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SURTI ANANDARI

FOR PARISIAN WOMEN, A CHANGE IN SEASON MEANS A CHANGE in fashion—perhaps just a light scarf with a floral design wound around the neck to complement maroon-colored flats or to contrast with a beret of checkered motif, or maybe just a simple but elegant white long-sleeved satin blouse. For men like me who pay little attention to fashion—except insofar that clothes are needed to ward off the cold—Paris is in any season the largest open-air catwalk in the world. There’s no obvious planning here. And we’re not talking about the designer or model crowd. Normal Parisian women act and look like models. Parisians are a special breed whose lives are filled with style. In my mind, the term haute couture is little more than a ruse of the clothing industry which has conspired with designers to increase their profits. Nothing more. But, whatever the truth may be, it doesn’t matter, because whatever the season, Parisians are very fashion-minded and pay utmost attention to appearances. Even so, with all the city’s apparent luxury and despite being known as “The City of Light,” two things are missing here: orchids and jasmine flowers.

Tanah Air Restaurant on Rue de Vaugirard is a small and separate island in a Paris full of flair and color. It’s tiny compared to Café de Flore in Saint-Germain-des-Prés which, since the nineteenth century, has been the meeting place for the world’s literary figures and intellectuals who wish to engage in high-minded discussions while sipping soup and drinking coffee. Tanah Air Restaurant—“Tanah Air” meaning “Homeland” in Indonesian—serves authentic Indonesian food, meticulously prepared with ingredients and spices from Indonesia: shallots, turmeric, cloves, ginger, lemon grass, and galingale. But maybe all of this is just the Café de Flore for us political exiles, who spend our lives cooking food for customers and reciting poetry into the night, as we think of the homeland we knew prior to 1965.

Here, in this restaurant, I am sitting with them now. There’s Risjaf, the most handsome and masculine of our lot, with wavy hair and an earnest and honest heart; Nugroho Dewantoro, originally from Yogyakarta, who sports a Clark Gable mustache and has an effervescent personality but a heart of steel; and Tjai Sin Soe (who sometimes goes by the Indonesianized name Tjahjadi Sukarna), an action man and fast thinker with a calculator in his left hand, which he seems to value more than life itself.

As always, at the end of each night of service, after our customers have paid and gone home, Tjai takes out his calculator, counts the money that has come in, and divides up the tips among us all. Mas Nugroho makes sure all the perishable foodstuffs have been properly sealed and stored in the refrigerator; Risjaf cleans the tables and chairs and removes the posters from the windows for the event that took place that evening. Meanwhile, my helpers, Bahrum and Yazir, wash and dry the dishes, glasses, pots, pans, and utensils.

Risjaf has just turned the television station to CNN, which proceeds to air a few seconds of the news that today, in the 1997 presidential elections in Indonesia, President Soeharto was chosen in an uncontested election to serve a seventh five-year term. We are not surprised by the news; just bored. The news is like the sound of mosquitoes at twilight in Solo: ever constant, never changing. Much more interesting for us is the additional bit of news that in the wake of the elections, student demonstrators have taken to the streets throughout the country, and that even the traditionally cowed news media have begun to express public disgruntlement about the fact that the president’s new cabinet is filled with his cronies. Even his eldest daughter, Siti Hardiyanti Rukmana, was awarded the position of Minister for Social Affairs. We look around at one another. Risjaf turns off the television.

Together and without a word—perhaps all of us feeling the need to think of happy times and be consoled by the memories of younger days when we were naïve and full of love—we go from the lower floor of the restaurant to its ground floor and there stretch out on the chairs and listen to the song “Als de Orchideeën Bloeien,” which Risjaf plays on his harmonica. The song stirs and pierces the heart.

As the chords of “The Orchids Are Now in Bloom” float through the open window of the restaurant into the spring air, all of us there are thinking of another orchid, one who went by the name of Rukmini. Rukmini, the orchid… Sipping on small glasses of rum to warm the body, our minds travel back in time to a place forty-five years ago.

