Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage International) (23 page)

If the figures were right, his mother was forty-six when he was born. It was as though all his life had been a making-good to her of her abandonment by his father, who had left to open a piece of forest to make a rice field and to start a second family. And perhaps, apart from its business side, the labor-export license mattered. It closed a circle: it gave Lukman Umar the ability now to manage the lives of people who were as needy as he and his mother had been.

8
 

W
E AGREED LATER
that I was to call him Budi (a common Indonesian name, descended no doubt from the Buddha); but he was at first only a voice in the darkness. It was just after nightfall, and he was in the backseat of the Meliá Hotel minibus which was taking us from the Yogyakarta airport to the hotel. He spoke English well. He said he had come to Yogya only for the night. A friend was getting married that evening. She was the daughter of the fried-chicken queen of Indonesia, and the party after the ceremony would go on in the hall of the local university until four in the morning. A little sleep, then, and he would be flying back to Jakarta. He was in computers, and had worked for a big international company for thirteen years.

Through the traffic and the lights of the little town he told his story, content to talk to the back of my head, not minding that I didn’t turn round. It was early evening, and the regulation strings of colored lights, very dim, for RI50, masked the shapes of buildings and obscured the life of the streets.

He had his own company now and his partner was the close relative of a very important man. Through this partner big government contracts came
their way. They employed thirty people and they were planning to become one of the leaders in software; they weren’t leaving it all to the Indians and the Filipinos. The partner had access to the president and other important people; in Indonesia you needed a partner like that. The partner’s family weren’t as grand as the family of the great minister Habibie, the builder of the airplane, and connected with much else besides; but they were big enough.

When—to get an idea how things looked from this corner—I asked about the Habibies, his voice changed. They were people whose cup overflowed. They were on a higher level altogether, impossibly blessed, beyond emulation. Habibie’s brother was the ambassador to London; there were three sisters who were powerful in business; and there were all the nephews, energetic and prospering in many fields. The ideal in Indonesia was so to order one’s affairs that one could extend protection to the seventh generation afterwards: if anyone (always after the president) could be said to have done that, it was the Habibies.

I said I found it strange that I hadn’t heard of the Habibies until I had come to Indonesia, and yet they were such a dominant family.

He said, “Please don’t use that word. You must have read some of the speeches of our president. Nobody has to be too dominant in Indonesia.”

Was he speaking ironically? I wasn’t sure. Irony comes with the English language, enters the simplest texts; but English was for him a foreign language, something to be used with strangers, and might have been quite sterilized, without tone.

He told me, when I asked, how success had come to him. He had had the good luck, he said, to fail the entrance examination for the Bandung Institute of Technology, ITB. (And again what sounded like irony might have been said quite straight.) He had wanted, like so many other young people, to go to ITB and do electrical engineering. This was how Imaduddin’s career had begun (after the Japanese occupation and the Dutch war); and many people, in more settled times, had wanted to do the same thing: as though, because ITB had been the first institute of its kind in Indonesia, that career pattern had been stamped out for later generations.

He had failed the ITB entrance twice, in successive years; he was in despair; and then his uncle had suggested, quite simply, that he should forget electrical engineering and do something else. He had joined a private college for information technology. He had known nothing about computers when he joined, but then everything had come together for him. And religion had helped him. In fact, his business had started doing very well—they
had got some very big government contracts—after he had gone on the hajj.

I knew now that he had been speaking dead straight all along. Though this idea of religion and the pilgrimage, in someone so jaunty with success, as I judged him to be, was as unexpected as the photo feature in
Kartini
about the stylish pilgrimage of the stylish actor. It was his partner, a very religious man, like so many successful businesspeople in Indonesia, Muslim and Christian, Indonesian and Chinese, who had made Budi take religion seriously.

