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Still Out There

Whenever I leave a place I always wonder if I’ll ever see it again, especially somewhere far away and foreign.  And that’s even more true of people I meet along the way.  A year after I’ve returned from Lunatic, though, people I met have been surfacing.  Ping! my phone sounded the other day, and it was a text message from Daud, who I met traveling across the seas of Indonesia on the Bukit Siguntang.  I couldn’t believe he still had my number; last I’d heard from him he was jumping off the ship in Makassar to visit his parents and village for the first time in years, the last six months as a seamen on a ship in Dubai.  He was just checking in to say hi, texting from a freighter on the Mahakam River in East Kalimantan, Borneo.  A week or so before, I got a sudden email from the brother of Fardus, who I’d met in Bangladesh.  “This is the brother of Fardus!” he wrote.  “How are you??”  Small voices from far away on a big planet; I’ve been up the Mahakam, have been to Fardus’s house in Chandpur; I could picture both places – the cloying heat and humidity over the muddy brown Mahakam; the water pump and coconut palms in Fardus’s little yard.  Day there, night here when the messages came in.

Two months ago I returned to Delhi for the first time in eleven months.  My former hotel was a pile of rubble.  The city seemed dustier and hotter, but otherwise the same.  I went to Palika Park.  Stood still amidst the crowds and paan wrappers and a shoe shiner came up to me.  “Remember me?” he said, and I did, though not his name.  “You looking for Moolchand?” he said.  I was, and he took off, returning a few minutes later with the ear cleaner himself.  Moolchand looked tiny.  Thinner than I remembered.  He was wearing the identical shirt, slacks and shoes he’d been wearing the last time I’d seen him, a year before.  “My oldest daughter is getting married in the spring,” he said.  Which meant that he was saving money for the big event and not eating.  “TVs, motorcycles; girls are very expensive!” he said.  “What to do?”  The groom was from Khajuraho, Moolchand’s home village, of course, and he and family members – 35 people – had sat down with the groom’s family and hammered the engagement out.  We drank sweet, milky chai – along with six other shoe shiners I’d met last year.  We chewed tobacco.  Moolchand cleaned my ears.  Invited me to the wedding and I said, who knows, maybe I can make it!

In the process of writing the book all those people became almost fictional characters frozen in space and time, a little unreal to me.  The places too.  So it was great to be in Delhi again and smell it and breath it and see, not so much that little had changed, but that I’d seen it right the first time.  That I hadn’t imagined it or Moolchand; that Daud was still plying the waters, and maybe I’d gotten it right in Lunatic and had really captured just a little of the world as it is right this minute.

Slow Boat to Sarong

When the MV Joola sank off the coast of Gambia in 2002 it had a capacity of 580 passengers, but nearly 1,900 were aboard. When the Senopati Nusantara sank in Indonesia four years later, as The Washington Post reported, it was “thought” to be carrying 638.

“Thought” is the operative word on Third World ferries.

On Wednesday morning I boarded the Bukit Siguntang in Jakarta, which was bound for Sarong on the coast of Indonesian Papua, via stops in Surabaya, Makassar, Bau Bau, Ambon, Bandaneira and Fak Fak. Its capacity was clearly stated: 2003 souls, all but 300 of which – including me – were in “ekonomi,” otherwise known as steerage. Which wouldn’t have been too overwhelming: the lower two decks were a series of wide cabins with linoleum-covered knee-high platforms, seven people to a platform. Except that Pelni, the government-owned company that operates the Siguntang sold tickets to anyone who wanted one. And not everyone had a ticket. In Surabaya I watched a man shimmy up a dock line, a dangling, frenetic whirl of limbs up five stories, who disappeared into the throngs.

