The Rainbow Troops (16 page)

A BRIGHT Monday morning. A poem wrapped in purple paper covered with fireworks. A bouquet of flowers from the peak of Selumar Mountain, tied with a light blue rib bon. Their freshness was still intact because I had kept them in a ceramic vase overnight.

These magical things were props for my love saga, set to continue this morning. The scenario had existed in my head for weeks, and it went like this:

When A Ling pushed the chalk box out, I would put the flowers and poem into her hand. No words necessary. Let her take in the beauty of the flowers from the mountaintop. Let her read my poem and get a taste of something more delicious than Chinese New Year's cake.

After A Miauw gave his order, I hurriedly approached the chalk box opening. But when I was about two steps away, I was stopped dead in my tracks, startled by the rough hand emerging from the chalk box opening—it was not A Ling's hand!

This hand was very peculiar, like an evil copper blade: muscular, dirty, black and oily.

A black coral bracelet coiled three times around the copper arm. Heads of venomous
pinang barik
snakes ready to lunge were carved at each end of the bracelet. The area just below the elbow was encircled by a tight aluminum bracelet, like the one often worn by brutal giants in
wayang
stories. The heads of the coiled bracelet were in the shape of a jagged key, the kind usually used to break the law. There were no tattoos, taboo for religious Malays, but the fingers were choked by three threatening rings.

The ring on the index finger held the largest
satam
stone I had ever seen.

Satam
is a unique meteoric material found in only one place on this earth: Belitong. Its place of origin is out of this world. It is pitch black because of its composition—car bonic acid and magnesium. It is denser than steel and impossible to be shaped.

Satam
is hidden in holes of old tin mines and can't be found when sought—only good luck can bring it out from the bowels of the earth. In 1922, the Dutch named satam
billitonite.
That was how our island got its name: Belitong. In the local dialect, it was a sacred name,
kuake
. Later—I don't know why, maybe it was to not sound too backcountry, or perhaps because backcountry Malays rarely use the letter 'u'—the foul minions of the New Order government vulgarly changed that name to Belitung.

Without any aesthetic consideration whatsoever, the owner of that copper hand mounted the sacred object on plain cheap brass. But it was worn proudly, as if its wearer were the ruler of the world.

The ring finger displayed a ring bearing an
akik
stone, as impressive as the valuable amethyst of Kalimantan. But I couldn't be fooled. That stone was nothing more than the result of synthesizing plastic and crystal at a high temperature. Its bearer was a fraud and it was fooling no one but himself.

And lastly, on the middle finger, sat the leader of all the intimidating rings and the revealer of its owner's sneaky tendencies: a big human skull grinning eerily with hollow eyes. This ring was made of stainless steel nuts obtained by conspiring with PN machinery washers.

The process of changing the stainless steel nut into a ring would make anyone shudder. After roughly shaping it with a lathe, the unbreakable nut was manually filed for weeks. Coolielevel PN employees usually made the rings. It was a secret culture of resistance against PN: That ring was symbolic of the people's oppression. Weeks of secret hard work yielded nothing more than a hideous, shiny ring. To this very day, it's a practice that makes no sense to me whatsoever.

And the fingernails, ugh! Good Lord, they were shaped as if they'd been cursed. The difference between A Ling's fingernails—with which I had been enchanted for years—and these was like the difference between heaven and earth. These nails were thick, dirty, long and unkempt. They were cracked at the tips. Basically, they looked like crocodile scales.

I hadn't recovered from my shock when I heard a loud tapping. I was being urged to take the chalk that had been pushed forward. Then I heard an unfriendly grunt. The tapping grew louder, it put me on edge. But most disturbing of all was that I didn't meet A Ling. Where could she have gone?

"What's going on?" Syahdan asked when he came to see what was taking me so long. "Whose hand is that?"

I couldn't answer, my throat tightened up.

That hand was not foreign to me. It was none other than Bang Arsyad's, A Miauw's coolie. I remember when he carved the
pinang barik
snake heads into the black coral given to him by a Sarong man some time ago. He told me it takes three weeks for the long coral from the ocean floor to be shaped into a threecoil bracelet. The coral, long and taut at first, was conquered by smothering it with brake oil and patiently smoking it over a hearth.

The tapping grew even louder. Bang Arsyad had no feelings. He knew I was panicked because I hadn't met A Ling, a routine that had been going on for years and years.

Syahdan took the chalk box. Bang Arsyad pulled his hand back. It disappeared like an animal slithering back into its hole.

A Miauw, who had been watching me since the beginning, approached me. He stood beside me and drew a deep breath.

"A Ling is going to Jakarta ... he said slowly. "She'll take the nine o'clock flight. She has to stay with her aunt who lives alone. She can go to a good school there ..."