The partner had a young religious teacher who had suddenly come up, and was known to many successful and important people. The partner introduced Budi to this teacher, and it was this teacher who had made Budi go to Mecca. He had told Budi that when he saw the Kaaba in Mecca he wasn’t simply to ask forgiveness for his bad ways: he was consciously to throw aside his bad ways forever. This was what he had done. And now, with his growing success in the computer field, he wasn’t letting go. In fact, he was now more religious than his partner. He was praying five times a day. He didn’t eat beef in hotels or restaurants because the meat there came from Australia, usually, and the animals wouldn’t have been slaughtered in the Muslim way. His partner didn’t mind about the meat.

All this was said in the darkness to the back of my head, as we drove through the dim illuminations of the town. And it was only in the glass and marble and bright lights of the lobby of the over-decorated new Meliá—waterfalls and fountains playing noisily in the rock garden of the patio, a Chinese woman half-hidden in the mezzanine singing (as if to herself and her woman pianist) popular old operetta songs, a gamelan orchestra with a middle-aged woman singer (with her hair tightly combed back and one cheek round over her tobacco chew) waiting in their corner downstairs to start up—it was only there that I was able to see Budi properly.

He was a little above average height, strongly built, perhaps getting heavy below the batik shirt. He had friendly brown eyes and his cheeks were round and pale; he had a moustache and a full head of straight black hair. Though his openness with a stranger was a mystery (but perhaps not: a stranger could be expected to go away), he was as jaunty with money and success as I had imagined him to be. He appeared to exemplify what Imaduddin taught, and what Habibie had committed the country to: the congruence of Islam and technology. With the rich wedding he had made a long journey to attend, the celebrations of people who, as he had told me, were of simple background, he seemed to be living out in himself the excitements of wealth and all that was new in the country.

But everything he had said to me, every impression, I had of him, was to be modified in many ways over our subsequent meetings. He was not as jaunty as I had thought. The wedding celebrations in the university hall went on till four without him; he did not stay long. He had not mastered the new society; he was one of its orphans or half-orphans. Everything I had seen of him represented a series of little triumphs: the greeting of the stranger, talking in English, the correctness in the Meliá lobby. He was desperately ambitious, and he had almost no protection; he could be crushed quite easily. He lived with the knowledge of his danger; and in his head he carried pictures of old humiliation.

My base in Jakarta was the Borobudur Hotel, and Budi, as it happened, was working in a room there that week. His firm and a firm in Europe were partners on a big project, and two men from the European firm were in Jakarta (and in the Borobudur) to have discussions with him. The final project, Budi said, was going to cost sixty million dollars; the report alone—on which they had begun to work—was going to cost six million. On Friday, the sabbath, and after the midday prayers at the big, modernist Istiqlal Mosque in front of the hotel (mightily amplified quavering calls to prayer five times a day), Budi came for a late lunch. We sat next to the glass wall overlooking the mature hotel gardens—big shade trees, tennis courts open and covered, the big swimming pool, the barbecue pavilion, the perimeter jogging track.

He was willing to talk, but he was not always easy to follow. He stored experience in separate segments or, so to speak, files. When, staying with the analogy (appropriate for a computer man), he took out a file he handled it like a file: he started with the present and moved backwards. When he ran together two or three files the time sequence became confusing. All the connections would have been clear to him, but he couldn’t present them in a clear narrative. It might only have been that he hadn’t been asked to do so before. So he appeared to me over our many meetings to be always adding to, and altering, what he had said before. A narrative came out at the end, however; and even at that Borobudur lunch there were the scattered bones of the same story.

When he was in his mid-thirties Budi’s father, worked on by some profound feeling that he should be his own man, gave up a very good job with a foreign oil company in Indonesia (he was the highest-placed Indonesian
in the company), and went into business on his own. His extraordinary idea—extraordinary in an oil man—was that he should design and manufacture furniture. He went bankrupt. This was in the town of Surabaya in East Java. The family had to sell their big house; there was often, literally, nothing to eat at lunchtime; and Budi had to cycle ten miles to school. After seventeen years that bankruptcy was still close to Budi, something he was reminded of every day: the cycling which he had had to do out of necessity he now did as a sport. In a corner of his office he kept, oiled and clean, and almost like a sacred object, an extravagantly equipped and expensive mountain bike which he had imported from the United States.