I have never seen such crowds. The decks outside, the decks inside, the passageways, the stairways – every square inch of floor was covered with humanity. There must have been at least another thousand on board. To descend the stairs into steerage was to get hit with a wall of heat and humidity and cigarette smoke. You could touch it, feel it on your face and hands. It almost knocked me backwards; made me want to flee. Massed human beings in tight quarters are not a pretty sight. They sweat, cough and hack. They snore and belch. They produce untold quantities of garbage and trash, from cigarette butts to egg shells to fish tails, which can’t go anywhere, can’t be hidden.

What is the standard roach calculation? For every one you see, there are 1,000 you don’t. Or is it for every one you see, there are 10,000 you don’t? No matter. For most of us, one or two roaches in sight when you flip on your kitchen light heralds an infestation. On the Bukit Siguntang there must have been a billion roaches. Literally. The decks, the bulkheads, the ceilings, the toilets (such as they were) swarmed day and night. Lying on my hard plank I watched them crisscross the ceiling overhead, waiting for one to lose its grip and fall, which they did. Roaches are surprisingly soft, almost silky feeling to the touch.

Having staked out their patch of ground, thousands never moved, even as the garbage built and the bathrooms seeped and leaked. There wasn’t a chair or piece of padding on the boat, save thin mattresses you could rent; Lena, one of my seven platform mates, cautioned against them. She held her nose, scratched her leg and wagged her finger, so I spend five days on a plank. My body became a thing of bruised points, tender to the touch: ankles, knees, hips, shoulders and head. But I only found one flea – on my ankle.

The lights never went off at night. At roughly 4 am wailed the first call of the muezzin. The boat was dry; we were a potentially volatile mix of tightly packed Christians and Muslims and animists living off of cigarettes, rice and hot sauce for days on end.

But.

But it was, as usual, a thing of wonder in the madness. I saw whales blow and their great flukes slap the sea. I saw porpoises shoot through the wake and flying fish glide over the wave tops. Nine Papuan roughnecks returning from the oil fields of Malaysia sang for hours in the heat and smoke with ukuleles made from Masonite. Mrs. Nova, as she called herself, who was 17, sang sweet Indonesian pop songs with Lena who she’d never met, and treated me to mie bakso – tangy, hot, sorta matzo bally and noodle soup on the docks of Surabaya. Daoud Genti, a Toraja seamen returning to his village for the first time in five years after stints in Malaysia and Dubai, taught me Indonesian. Saya pergi ke Ambon. I am going to Ambon. “I”m worried,” he said. “My village is small and has no electricity, no mobile signal,” he said, fingering his phone. “What am I going to do there?” He had not had a day off in the last five months.

Indeed, it was a world of immigrant workers making epic journeys. We fly to Los Angeles and back in a weekend, to Chicago for the day – a long haul is a flight across the Pacific to Asia. The Papuans would be traveling for nine days; they had been gone for years. Ditto Arthur, who’d just left the oil patch of Brunei; he was 24 and hadn’t seen his family in seven years, though he supported them all. From Brunei he’d crossed Borneo, was now crossing the archipelago, a journey of ten days to get home.

We were lucky. The skies stayed blue, the seas calm. I could only imagine what it had been like on the Senopati Nusantara, which battled 15-foot seas for ten hours before it sank. Sickness. Panic. The garbage, shit, piss and vomit, people rolling and pitching on an overloaded roller coaster of death.

The journey wore on me. Physically, it was my hardest yet. After five days my body ached. I was coughing and hacking from the thick and omnipresent smoke of unfiltered cigarettes. My throat felt like sandpaper rubbing together when I swallowed. There was no place to be alone. No quiet. I longed for padding. Silence. To not be stared at by 3,000 pairs of eyes. To sleep in darkness, without a strange leg flopping on mine, or the insistent cries of an infant jerking me awake.

Total honesty: I’ve never wanted to get off a conveyance so much in my life.

Which I did, in Ambon, in the Moluccas, at three pm Saturday. Here, just four years ago, Muslims and Christians rioted, massacring each other by the hundreds. I’m going to see if I can find someone to talk about it, to explain it all to me.

And there are some very old, very rustic wooden ferries listing in the harbor. I wonder where they go?