enjoy some story extracts
Kathryn Purnell lived in Indonesia in the 1950s as the wife of a UNESCO diplomat. These stories reflect her impressions of mid-century Indonesia.Intriguing and insightful, her understanding of the land and its people enabled her to produce a wonderful collection of varied stories, some reflecting her personal experience while others demonstrate her creative skill as an entirely fictional storyteller.
Play of Shadows: Indonesian Short Stories is available for purchase from your favourite bookseller
GUIDO AND THE GEDEH
To get to Djapanas it is necessary to drive through Bogor where late starters from Djakarta can stop for lunch in the world-famous botanical gardens, the Kebun Raya, which lies under the conical shadow of the volcano called Salek.
Salek was one of the volcanoes on Guido’s list but not nearly as important as the Gedeh which he would see every day from the hotel near Djapanas where he and his friends were going to spend the holiday. Guido was terribly excited to be getting close enough for a good look at the Gedeh for this volcano had erupted within the last few years and he had written down the details in his special notebook. He knew of course that the Merapi in Central Java was bigger and that Anak Krakatau, the island child which the great volcano Krakatau had thrown up from the sea in 1928 were more interesting from a volcanologist’s point of view, particularly as Arak Krakatau had gone back into the sea, re-appeared again and erupted as recently as 1950. But these volcanoes, like the parent Krakatau which had killed thirty thousand people when it blow up in 1883 were too tremendous for Guido to contemplate without trepidation and made him wish the certainty of his future profession as a volcanologist had taken a little longer of germinate. Since Guido was so far only eleven years old, he thought about volcanoes like he thought about God. Both were enormous, rumbling presences full of inexplicable power, fascinating and unpredictable. Both were fire in the bowels of the earth and thunder in the sky.
Surjo, Guido’s Javanese friend who was sitting beside him in the car thought God actually lived in volcanoes and that when people were bad and needed to be punished, the volcano erupted and drowned them in lava and ash which obliterated their house and rice-padis. Guido tended to discount Surjo’s theory although it worried him a little. He had heard his parents say that some Indonesians were pagan animists, whatever that was and full of superstitions that were divorced from true religion, but Surjo was a Christian who went to the same school as he did himself so that didn’t hold. Nor for that matter had Guido had much satisfaction when he asked his father whether Vesuvius erupted on Pompei because of the wickedness of the Roman Empire of those days.
PLAY OF SHADOWS
The house was set well back and in the shade of many trees and the perfume of budding cloves and the sweet scent of the blossoming djeruk filtered in through the open door to mingle with the warm smell of wax and leather. Despite the protection of the trees, the bamboo blinds were lowered against the heat and the room was sombre as the flickering sunlight fell on the carved heads and disclosed the shadowed wooden arms and faces of the puppets hung upon the walls. It was a magnificent display of the exotic legend of India created in the living art of Indonesia. All was broken shadow, purple-brown patches of shadow-play; a study of Wayang – fascinating, inscrutable.
Gratefully, I turned to Jan Strato, who was a specialist in Wayang and who had offered to show me the puppets of his collection when I visited Jogja.
“How fascinating they are,” I said. “You know, I remember seeing one or two like these at the Jakarta airport when flying home from London years ago, and I have been furious with myself ever since for not buying them.”
“I can understand that. For me the first fascination was the same, in fact, as you see, it became an obsession with me. But now I am here in Java I see so many I do not know how to choose.”