The Lost Ticket

Fictional Short Story

Originally published in the Jakarta Post, 18/10/09

http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2009/10/18/the-lost-ticket.html

The police post floated alone like a candle flame in the humming Jakarta darkness at the southern entrance of Gambir train station. Behind it was the great black void of Merdeka Square where Monas blazed in a smudged strip of yellow light. The night was thick and heavy and full of mosquitoes.
A lone policeman stood in the open doorway of the police post, smoking and staring vacantly out at the streaking orange of the passing headlights. He had changed out of his uniform and was wearing dirty rubber sandals, a gray tee-shirt and a pair of blue shorts that showed thin, hairless calves.
“Pak? Selamat malam…” Viktor stood at the foot of the police post steps.
The policeman turned his head very slowly down towards Viktor. He had a lean, carved face, a slight hollowing beneath his cheekbones and a bristling crop of up-brushed hair. He raised the cigarette to his lips and flicked his head back questioningly.
Viktor shifted the rucksack on his shoulder. He could feel the narrow strip of sweat that had oozed down the length of his spine.
“Pak, I lost my ticket; they told me to come here to report it.”
The policeman turned his head and slowly blew out a long draught of smoke. The room behind him was a hollow of sickly yellow light. Viktor could see a shifting cloud of mosquitoes milling around the 40-watt bulb.
“Where are you going?” the policeman asked.
“To Semarang. I’m going home.”
He flicked the cigarette away and the little orange spark arced into the blue-black darkness. He narrowed his eyes for a moment and peered at Viktor, then a fraction of a smirk showed on his face and he turned into the room, muttering, “From Semarang.” He drew the S out and ran hard into the rest of the word.
Viktor followed him up the steps. The room was bare and the walls were dirty and cracked. In a little recess to the left of the door was a desk. On the desk was a typewriter. Above the desk, framed behind a piece of dirt-speckled glass, was a mildewed sheet of paper proclaiming the honesty, helpfulness and patriotism of the ideal policeman of the Republic of Indonesia. Another cloud of mosquitoes swarmed over the typewriter.
The policeman dragged his feet across the floor so his sandals slapped against the grubby concrete. “Which train?”
“Bromo Anggrek. Nine-thirty.”
The police post was open through and through with the back windows gaping onto the blackness of Merdeka Square. There was a kind of silence to the place, though the squealing and roaring of the trains and the ceaseless bleating of the cars and bikes was like a flood. Viktor and the policeman stood knee-deep in traffic noise.
The policeman fiddled in the top drawer of a gray filing cabinet in the corner. The metal beneath its grey lacquer had rotted and an acne of rusty boils had bubbled through. He took out a form, a photocopied sheet of limp, yellowish paper, and came slowly back across the room. He sat behind the desk with the typewriter. Viktor sat on the dirty orange plastic chair opposite with his back to the door. His clothes felt clammy and damp.
The policeman took out another cigarette. “Better to go by aeroplane,” he said.
Viktor looked at him. There was a certain grayness under his black eyes that came from drinking and not sleeping at home, but his face was strong and hard. He narrowed his eyes as he lit the cigarette and a hurried rope of blue smoke spiraled upwards in front of the framed proclamation of honesty and helpfulness.
“Flying is expensive,” Viktor said, quietly.
Even more quietly, looking down at the photocopied form, the policeman said, “Don’t be stingy, ya…” then looked up, and smirked. “Semarang, eh? Originally from Semarang?”
“Yes.” Viktor could feel his armpits sticking to his shirt with sweat.
The policeman shrugged. “Your ticket, was it stolen?”

