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Jakarta Post

The Magic `Jamu' (part 2)

She nodded, and reached for the bottle of Coca-Cola

By Wendy Bone (The Jakarta Post)
Sun, August 2, 2009

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The Magic `Jamu' (part 2)

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he nodded, and reached for the bottle of Coca-Cola. She added a splash of this and that from other bottles, remembering the recipe her mother had taught her. Then she reached in the front basket of her bicycle and found a second small glass bottle. She added five drops. Instantly the mixture turned green, the color of leaves after a monsoon, or fresh-minted American money.

The youth took the jamu and drank. He made a face and tossed his hair. "Wah! So strong!" The jamu lady smiled. Yes, he would have to be strong. The magic jamu can only do so much. You must meet it halfway and keep up your end of the bargain, create space for the magic to work.

The jamu lady did a brisk business in the market that morning. Soon almost all her bottles were empty. She packed her things, bid goodbye to the kaki lima rockstar, and hopped on her bike. She was on her way home to give her children lunch after school, attend to the garden and prepare a fresh batch of jamu for her afternoon route on the other side of town. But suddenly the sky darkened. Thunder rumbled deep in the belly of the clouds.

Then the rain spilled out, gushing through the gutters and splashing on the streets. Becak drivers covered their becaks with sheets of old plastic. Motorcyclists pulled over to wait out the rain under the eaves of buildings. The jamu lady did the same. She pulled her bicycle to the side of an empty building. It was still being built and the exposed rust-red bricks were not yet plastered over. Piles of bricks stood in front, and mounds of grey dirt used to mix into cement and cover the bricks. The workers, in tattered vests and pants, were gathered, smoking. They were staring hard at something. "Pssst! Pssst!" they hissed, like snakes. The jamu lady turned to see what they were looking at.

The girl's skin was so white she looked like a ghost. Her hair was corn yellow and her eyes the color of faded denim, or the painted bicycle box that held her jamu. The girl was tall, very tall. She stood in the doorway, shoulders stooped, and her back to the smoking men.

The jamu lady had never seen a white girl before. She couldn't take her eyes off her. She looked so strange! And even more ghostly in this haunted, empty house full of eyes. Even stranger, the girl was crying, harder than the rain was falling from the sky.

The jamu lady's heart filled, looking at the girl in her predicament, all alone, with those men eating at her with their eyes, like tigers who hadn't seen a meal in weeks. Despite her shyness, she came closer to the girl and saw she was wet and bedraggled, her knee covered in blood. Her cotton blouse and army green pants were wet and dirty, as if she had fallen in a mud puddle. She carried a duffel bag and an old guitar case beaten up and covered with stickers.

"I'm lost and I don't know where I am," the girl cried. "I'm supposed to go to some hotel, but the becak driver didn't understand me, and he just kept going around and around. So I got off, and after he overcharged me, I fell through a hole in the sidewalk and got all dirty and cut my knee." She trailed off and broke into a fresh gale of sobs.

The jamu lady didn't understand a word the girl said. One thing she did understand, though, was that she needed help. She patted the girl's shoulder to soothe her. She might have looked strange, but she was solid. Only a human being after all. The jamu lady couldn't be sure if it was the color of the girl's eyes, but suddenly she could see more deeply into them than she could into eyes like her own, as if looking into the ocean. The girl became quiet, and allowed her to clean her knee and put a soft clean cloth on it.

"You are so nice," the girl said. "I know I shouldn't be traveling alone, but I saw it as a kind of adventure, you know? I wanted to travel the world, go places where tourists don't normally go. But now I wonder. What have I done? What am I doing here?" The girl's eyes brimmed again. The rain wasn't letting up. The jamu lady nodded. She didn't understand the words, but she understood the meaning.

So the jamu lady took matters into her own hands and mixed her final elixir of the day. She added seven drops from another small bottle in her bicycle basket. The jamu was bright as an orange, or a smile. The girl hesitated, but took a tiny sip. "Mmm," she said, and drank the rest.

* * *

The magic jamu works in mysterious ways. You may drink it with a wish in your heart but, like a prayer, it may not be fulfilled in the way you expect. The magic transforms from one person to another. Like giving, it flows. The final outcome is the result of an invisible alchemy, the interplay of emotion, desire, fate and free choice-and the hand of the jamu lady who mixes the medicine.

