Indonesia, Etc.: Exploring the Improbable Nation (16 page)

Even Indonesians who are less contented with their lot, young men such as Anton the ojek driver, don’t need to go overseas to look for a better life. Why bother, when there are plenty of places within your own country that provide opportunities almost as foreign? By drifting to another island, you can unlace the stays of place and clan, you can learn new dances and try new foods, without having to denude yourself completely in front of a foreign language, an unknown currency, an uncompromising police force.

One thing that both unites and divides Indonesia is food. Every region has its own cuisine, but in the small towns in poor islands in which I spent the first months of my travels, the local fare was frustratingly difficult to sample. Only when I was invited into people’s homes did I get to try papaya leaves with marsh weeds or sweetcorn and pumpkin mash. On the streets and in hole-in-the-wall restaurants, food is provided by a handful of itinerant tribes who have cooked their way across the nation. Most famously, the Minangkabau of West Sumatra who gave us nasi Padang, the cuisine named after their provincial capital.

The Minangkabau gave us the word most Indonesians use to describe migration:
merantau
.
Merantau
means to travel abroad to seek one’s fortune. It’s something Minangkabau men have always done. Until recently, several generations used to live together in large wooden houses whose walls slope outwards slightly, topped with a roof which sweeps up in a series of dramatic curves, like nested buffalo horns. These houses belong to women among the matrilineal Minangkabau. Young boys could live with their mother, but they had to move out when they grew up. After leaving mum’s house, a young man had nowhere to go until he married and could move into his wife’s house. The solution: to seek his fortune outside of West Sumatra.

The West Sumatrans conquered the nation one restaurant at a time, just as McDonald’s conquered the United States, though without a corporation siphoning profits out of the pockets of hard-working family restaurateurs. Padang restaurants are signalled by a truncated version of the buffalo-horn roof, often sticking incongruously out from a row of flat-fronted shop-houses selling mobile phones or motorcycle parts. If there’s no space for a curve of corrugated zinc, then they will at least have a Minang house logo painted on the window. The symbol is universally distributed across the nation, as recognizable as the Golden Arches to fast-food fans.

Padang restaurants have a subculture of their own. The cooking starts around dawn. By mid-morning, vats of food sit along the bottom shelf of the shop window. There will always be
rendang
, a stew of tough beef simmered for several hours with red chillies and coconut milk, until the liquid, spices and meat amalgamate into a stringy-tender whole. There will always be wilted cassava leaves or chunks of giant jackfruit swimming in a rich, coconutty sauce. But there will be dozens of other dishes too, many of them already portioned out onto small saucers which are stacked in pyramids on shelves above the vats. Shrimp cooked with the stink-beans which leave their pungent trace in later visits to the loo. Skinny aubergines in chilli paste. Lumpy brains floating in a thin grey sauce. Slabs of lung, fried to the texture of desiccated sponge. Boiled eggs, their peeled nakedness unevenly clothed in a gummy spice mix. Grilled fish, staring up through whited eyes. A whole dish of mulched green chillies. Not all of it is equally appetizing, but there will always be
something
that you like.

A lace curtain hangs behind the shelves to keep out hungry flies. In the bigger restaurants, a profusion of little dishes from behind the curtain simply appear on the table before you when you sit down, together with a coconut-shell-sized mound of rice. You pay for what you eat. In smaller places, customers just go up and choose for themselves. Takeaway is always possible: brown wax-paper cones of
nasi bungkus
, ‘wrapped-up rice’, are as common in Indonesia as sandwiches are in the West. And the food is safe for most Indonesians. The Minangkabau are strictly Islamic, so there’s no question of anything that is not halal creeping into your nasi Padang, even if you are in a pig-slaughtering island like Sumba.

The Minang may have stamped their buffalo-horn iconography on hole-in-the-wall restaurants across Indonesia and pavement vendors from Java have the national franchise on fried tofu sewn up, but it is another itinerant tribe, the Sasak, that I always fall on with the greatest joy. The young Sasak men of Lombok, in the province of NTB (short for
Nusa Tenggara Barat
– West Nusa Tenggara), just east of Bali, have cornered the market in coconut juice across the whole sweep of Indonesia.

When you are hot, dehydrated and perhaps a little grumpy there is no sight more cheering that a pavement cart emblazoned, in letters cut from sticky neon-orange plastic, with ‘ES KELAPA NTB’, iced coconut water, NTB-style. The cart will be a bog-standard
kaki lima
: a wooden chest about two metres by one metre, usually painted in a lurid green or pink, topped with glass shelves that serve as a sort of shopfront, on which wobbly advertisements for the wares are stuck or painted. Es kelapa, fried tofu, barbecued satay, even nasi Padang, all can be found in this itinerant format. The whole structure is mounted on two large bicycle wheels. Sticking out of one end is a pair of handles by which it is pushed along the road, rather like a wheelbarrow. At the other end, a short wooden leg on which the cart is propped when it comes to rest. I like to think that the name of these carts –
kaki lima
or ‘five feet’ – comes from the two wheels, the wooden leg and the two legs of the itinerant trader who pushes his cart through the streets. Others, however, hold that the expression comes from a regulation that dates from Stamford Raffles’ tenure as Lieutenant-Governor of Java during the brief British occupation of 1811–16, occasioned by the Napoleonic wars in Europe. Raffles decreed that all pavements had to be at least five feet wide. Because the carts sit on pavements, they absorbed the name.