I was stupefied. I couldn't believe my ears. The feeling that something bad would soon happen, drawn from my recent Bodenga flashback, had come true. My spirit was crushed.

"If it is meant to be, you will meet again someday," A Miauw patted my shoulders.

I lowered my head like someone observing a moment of silence. My hands tightly clutched the bouquet of wild mountaintop flowers and my poem.

"She asked me to pass along her greetings and wanted me to give you this ..."

A Miauw gave me a necklace. It was the jade necklace I had seen A Ling wear for years and years.
Miang sui
was written on the jade,
destiny
. Then A Miauw also gave me a box wrapped in purple paper covered with fireworks, exactly the same as the paper concealing my poem. A nearly impossible coincidence. I knew it! From the beginning, God had watched over this extraordinarily beautiful love.

I took the box, and at that moment, I felt all the merchandise in the store fall on me. I wanted to say and ask A Miauw so many things, but I was tonguetied.

My chest tightened. I looked around and a sudden thought crossed my mind. I grabbed Syahdan to go home.

I pedaled the bicycle as fast as I could from
Sinar Harapan
toward the school. Dozens of kilometers, steep grade after steep grade, I never slowed down. Exhaustion wasn't an option; I had to get to the schoolyard.

8:50 a.m.

We arrived at the school. Syahdan returned to class. I ran across the yard toward the
filicium
tree. I climbed into the tree and sat on my branch, my usual position for watch ing rainbows.

My eyes didn't blink staring at the empty blue sky, as empty as my heart.

9:05 a.m.

Gradually, a Fokker 28 plane emerged in the offing.

It was flying from Tanjong Pandan to Jakarta. I knew A Ling was inside that plane. My eyes were fixed on the vessel taking my love up into the white unreachable clouds, high up in the sky. For each inch the plane moved, one of my breaths went with it. The longer I watched, the blurrier the plane became, not because of the distance, but because of the tears welling up in the corners of my eyes. Then it was gone. My soul mate had been torn away from me, leaving my heart shattered. The sky was empty once again. Good bye, my first love.

A MYSTERIOUS ATOMIC bomb exploded in Belitong. A giant mushroom cloud descended from the sky, carrying with it radioactivity, mercury and ammonia. Everyone scattered in confusion, searching for cover, slipping into waterchannels or jumping into drains. Many perished on the spot, and those who survived became dwarfed, putrid smelling creatures.

Seeing the dwarfed appearance of the people of Belitong, the central government in Jakarta felt shamed before the world and refused to admit that they were citizens of the republic. We had no choice but to hold a referendum.

While only a few Malays wanted to separate from the unitary state of the Republic of Indonesia, the government took the referendum as Belitong's declaration of its status as a free nation. And it was certain, Belitong could no longer support itself because its natural resources had been sucked dry over hundreds of years. The island collapsed.

At that moment, Bodenga—the long lost crocodile shaman—reemerged to take over the government. He oppressed those who had previously treated him and his father unjustly. They were herded into and flushed down the Mirang River, left to the crocodiles. The dwarfed people held on for dear life, but to no avail. Within no time at all, they perished, floating in the river like poisoned fish.

That was, more or less, what consumed the thoughts of a dreamer on the brink of insanity over the loss of his first love.

I couldn't think straight, had nightmares, and was haunted by bizarre fantasies. If I heard birds chirping, it became the drone of a mystical bird carrying news of death. I thought everyone—shopkeepers, the postman, coconut graters, civil service police and coolies—was conspiring against me.

A Ling's departure left pain and sorrow in my heart. I wanted to burst into
Sinar Harapan
Shop. But I knew that such dramatic action—the kind I had seen in Indian movies—would only be greeted by bottles of bean paste and heaps of rotten shrimp seasoning. I was miserable, just miserable.

And then, mirroring again the conventions of Indian films, the separation made me ill. Some time ago, I had laughed at my neighbor, Bang Jumari, who suffered from severe diarrhea and shivers because my older cousin, Kak Shita, had broken up with him. I could not get over how such an absurd reaction was possible. But now, the same fate had befallen me. I had ridiculed Bang Jumari, and now I was struck by the same rock. Karma surely applies here.

I had been absent from school for two days with a high fever. All I wanted to do was sprawl out on my bed. My head was heavy, my breaths were short. My mother gave me
Askomin
syrup, but I did not recover. It turns out love sickness cannot be cured by worm extract medicine.

And then Mahar and his faithful follower A Kiong came to visit me.

Mahar wore a jacket that came down to his knees. A Kiong hurried behind him lugging a suitcase like a nursing student doing an internship. It was a very special suit case because it was covered in
peneng sepeda
—the stickers used back in the day to show that the bicycle tax had been paid—and various government symbols to give the impression that they were important regional government officials.

