A Night of Bahasa
The narrow, choppy Strait of Malacca between Malaysia and the island of Sumatra has swallowed countless trading ships over the centuries. That was in the back of my mind as I flew over the Strait in one of those small seaplanes where they ask how much you weigh before you board. Just being asked that question makes you hope the other passengers are all slim.
I certainly was. After quitting my job as a lawyer in a big firm and spending the last seven months traveling overland in Southeast Asia, I was at least ten pounds underweight, and I was thin to begin with. Occasionally I’d get sick for a few days and lose a few more pounds, making me cinch my belt even more. So when it came to making sure the propeller plane skimming the rough waters of the Strait of Malacca would not plunge into the sea, I carried my weight, so to speak, by not carrying much weight.
Once you got to Sumatra, the second largest of Indonesia’s 18,000 islands, travel in 1986 was slow. The island is immense, its mountainous and dense jungle unrelenting. The equatorial heat and rain left signature potholes and ruts in the barely-paved roads. But I’d never been troubled by long bus trips. When your journey is measured in months instead of days or weeks, you have the luxury of slow transportation. I almost felt an obligation to travel slowly and soak up everything I could.
That was my plan when I started the first leg of a twenty-hour bus journey up Sumatra’s west coast along the Indian Ocean, from Padang to Sibolga. The dilapidated, creaky bus I caught early in the morning looked a lot like the one I rode to school in the third grade; maybe it was the bus I rode to school in the third grade. I found a pair of empty seats and claimed one. A few passengers walked past me before a twenty-something guy wearing a crisp t-shirt threw his fraying shoulder bag up into the luggage rack and sat down next to me. His name was Ichwan and he spoke only two morsels of English, gleaned from American movies: shit and son bitch you.
I didn’t expect much different in Sumatra, even though there was a surprising amount of English spoken in Southeast Asia. A zigzag line of English-speaking countries just north of the equator stretched east to west. A few places, like the Philippines and Micronesia, had English foisted upon them by Americans. Most English-speaking in Asia, however, dated to the former British Empire—Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Myanmar, Bangladesh, India and Nepal are all former British colonies. Many people in Sri Lanka, almost on the exact opposite side of the globe from where I grew up in Arizona, spoke some English. But that list of Asian countries where you might hear a lot of English did not include Indonesia.
Sometimes, however, the travel gods are kind, as they were when they made Indonesian one of the easiest languages to learn, maybe the easiest. It uses the Roman alphabet, so it looks familiar to a Westerner, and most words are pronounced exactly as they appear; not much in the way of silent letters or diphthongs. Indonesian, also called Bahasa Indonesian, isn’t preoccupied with tenses and conjugations. Most languages make simple concepts complicated by using different tenses for different time periods; simple statements like I am eating and I ate yesterday and I will have eaten tomorrow invoke constant changes in vocabulary, grammar and tense. Not in Indonesia: You say I eat today and I eat yesterday and I eat tomorrow. All you need is vocabulary. A tourist who puts in the effort can become competent in Indonesian rather quickly, or at least what you might call Tourist Competent. As an added bonus, Bahasa Indonesian will take you far in neighboring Malaysia as well.
I didn’t speak much more Indonesian than Ichwan spoke English, but that would soon change. When I showed him my pocket-sized English-Indonesian dictionary, he was delighted to see that such a dictionary even existed and flattered that a foreign tourist wanted to learn his language. He began pointing things out to me as we drove along, and telling me names and proper pronunciations—bus, road, chicken, truck, tree, sky. I’d then try to find each word in the dictionary, so I could visualize it. Ichwan had as much fun with the dictionary as I did as we bounced through the Sumatran jungle. And I do mean bounced.
