my blue raincoat

Part of the rainy season is buying a raincoat and an umbrella. As you might imagine, when the changing of the seasons is marked by something as definitive as rain and then later it ceasing to rain for eight months, it is tough to fake it. Since it is difficult to either put your poncho into mothballs or recall exactly which stowage seemed most fitting for your umbrella to winter, everyone has to come by these necessities again, either by hook or by crook.

As the saying goes, there are two modes of acquisition, either schlep to the store like most god-fearing (from what I can gather a slightly less mellow and less personal god than we westerners might be familiar with) folk or steal it from the well meaning (and dashing) honky that lives in your alleyway.

Needless to say, as I was drying my raincoat across the handlebars of my bicycle (truly more of a tangle of sharp metal resembling a bicycle) my raincoat found a new home. I was able to find this new home almost as quickly as it disappeared, in large part because my poncho did not have to make a long trip.

Two days later—days, coincidentally, where I weighed and considered the rain like the miniature golf ball courts the windmill—I noticed on my way to school a rain coat about 25 meters down the alleyway that looked strikingly, down to the bicycle rust stains, like my recently departed one.

That afternoon, after spending an entire hour practicing and learning necessary vocabulary to dispute the ownership of a raincoat (yet to be covered in my studies, though the vocabulary necessary to set up a small business that makes banana chips—check) I set out for home on my bicycle full of resolve.

Indonesian language is basically organized entirely in the passive tense, so as to avoid saying anything outright and thereby never cause offense. Therefore, key sentences included: ‘My raincoat is no longer on top of my bicycle,’ ‘My raincoat looks similar to this raincoat,’ and ‘This raincoat, might it be from that house?’ It is the type of language where when someone stands on your foot in the bus, the proper thing to say is ‘My foot is being stood on.’ Anyhow, my teacher implored me to just forget about the raincoat, cut my losses, and call off the recovery mission: you cannot do this sort of thing here, people will not understand. I, muttering something about subsidizing raincoats for the whole neighborhood, refused to demure.

I managed to make it about halfway home before the windmill blade descended like a thunderclap (in actuality, with a thunderclap) and the rain opened up. You have scant seen rain come on with such alacrity and sheer power until you have experienced the monsoon. Water pours from the sky and the streets become sluices; this happens every day, seemingly without fatigue. With the élan that only a twenty-year-old bicycle built for someone about a foot shorter than me can emboss, I clattered off the road and under the awning of a roadside shop and, as the rain poured down, knew that I had been defeated. I fished through my pockets, bought another (identical, or soon to acquire the requisite rust stains) raincoat, and pedaled home, fully aware of Indnoesia's coquettish laughter all around.