The Rainbow Troops (14 page)

I had been waiting for almost five hours, from
isya
prayer until midnight—A Ling had not shown up. She had bro ken her promise. Maybe she was picking bean sprouts and had forgotten her promise? Didn't she know how much the message on the chalk box meant to me? She wasn't even coming.

I was tired of listening to the Malay dangdut song
Gelang Sipatu Gelang
, a song that asked those in attendance to go home because the show was over. I stared blankly at the traders tidying up. I was sad to see the masses leave. My hope was broken. Apparently, the happiness I had felt all this time buying chalk was felt by me alone. I was no more than a wolf howling at the moon, an unfortunate man with an unrequited love.

My chest tightened because of longing mixed with hopelessness. I wanted to pedal my bike away as fast as possible and then throw myself into the Lenggang River. But just as I was about to pedal off, I heard a voice directly behind me. It was as soft as tofu. It was the most beautiful voice I had ever heard in my life, like the tinkling of a harp from heaven.

"What's your name?"

I turned around fast and immediately felt as if my feet were no longer touching the earth.

I couldn't even utter a fragment of a word because right there, precisely three meters away, there she stood, the distinguished Miss A Ling herself !

She had come from a completely unexpected direction because all this time, she had actually been inside the temple watching me. At the very last minute, when I was about to give into despair, she came and turned my feelings of disappointment upside down.

After three years of knowing her, knowing her nails only, it was just seven months ago that I first saw her face. After writing her dozens of poems, and after immense longing, only after this night would she know my name.

I stuttered like a Malay learning the Koran.

She only smiled; it was a very sweet smile. She wore a
chong kiun
, an enchanting dress for special occasions, and in this festive month of June, she came down to earth like a Venus of the South China Sea. The dress followed the curves of her body, from her ankles up to her neck, and it was fastened with a high button shaped like a nail. Her slender body rested on top of a pair of blue, wooden sandals.

At that moment I felt inadequate. For me, A Ling was like a person who would always belong to someone else. I was no more than an entry in her address book that she'd forget a week after this meeting.

She read my mind. She grasped her
kiang lian
, her necklace. The surface of her necklace was a jade stone en graved in Chinese writing that I didn't understand.

"
Miang sui
," she said, "Destiny."

A Ling took me by the hand. We ran from the temple yard toward the Ferris wheel.

The Ferris wheel operator had already killed the lights. He was getting ready to go home. A Ling begged him to let it go round one more time. The operator apparently under stood the plight of a couple drunk with love.

"I read your poem,
Chrysanthemum
, in front of my class," said A Ling. "It was beautiful."

I was soaring.

And then we were silent, just silent, spinning around on the Ferris wheel, not wanting to get off. My heart swelled at the sight of the Ferris wheel's lights brilliantly lighting the sky. That was the most beautiful night of my life.

WHAT MUJIS, the mosquito sprayer, said turned out to be true. Today, four men wearing construction hats and carrying drills came to our schoolyard. They were PN's
juru cam
—surveyors. Their job was to gather land samples to find out the level of tin. If the tin level was indeed high, they would steer the dredges our way to extract it.

We could only pray and hope that the tin level around our Muhammadiyah Elementary was low so the dredges would have no need to pulverize our school. We were already strangled by daily difficulties, and Mister Samadikun's threat to close our school had not yet vanished—would our troubles now be compounded as we faced the dredges?

But for the time being, we were temporarily distracted, as a very dashing man showed up in a uniform. His pocket was emblazoned with an emblem that announced:
Pramuka
(Boy Scouts). He asked, "Are there any
Pramuka
here?"

Bu Mus shook her head no. Because we couldn't afford it, we had never formed a Boy Scouts troop. Our daily clothes didn't even have all of their buttons—we couldn't afford Scout uniforms.

The man said he needed the help of Scouts from various schools to look for a young girl lost in Selumar Moun tain.

"But we do have Laskar Pelangi," Mahar volunteered. "What is Laskar Pelangi?"

Mahar solemnly went on to explain the connection between rainbows and the ancient cannibalistic people of Belitong. Bu Mus and the uniformed man were left scratching their heads, both at a loss for words.

"We are ready to help," Mahar said convincingly. y It was already late afternoon by the time we arrived at the slopes of Selumar Mountain. The police, the Search and Rescue Team, different Scout troops and members of the community at large wanting to help were all ready to climb the mountain to look for the lost little girl. Apparently, the little girl was from the Estate, a student of the PN School who had wandered away from her large group of classmates while hiking
.
Her family and teachers were panicked and crying.

A chorus of dog barks, people calling her name, and megaphone clamor rang out. From the shrieks of the mega phone, we knew the lost little girl's name: Flo.

It was almost night. The expressions on everyone's faces grew even more concerned. Last year, two boys had gotten lost; three days later they were found huddled under a
medang
tree, dead from starvation and hypothermia.

The contours of Selumar Mountain are very unique. From any angle, the forest looks the same. A person may feel like he knows his whereabouts and, without realizing it, lead himself further and further into the wilderness.

