A. Kurniawan Ulung

Reading the anthology Metafora Padma is like diving straight into the diary of a brokenhearted man.

Author Bernard Batubara is not worried about losing readers after they read his ninth book, the anthology Metafora Padma, which he says is a departure from his romance novels.

“I’m bored of writing romantic tales,” said the 27-year-old.           

He says that since the book hit bookstore shelves in August, most of his readers have referred to the 14 short stories in the book as “dark”.

“Why are they ‘dark’? Because the material is ‘dark’, [such as] events that are gloomy and traumatic for many people,” he said.  

According to Bernard, the short stories are fictional, but are inspired by true events, such as the deadly ethnic conflict between the Dayak and Madurese people in 1996 in Anjongan village in Pontianak, West Kalimantan, his place of birth.   

The title, Metafora Padma, is taken from one of the 14 short stories. The Metafora Padma story is about a rendezvous between a woman named Padma, who witnesses the 1996 bloody conflict, and a man, who later realizes that the woman he talks to is a ghost.

For Bernard, writing about a ghost was not without reason.

“When I was little, I lived in a village where mystical things and supernatural beings existed,” he said. “When my works got published, my first three books did not expose those ‘dark’ things – which I actually I really like.”  

In Perkenalan (Introduction), Bernard tells of the tragic life of a woman who is sexually abused by her father and tortured by her mother. After learning that her boyfriend has mysteriously died, she commits suicide to live with him in the afterlife. Meanwhile, Kanibal (Cannibal) tells of a desperate writer who cuts off his fingers one by one in hopes of gaining writing inspiration. At school, his friends bully him because he looks like a girl.  

Despite its fictional plots, the Metafora Padma anthology is very personal for Bernard, as he also pours his heart into it.

“I think that a strong story comes from something that is actually experienced by its writer,” he said.

He may have been stealing the hearts of his readers through his romance novels since 2010, but Bernard says the experiences he has gone through in life have been far less pleasant.

Bernard does not count childhood as among his happier times in life.

“If our heart was like a tube, the biggest part of my tube was empty,” he said. “I feel empty and it made me restless.”

Bernard recalled having a difficult time making friends as a child, as people saw him as “different”.

“My friends liked playing soccer, but the only sport I was good at was volleyball. In my village, volleyball was only played by housewives, so I played with them. I really wanted to join my friends, but everyone who could not play soccer was excluded,” he said.

The atmosphere at home was not so different.

“When I was a senior high school student, there was a moment when I told myself that I would not contact my father and mother after I was financially independent,” he said.

Bernard said he read and collected various books to deal with his loneliness, an activity that made him fall in love with the literary world.

“In my village, I was the only child who had a library at home.”

Little Bernard was inspired to become a writer after reading the first book of JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series when he was in elementary school.

After graduating from senior high school, he left his hometown of Pontianak for Yogyakarta in 2007 to further his education.

In 2010, he released his first book, Angsa-Angsa Ketapang (The Swans). Since then, he has published eight romance novels, including Radio Galau FM, which director Iqbal Rais adapted for the big screen in 2012. At that time, he said, he wrote romance because he had been familiar with the genre since junior high school.

For Bernard, writing the 157-page Metafora Padma is like going for a ride in a time machine to his childhood for self-reconciliation. The moment that encouraged him to write the anthology took place three years ago while observing the strong ties his friends had with their families.

“How could they have such close relationships? Why didn’t I have that?” he said. “After I returned [to Pontianak], I found out many interesting things about my father and my mother. Then I became close to them again.”

Bookworm Syaravina, who confessed to having read all of Bernard’s works, said Metafora Padma impressed her because it was apparent that the author had gone out of his comfort zone.

“This book shows his other sides as an author. We see that this author we admire is growing,” she said.  

Bernard says he has no plans to write a new romance novel in the near future. In fact, he hopes to write a fantasy that takes his readers on a magical adventure.

“Maybe, this is the effect of Harry Potter. That is a very magical series. I really like books that include monsters, witches and ghosts,” he said.

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