With the jamu lady's cure, the girl eventually found her way. Soon after she drank it the clouds cracked open, but this time the sun appeared like the bright, fresh yolk of an egg. The jamu settled the girl's stomach (that was the ginger). She felt a peace descend upon her. Suddenly, she didn't seem so alone. In this city she was surrounded by people who said hello and smiled. They were curious and asked questions like, "Where are you going?" or "Where are you from?" She connected with people at mosques, churches, and temples. She decided she like the city and its motley assortment of people and riotous traffic, the sultry nights and sweltering days so different from the chilly northern country she had left behind. She liked the trees heavy with mangoes, the groves of palms in the middle of the city, the greenery clamoring over the gates, reclaiming its space. She had found her place in the world.

The girl accepted a job teaching at a local school, and there fell in love with the children-their thick tousled hair and skin like chocolate, how their eyes lit with understanding when she planted a seed of knowledge in their minds.

The girls wore candy colors and sparkles, and the boys hid toys in the pockets of their school uniforms. Sometimes she brought her guitar and played them songs. When loneliness threatened to return, the young teacher thought of the children, and the kindness of the jamu lady who gave her medicine and helped her find her way.

One day after class the young girl with the Minnie Mouse T-shirt who always loved to listen to the teacher play said, "Thank you, Miss! God bless you, Miss!" When the girl's mother came for her the teacher said, "Your daughter is a wonderful girl and a good student. You must be very proud of her."

The mother beamed, showing a gap where one of her front teeth used to be because she spent all her money on her children's education instead of the dentist. She didn't understand the teacher's words, but she understood the meaning behind them. Her smile was so pure the teacher was struck by the beauty of the woman.

The mother returned to her modest house on the outskirts of town with chickens out the front and laundry drying on the line. She stood a little taller as she entered. It felt good that her achievement with one of her children had been recognized.

The good feeling spread from her head down to her toes. She loved her children, heart and soul. As she sat on the floor preparing spicy kangkung and tempe with rice for the evening meal, she felt her daughter's slender arms circle her shoulders in an embrace. "Momma, you look so pretty today," she said. "When I grow up, I want to be just like you."

Later, the mother had an idea. She wrapped up some of the fresh dried rice she and her husband grew in their own paddy, enough for a month of dinners, and brought it to the school.

Things started to look up for the kaki lima rockstar. He still peddled fashion accessories from his cart (one foot on the cart, two on his bicycle and two more at the end of his skinny legs made five feet, kaki lima). But by night he took to serenading young lovers as they sipped tea demurely together at roadside stalls, under the cool light of the moon and an LED light bulb hanging from the tarp.

He was a pengamen, although he preferred to see himself as a troubadour rather than a traveling singer, making a name for himself singing rock ballads and making a little more money. He even wrote some of his own tunes.

A western girl had started coming to the market, only the second he had ever seen next to some girl in a music video on television who tossed her corn-tassel hair and writhed half naked with a python around her neck. As the schoolteacher hovered over rhinestone necklaces and velvet hair scrunchies, he wondered if she did the same in her spare time. But she was not that kind of artist.

The teacher often bought small treats for her students as prizes. She bought fresh fruit from the market, and stopped for some jamu and a chat with the jamu lady. She was even beginning to speak their language. One day she had her guitar over her shoulder, and he asked her to play while he sang along. The people in the market stopped to listen.

They smiled and tapped their toes. Later, she brought him the guitar. She had just bought a new one, and on a whim (she didn't know what possessed her), she thought she would give the old one away. She asked the kaki lima rockstar if he wanted it. Did he! He accepted the gift and began to play, teaching himself sitting on the front stoop of his house at night. Sometimes they sang together in the market and people gathered around. The jamu lady smiled and nodded her head to the rhythm. He started making a few extra rupiah. It wasn't a lot but it was more than he had before. "God is great," he said. "This is just the first step. One day, I will make an album."

The jamu gendong returned to the forest to make more magic jamu from the roots, leaves and fruits of the plants there. As the men drank jungle juice under the trees, howling with laughter and falling off their tree stumps, she prepared fresh medicines for happiness, wealth and love. A happiness elixir that may beget the blossoming of a heart in a new city, a wealth elixir a new friend, a love elixir the eternal admiration of a child.

You never know what you are going to get with that magic jamu.

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