JAKARTA, JANUARY-OCTOBER 1952

Three flowers, three young and beautiful women, transformed Jakarta into a garden of delight. Ningsih was a red rose of arresting beauty who made every man’s heart beat faster; Rukmini, a purple orchid whose color never faded with the passing of the seasons; and Surti Anandari, a white jasmine who left her lingering fragrance wherever she went. Men who fell in love with her could almost not function when she was not in their sight.

These three young women were members of the freshman class in the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy at the University of Indonesia in Jakarta. Risjaf, Tjai, and I, being junior classmen, felt ourselves to be much more knowledgeable and superior, and we liked to tease them. The three women rented rooms at a boarding house on Jalan Cik di Tiro. My friends and I lived, as we had for the past three years, in a boarding house for men on Jalan Solo just a few hundred meters away. Across the street from our lodgings was the home of a Mr. Bustami who rented out his paviliun—a semi-detached annex of his home—to Mas Nugroho and Mas Hananto, older friends of ours who had recently begun to work at the Nusantara News office.

For Tjai, Risjaf, and me, the paviliun across the road became our place of recreation. Compared to our own small rooms, the paviliun was quite spacious, with a separate living room, where we could lounge about or play chess on the comfortable but louse-infested sofa. Mas Nugroho and Mas Hananto, who seemed much more mature than the three of us, frequently lent us their books—anything from anthologies of European poetry to titillating titles with pictures of men and women engaged in a myriad variety of sexual acts. Risjaf’s eyes would open widely in surprise when he flipped through the pages of these books, as if incapable of believing that that women could wrap their bodies in such positions. Mas Nug even made it a point to lend such books to Risjaf, because he got such a kick from seeing this younger and more naïve man’s reactions. Although Risjaf was the best-looking man among us, when it came to women, he was the most inexperienced.

At first I wasn’t too interested in pursuing these three new freshman girls, not as girlfriends, anyway. To my mind, they seemed excessively cheerful and sweet-natured. Further, with all their fine clothes and makeup, they looked to me like privileged daughters of aristocrats who had never known hardship. One day as I was passing by their boarding house, I saw a man I guessed to be Surti’s father pull up to the curb in front of the house in a white Fiat 1100, a car that only a member of the upper economic class could aspire to own. As I came closer and was able to see the man more clearly, my suspicion was confirmed: Surti was the daughter of Dr. Sastrowidjojo, “the” Dr. Sastrowidjojo who lived on Jalan Papandayan in an elite and leafy residential area in Bogor, south of Jakarta. Not only was he famous, he was the son and grandson of equally famous doctors, members of the crème de la crème in pre-independent Indonesia. Surti’s father was known to have played a leading role in the founding of Jakarta’s central hospital, the Centraal Burgerlijke Ziekenhuis. The fact that Surti had not followed her father’s footsteps and gone into medicine suggested that there might be something special about her; but later, when I heard Mas Nug and Mas Hananto talk about her family background, my interest in knowing her better dwindled. I could neither afford nor be bothered with all the things that having a girlfriend from her social and economic class entailed.

The problem was that Risjaf was attracted to Rukmini, she with the luscious red lips and very sharp tongue. Yet the more caustic her words, the more infatuated Risjaf became. In the end, it was for Risjaf—who swore that if he could go out with Rukmini just once he would be happy to die and go to heaven, and who often woke me when he talked about her in his sleep—that I decided to approach these three lovely women and invite them on a group date with my friends.

At first, the three girls paid no attention to my advances, pretty much ignoring me altogether. They were too busy flirting with the male students in the Faculty of Law, who were given to citing legal statutes. (And what for? What was sexy about citations from law books, which were still in Dutch no less? Wouldn’t they find our skill in reciting poetry more interesting?) But I knew from the way they pretended to ignore me that they noticed me. At least Surti, for one, sometimes smiled. Once, I even caught her staring at me, her eyes like stars shining their light on me; but when she saw me staring back, she immediately turned her head. At that instant, I knew that she was the jasmine flower I wanted to pluck and store in my heart.

