rats!

One of the more charming amenities of my home in Kalimantan was the family of rats built in, gratis. When they were not carrying off unattended small children from neighboring villages, they spent a good deal of time holding impromptu nighttime contra dances in the walls surrounding my room.

It was a bad situation. Having lived in Indonesia for a little while, you become accustomed to rats being around—the occasional scamper across the kitchen, chance encounters in dusky alleyways—and yet nothing prepared me for the sheer size and brazenness of my Kalimantan rats. It was like having a live-in crew to prewash all my dishes and in terms of household power dynamics, the rats pretty much ran the dark.

Obviously, this would have been a more serviceable problem if not for Sukadana’s especially reliant electrical power. Usually I could just keep every light in the house blazing until battered down safely beneath my mosquito net, but without the protection of electricity there was no check to keep the rats from sitting in the shadows of the kitchen abusing me to hurry up and finish my dinner (understandably, it was 5:30, they were probably hungry, and I was just a skinny cracker in a skirt). With only candles for protection, I spent most nights eating hastily, feet inclined, while my pyrotechnic rat obstacle course provided the vantage needed to conclude that my floorboards were actually greasier than I previously thought. The neighbors across the street, who ran a convenience store out of their living room, got quite familiar to the sight of me frantically banging on their front window at 7:30pm, feverishly looking for yet another of the soiled boxes with the fatty, yellowish tapers. The old man could never get enough of this; he thought it was hilarious, even without me figuring how to explain what methadone is.

Now I like to think of myself as a pretty hearty being, but after being woken up from a dead sleep nearly every night, by their screams and scampers, something had to be done. To further my case, I would like to call upon all da ladies that have bunked with me (also rolled in the Lex) to testify and justify that I just do not wake up in the middle of the night. These rats had it coming: I got myself a cat.

First, though, I had to get the cat (taken from a friend who was tired of its behavior—more on that later) back to my house. Next time someone tells me, ‘You know Matt, your blog just does not help me imagine what you are doing:’ here is an image for you. Imagine me riding a bicycle in the dark, clattering over a mud road, pockmarked with lake--like potholes that frequently bottom out the dump trucks that rumble around the regency. In my neighborhood, its hard to purchase a candle without arousing notice, and the next day I was peppered with questions: ‘Mistah, why were you stealing a cat?’ ‘Hey Mistah! Where were you going with the cat di bungkus?’ (bungkus is usually used when you get food to go, it means wrapped up in paper into a tight triangle of deliciousness; I had unsuccessfully swaddled the cat to try to immobilize it) ‘Mistah, do all animals fear you?’

This journey is usually difficult enough: one hand for the flashlight, one for the bike. However this journey is an especially maddened weave because of the frantic, half-feral cat wrapped up in my bag. Put it this way: at some point, something that urgently needs attention—be it handlebar, torch, or feline—has to go it alone. So there you have it, this is me, cat thief, in Indonesia.