The Rainbow Troops Read online

  And blessed is the land where tin flows, because like a widow flower swarming with honeybees, tin is always accompanied by other materials: clay, xenotime, zirconium, gold, silver, topaz, galena, copper, quartz, silica, granite, monazite, ilmenite, siderite, and hematite. We even had uranium. Layers of riches stirred below the stilted houses where we lived our deprived lives. We, the natives of Belitong, were like a pack of starving rats in a barn full of rice.

  The Estate That great natural resource was exploited by a company called PN Timah. PN stands for Perusahaan Negeri, or state-owned company, Timah means tin.

  PN operated 16 dredges. The enterprise absorbed almost the entire island's workforce. It was a pulsing vein with a complete power monopoly over the whole island of Belitong.

  The dredges' steel bowls never stopped digging into Belitong's soil. They were like giant, greedy snakes that knew no exhaustion. They were as long as football fields, and nothing could stand in their way. They smashed coral reefs, took down trees with trunks the size of small houses, demolished brick buildings with one blow, and completely pulverized an entire village. They roamed over mountain slopes, fields, valleys, seas, lakes, rivers and swamps. Their dredging sounded like roaring dinosaurs.

  We often made foolish bets, like how many minutes it would take a dredge to turn a hill into a field. The loser, always Syahdan, would have to walk home from school backwards, not allowed to turn around at all. We would follow along, beating on tambourines while he waddled backwards like a penguin. His journey usually ended with him bottom up in a ditch.

  The Indonesian government took over PN from the colonial Dutch. And not only were the assets seized, but also the feudalistic mentality. Even after Indonesia gained its freedom, PN's treatment of its native employees remained very discriminatory. The treatment differed based on caste-like groups.

  The highest caste was occupied by PN executives. They usually were referred to as Staff. The lowest caste was comprised of none other than our parents, who worked for PN as pipe carriers, hard laborers sifting tin or daily paid laborers. Because Belitong had already become a corporate village, PN slowly assumed the form of a dominant hegemonic ruler and, fitting with the feudalistic design, the caste of a PN worker automatically bled over into non-working hours.

  The Staff—almost none of whom were Belitong-Malays— lived in an elite area called the Estate. This area was tightly guarded by security, fences, high walls and harsh warnings posted everywhere in three languages: Formal colonialstyle Indonesian, Chinese and Dutch. The warning read "No Entry for those without the Right".

  In our eyes—the eyes of poor village children—the Estate looked like it said, "Keep your distance." That impression was reinforced by a row of tall pinnate trees dropping blood-red pellets on the roofs of the expensive cars piled up at the garage exit.

  The luxurious houses of the Estate were built in the Victorian style. Their curtains were layered and resembled movie theater screens. Inside, small families lived peacefully, with two, maybe three children at the most. They were always peaceful, dark, and not noisy.

  The Estate was located on a high curve, giving the Victorian houses the appearance of nobles' castles. Each house consisted of four separate structures: the main chambers for the owners, the servants' quarters, the garage and the storage unit. All of them were connected by long, open terraces encircling a small pond. Captivating blue water lilies floated around the edge of the pond. In the center stood a statue of a potbellied child, the legendary Belgian peeing mannequin that always sprayed water out of its embarrassingly funny little piece.

  Pots of silver ball cacti hung in rows on the rim of the roof. There was a special worker to tend to the flowers. Outside the circumference of the pond stood a square cage decorated with Roman pillars. It was the home of the English pigeons, voracious but tame.

  The living room was filled with a large Victorian rosewood sofa. Sitting on it, one felt like an exalted king. Next to the living room stretched a long, intricate corridor. Expensive paintings of high artistic value, which, because of their greatness, were difficult to understand, hung along the corridor walls. My friend, if you were trying to get from the living room to the dining room and you weren't paying attention, you would get lost because of the abundance of doors in that house.

