Empire of the East (3 page)

We went in and found ourselves in the Victorian surroundings of what could have been a family restaurant in the back street of an English country town. The walls bore massive, fly-spotted mirrors in heavy frames carved from dark, expensive-looking wood, and the dining area contained nine circular tables with marble tops, each of them some seven feet across. Having seated us at one of these, two waiters went off together to a cupboard under the back of one of the windows, opened it, and came back carrying between them a tray holding twenty-five dishes of food which they proceeded to arrange on our table. We prodded with our forks at the items on offer, identifying what might have been lamb or goat, the unmistakable limbs of chickens wrapped in yellow, parchment skin, a short black length of rubber imitation of bowel, segments of fish, and octopus tentacles. It was all cold, rock-hard, and caked with what had once been a reddish sauce, recalling an unimaginative museum exhibit illustrating, perhaps, articles of food recovered from a Celtic settlement. Within minutes of our arrival four customers sitting at the nearest of the enormous tables got up and prepared to leave. They too had been confronted with twenty-five plates and their disturbing contents, and we had been in time to watch their fumblings in search of last-minute titbits before their departure. The waiter picked among them, and added several obviously popular dishes to those we already stared down at disconsolately. ‘Were all these things cooked some days ago?’ I asked Andy.

‘Oh, yes. Cooked once, twice a week. Very long time cooking. This way is keeping fresh.’

As it was quite impossible to bite into these victuals there was no opportunity, even had we desired to do so, to test their flavour, and in studying them, appetite had leaked away. Since no more food might be forthcoming for some hours, if at all that day, it seemed reasonable to stoke up with rice. A bowl of this was brought, but large mosquitoes, evidently attracted in a dry place to moisture when food was newly prepared, stuck like festive embellishments about its surface where they had weakened, then expired. Even Andy was not tempted by this offering. ‘Rice is eating for farmers,’ he explained. ‘Make you no can do shit.’ Otherwise he ate heartily and with evident relish, tearing at the dry and often withered segments of meat, the corrugations of skin and shattered bones, with small but powerful jaws. Experience might have taught him that this was the last such feast he would enjoy on the journey.

We were entering an area which appeared to be increasingly Muslim fundamentalist the further we travelled. Every village was dominated by its mosque, its size and architectural pretensions clearly reflecting the prosperity or otherwise of the local rice-farmers. Some of the mosques were showy, domed pavilions; others, where crops may have been normally poor, were no more than a dome added by way of an afterthought to a normal house. The domes were of all sizes and shapes: inflated Moghul with accompanying towers, Slavic onion, Hollywood fantasy, Tartar. Some, in the case of the richer villagers, were very vulgar. Religious outcry broadcast by loudspeakers was a feature of this region, and it would have seemed that the normal call to prayer was liable to extension by a lengthy discourse in Arabic, or possibly a reading from the Koran.

These villages were spotless and rather austere. Each one had its school, and we passed several of them shortly after midday when studies came to an end. Pupils streamed from them by the hundred and our attention was drawn particularly to the girls in their fundamentalist uniforms, rubicund faces enveloped in spotless white wimples, with medieval-looking capes, and grey skirts reaching to within inches of the ground. A few among these, perhaps prefects, wore dark blue skirts instead of grey. All were stunningly immaculate, and it was amazing to see that, despite these constraining outfits, the girls clambered into the back of the minicabs waiting to collect them with great agility. It was an illustration of the versatility of human beings, who can so easily adapt themselves to the trappings designed for another environment and another age. Further on, in reflection perhaps of less stringent fundamentalist views, schoolgirls in the longest of long skirts had taken to bicycles. In another area, clearly even more relaxed, the skirts, still as long as ever, were pink, and in a few cases the daughters of the rich had been allowed to pretend ignorance of orthodox prohibition of luxurious display by fringing the edge of their wimples on the forehead with trinkets of gold.

The road north from Langsa was full of surprise and colour. We passed over a terracotta river and round the verge of a swamp in which the mangroves brandished their black, surrealistic shapes. From this swamp a seepage spread inky plumes among neighbouring paddies. At this time of day heat-waves disguised the ingredients of this picture. In the halation it was hard to distinguish the white shapes of the peasants, knee deep in the paddies, from those of the cranes fishing a few yards away.

