A Quiet Knife in The Ribs
I know the secret of a murder, though I've never actually been told . . .
We'll call her 'Fi,' and him 'Budi':
Fi and Budi were childhood sweethearts in a village in Banten in Western Java. Fi told me once that their favourite pastime was to eat the delicious cobs of corn that the Javanese cook by the roadside, on little braziers, and serve with oil and herbs.
One evening in the wet season, a guy they both knew caught Fi at dusk, in the rice fields on the edge of the village, and raped her.
Budi waited: the Javanese are patient beyond the ken of the westerner. Some months later, Budi caught the guy at dusk, in the rice fields on the edge of the village, stabbed him unceremoniously in the heart, and slid his body face-down into the river.
Soon after, Fi was offered a place at college – a real achievement for a village girl – but her father, a pious muslim, refused to let her study: a village girl needs no education.
Now, Budi was a talented motorcyclist, and had in the past won races called 'balap.' Balap is organised illegal street-racing, with considerable prizes. Fi, though, had wrung from Budi a promise to stop: it's a very dangerous business.
Some weeks later, a friend of Fi's stepped up to her in the market, and said, 'Fi, Budi lagi balap!!': Budi has gone street-racing!
There are details missing here. I don't know where the balap was, and I don't know how Fi got there. However, I did manage to determine several things: the first was that the organisation of the race, as with most everything else in Indonesia, was clumsy. Somehow, one of the roads leading onto the impromptu track had not been closed. The second was that Fi arrived just in time to see a truck blunder onto the track and kill Budi, who had determined to win enough money to send his girl to college.
Several years later, during the worst months of the Asian financial crisis of the late 90's, when murder and mayhem had the upper hand, Fi began to lose her mind. At night, she would have the same nightmare again and again, thrashing about, crying, 'Budi! Jangan balap lagi!' -- 'Budi, don't go street-racing anymore!!' It was from listening to her cries in the night, and by stealthily drawing details from her by day, that I pieced the story together.
I pride myself that I managed to care for Fi during her breakdown. She would forget who she was, even what languages she spoke. She would wake at dawn, and not know who I was, and ask where so-and-so was, and want to simply walk out of our little apartment to look for her – a terrifying problem for a white male non-muslim to deal with. I recall returning from class one evening to find a gaggle of locals standing snickering at Fi, who had climbed out a second-story window onto the branch of a mango tree, where she was sitting, laughing, as happy as a child, collecting mangoes.
Fi is well now, and the genie of life's lamp has whisked her away to Europe, where she has a husband and a child and a career, and kindly Nature has allowed her to forget.
But I haven't forgotten, and I like to think that on cool and quiet evenings, the frangipani, the omnipresent frangipani of Java, rains its waxy white and yellow flowers on Budi's inconspicuous grave.