  The occupants of the house ate dinner wearing their best clothes—they even put on their shoes for the meal. After placing their napkins on their laps, they ate without making a peep while listening to classical music, maybe Mozart's Haffner No. 35 in D Major. And no one put their elbows on the table.

  On this serene night, the atmosphere of the Estate was very still. There was almost utter silence. There was some playful noise coming from the corner over there, but wait, it was just a poodle messing around with a few angora cats. A housemaid, after being snapped at by her boss, broke up the cute animals, and it was quiet once again. Not much later, the sound of tinkling piano keys escaped faintly from one of the tall-pillared Victorian homes. A small tomboy, Floriana, or Flo for short, was having a piano lesson. Unfortunately, she was a bit drowsy. Her chin rested on both of her hands, and she yawned over and over again. She was like a cat that had had too much sleep.

  Her father, a Mollen Bas, head of all the dredges, sat beside her. He was infuriated by the behavior of the tomboy and embarrassed in front of the private piano teacher, a middleaged, wellmannered Javanese woman.

  Flo's father was capable of managing the shifts of thousands of workers, competent in solving the most difficult of technical problems, successful in overseeing million-dollar assets, but when faced with this small girl, his youngest, he just about gave up. The louder Flo's father scolded her, the wider her yawns became.

  The private teacher meekly started with the notations do, mi, so, ti, moving across four octaves, and showing the finger position for each notation, a basic hand-positioning exercise. Flo yawned again.

  The PN School The PN School was in the Estate compound, and it was a center of excellence, a place for the best. Hundreds of qualified students competed at the highest standard at this school, and one of them was Flo.

  The difference between this school and ours was like the difference between land and sky. The PN School classrooms were adorned with educational cartoons, basic math tables, the periodic table, world maps, thermometers, photos of the President and VicePresident, and the heroic national symbol—which included that strange bird with an eight-feathered tail. There also were anatomy sculptures, big globes and models of the solar system. They didn't use chalk, but smelly markers, because their chalkboard was white.

  "They have a lot of teachers," Bang Amran Isnaini, who once attended school there, informed me the night before my first day at Muhammadiyah Elementary. I became lost in thought.

  "Each subject has its own separate teacher, even when you are in first grade."

  I couldn't sleep that night, I was dizzy trying to count how many teachers the PN School had—and also of course because I was so excited about starting school the next day.

  The first day of enrollment at the PN School was a joyous celebration. Not nervewracking like at our school. Dozens of fancy cars lined up in front of the school. Hundreds of wealthy children enrolled. That day, the new students were measured for three different uniforms.

  The uniform for Mondays was a blue shirt with a beautiful floral print. Every morning, the PN School students were picked up by a school bus which also was blue. Whenever that vehicle passed us, we stopped, stared in amazement from the side of the road, and admired it. Seeing the PN School students getting off of the school bus reminded me of a picture of a group of small, cute, white and winged children getting off of a cloud, like in the Christian calendars.

  The principal of the PN School was named Ibu Frischa, highly educated and very concerned with prestige. She managed her gestures in a way that accentuated her social class. Up close, anyone would feel intimidated. It was clear by the way she wore her makeup that she was fighting her age; it also was
clear that it was a battle she had already lost.

  Ibu Frischa was very proud of her school. If one had a chance to speak with her, she was only interested in talking about three things: the PN School's fancy facilities, the extravagant extracurricular budget, and her former students who were now successful in Jakarta.

  The PN School was Belitong's most discriminating club. That school only accepted children of the Staff who lived in the Estate. There was an official rule that regulated which rank of employees could enroll their children at the PN School. And of course, on the gate hung that warning not to enter unless you had the right.

  This meant that the children of fishermen, pipe carriers, daily paid laborers or hard laborers sifting tin, like our parents, and especially native children of Belitong, didn't have the least opportunity to receive a good education. If they wanted to go to school, they were forced to join the Muhammadiyah village school, which if caressed by just a little bit of strong wind, could fall apart.