***

Suddenly the ticket just wasn’t there. Viktor had been standing in the echoing hall of the station, on the lower level under the tracks where noise and voices washed off the walls in waves. With two and a half hours until his train, the ticket was gone. The little blue sheet, with perforated edges and the time and date and seat number all printed in pale gray, a centimeter to the right of the boxes allocated for them, wasn’t in his hand. It wasn’t in the wallet he kept on a keychain in the pocket of his baggy shorts. Or in the breast pocket of his short-sleeved shirt. Or in his rucksack on top of the folded pair of jeans. The hall had suddenly seemed very, very noisy. There were bright lights over the stalls where they sold chocolate-bread and water and peanuts, and girls in pink head-scarves were laughing at each other. The ticket wasn’t on the floor. It wasn’t in any of Viktor’s pockets, and no one had brushed against him – at least he didn’t think so.
Viktor phoned his mother and the whole roaring mass of Gambir Station turned around him in a whorl of dulled colors.
“Ma,” he said, cell phone clamped to one ear, finger pressed into the other; “My ticket – it’s lost...”
Five hundred kilometers away in Semarang she panicked for him for a moment, then abruptly told him to buy another ticket.
“I don’t have enough money, Ma.” Suddenly he felt lonely, and almost hysterical, and wanted very badly to be at home. He heard other voices in the background over the phone, coming, he guessed, from the space by the porch where his mother kept pot plants and liked to sit in her nightdress and drink coffee late at night and early in the morning.
“What… wait a minute…” and then, “Tante Susan says they’ll give you another ticket if you can remember your seat number.”
“I remember it; it was 13c in coach 6…”
After that he had shouted though slats of rough-cut glass at the information counter and a man with thick glasses told him to go to another office. Then there had been a low room with brown walls and a television showing a soccer match through a cataract of interference in the corner. There were two tall girls with glossy hair arguing with a man behind the low counter. Another official with a moustache and a white skullcap was watching the television and speaking into a heavy green phone at the same time. Viktor sat there, and other people came in and out and the girls were still arguing shrilly with the man behind the counter, and the man in the skullcap made more phone calls and watched the soccer and three times he raised an abrupt finger to Viktor and said, patronizingly, “Be patient, ya…”
When there was only an hour and a quarter until his train Viktor had sat forward and said, as firmly as he could, “Pak?” and the man had looked away from the soccer. He sat right back in his chair, tilting the white skullcap on his head to show a threadbare hairline and a purple bruise and said, bluntly, “What?”
Tante Susan was right: they could give him a slip to replace the ticket, but first he needed to report the loss to the police and bring the report sheet back to the office.

