Introducing the Neighborhood
We love our current setup, mostly. Our rented house is a sauna but the bedrooms have AC. Our street is wide enough to let in sunlight and scooter traffic but not mobile traffic. Its gutters are wide, deep, reek of decay, and breed mosquitos, but the rains wash them out often enough. Save the noise of children playing nearby and the ubiqitous but intermittent calls to prayer, our neighborhood is a hot and humid island of relative quiet in a very loud city. It’s home.
Our house is next to a warung, a slapdash booth of corrugated metal and plywood that sells snacks and drinks. This warung serves as the ladies’ local hangout spot because it uniquely features a leather seat and bench seating under a silver tarpaulin. Let’s call the warung’s owner Auntie. She acts as the friendly neighborhood security guard, concierge, and package holder. She also serves as local wisewoman for the two foreigners new to the ‘hood. She constantly tells us to lock our gate so the house is secure, usually ending in the admonition, “Don’t make me mad!!” Auntie’s go-to joke is a spontaneous “YES NO YES NO YES NO!!” because (a) that is the extent of her English, and (b) she believes it to be a constant of marriage in its basest form.
Auntie daily plays host to another lady we will call Emak. Emak watches the hangout while Auntie naps or performs prayers. She’s very motherly. Rather than tell us what to do she will often just do it for us as we watch on. Emak’s son, Pak Jaga, is a friendly tukang Parkir [Crossing the Terminator Into Night (b)] by day. At nightfall he doffs everything but a pair of sports shorts. His nightly conversation with me usually revolves around lack of money, coffee, or food, usually with a half-smoked cigarette waving in the air. At least, I think that’s the case. I usually find him incomprehensible because he has few teeth left. His thoughts are also not always coherent.
To the right of Auntie’s house is an older gentleman we will call Pak Tulus. He is polite, soft-spoken, and kind. His son described him thusly: “He could’ve advanced far in his company, become a rich man…. but he was too honest.” Then his son shakes his head with both regret and admiration. Perhaps unknown to his son, Pak Tulus was quite an adventurer in his early years. Those days are long behind him. Pak Tulus is satisfied to stay at home with a gentle cup of coffee, a book, and working AC. He likes the simple, halal life.
Pak Tulus’ son, by contrast, has ambition. He wants to go somewhere and become something. He is as honest as his father but believes he can rise to the upper echelons with enough hard work, honest politicking, and a touch of divine intervention. For some reason, his hobby is to take me to nice date places so I can return there with Dana. I expect to act as his wingman at some point. We will call him Bro.
The last ones important to this story are an 8-year-old boy named Ben and his family members. Ben and his family are Chinese Indonesian. I teach Ben English every week. I do not know if he suffers from boredom or too much energy, but he will happily take over anything we are doing. Whether making cookies, vacuuming, sweeping, cleaning cat poop, watering plants, or learning English, Ben will happily request to do it for us. We are quite happy to surrender said activity, supervise, and heap praises on him in return.
Ben’s mother and grandmother, (”Mama” and “Oma”, respectively) are also friendly and welcoming. Mama spends her time watching over Ben and his sister, exercising with youtube workouts and watching drakor (the Indonesian word for korean dramas). Her manner is nonchalant, her humor dry. She is a kind soul in a sardonic shell. Oma is much louder with her opinions. Her volume is appropriate to a zest for life unmatched by anyone else on our street. She often drops by with food, cookies, and advice on how to save money for various things. I’ve concluded she is convinced that I will die poor due to careless spending and wants to save me from myself. Welcome to our neighborhood.
War: They Started It
One of the more interesting observations I’ve made while living here is that stray cats are everywhere. I have yet to see any stray dogs though I’m sure they exist. Despite being overrun by felines, our city has neither euthanization program nor capture, neuter, and release program. They once did but the program was so quickly condemned as cruel and unusual that the government backtracked only a few weeks afterwards. The grand result is an overlarge and exponentially growing population of feral cats.
Our street is home to nine feral cats. They sleep, eat, and wander wherever they please. They yowl in heat, argue with one another at 3am, rip open garbage bags in search of leftovers, and hunt mice across our metal rooftops. One wears a multicolored macrame choker, a mark of favor from Emak. Let’s call him Manja. Another is white with black, orange, and brown patches. He’ll be Spot. The rest certainly exist and play their part, but those two toms will suffice.
During our first week of moving in, I noticed that our Muslim neighbors consistently leave out cat food for all the strays. I like furry animals but have a strong allergy towards cats. Twenty minutes with a cat or cat owner will make my eyes tear, nose run, and lungs wheeze. I therefore have no desire to feed them lest they congregate and cause a sneezing fit.
Cats unfortunately are also devout followers of the principle, “we do not shit where we eat.” All well and good, but the one place they don’t eat happens to be ours. Our cement dividing wall became the public shitter for all the cats. Everyday for the first two weeks I’d find a new pile or three next to the wall separating our house from our neighbors’ land. The cement wall itself smells sharply of cat urine. I’d daily walk past the fresh piles down the lane hoping that the hot sun would dry them out enough to be easily removed later.
I actually don’t mind picking up poop so long as the animal belongs to me. Poop is part of the contract. Yet somehow we’ve landed in a non-consensual unilateral agreement. The consensual unilateral agreement that I’m currently in (my marriage) dictates that I’m one who gets to clean it. Auntie chuckled as I swept out the poop one day. She said, “Yang sabar, ya?!” It’s an admonition of sorts, something along the lines of, “Endure it patiently!” It’s easy for her to say; she only feeds them.
I asked my neighbors why they daily feed all the cats. They explained that they do so out of respect for the Prophet. His favorite animal was the cat. This leaves me in an awkward position. I can feed them, thus triggering my allergies. I can stomp around outside and scare them off if I don’t mind sacrificing my dignity in front of my neighbors. I cannot be seen hitting, swatting, spraying, trapping, or kicking a cat in any way. To do so would disrespect the prophet himself.
We decided to buy some plants to beautify our home a month later. Our ulterior purpose was to line the wall, depriving the cats of their poop repository. We went to a nursery and bought several jasmine trees, a hibiscus flower bush, white rocks to prevent the cats from pooping on our plants, and 4 bags of potting soil. The problem was that we’d never tried to pot anything bigger than small succulents. We were foreigners with more money than sense and experience.
Then a beautiful thing happened. Our neighborhood came to us. Auntie donated two aloe trimmings and some lush green bushes she was growing. She called over Emak, who was quite happy to pot everything for us. Ben also came over to pot the new plants but Mama restricted him to watering. We gave him a bottle and he took off. Oma advised Ben on how to water our plants while lecturing me on where I can buy cheaper plants of similar quality. Pak Jaga started to (unnecessarily) weed everything with such enthusiasm that we preferred to let him keep on rather than request him to stop. Bro and Pak Tulus advised where to place our plants to avoid tree theft. So many neighbors came to help that our sole function in this party had been to buy the supplies and give everyone water.
We never doubted that we would eventually become part of the neighborhood. Yet that event definitively proved that we had started the process. I envisioned our home with tall, shady trees and a prospering hibiscus bush. Our cement wall would be lined with creeping vines and verdant green things. Cats would sigh and resignedly search for a new bathroom. We ended that day happy and hopeful.
I woke up the next morning to three fresh piles in the middle of the lane. Tsk….Bastards.