Ichwan had a natural skill for explaining things. As the day went on, he strung words together into simple sentences, like pre-school lessons. He combined words he had already taught me with new words that were easier to learn in context. And since Bahasa Indonesian requires little grammar, tense or conjugation, all he did was teach vocabulary. He taught me how to order food and drink when we stopped at a roadside cafe for lunch, where others from the bus joined in the lessons, and then again a few hours later when we stopped for dinner. He taught me a few idioms, including my favorite: The phrase in Bahasa for taking a walk is makan angin. It translates as eating wind. What a sublime way, I thought, to describe what happens when you take a walk: You eat wind. Ichwan taught me that and many other words in a casual, conversational style that has little to do with education and IQ, but everything to do with patience, willingness and imagination. Ichwan had all that.
One of his favorite words was bagus, pronounced bah-goose, with an emphasis on the goose. Bah-GOOSE. It’s a word of general approval and favor, meaning nice or good or delicious or wonderful or beautiful. A foreigner can rely on it often. If the meal was good, you tell the waiter it was bagus. If someone asks whether you like Indonesia, you say Indonesia is bagus. If you speak a few words of Bahasa, they’ll compliment your Bahasa as bagus. Bagus was an all-purpose word for satisfaction and usually came with a smile.
Ichwan taught me bagus and scores of other words before I got off that bus, exhausted, at half past midnight. All we’d done was sit on a bus for a long day, but it was an intensive language class for twelve straight hours, without a break. I was euphoric but burnt. I said my goodbyes to Ichwan and my other teachers at a tiny transit station in the jungle where dirt roads carved into the dense rainforest intersected. Except for a few lights in the one-room building that served as the transit station, the Sumatran wilderness around me was pitch black. The station had a cement floor, dusty and dry, and a thatch roof. They said there was no way to know when the next bus heading in my direction would arrive, but Ichwan made sure the young men working the station knew where I was headed. They promised him I’d get on the right bus.
I laid on the floor, propped up against my backpack, and fell asleep, the kind of instant, deep sleep that comes from being as content as you are exhausted. When I woke from that profound sleep under the dim lights of a shack in the darkness of the jungle, I had absolutely no idea where I was—not what country I was in or what continent I was on, maybe not what century I was in. But it came back in a moment. The station attendants, true to their word, were waking me for the next bus. It was 1:00 in the morning—I’d slept for half an hour.
My new bus was smaller than Ichwan’s, more like a van, with room for eight people. There were already ten inside. We were in a sparse part of Sumatra, if that’s not redundant, meaning fewer travelers and smaller vehicles. I hoisted my backpack and climbed in. A weak interior light barely illuminated a few faces of the passengers. They pinched together a little more and made room for me to sit down.
It was a friendly group, friendlier than I was hoping for. My body wanted to dissolve into the blackness of the night and fall back to sleep, but I couldn’t. I was the center of attention, even in the dark. And this time, when people began asking me questions, I knew enough vocabulary to give some simple answers, which only fed the fire and prompted them to teach me more. I fielded scores of questions, more from locations in the dark than faces I could see. Is your house big, a voice would say in Bahasa … how long are you here … how much did it cost to fly here … are you married? (I’d learned that the proper answer to that question, in deeply religious Indonesia, was “not yet.”) I knew if I stopped responding they would let the conversation die and let me go to sleep, but I felt the obligation of a celebrity. I felt a duty to return their attention, to put on a good show. I wanted to be the foreigner who respected their language and showed an interest in everything Indonesian. It became even more intense when we stopped for tea at 4:30 in the morning, where the owner of a dirt-floored shack of a restaurant half swallowed by the jungle joined in the conversation. They all insisted on buying my tea, almost quarreling over who would pick up the tab. A few months earlier I was a rising star in a big Washington law firm with more lifetime earnings potential than everyone else in that shack combined, but here, in the middle of the night in a dark café somewhere in the Sumatran jungle, nobody would let me pay for my own tea.
We arrived in Sibolga at about 6:00 in the morning. I’d had thirty minutes of sleep in the last twenty-four hours and it must have shown. Since it was too early to look for a hotel room, one of the men in the van invited me home to nap on his couch. He woke me later in the morning, escorted me back into town, and helped me find a hotel.
When I thanked him, in his language, and told him his country was beautiful, he gave me a warm smile. “Bagus,” he said softly.