***

The policeman sighed and pulled himself upright in his seat, cigarette fuming between his lips. He slotted the photocopied form into the typewriter. The mob of mosquitoes above the desk danced wildly and shifted their whining black thunderhead closer to Viktor. Some of them broke off. He could feel the frantic nettling where they bit at his bare legs. He rubbed at his calves with the edge of his sandals. The policeman was also wearing shorts, but he was not itching or scratching.
“Identity card,” he demanded from the corner of his mouth.
Viktor passed it to him; he glanced at it and began to type, very slowly, with stabs of his rigid index fingers.
The policeman read out the lines to himself, speaking more slowly when he had to type in the details. “On today – fri-day se-ven Dec-em-ber – this person, an Indonesian citizen-slash-foreign national…” There was a clatter from the typewriter as he blanked out one of the options.
“Name – Vik-tor Tan-jo-no.” There was a punching noise as the keys smacked onto the paper: thwack, thwack, thwack. “Place-of-birth – Sem-ar-ang, date of birth – nine-Mar-ch-19-89,” thwack, thwack, thwack.
The policeman punched harder at the keys as he worked down the page. The mosquitoes went wild. “Religion – Chris-ti-an; occupation – stu-dent,” THWACK, THWACK, THWACK.
Outside the night was roaring. Another policeman, in uniform, came through the doorway. He was flabbier than the man at the typewriter and his shoulders slumped beneath his epaulettes. He looked at Viktor then tilted his head questioningly at his colleague.
“Lost ticket,” he said, smirking.
The new policeman shrugged. “Better to go by aeroplane.”
The other sniggered. “Didn’t want to. Stingy.”
Viktor felt that same lonely hysteria that he had felt when he had stood on the station concourse and called his mother. He itched his legs more frantically.
The man in the uniform passed through the room and out of the open back door. “Up to him,” he said as he stepped outside. Viktor could see the firefly of orange light where he stood smoking in the gloom.
The policeman had filled in the details of the “lost baggage”.
“It’s not baggage,” said Viktor; “it was a ticket.”
“No problem.” The policeman took up his cigarette again. Slowly he unrolled the sheet of paper from the typewriter and laid it on the desk before him. He signed it on the right side and then, with a backwards nod and pursed lips, he twisted it towards Viktor. Viktor glanced over the form as he signed on the left. The policeman had spelt his name wrong and none of the typed-in details met the photocopied lines.
The policeman took back the form and straightened it with theatrical care, then he took out a chunky rubber stamp and a bleeding inkpad from a drawer and laid them delicately alongside it, like a doctor preparing for surgery. He did not stamp the sheet, but he folded his hands together and leaned forward and looked directly at Viktor’s sweating face for the first time.
“Now,” he said, gently; “I cannot give you the form until you show me the replacement ticket from the station office.”
“But they said in the station that they can’t give me the ticket until I have the report!” As Viktor spoke he heard in his own voice the shrillness of a man accused of something he didn’t do.
The policeman leaned back in his chair and smiled slowly. “What can I do?” He opened his palms. “How about if I give you the report, and you’re lying, and you didn’t really loose the ticket?”
“But Pak, why would I do that? They told me in the station I had to get the report sheet first; the ticket can’t be replaced until I have it.” The mosquitoes had bitten the thin skin on Viktor’s ankles.
“You have no evidence.”
“Evidence?”
“Better to go by plane.” The voice came from behind him; Viktor hadn’t seen the other policeman, the flabby, uniformed man, come back into the room. “Flying’s small money – for you. But you were stingy.” He sniggered.
“But how can I get the replacement without the report?”
The policeman rocked right back so the chair was against the wall under the framed sign and his knees were hooked under the lip of the desk. He slotted his hands behind his head and repeated, gently, “What can I do?”
Viktor understood, but suddenly, and unexpectedly, he was angry. He said again, holding himself very carefully, “But how can I get the replacement without the report?”
The policeman said again, “What can I do?”
“Better to go by plane,” said the other policeman from the back of the room.
There were forty-five minutes until Viktor’s train. The policeman leaned against the wall. Viktor sat on the grubby plastic chair, the mosquitoes swarming around him. The report form, unstamped, lay on the table between them, and the police post floated alone like a candle flame in the night.

© Tim Hannigan 2009

A Pilgrim on the Holy Slopes of Gunung Penanggungan

Climbing Gunung Penanggungan, East Java

Originally published in the Jakarta Globe, 06/10/09

http://thejakartaglobe.com/travel/a-pilgrim-on-the-holy-slopes-of-gunung-penanggungan/333875

The forest was silent in the gray pre-dawn light and the stone slabs at the edge of the bathing tank were slippery underfoot. Someone had been here ahead of me, for there was already a scent of incense in the air, and a fistful of pink petals in the green niche beside the waterspout, but for now I was alone. I undressed and dropped into the icy, chest-deep water. This was the sacred bathing place at the Jolotundo temple on the forested western slopes of Gunung Penanggungan. Suppressing a shiver I did what countless pilgrims before me had done and bowed my head under the stream of cold, clear water pouring from mouth of an algae-covered gargoyle, then clambered out, dressed and set out uphill towards the summit.

