These Streets of Jakarta

By Michael Quin

Jakarta, still in Jakarta, where questions breed like mice. Where the end is never the end. This damp metropolis of 10 million by night, a smoky machine drawing millions more by day, is never the straight answer you may have wanted. It's a flurry of allusions and clues jumping at you in the streets.

These streets, where the air wraps around you like hot breath: old, moist, imbued with spicy scents and the smells of smoky chicken satay. Every sound, smell and taste in Jakarta is written in the air.

And it's a welcome maze to wander. Street stall diners blocking your way smile with mouths full of rice, the kids jostling in the back streets giggle as you pass, the man repairing black scooter engines says "good morning mister" at any time of day.

In these streets, so many people eke out a living where other societies don't bother to go: Small boys no older than 10, directing traffic at busy intersections on the odd chance a driver might tip spare change; A bent old lady pushing a wooden cart the size of a car, stacked high with soggy cardboard boxes, grinning at passersby; A man struggling under bags and bags of bottles; People called 'jockeys' standing expectantly along a racing eight-lane road offering, for a very small fee, to jump into the car of anyone who wants to use the passenger-carrying lane in a vain attempt to outwit the permanent peak hour jam.

Then of course are the informal street sweepers, the informal parking attendants, the wandering bands of young kids with un-tuned guitars and those pushing food carts down highways or peddling bicycle-powered ice cream stands with bell songs ringing repetitive and loud. There are those selling umbrellas and those selling balloons next to the kids with dancing monkeys on chains - the monkeys wearing cut-out doll faces as masks.

Weaving through it all, on roads spilling into the wrong lanes and onto the pavements and through front yards and over curbs, is the traffic, always the traffic. Millions of revving motors going nowhere fast.

A couple and their two young kids on one motorbike, all wearing masks for the pollution. In the next lane a businessman in his over sized 4-wheel-drive with opaque tinted windows.

Off the street are the air conditioned shopping malls, the Gucci and Armani for who knows who, bubbles from where Jakarta doesn't have to be true.

For the truth you must look down. Holes await, along every sidewalk, large enough to swallow people, deep enough to break a leg in - And there's sewage slush at the bottom. The concept of liability to the citizens seems not to have taken root here, in this fertile soil where corruption seems to flourish. If accidents happen people take care of themselves, I've been told. Keep an eye to the pavement then.

Yet it's in these tough, broken streets where the warmest smiles in the world abound. Smiles that linger. Smiles with big white teeth. Smiles with no teeth. Smiles to make you smile against your will. Smiles to make you laugh involuntarily. Smiles from Military Police in impeccable fitted uniforms, and smiles from school girls in long skirts. Smiles from those doing jobs you couldn't imagine. Smiles from someone your mother's age living in a box on the pavement.

It sometimes feels like a sin to say, but these people might be content.

So much poverty in this city and so much wealth, so many problems, so much corruption, so many broken things. Yet an air of contentedness. A happy population?

Either way, political flags flap from bamboo hoisted here, there and everywhere in the neighborhoods for the coming national election. Red flags with bulls, yellow flags, blue and white flags, green flags and a score of smiling candidates beaming from every post in the neighborhood.

In the quiet back street, what do people expect from their government?

A group of young religious men sit talking in the town square with their shoes off. Two old men watch an action film on a tv in the street, smoking pungent clove cigarettes. A skinny cat with no tail avoids a giant rat. A man walks his chicken down the street in his arms and talks to it.

The call to prayer rings out where good Muslims converge. In the Istiqlal mosque cool breezes wander and the city retreats. A bearded man reads a paper, his back against the cold marble pillar. Children trail their parents down long polished hallways. An air of peace reigns here.

Outside a university campus young law students with long dark hair and band t-shirts sit discontentedly with guitar and cigarettes their instruments. Straining as far left wing as they can imagine, these sons and daughters of authoritarianism. You won't find a group of Jakartans more discontent than these. Why them? What do they expect, this next generation of privileged Indonesians? What sounds and smells will the air carry in the streets of their Jakarta? And do they know what change they want?

Jakarta, sprawling maze where the end is never the end, where questions breed like mice.