Remembering Indonesia

This was written for a school assignment. Aside from a liberty or two with insignificant details, it’s accurate to how I remember the evening.

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I’m finally here.

We left at dark, just after the sunset call to prayer. The call – broadcast in Arabic although the people speak Indonesian – rang over the city like a poem as we arrived at the dock. The dozens of mosques in the city keep their own clocks; the call to prayer begins at one mosque, then another begins its sacred counterpoint, then another. For five minutes, the city is overlaid with the cacophony, overburdened loudspeakers crackling like popcorn.

We boarded the small cargo boat a few minutes after the last mosque’s call, lagging behind the others by a minute or two, faded into the evening sky, replaced by the sounds of waves lapping against the boats and the shouts of crew members loading their cargoes of rice, eggs, sarongs, plastic chairs in shocking shades of pink and orange, and other household goods they would take back to the families on their respective islands.

Our boat, the Alam Shukur, would arrive at one of these islands around noon the next day. The island is one of hundreds that cluster in the sea that fills the space between the several major, large islands that make up Indonesia. Our island, Balobaloang, had the good fortune of being part of an archipelago of several similar islands, most of which were inhabitable, so although Balobaloang is a fifteen-hour journey by boat from the nearest city, at least it is not completely alone out in the empty sea.

These were some of the thoughts that offered me comfort as we got underway. I had never been this far from home before – literally half the world away – and my excitement at the journey was dampened by homesickness and a dull foreboding that simmered in the pit of my stomach like the pot of fish stew we’d eaten earlier that day. I did not speak Indonesian well at all, and now we were going to live for a month or more among people who primarily spoke a regional language, with only a little of the national language mixed in. At least my traveling companion, an Indonesian by birth who had been studying in the United States, spoke excellent English and some of the regional Bugis language, and could fill in the gaps when my language skills failed. Or so I told myself, to hold at arms’ length my anxiety about traveling into a place so foreign to me.

Once we entered the open ocean, my fear began to recede. We sat on the small deck with the six-man crew – as large a crew as could comfortably fit on a boat this small – under the clear evening sky. With no light pollution from the mainland to spoil the view, the stars overhead were thick and luminous, more stars than I had ever seen before. The ocean was relatively calm; the waves rocked the Alam Shakur as we made our way, but not enough to disturb our normally land-bound sense of balance. The gentle rocking relaxed me, like the motion of the rocking chair in which my mother would soothe me when, as a little girl, I would suffer nightmares and a fear of the dark.

I slept that night on the deck, under the stars and the sails, wrapped head to toe in a blanket against the wind and the light mist of spray stirred by our travel. My last thoughts before sleep were of my parents, whom I’d lost fifteen years ago. I pictured them as they were in their wedding album, young and filled with the exuberance of a life just beginning. They had loved boats and the romantic ideal of ocean travel by vessels such as the one that carried me, but they had never had the opportunity to take such a trip as the one I was on. I imagined them looking down on me from among the stars, two of the numberless points of light turning slowly above me. I saw them smiling at me, glad that I could experience what they never had. And I imagined that, through my eyes, through the part of them that I carry in me, my parents finally were able to realize their long-delayed wish.