One day, as she was going into class, I slipped into her fingers a verse from the poem “She Walks in Beauty” by Lord Byron—“She walks in beauty, like the night / of cloudless climes and starry skies …”—but when she opened her mouth to speak, I immediately walked away, worried that she wouldn’t like the poem. The next day, however, she was the one who slipped a note to me: two lines from the poem “Elegy” by Rivai Apin: “what is it that we feel, yet have no need to express / what is it that we think, yet have no need to speak…” I almost swooned—not only from the sentiment of the poem but from the paper on which it was written, with its fragrant smell of jasmine.

For a few days thereafter, we communicated almost only through lines of verse, with very few words spoken. One time I copied in longhand a romantic section from Romeo and Juliet and gave that to her. She replied with a quote from the poem “Bright Star” by Keats: “Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art / Not in lone splendor hung aloft the night.”

Surti Anandari was a stem of jasmine; she was a bright star in the midnight sky.

One day I waited for Surti outside her classroom. As usual when she saw me, she opened her hand to receive from me a slip of paper on which was written a romantic verse or scene. I smiled and when she raised her hand towards me, I took it and clasped it tightly. Startled, she instantly stopped walking, and looked at me in question. Lowering my lips to her ear, I whispered, “I want to be with you. Forever.”

During the first few months of my relationship with Surti, things went along pretty much the way they usually did among young men and women at that time: politely, guilelessly, and chastely. Any time our breaths began to join as one, we’d suddenly hear Risjaf or Tjai cough, causing us to draw apart from each other again. Sometimes, Surti and her friends would come to our boarding house with Rukmini and Ningsih, “just to bring us cookies they had made” or something on that order; but, usually, after the briefest of conversations, they would immediately take their leave. “It’s not proper for an unmarried woman to be seen visiting a man,” Surti reminded me.

And whenever this trio of young ladies did stop by, all of a sudden our older and more dashing neighbors, Mas Nugroho and Mas Hananto, would also appear, “just to borrow some glasses or a platter” (which I knew they’d never use) or to help me cook up some fried rice. Even though my fried rice was famous among the students who boarded on Jalan Solo, it was obvious that our neighbors were coming not to dine but to feast on the sight of the three young women. Crafty devils that they were, they’d pretend to help by grinding chilies or preparing the seasoning by mixing shrimp paste with oil, but all the while they would be shuttling back and forth between the kitchen and the living room where the three girls were seated, a farce that would end with the batch of them giggling together. Meanwhile, Risjaf and Tjai would find themselves staring, hopelessly frustrated by the sight. The three of us were just college students, whereas Mas Nugroho and Mas Hananto were grown men with mustaches they could shape like that of Clark Gable.

Through their gambit of borrowing things and “giving Dimas a hand” at our boarding house, Mas Nug and Mas Hananto succeeded in persuading the three women to visit their den of iniquity. Mas Nug, who had a much larger expendable income than we as students had, owned a hi-fidelity player and would play records for the three womem. For that reason, the trio willingly spent what I thought was an inordinate amount of time at the paviliun listening to the songs of Sam Saimun and others. Mas Nug, who couldn’t carry a tune to save his life, would always start singing along, disrupting the glorious sound of Saimun’s voice. Mas Hananto owned a radio and sometimes we’d hear the girls laughing at the comic repartee of Bing Slamet and Adi Karso on their show at Radio Republic Indonesia.

Initially, I thought that Mas Hananto was attracted to Rukmini with the ruby red lips. I knew that Risjaf was almost epileptic about this but was trying not to show his jealousy. Only later I realized that Mas Hananto was in fact helping to win over Rukmini for Mas Nugroho. As the competition between Risjaf and Mas Nug to capture Rukmini’s affections heated up, I of course stood by Risjaf. As his friend, I was bound to support him.

One day I found Risjaf rummaging through books on my work table.

“I want to borrow some of your poetry books,” he said. His eyes emitted a deep light of sincerity.

