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Urban Chat: Idul Fitri is where you find your peace
âSo, where are you going for mudik during Lebaran?â This question was thrown at me on the last week of Ramadhan by colleagues, security guards, hairstylists and everyone in between
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'So, where are you going for mudik during Lebaran?'
This question was thrown at me on the last week of Ramadhan by colleagues, security guards, hairstylists and everyone in between.
Had they expected an exotic destination as an answer they would have been quite disappointed, as I stayed in town for Eid.
Don't I have a family? Oh, I've got a big, fat, extended family of 40-plus cousins from both parents. But I have always celebrated Eid with my nuclear family. With only a modest income to raise a new family in Jakarta in the early 1970s, it was perhaps too expensive for my parents to have spent Eid at Dad's hometown all the way in Aceh, or too awkward to be among Mom's mostly non-Muslim family in Surakarta, Central Java.
It didn't matter for the little me, raised in the Betawi kampung part of the city. I came to know and love Jakarta's own Eid merriment.
It started with a bang, almost literally, when dusk settled on the last day of Ramadhan. Fireworks were out of common folks' reach then and were saved for the Jakarta anniversary celebrations in Monas, so children turned to firecrackers. Yes, they were dangerous and can be annoying to families trying to put babies to sleep, but for Betawi village kids there could be no Eid without firecrackers.
The sounds would compete throughout the night with a cacophony of takbir coming out of mosques, so if you learned as a child to get a good night's sleep on this evening you'd always sleep through pretty much any other sound out there (like earthquakes, in my case).
In the morning after the Eid prayer every house door would be flung wide open ' cookies, cakes, Betawi's famous rice cake, beef stew and sayur godog (mixed vegetable soup) were on every dining table.
Neighbors would visit each other, even for only five minutes ' doling out small bills to children along the way.
I wasn't allowed pocket money back then, so Mom put all the Lebaran 'earnings' into a cat-shaped piggybank (cattybank?) I owned. Sometime around lunchtime my uncle and his family would arrive and we'd leave together to visit other relatives in Jakarta. The next day I'd usually tag along as Dad went to his boss' house to pay him respect.
The traditions became such an integral part of my fun childhood memories that I failed to fathom why many Jakartans would rush to leave Jakarta, not out of respect for aging parents and grandparents in their hometowns, but because of the sad excuse: 'Eid in Jakarta is not merry.' Well, things can only be merry if you give them enough chance to be.
I knew this because I lived through a different kind of Eid during my high school and college years when Dad worked all over Indonesia and, because of his particular job in a state-owned enterprise, wasn't permitted a leave of absence during Lebaran, Christmas and New Year.
So that is how I got to spend Eid in the likes of Surabaya and Palembang, each with its own rich Eid traditions, or in Christian-majority Manado and Ambon, where Christian neighbors cheerfully came to lend a hand to make sure the Muslims could feel an air of celebration.
It was different, not like in the Jakarta that I grew up in, but I opened my eyes to the new experiences while remaining with my parents, so it was all okay.
And even that lightheartedness came to be tested further as I grew older and lived overseas. There was the Eid I spent by the Chilean border during a Winterim program in Latin America where I was probably the only Muslim in the entire region. After spending a teary five-minute collect call talking to my parents, I could only drown my homesickness by swimming in one of Puerto Varas' icy lakes.
Or that fateful day in December 2001 when I woke up on my pal's couch in Phoenix on my first day without employment ' when America got into a deep recession after 9/11 my company had to lay off us fancy MBA rookies, while the only possible salvation, to work with the company's Latin America office, had vaporized a week earlier when Argentina defaulted its IMF loans and the country went into chaos.
I remember dragging my feet to the Eid prayer and sitting for a quiet lunch afterward with another friend, convinced that nobody could have had worse luck than having Eid, a birthday and unemployment rolled into one fine Sunday in some foreign country without loved ones nearby ' which I believed until a family friend's sealed coffin arrived home last year straight from America's finest oncology hospital, a 10-month feisty battle against cancer harrowingly lost, and I stood in black on the day slated for the whitest ' garbs mumbling any prayer I could remember before losing it to tears.
It dawned on me, as I watched my friend's parents mourning inconsolably, that even if you're in the comfort of your hometown you may not be with your loved ones anymore.
So Eid is not about place or people. Eid is about where you find peace in your heart and mind. Eid is about where you express your deepest gratitude to the universe. And, as I turned on the TV to see Gaza, and learned Argentina is defaulting on loans all over again, I looked around to where I am this time around ' and loudly I expressed mine.
Happy Idul Fitri, everyone.
Lynda Ibrahim is a Jakarta-based writer and consultant, with a penchant for purple, pussycats and pop culture.