At that time, Syahdan was also in my room. A Kiong and Mahar didn't say a word. With the snap of his fingers, A Kiong ordered Syahdan to step aside.

Mahar stood right next to me and looked me over from head to toe. His face was serious like a doctor's, and in no time at all, he had finished his diagnosis. He shook his head as a sign that the case before him was no laughing matter. He drew an apprehensive breath and looked to A Kiong.

"Knife!" he yelled suddenly.

A Kiong quickly spun the combination to the suitcase and took out a rusty kitchen knife. Syahdan and I looked on anxiously. The knife was respectfully handed over to Mahar, who received it like a surgical specialist.

"Turmeric!" Mahar ordered once again, loud and clear.

A Kiong hastily groped for something in the suitcase, and then handed Mahar a piece of turmeric the size of a thumb. Without much fuss, Mahar cut the turmeric, ground it up and painted a big 'X' on my forehead with a move so fast that I didn't even have a chance to avoid it. Then, as if they both knew the next step in the procedure without need of a command, A Kiong took gardenia leaves from the suitcase and tossed them to Mahar, who caught them nimbly and proceeded to mercilessly slap them all over my whole body while chanting.

Not only that, but while Mahar was slapping me with gardenia leaves, A Kiong was spraying me with water. I tried to evade and repel them, but I couldn't get away because Mahar and A Kiong were a unified, fast, and systematic team.

Not much later, they stopped. Mahar let out a sigh of relief. A Kiong's silly face echoed Mahar's sigh.

"Three genie children were furious because you peed on their kingdom near the school well," Mahar explained, as if my soul would have been beyond help had he not come when he did. There was no sign of guilt or mischief on his face. Mahar and A Kiong had calmly executed a fully coordinated performance in complete innocence. They didn't have the slightest doubt in their certainty of their silly shamanistic method for curing me.

"They gave you the fever," he continued while putting his doctor's equipment back in the suitcase and elegantly handing it to A Kiong.

"But never fear, my friend, I have banished them, and you can come back to school tomorrow!"

I could only submit and accept one of the oddest incidents of my whole life. And then, without any small talk, without bidding farewell, the two of them went home. A Kiong hadn't even uttered a single word. And there I remained with Syahdan, like a mangy, wet cat caught in the rain.

After the two magical kids, Bu Mus and my other friends came to visit me. Bu Mus brought me an APC pill.

THE NEXT day, I was able to return to school, and I knew it was because the APC pill from Bu Mus had cured me. upon seeing me, A Kiong went right over and shook Mahar's hand. Mahar raised his eyebrows, shrugged his shoulders and nodded repeatedly. A Kiong became a bigger Mahar fanatic.

Physically, I was cured, but my heart was not. I shut myself off for days. I randomly was overcome with a feeling of emptiness. It wasn't easy to forget A Ling. A void filled my chest, and my longing made it hard to breathe. Before, when I found my first love, I became a strange person. Now that I lost love, I became a different person. Before, when I found love, I was hit over the head with an awkward happiness, a feeling I had never felt before. Now that love left me, I felt a sadness I had never felt before. A sadness that made my joints ache. So, I went to our shaman, Mahar, for answers.

"
Boi
, what could this sickness be that has befallen me?"

It was a frustrating question. In all honesty, I knew what had befallen me—I was suffering from the loss of my love. However, an eccentric individual like Mahar just might have a magical answer that could make me see my situation in a different light. Like most brokenhearted people, I was thinking irrationally.

Mahar stared at me, slightly irritated, and said, "What did I tell you? Watch where you pee!" He turned and left.

Two weeks after A Ling's departure, during a break period, I—crestfallen, of course—showed Lintang the box she had left for me with her father. There was a picture of a tower on the box.

"Lintang, what's this picture of?"

Lintang examined the box.

"That's a picture of the Eiffel Tower, Ikal. It's in Paris, the capital city of France," Lintang said, his tone a bit surprised. "Paris is a city of smart people; artists and scholars live there. They say it is a beautiful city. Many people dream of living there."

When I got home from school, I lay down listlessly on my bed and stared at the box. Then, I opened it. Inside was a diary and a book with a blue cover.

I opened the diary and, to my surprise, the pages were filled with every poem I had ever sent A Ling. The poems had been copied, one by one, into the diary. This answered the mysterious question of why she always returned my poems. Then I took out the blue book.

It was called
If Only They Could Talk
, and it was by a writer I had never heard of: James Herriot. I didn't know why A Ling had given me this book, but I wanted to read it. I told myself that if the book was boring after the first page, I would cover my face with it because I also wanted to sleep.