What? Here was this tall and very handsome man from Riau with thick wavy hair— a living and breathing testimony to masculinity—looking for books of poetry. A man with his build and temperament didn’t need poetry to conquer a woman’s heart.

I took Risjaf firmly by the shoulders and turned him around until he was facing me. “Listen to me, Sjaf! Rukmini likes you. She’s always liked you. There’s no need to woo her with poetry. Just ask her for a date.”

Risjaf stared at me, wide-eyed. “That’s easy for you to say, Dimas. You’re good with words. But whenever I see Rukmini, my heart stops beating, and I don’t know what to say.”

Oh, Risjaf… I told my friend to sit down and take a deep breath. Obediently he sat down on the edge of the bed. His thick wavy hair was disheveled and big drops of sweat rolled from his forehead and down his cheeks. Risjaf, this Malay man with such a fine heart, was completely unaware of his own charm.

“Risjaf, just look into Rukmini’s eyes and tell her that you want to ask her out.”

Risjaf’s mouth dropped open. “Where?”

Good God! How could such a handsome face exhibit a mien of such stupidity?

“Out! On a date!” I almost yelled. “Take her to see Solo by Night at the Metropole; invite her to dinner at Tan Goei; treat her to a milkshake at Baltic Ice Cream; or, if you really want to save your money, go for a walk with her at Zandvoort.”

“Zandvoort…Zandvoort…” With his mouth still agape, Risjaf repeated the word over and over.

“In Cilincing, stupid!” I half shouted at him.

“You talk to her first, will you, please?” Now he was pleading with me.

My God.

For two long and painful hours I mentored this man who was so handsome but so naïve about women. Risjaf nodded at my instructions and wrote down all the places he might take Rukmini. After that, he quickly bathed and then changed into a blue dress shirt. He glossed his hair with pomade and combed it neatly. He folded the notes he had made during my primer course and put them in his trouser pocket—as if they were some kind of amulet that would help him to speak fluently.

With Surti spending the weekend at her parents’ home in Bogor, I myself was “on vacation” that night, so I gave my blessings to Risjaf, wished him the best, and made ready for a night of reading. Risjaf strode from the house with an almost confident air.

No more than a half hour later, I heard a weak knock on my door. Who could that be, I wondered. Opening the door, I found Risjaf, who came into my room with his head drooping like a limp dish rag. He let his body fall onto my bed. His eyes stared blankly at the ceiling overhead.

I looked down at him. “What is it, Sjaf?”

“I went to her place…”

“And so?”

“So she wasn’t there.”

“Then you can go back another time.”

“She’d gone out with another man!” Risjaf cried.

I was silent, not knowing what to say. My heart poured out for him.

Risjaf stared at me, his eyes reddened with anger or perhaps pain.

He spoke slowly and in a low voice, but the sound in my ears was like the ticking of a bomb.

“The lady at the boarding house told me that Rukmini had gone out with a man named Nugroho.”

That night I let Risjaf sprawl on my bed as he played the same song repeatedly on his harmonica, the Dutch tune “Als de Orchideeën Bloeien.” After about the fifth time, I was ready to wrest the harmonica from his hand and throttle him with it, but the tears welling in his eyes made me feel sorry for him. And after midnight, when the orchid still hadn’t bloomed, Risjaf, in his now-crumpled blue shirt, finally fell asleep and began to snore. I stretched out on the floor and stared at the ceiling, unable to fall asleep. There were still many things about women that I, too, did not understand.

In the weeks that followed, I was Risjaf’s shadow, going with him wherever he went: to campus, the library, Senen Market, Metropole Cinema, most everywhere, just to make sure he didn’t wind up standing atop a tall bridge or on the edge of a deep well. His demeanor and manner were those of a man without hope. I also shadowed him when he walked across the street to stand motionless on the sidewalk outside Mas Nugroho’s paviliun. He had held the phlegm in his throat for so long, I knew he was now ready, that he had to spit it out. Splat! At least he had spat on the walk and not into Mas Nugroho’s face, I thought. But that would not have been my friend Risjaf, who was not the kind of man given to open displays of anger. I knew he realized that he had no claim on Rukmini. Therefore, what right did he have to be angry? Even so, I could not allow the situation to continue indefinitely.

