I had been giving private tuition to a group of Indonesian students whose parents had sent them to Singapore for their education. They kept telling me I must go and visit their country, so during the end-of-year school holidays in December, that was what I did, staying with student Honi Handaya’s family.
On my second day, Honi took me out to explore Jakarta.
The driving was hair raising, to put it mildly, with smaller vehicles like motorcycles, bicycles and trishaws (called becak [pronounced beh-tjak], from the Fujianese dialect pronunciation of 馬車 / 马车 mǎchē / “horse vehicle”) weaving their suicidally fearless and reckless way in and out of the throng of buses and cars. Sitting in one of these becak, you are only at the level of the wheel of a bus, so it was very frightening to be about a hair’s breadth from these tons of metal thundering past. Also, the trishaw rider is behind the passenger, which means that the passenger doesn’t have the driver between him/her and the vehicle in front to take the impact of any collision.
After that leg-wobbling experience, I suggested we take the bus instead. Honi took me to where a cluster of people were standing by the road—that was the bus stop. No post, no board with bus numbers, let alone a board setting out the routes. Just a bunch of people to mark the spot. I asked Honi, “How do we know which bus is going where?” She said, “The conductor will announce the stops.”
Whenever a bus—unmarked on the front—arrived, the knot of people would surge forwards as it approached, looking expectantly and listening intently. The conductor would hang out of the door, shouting out all the names of the stops from that point on. Those who heard the name of their stop on the list would leap on; the rest would step back to wait for the next bus. And the whole process would repeat itself the next time a bus approached.
(Indonesia, 1973)
No comments:
Post a Comment