I opened the cover. There, in a drab font and depressing layout, appeared the title, writer and publisher. I turned to the first page of the first chapter and began reading.

Like a song, Herriot began with an unusual yet catchy introduction. First, he told the story of his work tending to a cow giving birth. He wore no shirt, and the barn had no door. The wind blew fiercely. Snow entered the barn and pelted his back. He said that such things had never been written in a book.

After those sentences, I continued on to the next one and the next one and the next one; soon I was reading paragraph after paragraph. Maybe turning the pages was a reflex because, without realizing it, I was already on page three.

I devoured it chapter by chapter without stopping for even a moment. Sometimes I even read the same paragraph over and over. In no time at all, I was already on page ten and hadn't moved an inch from my lying position. All of the hopelessness and tears of longing for A Ling were whisked away page by page by that book.

The magical book told of the struggles of a young veterinarian during the depths of the Depression of the 1930s. The young doctor, Herriot himself, worked in a remote village called Edensor somewhere far off in England.

I felt, with each one of Herriot's sentences, a new spirit being blown into the crown of my head. My mouth hung open and I held my breath when I read the description of the village of Edensor. The scattered slopes of hills looked like they were cascading. I imagined high mountaintops whose slopes plunged into green hills and vast valleys. In my head, I pictured rivers winding through the bottoms of the valleys among the willow trees and farmers' houses made of cobblestone.

I was mesmerized by the small village of Edensor. I soon realized that there were other beautiful things in this world besides love. Herriot's lovely description affected me so completely that when he told about the little roundpebbled lane outside the home where he practiced, I could smell the
astuarias
running along the livestock fences down the lane. When he described the meadows spread out over the hills of Derbyshire surrounding Edensor, I wanted nothing more than to stretch out over them and rest my tired heart, to let my face be kissed by the calm and cool village winds.

That evening I finished reading Herriot's tale and immediately adopted it as a representation of A Ling and the picture of my feelings for her. Now I understood why she had given me this book.

Miraculously, I was suddenly cured. I had a new love right inside my worn out bag. That love was Edensor. After 480 hours, 37 minutes, and 12 seconds of mourning my loss of A Ling, I decided to stop feeling sorry for myself and dwelling on my first love.

I did a complete 180.

Instead of reminiscing over the stinky
Sinar Harapan
Shop and the moment my heart was badly broken there, I was now diligent about visiting the municipal library in Tanjong Pandan. There, I loyally read books about the secret to success, how to socialize effectively, steps to be coming a magnetic individual, and a series of books about managing selfdevelopment.

I focused on studying and stopped making strange and unreasonable plans. I found my new life motto by a stroke of luck in an old newspaper clipping at the library. The clipping contained an interview between a senior American journalist and the late John Lennon. The Rock and Roll legend said,
Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans
!

I scoured all the roadside stalls in Tanjong Pandan for a John Lennon poster until I found a big picture of his face. The next day, I went to Bu Mus to ask permission to hang it in our classroom.

"Young man," my teacher said, furrowing her brow, her forehead crinkled up, "can you tell me, honestly, what prestigious achievement you have accomplished to deserve the right to hang that poster here?"

Bu Mus glanced over at Bruce Lee. Bruce Lee glanced at Mahar, Mahar glared arrogantly at me.

I explained to her about the prestige of years of unrewarded dedication to buying chalk. Her ears perked up.

"uh huh, unrewarded you say? Do you suppose these ears of mine are deaf? That they haven't heard the talk in the fish market—that you played with fire every Monday visiting A Miauw's daughter?"

Ah! Caught redhanded!

"Do you think I didn't know that on Fridays you tampered with our chalk so you could meet the girl?"

I was caught by surprise; it turned out Bu Mus knew everything. She had been wise to my behavior all this time. I felt so ashamed.

I froze. I asked Bu Mus' forgiveness. I kissed her hand while promising that after I returned the chalk I had buried near the
filicium
tree, I would return to class. Then, I tried to change the subject.

"What we need most in our classroom,
Ibunda
Guru, is inspiration!" I coaxed all knowingly.

I went on to relate the inspirational advice of John Lennon.

Bu Mus may have been a village teacher, but she had progressive views. Maybe she was also impressed with my sincere apology. After fulfilling the terms of my inspiration al apology, I was allowed to hang the poster.

So, amazingly, three posters and one glorious symbol hung in our classroom. A motto was printed on each:

Rhoma Irama:
Hujan duit
(Rain of Money).

John Lennon: Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans!

Bruce Lee: The dragon kung fufight to the death.

The Muhammadiyah symbol:
Do what is good and prevent what is evil.