***

Gunung Penanggungan stands sentinel on the northern fringes of East Java’s volcanic hinterland; on a clear day you can see its smooth purple cone from the shopping malls of Surabaya. This 1653-meter mountain was long considered one of Java’s most sacred peaks. According to legend, when Hinduism arrived in Indonesia Mount Meru, the home of the gods, was shifted from the Himalayas to Java. Unsurprisingly the mountain suffered some damage during transit. The base broke away to form Gunung Semeru, Java’s highest peak, while the top fell 60 kilometers to the northwest to become Penanggungan.
My journey – by motorbike – had begun the previous day at another sacred bathing place, Candi Belahan, on Penanggungan’s eastern slopes. This temple dates from the late 11th Century, and is said to be the memorial of the great King Airlangga of the Sanjaya Dynasty. To find it I had branched off the howling Surabaya-Malang highway, and within minutes was deep in the Javanese countryside. The temple’s rather racy local name is Candi Tetek, the “Breasts Temple”, and the reason is obvious: the water that feeds the shallow pool here emerges in two ceaseless streams from the ample bosom of a statue of the goddess Laksmi. When I arrived a pair of truck drivers were unashamedly soaping themselves under this ancient power-shower.
“Come on mister!” they called to me; “take a bath, the water’s good here!” To their disappointment I only dipped my toes in the pool before heading on along rising roads through the little hill resorts of Tretes and Trawas. To the south the towering slopes of the Arjuno-Welirang volcano massif swept away into dark cloud; to the north Penanggungan itself stood stark above the concertinaed rice terraces.
At the end of a steep, potholed track through the trees I came to Candi Jolotundo. This temple is the oldest and most sacred on the mountain, and also the best starting point for the climb to the summit. Built in 977 AD, Sanskrit inscriptions suggest that it was the royal bathing place of Airlangga’s father, Udayana, king of the old unified Balinese kingdom that once held sway over east Java.
I could smell the incense and hear the sound of running water even before I saw the temple. It was set into a steep, forested hillside behind a pool full of huge, slow-moving fish. In a deep, walled-in tank three men were bathing, but they were not merely washing themselves like the truck drivers I had seen earlier. They stood upright, heads bowed and palms pressed together in prayer. Incense sticks fumed in the damp recesses of the façade and an offering of petals floated in the water. On the temple’s central platform a young man in a white tee shirt was meditating, eyes closed, the afternoon sunlight slanting through the forest behind him.
One of the bathers emerged shivering from the tank.
“Is it cold?” I asked
“It’s not too bad if you jump straight in,” he replied. His name was Rozi. He lived in Surabaya and often came to the temple with his friends. “The water is good,” he said, “and it’s a good place to meditate. You can be close to god here.”
Another man, Aji, sitting in the shade of a pavilion nearby said that he drove up here from his home in Sidoarjo almost every day. He had a problem with his shoulder, “But after bathing here, it doesn’t hurt,” he said. Both Aji and Rozi were Muslims.
“This used to be a Hindu place,” said Aji, “but now it’s universal.” Nonetheless, the incense and the petals were still a strong echo of Hinduism.
“You should take a bath,” said Aji; “it will make you strong!”

