhaps, because these were traumatic times for most of us, but maybe just because of the boredom we endured. 

I think that here in Indonesia quarantine measures were less severe in one sense, and yet more extreme in another. In general, except for a few brief periods, we were not confined to our homes, although on the other hand there wasn't much point in leaving our homes, because nothing was really open for business, nor were the beaches open. So one was free to go out and drive around on his motorbike for no particular reason, but staying home and watching TV was usually more entertaining. I have a photograph somewhere of the barren streets of Sanur looking rather ghostly of an evening. Later on, some cafes opened for business, but offered only take away items. So you could go to Starbucks and get a coffee in one of their paper cups, and then bring it home. If you were on a motorbike, however, there was no telling how much coffee would remain in the cup by the time you got home. Best just make it at home, right?

On the other hand, vaccinations were pretty much required. Well, you could choose not to vaccinate, but without holding a certificate of vaccination, as well as having a special app on your phone, you would be barred from any place where the public gathered, to include malls, restaurants, cafes, movie theaters, shopping centers. In short, by refusing vaccination, one basically imposed extended quarantine on oneself. 

But we did not have here any significant protest against vaccination, any large scale conspiracy theory proponents. On the contrary, people were eager to vaccinate because there is nothing that Indonesians love more than gathering in big social groups.

We did have deaths here - - lots of them, just like everywhere else. The difference between COVID in our time and the plague described in Pamuk's story of the first decade of the 20th century, is that we got a vaccine, they did not. 

Plague

"Nobody ever wants a quarantine, not governors or mayors, not shopkeepers nor the rich. Nobody wants to accept that the comfortable lives they are accustomed to might suddenly come to an end, let alone that they might die. They will reject any evidence that disrupts their usual ways, they will deny any deaths, and even resent the dead." 

--Nights of Plague, Orhan Pamuk

Remember COVID, folks? Remember the COVID deniers? Remember the vaccine refusers and the mask opponents and the sinister Chinese who spread the the virus and the government conspiracy to trammel the freedoms of the American people and the accusation that the whole thing was a hoax, that people had not really died, that the people who did die were dying anyway and the government just said that all had died from the virus. Remember the wackos and the knuckleheads? Well, it was nothing new. The virus itself was new, but the knuckleheads were not. These same folks, or their ancestors we should say, reacted in the same way to the European plague of the early 20th century, which had required the same measures to save lives--isolation, separation, quarantine, masking. It was the same with the plague of the mid 1600s, the measures were the same. People were confined to their houses, and yet there were those who refused to be confined. The government would respond by sending soldiers to nail the doors shut where the occupants refused to join in with the common good. And still they escaped, and of course spread more infection. Orhan Pamuk tells a familiar story in this 2022 novel. It is an eerie read concerning a plague that took place a century and a quarter ago, and yet a people that have not changed from one plague to another, one century to the next. 

Life Insurance for the Dead

Imagine a person who makes herself both the policyholder and the beneficiary of a life insurance policy. It doesn't make sense, right? It's stupid. 

And yet this is apparently the case with my girlfriend's mother. In the initial action, mother had taken out the policy and named daughter as the beneficiary. However, she added the clause that should her daughter die first, the beneficiary status would then revert to the policy owner: to whit, herself. She could have named her grandchildren as secondary beneficiaries, however she decided to name herself. I will note here that the daughter is 53, the mother 80. This is an 80 year old woman, in other words, who figures that she may well outlive not only her daughter, but her grandchildren as well.

Now I ask you, what does a corpse do with a life insurance payout? Clearly, one condition is now missing. Life. By the time the money comes through, the new beneficiary (again, herself) will be 6 feet underground. How to deliver the payment? Disinter the body? But that only leads us back to the initial conundrum. How will the beneficiary, hereafter referred to as the corpse, be able to receive, let alone utilize the rewarded funds? 

Then again, who says the funds must be utilized? They must merely be rewarded, right? I suppose this could be managed by a direct deposit to the bank account of the corpse, where they will either be as useless as the corpse now is, or perhaps reserved for some possible point in the future when the body happens to rise from the grave. In the theoretical case of a rapture, the corpse, now reanimated of course, could maybe stop by the bank on her way to meet the Lord in the sky. I mean, it's possible I suppose, although it will require unforgivable sin for at least one banker so that there may be someone left behind to disperse the funds. 

Then again, such worldly treasures, as Jesus told us, are stored up here on earth, not in the Kingdom. In other words, you can't take it with you. You can only give it to the living on earth. 