From my point of view, the problem rested with Mas Nugroho, who was completely insensitive to Risjaf’s feelings. He didn’t seem to realize that Risjaf was suffering from a broken heart—even though I thought it was apparent to everyone else. Whenever we saw Rukmini stop by at the paviliun across the road, even if it was only for a moment, Risjaf would immediately scurry into his room, hide behind a pile of homework, and not come out again.

One Sunday, I finally spoke about the situation with Surti, who gave me a look of complete surprise. “What? Risjaf likes Rukmini?”

“Yes. Didn’t you know?” In the mortar, I used my pestle to attack the sliced shallots and garlic and chunk of peeled turmeric root, as if they were to blame for keeping Rukmini and Risjaf apart.

Risjaf was still in the throes of misery, and I had promised myself that on Sunday I would cook up a pot of ikan pindang serani as a means to soothe his heart. Originally an Indo-Portuguese dish, the recipe for this spicy and sour milkfish soup was from my mother, and the taste of the fish which had been simmered slowly in turmeric sauce never failed to cheer me or my brother Aji when my father, who often had to travel for work, was not at home. I hoped that the dish would turn its magic on Risjaf, permitting him to recover and cast his attention on another woman.

As it was now Tjai’s turn to shadow Risjaf, who had gone to borrow lecture notes from a friend, I had some time to spend alone with Surti, even if I was cooking.

The cuts of milkfish, sliced shallots, green tomatoes, and citrus leaves were in their respective piles on the countertop and I was now grinding the turmeric with red chilies and garlic. The skin on my hands had turned yellow from the turmeric, and the paste of spice mixture began to splatter as I ground.

Surti, who was standing next to me, placed her right hand on mine, causing me to stop what I was doing.

“How was Rukmini supposed to know?” she asked, now stroking my hand. “Whenever Risjaf is around her, he’s as stiff as a statue, like he’s in electric shock.” She smiled gently and looked me in the eye. “I’m very sure that Rukmini is unaware of Risjaf’s feelings towards her.”

I stopped torturing the spice mixture and wiped my forehead with the back of my arm.

She was probably right. “Does Rukmini like Mas Nug?” I asked.

“It would appear so,” she said evenly. Adding another slice of turmeric to the paste, she began to move the pestle. By the way she crushed the root—gently, wordlessly—she seemed to be coaxing the spices to surrender themselves to their individual destruction in order to create a more perfect union of taste, one more pleasing to the tongue. I stared, fixating on her as she slowly turned the wooden pestle in the mortar as if massaging the spicy mixture. I swallowed. My body tensed. I hardly knew what was happening and I was unable to comprehend why her actions excited me so.

“What’s clear,” Surti said as she continued to grind the spices (which in turn made me more tense and less able to speak), “Mas Nug is willing to express his feelings. As is Mas Hananto. They are men who know what they want.”

She was right, of course. Damn the two of them, both of them older and more mature! Both had good jobs, though neither held a college degree. After graduation from high school, Mas Nug had enrolled in Chinese studies at the University of Indonesia but had never completed his degree. For several years, Mas Hananto had been a student in the Faculty of Law, but hadn’t finished his studies either. Even so, regardless of their educational deficit, the two of them were definitely more experienced in dealing with women. I felt chagrin. It wasn’t fair that we—Risjaf and I—were being compared to the two of them. And, for that matter, it wasn’t right that those two guys were going after college co-eds.

But wait a minute, I then thought. “You said Mas Hananto. He’s going after Rukmini, too?” I asked.

Surti looked at me clear-eyed, not bothering to offer an answer. A speck of the spice mixture—turmeric and chilies—was on her cheek. She looked away and then busied herself grinding the spices again. My God!

“Mas Hananto asked you out!?”

Surti squeezed my hand. “I turned him down. Doesn’t my heart belong to you?”

“Surti…”

“Don’t worry, Dimas, and don’t ask again about Mas Hananto. I’m here with you, aren’t I?”