Maybe Flo was lost in the south, headed toward the currents of the Linggang River's tributaries, full of rapids. There, on the evenly spread out, level land, lay deathtraps,
kiumi—
quicksand that looked solid, but once stepped upon, immediately swallowed the entire body whole.

But if Flo was unfortunate enough to be lost in the north, it could be said that she had walked through death's very gates. There was no return. That area was blocked off by a cruel river called the Buta River. The river culminated in a gorge. The villagers named it the Buta because it was terrifying. "Buta" means dark, blind, clueless, trapped with no way out—death.

The Buta River was feared by all. Its surface was placid like a lake, still like glass. But beneath the calm surface lay certain death—huge crocodiles and black bottomdwelling snakes. The crocodiles of the Buta River had a strange dis position. They had their sight set on monkeys hanging on low branches, but they even snatched at people on boats. Old Australian pines grew down to the middle of the river. Some of them had died, their figures now presenting a hairraising scene, like giant ghosts hovering over the river's surface waiting for prey to pass.

If Flo indeed was lost to the north, she couldn't possibly get back, for she wouldn't have enough strength to scale the steep granite ridge. If she forced herself, it was highly likely that she'd slip and fall, sending her small body crashing down. Her one and only choice was to swing across the Buta River. In order to cross, she'd first have to sift through the chest-high rug of wild lilies. Her first steps into the lilied area would surely be her last, for that area was the largest habitat of Belitong's most savage crocodiles.

Night fell. Flo had been missing for ten hours. No ray of hope illuminated our search. That poor child, alone in the pitch black forest. Maybe her leg was broken or she was unconscious. Maybe she was under a tree—sobbing, scared, frightened and cold.

Amidst all the panic, several people suggested we en list the help of an old man named Tuk Bayan Tula. Tuk Bayan Tula was an infamous shaman. They say he could fly like the fog and hide behind a skinny blade of grass. He could turn off a lamp with the blink of his eyes. He was more powerful than Bodenga, the crocodile shaman, more powerful, in fact, than any other shaman. There was no match for his power. He was the only shaman in this world capable of crossing the sea through sheer wizardry. With the simple utterance of a mantra, he could kill someone over on the island of Java.

Malay villagers believed Tuk Bayan Tula was half human and half divine—half ghost, to be more exact.

In addition to Bruce Lee, Tuk Bayan Tula was Mahar's other alltime idol. Just as A Kiong always desired to be Mahar's spiritual student, Mahar longed to be the spiritual student of that divine shaman.

So a few people were delegated to go meet Tuk Bayan Tula on
Lanun
Island—Pirate Island—where he lived. They set out for the island on a PN speedboat.

Morning approached and the delegation returned. They were greeted by all with irrational hope for a miracle. But even irrationality was better than giving up completely. We'd searched for Flo everywhere, and there was still no sign of her.

The delegation brought a piece of paper from Tuk Bayan Tula and told us a story that raised the hair on the back of our necks.

"The shaman lives in a dark cave," they said shakily. "His eyes flashed like a parrot's. He wore nothing more than a sheet of fabric wrapped around his body."

Mahar observed attentively, his mouth agape.

"When he walked, his feet didn't even touch the ground!"

For years, I had been taught at the Muhammadiyah School by highquality teachers—Bu Mus and Pak Harfan— to believe in the righteousness of rational thinking and to avoid the polytheistic world of shamanism, so it was hard for me to believe any of this. But this information was accepted by the members of the delegation, and they were not just coffee stall knowitalls making things up to toot their own horns. Mahar now admired Tuk Bayan Tula even more.

The head of the delegation unrolled the paper from Tuk Bayan Tula and read it aloud:

These are Tuk Bayan Tula's instructions:

If you want to find the girl, look for her near the abandoned shack in the field. Find her soon or she will drown under the mangrove roots.

I was taken aback by the message. It was a threatening message, or to be more precise, intimidating. But it was un deniable that this message held a certain power. His word choice was meticulous and demonstrated a high level of paranormal ability.

If Tuk Bayan Tula was a liar, then he must have been a very skilled one. But if he truly was a shaman, he was no phony. That message held the fate of his reputation. There were no ambiguous or hidden words.

If we wanted to test Tuk Bayan Tula's ability, this was our chance. We had to forsake logic and follow his instructions. And if Flo wasn't soon found near the abandoned shack in the field, or dead in the gaps of the mangrove roots today, then the legendary Tuk Bayan Tula was nothing more than a roadside diceroller. Every creature that loves to play dice is a swindler. And if that was the case—if he was, indeed, swindling us—then I personally wanted to go to Pirate Island to seize the meager cloth coiled around his body.

Agricultural field rotation was still a commonly used practice. It was highly likely that difficulties would arise, for determining if a field had an abandoned shack or not was no easy task. There were in fact many abandoned shacks on the slopes of the mountain, and they made great secret hideouts for tin thieves. The illegal prospectors dug up tin from the mountain and sold it to smugglers disguised as fishermen at the mouth of the Linggang River. The tin was then sold in Singapore. The unauthorized prospectors built shacks and sometimes disguised their mining sites with agricultural fields.