Well damn, this must certainly be a painful let down to the hopelessly avaricious dead.

But they probably deserve it. 

Pamuk

The art of the novel is based on the craft of telling our own stories as if they belonged to others, and of telling other people's stories as if they were our own. 

--Orhan Pamuk, Nights of Plague

Orhan Pamuk is my latest addiction. I have always had a way of coming upon an author I like and then proceeding to read the better part of what he has written. Just a while back I was onto Thomas Hardy, and read his four major novels. Now I am onto Pamuk. I have finished The Museum of Innocence, I am currently wading through the Indonesian language version of a novel called Snow, and I have just begun on Nights of Plague, a novel that is about the size of a phone book (although I guess I am dating myself with the phone book reference. What's a phone book? you say). Anyway, it is long. 

Pamuk it is not the most quotable writer in the world, and I think that is because he does not intrude himself into the story he is telling. Or so it is in the work I have read so far. Instead, he himself is to be found only in the telling of the story, as suggested in the quote above. 

Interestingly, the narrator of the Museum of Innocence hands over the conclusion of his long story about love and obsession to the writer Orhan Pamuk by name. The protagonist hands over the book to the writer of the book, leaving judgment, evaluation to him. It's an interesting little trick, and a stunning one as well. Suddenly we are standing outside of the story, soberly looking in. Obsession fades like fog in the sunlight, the mystery, the aura, the veil falls away. 

The fixation of the lead character, Kemal, on the young and lovely Fusun is extreme (extreme in the extreme, one might say), and yet I think that everyone can identify to some degree with what Kemal is going through, or rather putting himself through. Anyone who has ever had a crush cannot help but experience a pang of memory, and probably a wince of embarrassment as well. I was obsessed once with a certain woman when I was younger. Yes, I would have to say obsessed. Like Kemal, I would collect things that she had left behind after a visit - - some strands of hair, for example, or something she had written on a scrap of paper, or the pen she had used to write it. These things were a bit of her, they were things I could hold when she was away, each having a magical significance, just as the woman herself possessed a magical significance, though wholly conferred by my own imagination. She was, the best of her anyway, an invention of my own, just as Fusun was Kemal's invention. 

 

And that's it from Bali tonight, folks. It's my bedtime now and I am sleepy. The other night I had a dream of this same woman. In the dream there was some kind of problem. We had argued and there was tension in the air, a certain painfulness. We separated and I headed for home, ending up in an apartment building and standing before a room numbered 222. I was searching in my pocket for the key, and suddenly realized that this was not my home at all. I then pictured my home in Bali, from above as in a certain photograph I have that was taken by a drone. Now I am curious about the number 222. What does it mean? Perhaps I will find out in tonight's dream.

Mini Trek

Given the mild weather this evening, a bracing 82° or so, I decided to take a walk down to the nearby Alfamart, not because I really needed anything but because it was a likely destination and because I reckoned I needed the exercise. During these weeks wherein I have been banned by the doctor from driving my scooter, I have been decidedly less active than usual (which is saying something, because I am not generally very active in the best of health). 

I live at the end of a dead end street, and walking up to the living end, so to speak, one passes by newly deforested land on his left side. This deforestation (or dejungleization) has unhoused all kinds of previously hidden critters, including, no doubt, the snake that recently showed up in the middle of my living room, as well as lizards of the larger variety (such as the tokek which has now set up house in my bogainvillea tree), and a number of very well fed rats (one smashed variety of which I pass on my way up the street).

On this barren land, new houses are being built, and the builders have set up little plywood shacks to live in while they do their work. These are migrant workers for the most part, coming either from the boonies of Bali or from other islands, principally from Java. On the side of one of these shacks two words have been painted in red: bajul bedeng. I have no idea what this means. (Later on, I ask Evelyn, but she also has no idea). These particular scarlett letters must remain a mystery. 

At the head of the street, one turns left if he wants to go to the market (and right if he wants to go nowhere in particular), and then left again upon her reaching the main street. On the way I pass two young men coming in my direction, one wearing a t-shirt with a large cross on it, the other wearing a t-shirt with a colorful picture of Jesus on a cross, both smoking cigarettes. 

Just past the gas station is the market. Here I buy a bag of Cheetos, two bags of M&Ms, and two packs of cigarettes for a total cost of seratus sembilan puluh tujuh ribu seratus, about $10 USD. 

Fully equipped now to enjoy the remainder of the evening, I trek back home, only a little less wobbly from when I started out.

Mission accomplished.