  This was the most ironic thing in our lives: the glory of the Estate and the glamour of the PN School were funded cent by cent from the tin that was scraped out of our homeland. Like the hanging gardens of Babylon built for the tyrant Nebuchadnezzar III for worshiping the god Marduk, the Estate was a Belitong landmark built to continue the dark dream of spreading colonization. Its goal was to give power to a few people to oppress many, to educate a few people in order to make the others docile. The worshiped god was none other than status, status built through the unjust treatment of the poor native inhabitants.

  Chapter 6

  Those without the Right

  WITHOUT A DOUBT, if one were to zoom out, our village would appear to be the richest village in the world. The amount of mines sprawled across the land was unimaginable and trillions of rupiah were invested here. Billions of dollars flowed in like rats drawn to the melody of the Pied Piper's flute. Yet, zooming back in, the wealth of the island was visibly trapped in one place, piled up inside the fortress walls of the Estate.

  Just an arm's length outside of those fortress walls spanned a strikingly contradictory sight, like a village chicken sitting next to a peacock. There lived the native Belitong-Malays, and if they didn't have eight children, then they weren't done trying. They blamed the government for not providing them with enough entertainment, so at night, they had nothing to do besides make children.

  It would be an exaggeration to call our village a slum, but it would not be wrong to say it was a laborers' village shadowed by an endless eclipse since the dawn of the industrial revolution. Belitong Island, one of the first places in Indonesia occupied by the Dutch, had been oppressed for seven generations, when suddenly, in the blink of an eye, hundreds of years of the drought of misery were drenched in one night by a rain of torment: the arrival of the Japanese. My father vividly recalled the storm.

  "My son, the soldiers who never let go of their bayonets' snouts turned our world into a hell." His innocent eyes reflected the anguish of a man whose dignity had been wounded and whose land had been robbed.

  After three-hundred-fifty years, the Dutch said "good day" and the Japanese yelled "sayonara". Unfortunately, that wasn't the happy ending for us, the natives of Belitong. For we were to be occupied in another way. Our land was seized once again, but in a more civilized manner. We were freed, but not yet free.

  From our yard, we could see the Estate's walls.

  Our yard, overgrown with shrubs, velvet, and shoe flowers, was boring. Our crisscrossed fence, which leaned over the edge of ditches filled with still, brown water and mosquito nests, was also boring.

  Our stilted, worn-out house was crammed into the same area as the police station, the PN logistics building, Chinese temples, the village office, the religious affairs office, dorms for dock coolies, sailors' barracks, the water tower, Chinese-Malay stores, dozens of coffee warung—traditional roadside stalls—and pawn shops always full of visitors. At the edge of the village, tucked away in a corner, was the long house of the Sawang tribe. Their house was long, and so is their story—which I promise to tell you later.

  The rest were government offices, built with no logical plan in mind, and eventually abandoned, or used for official projects, legal and halal (permissible by Islamic law). The term official was often used to legitimize the corrupt robbery of state money.

  The Chinese-Malays, as they sometimes are called, have lived on the island for a long time. They were first brought to Belitong by the Dutch to be tin laborers. Most of them were Khek from Hakka, Hokian from Fukien, Thongsans, Ho Phos, Shan Tungs, and Thio Cius. That tough ethnic community developed their own techniques for manually mining tin. Their terms for these techniques, aichang, phok, kiaw, and khaknai, are still spoken by Malay tin prospectors to this day.

  As for the Malays, they lived like puppets—controlled by a small and comical but very powerful puppet master called a siren. At seven o'clock every morning, the stillness shattered. The siren roared from the PN central office. Immediately, PN coolies bustled about, emerging from every corner of the village to line up along the side of the road, jumping and jamming themselves into the backs of trucks which would bring them to the dredges.

