hujan

If language is any guide than Indonesia is a starkly bipolar place. Two words, sudah and belum, ‘already’ and ‘not yet,’ dominate conversation, and to a greater extent, how Indonesians digest life. It is an equally beautiful and frustrating delineation of life here.

When asked if you have been married, instead of answering with the simple negation, one answers ‘belum’—not yet. When unable to shake a hawker, a simple ‘sudah’ is often the most effective retort. Our well worn yeses and nos are relegated to bit parts.

Daily conversation is practically built around this partition; whenever you meet someone they can be expected to ask, ‘Have you eaten?,’ ‘Do you smoke?,’ ‘Have you been?’ and you to answer, instead of yes or no, ‘sudah, belum, belum.’

It gets a little absurd when asked things like, ‘Are you in the army?’ or ‘Do you have children?’ or ‘Have you ever lost a limb?’ and my Indonesian teachers can always be counted on to firmly remind me, ‘mas matt. Belum.’ Nearly always, your response ‘belum’ will be sparingly and precisely repeated, rolled back to you, remphasized, by one’s conversational counterpart, as the word itself might fit through a pinhole: in Jawa one shrinks to stare down the infinity of possibility alone, and learns to live with it knocking about in the night.

* * *

The rainy season has been a bit tardy coming to Yogya, and the past week has been marked by the further condensation of collective apprehension (heed, for Jawa) as each day passed without rain. Each day the question, ‘hujan’ (‘rain?’) became a bit more frequent and the answer ‘belum,’ often accompanied by a glance at the canopy, a bit more emphatic. When you only experience two seasons, and this specific changing of the guard is so palpable and—it rains—cathartic, the tension (sparing you the implicit survey of Javanese sexual psychology) gets a bit onerous.

Its funny and a bit unexplainable, because this friction becomes almost communal; I found myself on edge over the status of the rain, mystified by its absence, when rain really only meant buying an umbrella, getting muddy, staring down yet more cockroaches, and looking out for passing buses. Every day ‘sudah’ rolls across Jawa and into the ear of someone you meet: it rained in Jakarta, and heavy rain in Cental Jawa, the volcano had rain last night. In Yogya: still, no, not yet.

* * *

Today, it rained, and it was pure anticlimax. Yet, I could not help enjoy the Javanese accounting implicit in its passage: the sliding of the counter from one column to another, the removal of the blockage, Jawa's metaphysical divide; in an instant ‘belum’ becomes ‘sudah.’