I would need my strength to climb the mountain the next day, so I decided to take his advice. I spent the night a kilometer downhill from the temple at PPLH, an environmental educational center which also has eight neat little bungalows for visitors, and then, after that strengthening early morning dip at the temple, I headed for the summit.
The trail led through cool forest, then across a stretch of terraces studded with pale green banana plants. Ahead, the bald yellow summit of the mountain rose; to the left was the rocky outcrop of Bekel, one of Penanggungan’s four smaller outlying peaks.
Beyond the patch of farmland the trail rose into dense undergrowth. I was dripping with sweat by the time I came to the first temple. This was nothing more than a pair of small masonry stumps, but further on I came to another temple, this one a series of five basalt platforms rising to a crooked altar. Still higher up, on the saddle of land between Bekel and the main mountain, I found another three ancient places of worship. Struggling through the undergrowth I felt a little like Indiana Jones, but all of these places were well cared for. The surrounding vegetation had been cleared, and petals and ash showed that someone was still worshipping here.
There are at least 81 temples scattered around these slopes. Most date not from the time of Udayana and Airlangga but from the later Majapahit Kingdom. After the collapse of Majapahit the mountain was captured by the nascent Islamic state of Demak and the temples fell into disuse. They were “discovered” by European archeologists in the 1930s, though local villagers had always known about many of them.
Beyond the last temple – Candi Sinta – the scrub fell back. The trail here was a steep, ragged thread of yellow soil across slopes blackened by a recent wildfire. I had been hiking for almost two hours now and the sun was high overhead. Glancing back I could see the forests and fields of the lower slopes fading into a sea of yellow haze. A hot wind was whipping the dust into the sky and high above a dark-winged eagle turned on a thermal.
The slope grew steeper and steeper, and the ground rougher and rougher, but finally, sweating and gasping, I made it to the summit with its sunken crater. The mountain was adrift in the haze, but as I sat catching my breath the faint, dreamy sound of a traditional gamelan orchestra drifted up from what must have been a village wedding somewhere in the trees below.
The summit was a bleak and windy place of dry yellow grass, marked with the empty cigarette packets and burnt-out campfires of other hikers, but sitting there, listening to the distant gamelan and thinking of the cool water pouring into the pool at the Jolotundo temple – where I would certainly be taking another bath after my descent – the ancient idea that this was the home of the gods didn’t seem quite so farfetched.

© Tim Hannigan 2009

Travelling to the Dizzying Heights of Ladakh

A Journey through Ladakh, India, from West to East

Originally published in the Jakarta Globe, 30/09/09

http://thejakartaglobe.com/travel/traveling-to-the-dizzying-heights-of-ladakh/332455

I had been waiting at the roadside for an hour, shivering in the thin air. Behind me the poplar trees of the Chemrey Valley looked like a distant oasis; ahead the road swept away over barren slopes towards the mighty 5360-meter Chang La Pass. White lizards scurried over the rocks and no vehicles came past. Beyond the Chang La lay the fabled Pangong Lake, the remote strip of lapis-blue water that I hoped would be the highlight of my journey through Ladakh, northwest India’s high-altitude wilderness. But if I didn’t get a ride soon I would have to turn back. And then I heard the sound of an engine, straining through the switchbacks. I was on my feet in an instant, just at a shiny white jeep rounded the corner…

***

Ladakh lies hard on the Chinese border in the stark mountains of the Karakoram Range. To the southwest is Kashmir, of which it is technically a part; to the east lies Tibet, to which it is far more closely tied by history and culture. It is one of Asia’s most prized destinations for adventurous tourists.
I had arrived in Ladakh from the west, travelling through hills the color of Tibetan wild horses. My journey would take me to a series of ancient gompas – Buddhist monasteries – and then finally, I hoped, to Pangong Lake.
My first stop was the isolated village of Lamayuru, with its whitewashed gompa perched on a toothy ridge. As I made my way up the steep steps I found myself gasping for breath. Like much of Ladakh, Lamayuru lies well over 3000 meters above sea level, and here in the trans-Himalayan rain-shadow there is little moisture. Buddhist prayer flags snapped in the breeze and glossy black alpine choughs wheeled in the thermals.
I was shown around the silent, incense-scented halls of the gompa by a young monk named Tashi. He told me that Lamayuru is home to some 200 monks from all over Ladakh. The gompa, he said, was over a thousand years old, and had been built by the great Tibetan missionary, Rinchen Zangpo.
Ladakh has long been part of the wider Tibetan world and for many centuries it was ruled from Lhasa. Later it was an independent kingdom under the powerful Nyamgal Dynasty. It was only with its annexation by the Hindu ruler of Jammu in 1834 that Ladakh found itself more closely tied to the Indian scene. But as I looked out from the gompa courtyard on barren mountains that ran all the way to Tibet, lowland India seemed as far away as the Indonesian tropics.