I nestled my body close to hers. Her body emitted a scent of turmeric. I wiped the yellow speck from her cheek.

“I want you to be the father of my children,” she said in a voice of certainty.

My God. She had never spoken with such assuredness before. I tried to follow suit and said lightly, “If you have a girl, we’ll give her the name Kenanga.”

“And if the child’s a boy?” she responded in kind.

“Then we’ll call him Alam.”

There was still a bit of yellow color on her cheek and I licked it to wipe it away. Almost unable to resist my growing excitement, I held her chin in my hand and pressed my lips to hers, which were soft, velvety, and luscious, like the taste of Baltic Ice Cream. I used my tongue to explore her bodily curves: the nape of her neck, the cavity between her breasts, her erect nipples. When Surti released a suppressed moan, I knew that I would not, that I could not stop myself from further exploration. If Risjaf came back and demanded his promised dish of milkfish soup, I would cite force majeure: an earthquake had destroyed the kitchen. I lifted Surti and set her down on the kitchen table. As my body entered hers, I knew the feeling that I experienced would last forever. Forever and always.

I often use the word “forever.” “Always” is a favorite of mine as well—especially when I’m naked. One should always remember not to say anything when making love, because ecstasy makes us forget the ground we’re standing on and even our ideals. People who know me well tend to portray me as the antithesis of all that is certain and constant. There was some truth in Mas Hananto’s accusation—that I wasn’t willing to take sides, either in politics or in love. I was a ship never tethered to one port for long. Soon after calling into one harbor, I would be anxious to raise the anchor again.

After that love-making session, which raised havoc with the kitchen, I knew for certain what Surti would expect from me: one day, and sooner rather than later, I would have to fasten the knot of my love to something certain. But did that mean I had to stop my voyage now, I asked myself. Were there not more voyages to undertake, more ports to explore, more books to read? The ocean is vast. Even on such a long journey as ours, was it necessary to stop or take a break? When writing, I didn’t like to use periods. I preferred to use commas instead. Don’t tell me to stop. I would drown in stagnation. Don’t.

I sensed that Surti was aware of my anxiety. At the very least, she knew that with the end of my formal education ahead of me, I was preoccupied with my review of lecture notes and literary texts as I prepared for final examinations.

Many of the books I used, I borrowed from Mas Hananto’s personal library. I remember him once lending me works of Leo Tolstoy—books which the wife of a Dutch friend had given him. The wife had been crazy about him, he told me. And he was still friends with the both of them, he said; but then, with a glint in his eye, he added, “and their daughter, who is going to college in Amsterdam, is a real knockout.” Why I had suddenly thought of that incident, I didn’t know. There was no reason for me to get worked up thinking about Mas Hananto’s fecklessness or his amorous adventures with his friend’s wife or daughter.

At any rate, even though I had buried myself in books and notes, I shouldn’t have been surprised when one day Surti stopped by my boarding house to see me.

“Dimas …” she began, with a serious look on her face and a bright glow in her eyes. “My parents are hosting a dinner for some relatives, a few of my aunts and uncles. And there will be a friend of the family from the Netherlands as well, Dr. Bram Janssen, who is in the country at the moment. I want you to meet them.”

What?

What was this?

Why?

Was this necessary? Now? Her parents? At their home in Bogor? Her aunts and uncles? Dr. Bram Janssen? My throat suddenly felt scratchy. I understood the implication of her invitation, but there were still so many books, so many ideas, and oceans and continents to explore. Did I have to meet her parents now? Did I have to set anchor?

I looked at Surti. In my heart, I spoke out in protest, but my lips were sealed. Surti, Surti… Who was I to be introduced to your family with all its doctors and degrees? I could see myself, squeezed in among them in their elegant living room, with a glass of wine in my hand, as they chatted about the state of the nation and how it was never going to advance. What was I to say to her father and mother and to her aunts and uncles? All of these questions whirled around in my heart. Surti now knew me well enough to read my thoughts. Tears brimmed in her eyes. She turned away from me and left my boarding house.

