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span class="caption" style="width: 230px;">Bright: Handmade awnings shield customers from the afternoon sun along the street of Arabs in Bali.Mid-afternoon sun slaps ferociously against the handmade awnings strung along the footpath of Denpasar's Jl. Sulawesi. Across this narrow street Badung Market bakes in the scorching heat of mid May in the provincial city. But diving past the awnings and under the deeply shaded verandahs of this century-old traders' alley, the temperature drops, the glare is gone and you are suddenly in a river running with color.

This is Denpasar's famous fabric district, known a century ago as 'the village of Arabs' and today as Jl. Sulawesi.

Along its cool footpath people come from all over the world in search of inexpensive fabrics such as imported Indian cotton, nylon brocades, polyester prints and reams of the gilt-edged sarong fabric worn by Balinese men in ceremonies.

There are no high end silks or linens here, the traders who trace their ancestry to Yemen and Madya Pradesh know their market and it is volume, not vogue, they deal in.

Working cheek by jowl, the traders are also a snapshot of Indonesia's central Bhineka Tunggal Ika philosophy, which says while we are all different, we are all one.

Chamis Sanad's family has lived and worked on this street for at least a century. At 56 years of age, Chamis remembers an idyllic childhood living among Balinese, Indians, Chinese and other Arabs in a great gabble of ethnicities and religions.

For sale: Bolts of cloth are hung to entice customers on Jl. Sulawesi in Denpasar.
Like other traders, his family lived above the shop. 'My grandfather came from Yemen ' Hadramout, which is the home of all the prophets. They all came from Yemen. He came here in 1900 and this is the oldest shop and we have always sold fabric. Our childhood was very beautiful. No shoes, not even worn to school, and in the afternoons we all played soccer in the park. Not only Arabs but everybody: There was no distance between Chinese, Arabs, Balinese and Indians,' says Chamis, who made pocket money selling ices to his school friends.

One of those school friends would have been 50-year-old Hasim Abbashay, who has his fabric shop nearby. He remembers the evenings along the street of Arabs from his childhood.

'My father came here in 1938'¦ maybe he worked for a store here before opening on his own. I grew up on this street and it was good. We all lived at the back of our shops and every evening when I was still small and the shops were closed we would sit out the front and eat together and play. Slowly people started leaving the shops open, then slowly, people came to buy fabrics in the evenings and the shops
stayed open. Now we all live away from our shops and it's closed at night here. I think we all miss life as children; what we saw was the best of life. I love this street,' says Hasim fondly watching the river of humanity flowing past his shop door.

Seeing a niche in the needs of the people living on this street, 58-year-old Wei Kit's Cantonese father opened a home wares store in this fabric stronghold way back in 1950. The store, more than half a century later, is still stacked to the rafters with plates, fans, woks, cutlery, plastic racks and just about every other item ever needed in a kitchen.

Myriad: A river of color runs along Jl. Sulawesi in Denpasar, formerly known as Jl. Kampung Arab.
'We sell kitchenware instead of fabric because that's what came down from our ancestors,' says Wei Kit, who like so many other Chinese was forced to 'Indonesianize' his name during the 30-year Soeharto regime.

'A long time ago this street was called Jl. Kampung Arab, because most of the people here were Arab, then it was Jl. Pasar after the market, and then in 1970 the government changed it to Jl. Sulawesi, none of us knew why. I was born here and I love this street. As kids we all played together, the Arabs, the Indians, the sons of Bali, we were all the same. We didn't have this A, B or C we just all got on and never thought about religion or anything like that ' we lived in harmony,' says Wei Kit.

He adds Indonesia is a very different nation today.

'In the past under Soeharto the country was very safe, now it's not so safe ' there are a lot of preman [gangsters], but we can after 30 years of being banned again speak and learn Chinese. But before 30/09/65 [the Soeharto coup of Sukarno] it was very harmonious here, across Indonesia. After that came the ethnic and racial politics of Soeharto,' says Wei Kit of his half century within the microcosm of unity in diversity that is Jl. Sulawesi.

' Photos By J.B. Djwan