From Lamayuru I continued east along the River Indus, the backbone of Ladakh. I spent a night in the little village of Alchi, a cluster of traditional houses and an ancient gompa between irrigated fields, then pressed on to Leh, the Ladakhi capital.
Leh originally developed as a mountain crossroads, a meeting point of treacherous trade routes from Tibet, India and Central Asia. As late as the 1940s camel caravans were still crossing the Karakoram passes, but Indian independence and wars with Pakistan and China saw the borders sealed. Ladakh was closed to the outside world until the 1970s when the first tourists were allowed to visit. For many travelers today Ladakh is the next best thing to Tibet, or perhaps, with its well-preserved culture, even better.
In Leh the caravanserais of old had been replaced by guesthouses and giftshops, but there was still a hint of historical romance. The town lay in a nail-bed of pale green poplar trees; the mud-walled palace of the Nyamgal kings loomed over the dusty bazaar, and the descendants of Muslim traders from Turkestan still kept small shops in the alleyways.
I found a cheap guesthouse in the old town. Over a cup of salty yak butter tea – an acquired taste to say the least – in the traditional kitchen with its ranks of shiny copper pots and pans, Padma, the charming proprietress, told me of the changes she had seen in Leh over the decades. Despite relying on tourism for a living, she had concerns about sustainability and the speed of development – the outskirts of Leh are already marred by ugly concrete hotels. Also, like many Ladakhis, Padma complained about Ladakh’s status as part of Kashmir State – a legacy of 19th Century treaties between the Raja of Jammu and the British colonialists. Despite sharing no cultural ties, and having no involvement in the political unrest of Kashmir, Ladakhis are ruled from Srinagar. For Padma and many others it would be better for Ladakh to be governed directly from Delhi as a Union Territory.

When I asked in Leh about visiting Pangong Lake, replies were doubtful. Public transport is almost non-existent; a permit is required and regulations demand that foreigners must travel on an organized tour with at least three other people. I wanted to travel alone. The travel agent who helped me arrange my permit looked at me askance when I suggested hitchhiking. “Well, you could try…” he said.
Try I would, and the next day I set out, stopping off to watch a prayer ceremony at the gompa-topped hill of Thikse before catching a rattling local minibus, full of cheerful villagers who welcomed me with the universal Ladakhi greeting – “Joolay!” – up the side valley of Chemrey. The bus dropped me in the last village. The light was shining on the white ridge of the Stok Kangri mountains as I set out walking, picking my way to the lonely roadside beneath the towering hairpins of the Chang La.

***

The jeep screeched to a halt and a very surprised head in reflective sunglasses appeared from the passenger window.
“Where on earth are you going?”
“Pangong Lake!” I said; “can I have a ride?”
They were a party of wealthy Indian tourists on a daytrip from Leh, and despite their surprise at finding a foreign hitchhiker at this wild spot, they made room for me amongst the picnic baskets. I smiled all the way up the snow-streaked slopes to the dizzying summit of the Chang La Pass. My companions seemed less happy – they were suffering from headaches and nausea, mild symptoms of altitude sickness brought on by the elevation. A little shortness of breath was all I experienced.
Across the pass marmots and wild horses watched us from the roadside as we passed, and then, finally, the lake appeared in a blaze of bright blue. One glance and I knew the journey had been worth it. The Indians dropped me at a little cluster of tented camps at the head of the lake and I picked my way up the steep hillside to take in the view. The waters below faded from aquamarine in the depths to pale turquoise in the shallows. Flocks of delicate white gulls – incongruous here 4250 meters above sea level – flickered over the shore, and beyond there were bony brown hills under a vast sky. The wind from the east cut like a knife and the light was sharper than glass. It was a truly stunning place. The lake here was barely a kilometer across, but it ran eastwards for 134 kilometers, deep into Tibet. The upwelling of white mountains I could see in the far distance were inside Chinese territory, beyond the forbidden frontier. But shivering and smiling on this bleak hillside I was sure that the view from the other side could be no more beautiful than this…

© Tim Hannigan 2009