Evening stole up on us. We pressed on, besieged by hunger, to Lhokseumawe, a coastal settlement overshadowed by a vast oil refinery with the traffic under the severe discipline of police-manned road-blocks; and a one-way system that took the driver for a glum tour of the town before releasing him again into the main coastal road. One of the locals directed us to a Chinese restaurant where we settled to a succession of ingenious and imaginative dishes, only distracted by karaoke singing — a current fad in Indonesia which is not easy to avoid.

Andy had gone off to eat in an Indonesian place. When we picked him up later, as arranged, he took us to the Lido Graha Hotel, where he knew someone in the management who would give us a room. There was something about this vast barracks of a place that matched the architecture of the refinery and the industrial mood of the town. We were the only guests, so they had turned all the lights off to save money, and we had to feel our way along the passages leading to the rooms.

Apart from the reception the only place where there was a light was the bar. Here we were joined by Santana Mehta, an Indian from Bangalore who was in Lhokseumawe as part of a course he was doing on hotel management. He had aquiline features with fine, melancholic eyes, wore a blazer with a foulard scarf tied round his neck, and had spent a year in Sunderland that had left him overbrimming with nostalgic memories. ‘I had a whale of a time,’ he said. ‘Darts every Saturday night in the Marquis of Granby and Sunday fooling around in boats with the girls on the River Wear.’

‘Indonesia is OK,’ Mehta agreed, ‘but they don’t do things the way we do them in England.’ In England Mehta had been popular, one of the boys. Here he seemed to be held at arm’s length — handicapped, he readily agreed, by the fact that although he understood the language he could not twist his tongue round the long, unfamiliar words well enough to speak it. In his wry fashion he found his isolation funny. Not even the manager’s dog accepted him, he said. ‘I am so kind to that dog. Much as I try my persuasion that we should go for a walk, he will not associate with me. I am suspecting that it is my smell that he does not like.’

Sumatra’s monotheism worried him. He had little patience for a religion that ordered people to get out of bed at dawn to pray and do gymnastics on the floor. ‘In Bangalore we are paying our respects to so many gods. If there is a party at a temple we are going to that temple.’ He found it easier to get along with the British class society which in some way resembled the situation back home, rather than Islamic democracy which he did not understand. Puritanism shocked him. ‘Take my advice not to invite ladies to your room in this hotel. Now the police are saying that they are prostitutes and they will shave their heads. You are foreigners, but otherwise they may punish you for adultery.’

Happily enough, Andy, whose faith at least kept him out of bars, was not present at this conversation. He had put a gloomy interpretation on the presence of road-blocks in the town, and now Mehta brought up the matter of rumoured insurrection. The army was in action, he said, in the mountains nearby. He knew no more than that, but had seen military helicopters over the town earlier that day.

A large swimming pool had been built in a pseudo-garden setting on the hotel’s roof, and having learned of this we had arranged to take an early dip before leaving next morning. Arriving on the scene we found that despite possibly weeks of non-use the pool had been looked after to the extent that it was not only splendidly clear, but exuded a reassuring whiff of chlorine. But, possibly on the day of our arrival, it had been showered from the sky by many thousands of small black beetles, and these had formed an unbroken encrustation on the water, several inches in width, all around the rim. In addition there were islands of beetles floating here and there on the surface.

Under pressure of surplus energy, the young enjoy complexity in their sports. The hotel supplied a beach ball which Gawaine and Robin, standing at opposite ends of the pool, hurled across the water at each other, the game consisting of leaping into the air to kick the ball as far as possible before plunging into the pool. This exercise was pleasurably complicated by the need to avoid the rafts of beetles.

Athletic excess encouraged their attack on the hotel’s set breakfast. This included spiced porridge, chopped octopus, cold chicken pieces in curry, giant strawberries and an assortment of cakes. Mehta came in, wearing the most crisply laundered shirt I had seen since Delhi, hailed us genially, seated himself at the next table and swivelled in his chair. He bent across to inspect our breakfast with a hint of the misgivings of an aviary eagle over some dubious titbit thrown into its cage. ‘What is this food they are bringing us?’

‘It calls itself an Indian-style breakfast,’ I told him.