Stealing and smuggling are very old professions. These criminal activities—criminal, of course, from PN's point of view—have been around since the Kheks were brought to Belitong by the Dutch to be mining coolies back in the seventeenth century.

PN treated unauthorized prospectors and smugglers very harshly, inhumanely. The prospectors' and smugglers' actions were regarded as subversive criminal acts. In the peaceful mountains where the prospectors were seen as thieves, and on the sea where the smugglers were seen as pi rates, the law didn't apply: If they were caught, their heads were blown off on the spot with an AK 47 by rancid beings known as the "tin special police."

Based on Mahar's directions, Team Laskar Pelangi moved to the north, to the deadly path of the Buta River.

The whole way there, we stopped in dozens of fields and shacks. We also scoured the gaps of mangrove roots. We found nothing. Flo had vanished, as if swallowed by the earth itself. Our voices were hoarse from shouting her name.

For each shack we searched that did not contain Flo, Tuk Bayan Tula's reputation lost one credit. And as midday approached, Tuk Bayan Tula's reputation was just about shattered in our eyes. We began to doubt the power of the invisible shaman. Mahar looked offended each time we complained about finding an empty shack, and more so upon hearing Samson's insults. "If that shaman can turn himself into a parrot, then we shouldn't even have to search like this."

Finally, we arrived at a big, protruding boulder. We gathered there to rest and preserve what remained of our strength. This was the end of the northern slope, and after this, about a half-kilometer down, lay the mortal peril of the Buta River area.

Still no Flo. As far as the northern slopes were concerned, Tuk Bayan Tula's message had proved false. With a walkie-talkie, we monitored the progress to the west, east and south; Flo had not been found in those places either. All this meant one thing: Tuk Bayan Tula was a liar from all four points on the compass.

Mahar's face swelled up like he wanted to cry. He looked like he had been betrayed by the love of his life. Tuk Bayan Tula had broken his heart, though he had never known he was Mahar's revered hero. The consequence of blind conviction.

I too was sad, not because of the thought of Tuk Bayan Tula's shattered integrity, nor because of Mahar's disappointment, but because of the thought of the terrible fate that had befallen Flo. It was quite possible that she'd never be found. Or maybe she would be found, but only her crowpecked skeleton. Most heartbreaking of all would be if she died in vain, help having arrived just a few hours too late. It's difficult to hold onto life in cold nighttime temperatures without a crumb of food. I felt stricken because, by that time, we already had entered the era of "too late."

Harun patted Mahar's shoulders. Mahar slumped down in silence. His eyes stared down to the Buta River and the swamp of lilies. We got up, packed up our supplies, and got ready to head home. Before we left, Syahdan decided to give the plastic toy binoculars around his neck a try. He focused them on the periphery of the Buta River. We had already gotten off the boulder when Syahdan shouted. It was a shout of destiny.

"Look there, the mango tree at the edge of the River."

Mahar immediately seized Syahdan's binoculars. He ran to the edge of the boulder and looked down. "And there's a shack!" he said with renewed spirit. "We have to go down there!"

The rest of us were stunned by his crazy idea. Kucai, who had kept his mouth shut until now, thought Mahar's foolishness had exceeded limits. As class president, he felt responsible.

"What are you, crazy?!" he barked angrily. The look in his red eyes was sharp and angry as his menacing gaze fell on an openmouthed Harun standing beside Mahar.

"Let me explain something for your thick skull. There can't possibly be a field down there. No one in their right mind would have a field on the edge of the Buta River un less they wanted to die for nothing!"

Mahar stared coolly at Kucai.

"Use your brain! Come on, let's go home!" Kucai capped off his rant.

Mahar didn't budge. Harun, the eldest among us, gently advised Mahar, "Come on, let's go home ... this mountain has already taken one child. Come on, Mahar, let's go home."

Mahar seemed indifferent. We began to leave and, as we moved, Mahar said very calmly, "You can all go home, I'll go down alone."

So we all went down together, even though we knew we couldn't possibly find Flo down there. We cursed Syahdan for casually looking through the cheap child's toy. Syahdan himself even felt regretful. But it was too late for regrets.

So we headed toward the region of death—the flood plain of the Buta River—only to accompany Mahar. We accompanied him to satisfy his ego and protect him from his own stupidity. We hated his fanaticism for the shaman Tuk Bayan Tula, but he was still our friend, a member of Laskar Pelangi. If later Flo was not found, I knew in my heart that I would be the first one to give Mahar a noogie. Ah, friendship is sometimes demanding and it sucks. Moral lesson number five: Don't ever be friends with someone who is obsessed with shamans.

And as we made our way down, it turned out the said terrifying atmosphere of the Buta River was no exaggeration. We entered an area that clearly was hostile to newcomers. Places like this are controlled by wild, strange and cruel territorial creatures. Swampy water in the underbrush of the thatch palm trees looked like a kingdom of evil spirits and a breeding ground for all kinds of ghosts. Monitor lizards of all shapes and sizes slithered around there, completely unaffected by our presence, and not the least bit afraid of humans—some of them even behaved as though they wanted to attack.