These carts are ingeniously modified to suit most needs. Drawers, sliding shelves, built-in ice chests, on-board charcoal braziers or gas bottles, fold-out benches, pop-up umbrellas and pull-out awnings; each ambulant vendor has found his own way to minimize effort, maximize space and pull in the punters. Only the es kelapa boys have trouble, their wares too bulky to stow on board. So on the pavement next to them, or hidden behind a crumbling wall in an empty lot, sits a large mountain of green orbs, each waiting to be slashed open with a large machete, each eventually upended over a big beer-mug of ice, the jelly-flesh then scraped in fat white noodles into the glass, most often using a serrated bottle-cap nailed onto a stick of bamboo. A small ladle of reddish brown coconut sugar, a large dollop of condensed milk and the drink is complete.

The es kelapa boys are among the best-travelled Indonesians I know. They drift from island to island, from small town to small town. ‘It never ceases to amaze me,’ said one young Sasak man. ‘There are coconuts all around, but the locals never think to sell them. Then one of us comes along, and we do a good business for two or three months. Finally, three or four locals decide that they can do it too, and then the market is saturated and we move on somewhere else.’ Doesn’t that mean that the window for itinerant sellers was getting smaller and smaller? ‘Not at all. It’s hard work, standing out here in the sun ten hours a day. The locals are too lazy to keep it going for long. They start selling only in the cool of the morning, or in the evening, but that’s not when people are thirsty for es kelapa. So they start losing money, and they drop out. Then there’s no es kelapa until another Sasak moves in.’

There are other tribal monopolies too. Barber shops across the nation are run by people from Madura, while women from Java have a lock on the sale of
jamu
, traditional medicine cooked up daily from roots and herbs. Boats are built by the Bugis of South Sulawesi; their schooners ruled the waves in both trading and piracy long before the Europeans arrived, and long afterwards too. Their close neighbours the Makassarese do well as traders, while the people of the once-proud sultanate of Buton, a hop across on the south-eastern limb of the truncated octopus that is Sulawesi, have always been traders of dried fish. The
merantau
tradition provides a sort of consistency across Indonesia. Anywhere I go, I will find nasi Padang and jamu Jawa, es kelapa NTB and a Maduran barber. Indeed, you could argue that the peculiarly predictable mix of these different ethnic specialities is the essence of Indonesia: ‘Unity in Diversity’ in action.

For ‘Unity in Diversity’ in the flesh, go no further than a Pelni passenger ferry. All life is here. Even the smallest ferries have a handful of cabins and a special dining room for the ‘Class’ passengers. On the economy decks – as many as five on them on the larger boats – plywood platforms are arranged in paired rows and divided down the middle by a few centimetres of metal above which teeters a luggage rack. On these platforms people spread their sarongs and sleeping mats, somehow respecting one another’s territory in this so-public space.

The most common activity by far is sleeping, followed by just lolling around. People gossip, play cards, groom, massage one another. Children scream, everyone listens to tinny music on their cell phones and there’s an awful lot of eating. The British naturalist Alfred Wallace, who spent twelve years shooting orang-utan and pinning down beetles in some of the most forlorn parts of the archipelago in the mid-nineteenth century, took one of the Dutch mail boats that were the precursors of today’s Pelni. He described the food as follows:

At six A.M. a cup of tea or coffee is provided for those who like it. At seven to eight there is a light breakfast of tea, eggs, sardines, etc. At ten, Madeira, Gin and bitters are brought on deck as a whet for the substantial eleven o’clock breakfast, which differs from a dinner only in the absence of soup. Cups of tea and coffee are brought around at three P.M.; bitters, etc. again at five, a good dinner with beer and claret at half-past six, concluded by tea and coffee at eight. Between whiles, beer and sodawater are supplied when called for, so there is no lack of little gastronomical excitements to while away the tedium of a sea voyage.
*

These days, economy passengers can go to the pantry to collect their free meals three times a day – invariably a styrofoam box of gritty rice topped with overcooked cabbage leaves and the occasional lump of fish. Gin and bitters are sadly a thing of the past, but other ‘little gastronomical excitements’ are provided by ambulant stewards who tour the lower decks selling noodles, meatball soup and fluorescent sticky drinks in which swim green and pink worms of jelly. Even those are not enough; here a woman peels mangoes from her private store of food, there a family crunches through shrimp crackers or offers biscuits to their neighbours.

There is formal entertainment too. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ booms the inescapable tannoy, ‘for your viewing pleasure, we’re screening a romantic spy scandal starring the
beautiful
actress from Mandarin, Miss Beautiful Lingling Zhou. Please note, ladies and gentlemen, this
romantic
story of daring in the face of forbidden love is for
adults only
! Please join us in the mini-theatre, Deck 5, left-hand side. Just 10,000 rupiah.’
*
On the bigger boats, after the posh passengers have been fed, the First Class dining room is turned into a dance hall for the plebs. A band plays swing tunes behind a little square of parquet flooring, and passengers (‘Couples only, please, dressed neatly and politely’ enjoins the loudspeaker) can twirl around under the disco ball.

Strangers chat to one another with perfect ease. People swap stories of where they have been and where they are going, of exotic customs encountered in unfamiliar islands, of the foods and comforts of home, of incomprehensible pricing: in Bali they charge 30,000 for a kilo of sweet potatoes, imagine!