After that unspoken conversation and the dinner invitation I didn’t accept, it became ever more difficult for me to see Surti. Not only was I very busy preparing for my final examinations, she herself seemed to be doing her best to avoid running into me on campus. Frankly, I didn’t try extra hard to meet up with her either. I had decided that, for the time being at least, I needed to concentrate on my studies. After final examinations and graduation, I would go to see her.

One day I went to Mas Hananto’s paviliun across the road to borrow a dictionary. As was usual, the door to the paviliun was open. I stuck my head in and called out to Mas Hananto and Mas Nug. No answer. The door to Mas Hananto’s bedroom was closed. A surprise. I knocked. No answer. I opened it. I didn’t know why, but my heart was beating wildly. And there I saw Mas Hananto standing with his arms around a woman who was seated with her back to him at his desk. I couldn’t see the woman’s face, shielded as it was by Mas Hananto’s form, but I could smell the scent of jasmine. I quickly pulled the door shut, causing it to slam. My heart pounded faster and faster. My breathing came in spurts. I fled the paviliun with its louse-infested couch.

I cursed and swore to myself that I would never again set foot in the home of that traitor.

Prone on my bed, I stared at the ceiling as Risjaf repeatedly played “Als de Orchideeën Bloeien” on his harmonica.

After some time, he stopped and then I heard him say. “Hey, Dimas …”

“What …?”

“How about if we burn down that paviliun across the road?”

I turned my head towards him and smiled weakly, somewhat consoled by Risjaf’s display of solidarity and brotherhood.

“No need for that,” I said as Risjaf lifted his harmonica to play again. “Better to murder those two fuckers instead.”

Suddenly, we both burst into laughter, delighted by this black fantasy.

It wasn’t easy for me to expunge the name of Surti from my life. Not only because I liked to cook and the kitchen was a constant and painful reminder of my feelings towards her. For the first few weeks after that incident I was forever seeing Surti standing next to the cooker and her reflection on plates and in pots. But where I saw her most often was on the handle of my knife, perched there, looking at me, as I prepared spices for grinding: shallots, onions, and turmeric.

Just as other men with broken hearts would do, I tried to forget my feelings for Surti in the most clichéd of ways: by sleeping around with other women. After each of these sessions, however, I always felt foolish and sick to my stomach. By coincidence, with political and social tensions on the rise in Jakarta at that time, we rarely saw Mas Nugroho or Mas Hananto. They were busy with their work at Nusantara News and both had been assigned to cover the incident of October 17, 1952, when a group of army officers staged a failed coup attempt to force the dissolution of Parliament and install President Sukarno as the country’s supreme leader. If I had been on speaking terms with them at the time, no doubt I would have been dogging their tracks, hoping to learn more about the political situation. To become a journalist, I had begun to discover, was a career path I could not resist. Journalism uses the power of words in the same way that a chef uses the strength of spices in the dishes he creates.

So it was that for a few months our small community of friends broke down and dispersed. Neither our moods nor our schedules permitted any form of reconciliation. Mas Nugroho and Mas Hananto were busy with their work; Risjaf had his books; and I was busy with women, exams, and grinding spices in the kitchen as I thought about concepts of love between men and women as depicted in the Mahabharata.

Drupadi.

Drupadi had taken all five of the Pandawa brothers as husbands. But it was the brother Bima who always tried to protect her and had thwarted Kicaka’s and Dursasana’s advances when they tried to rape her. Tragically for Bima, Drupadi loved his brother, Arjuna, much more. I don’t really know and actually never tried to find out whether Surti loved Mas Hananto more than me. What I did know is that she had made a choice.

I’m even more uncertain about why it is that, even after meeting the lovely Vivienne and marrying her, up until this very day my soul still stirs whenever I think of Surti. Perhaps I truly did give my heart to her. Forever and for always.

And forty-five years later in Paris, that same song from Risjaf’s harmonica still softly suffuses the springtime air: “Als de Orchideeën Bloeien.”