‘This is not Indian,’ Mehta said. ‘It is pure imitation. They have caught me with this before. All spices and very deleterious for stomach juices. In your country I am eating one kipper for breakfast every day. It is enough. Someone must ask these people to desist from their imitations of Indian food.’ He paused to look up at a weasel-faced man with eye-shades and a heavy gold bracelet hanging from his wrist who had just slid through the door. After a glance in our direction he withdrew. Mehta lowered his voice. ‘Guess profession,’ he said.

‘Police spy, would you say?’

‘Spot on,’ Mehta replied. ‘He is checking to see no ladies are under table. He is living in hopes one day will be taking lady for hair to be shaven. The town is full of these silly men. So what is your immediate programme? Will you be leaving us?’

‘We’re going north,’ I said. ‘Probably get as far as Banda Aceh, and call it a day.’

Mehta lowered his voice, pulling with a finger at the corner of an eye in a cautious but unfamiliar gesture. ‘May I give you piece of advice? Take it easy.’

‘Any trouble expected, then?’

‘I am recipient of many rumours,’ Mehta said. ‘Now there is one that hostages have been taken. Seven oilmen working with their explorations on road you will be following.’

‘We’re tourists, not oilmen. Nobody will bother with us.’

‘Well, let us hope that is so,’ Mehta said, ‘and that you will arrive safely at your destination.’

‘Do you suggest checking with the police?’ I asked.

‘Oh no, dear boy. That is one thing you must learn not to do. Keep profile low. In Indonesia that is golden rule.’

W
EST OF LHOKSEUMAWE
, in the direction of Banda Aceh, a change of climate suddenly drained the colour from the landscape. The paddies were empty, awaiting the rains. Behind the bare, iron scrollwork of the mangroves the sea had whitened over the sand, and here the fishermen, just offshore, used rakish black feluccas with black sails. For these people, said Andy with good-natured contempt, black was lucky. They prayed in the mosque but were not in reality true Muslims for they put out offerings to spirits and sea-monsters on their beached boats, and at the entrance to their huts. From this point on, westwards and northwards, the people were a strange lot. ‘They eat things we do not eat,’ he said, ‘for example the heads and feet of chickens. Also some parts of the body they are leaving unwashed.’

At Bireuën, a few miles further on, we took the road going south leading to Lake Tawar and the not wholly explored Gayo range of mountains. Lake Tawar itself was the great inducement, for the guide-book said of it that, despite its spectacular scenery, it had remained undiscovered by tourism and could expect to receive only one hundred visitors annually. All at once we were in another world. We had driven two hundred miles through paddy-fields along the shore, through many pleasant villages with kite-flying boys, Muslim girls on bicycles, old men with their long religious beards, rice-farmers with children’s butterfly-nets splashing after tiny fish, and overbearing policemen on Japanese motorcycles — people in fact busying themselves in every corner of the landscape. Now we had passed the last little girl dragging her buffalo, and easily avoiding the occasional horn-thrusts in her direction, and the people had gone. The green and silent world of the jungle was closing in.

Suddenly, and strangely, it was cooler, and the odours of grass and sap, of acrid blossom, of earth and weedy decay were in the nostrils. Back on the coast road the only trees had lined up in plantation rows, identical in shape, height and colour, and as repetitious as a wallpaper pattern. Here they were spread in graceful disorder over the low hills at the back of the plain. Someone had built a mosque and then abandoned it. Its tin dome was streaked with rust, and tipped to one side like a drunkard’s hat. To the delight of the boys the narrowing road had developed sharp bends, a corrugated surface and perilous potholes that offered an excuse for the display of driving skills. The roadside markets of the small coastal towns had been glutted with fish and innumerable varieties of fruit. The only village in the first ten miles on the road to Lake Tawar could offer no more than fruit bats, their wings tied with auspicious red twine, hanging upside down by the claws, their eyes subjecting the prospective buyer to a sad but penetrating gaze. They were offered very cheaply — the largest of them costing less than the equivalent of 5p — and would be turned into stews believed in Indonesia to be the most effective treatment for asthma. Even Andy believed in the value of this remedy, although he rejected as pagan superstition the popular consumption of their flesh as a remedy for defective eyesight.