  The village fell quiet again. But moments later, an orchestra emerged as the women began crushing their spices. The sounds of pestles pounding against wooden mortars incessantly echoed from one stilted house to another, but when the clock struck five, the siren shrieked once again. The coolies dispersed to go home like ants fleeing a burning anthill. And that's how it went on, for hundreds of years.

  Unlike at the Estate, when eating, the PN coolies were not accompanied by Mozart's Haffner No. 35 in D Major. Their meals were accompanied by bickering, husbands complaining about the menu—always the cheapest fish for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The complaint was then countered by a hysterical blast from the wife, "I should have been the wife of a worker in the Estate instead. You are just a coolie, be grateful for your fish!"

  In the midst of their terrible fight at the dinner table, a calm backsound entered and harmonized the lyrics of their whimpering children, lined up neatly like boards in a fence, asking their parents to buy them new scout uniforms.

  The economic strength of Belitong Island was dominated by the Staff living in the Estate. The businessmen receiving concessions from the tin exploitation lived in Jakarta, and the conspirators receiving bribes were none other than the politicians. But we didn't know these underhanded, behind-the-scenes people or where they lived. They sat prosperously on the highest throne in the most exclusive class. They were the biggest benefactors of the riches of our island. The businessmen and politicians often visited Belitong to see the massive tin exploitation destroying the island's environment. The expressions on their faces led me to believe that they might have forgotten we existed.

  There was no middle class, or maybe there was—the public servants who engaged in small-scale corruption, or the law officers who took in extra money by intimidating the businessmen.

  The lowest class was occupied by our parents, the PN coolies. PN paid them 30,000 rupiah per month. Back then, one of Uncle Sam's dollars was worth 2,500 rupiah, meaning for 30 days work, they made no more than twelve U.S. dollars. They were also given about 50 kilograms of rice.

  They had no choice; that amount had to be sufficient to support a wife and at least seven children. But, don't worry, because surely, as sure as the coming of the judgment day, the coolies got an annual raise accompanied by a very personal message: With this raise, we would like to show the company's appreciation for your hard work and to thank you for making the company proud. Eight-hundred rupiah—that's about 80 cents—every year. Every year!

  It would be a miracle comparable to Moses dividing the Red Sea if a coolie achieved a wage above 35,000 rupiah before reaching retirement, and only God and Moses know how they were able to make it through each month. The bitter reality of their wages meant only one thing: there was no room for a child's education in the plan of a coolie's family. And if th
at wasn't enough to discourage them, the educational discrimination practiced by PN further destroyed the spirits of the coolies to send their children to school.

  My father said our family was still fortunate.

  One of the extraordinary qualities of Malays is that no matter how bad their circumstances, they always consider themselves fortunate. That is the use of religion.

  I remember something my father told me a few days before my first day of school. "My son, Muhammadiyah teachers like Pak Harfan and Bu Mus, fishermen, oil workers, coconut workers and dam keepers live in such poor conditions. You must be grateful to Allah for what we have."

  That was the first time I heard Bu Mus' name. Then my father said that he heard that she, the new, young Muhammadiyah teacher, wanted to teach so village children can get an education.

  That was the first time I accepted Bu Mus into my heart as a heroine.

  Sahara, me, Kucai, Trapani, Harun and Mahar were the children of PN coolies. Lintang was the son of a fisherman, Borek was the son of a dam keeper, Syahdan was the son of a boat caulker, and A Kiong was the son of a Chinese farmer.

  If we say the families of Sahara, me, Kucai, Trapani, Harun and Mahar were the jump rope of poverty, then the families of Lintang, Borek, Syahdan, and A Kiong played jump rope. When the winds were calm, they reaped a nice profit from shellfish and tapped rubber trees and were above the rope, having a little more money than us. But during the prolonged rainy season, they were below the jump rope of poverty and barely scraped by as the poorest of the poor on the island.

  And despite our varying degrees of poverty, there was someone even poorer than all of us, and she wanted to be our teacher. I couldn't wait to meet the young girl my father had mentioned.