the residence four hours ahead, to handle the receipt of flowers and other gifts, recording who sent what for later thankyou notes (to be drafted by guess who?). I would also be expected to deal with any emergencies that needed to be handled by someone with a better command of Indonesian than Mrs. Jones had.
First, Chi-chi said, I should ask Mrs. Jones for a pair of her underpants, preferably ones that she had worn and that had not yet been laundered.
Gulping, I nodded again.
“Then turn the panties inside out and get them put up on the roof.”
Eyes wide, I nodded again.
“Then take four ordinary hot red chili peppers and get the gardener to bury them in the four corners of the part of the lawn where most of the guests will be.”
“Anything else?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “That should do it.”
Midmorning of July Fourth found me already dressed in my best reception-going dress, carrying out my peculiar errand. I had wondered for days how to approach Mrs. Jones with my weird request for her underwear, and finally decided to just play it straight. I need not have worried. She burst out laughing and, with a shrug, asked her babu cuci (laundress) to comply, including carrying the item up to the roof and leaving it there while I watched. There followed a quick trip to the kitchen for four red chilies, and to the garden to get them planted in the four corners of the lawn, where a clearly inadequate awning was being installed that might temporarily protect half the expected turnout in case of a quick, light shower. (There were no light showers at that time of year.) Without hesitation, the gardener planted the chilies.
From then on, I had merely to help receive the flowers and the gifts and, during the party, join the officer and spouse workforce whose job was, more or less politely, to move the reception along, through and past the receiving line and into the garden. If I could spot VIPs who needed to be plucked from the line and brought directly to Ambassador and Mrs. Jones, so much the better.
It was only after the last straggling guest had downed his last gimlet that I took notice of the fact that it had NOT rained on our parade. I asked around, and it turned out—as usual at this time of year—there had been heavy tropical cloudbursts all over town before, during, and after our reception, but none at the residence until well after the awning had been taken down and carted away and our embassy colleagues had started to depart.
When John and I reached home, I burst through the kitchen door to say (in Indonesian), “Chi-chi! You really are wonderful. I did what you said and it worked!”
Looking up at me balefully through her one good eye, she said, “What are you talking about? I have been praying to Allah all afternoon!”
. . .
That was my first inkling of how complicated religion in Java was. Chi-chi’s seamless switch from animistic magic to orthodox Islam rocked me on my heels. Was she joking with me? And if so, which was the joke: The ritual she had me carry out? Or was she joking when she said she had prayed all afternoon? I knew by then that she (like most Javanese in those days) occasionally ate pork, sometimes drank beer, never wore a headscarf, rarely went to the mosque, and did not fast during the fasting month. Clifford Geertz, an American who was the best anthropologist ever to work on Java, would answer those questions a few years later in his seminal book, The Religion of Java.
Until then, much of what John and I knew of the subject was taught us one memorable afternoon shortly after July Fourth. We were picnicking near an emerald-green rice paddy along the north coast road between Central and East Java, and a peasant farmer—upon whose field we were probably trespassing—came up to greet us.
John invited him to join us and, at some point, seeking to try out my still imperfect Indonesian, I asked him a question I almost never ask anyone: “Pak [father], what is your religion?”
“I am Javanese,” he said.
“Yes, but what I had asked was: ‘What is your religion?’”
“I am Javanese; that means I am Muslim.”
His words hung in the air until he took pity on me and expanded his answer a bit: “The Javanese are Muslim—but, of course, we have not been Muslim long.”
I nodded for him to continue, while absorbing the fact that five centuries did not seem as long to him as it would to a Westerner like me.
“And”—making hand gestures to indicate descending layers—“before that we were Hindu-Buddhist—or our kings were—but before that, and always, and still now, we are Javanese.”
What a country, I thought, where even a subsistence farmer could gracefully take you through a thousand years of religious history in a few sentences: Islam on top from about 1400 CE on; Hindu-Buddhism from the third or fourth to the sixteenth century on Java and still the religion of Bali. And, going back at least as far as the first Neolithic settlements on Java and still now, animism—the placating of local spirits, which is what I had been doing at the ambassador’s residence on the Fourth of July.
. . .
We Western diplomats would have been ill advised to laugh at the natives’ “superstition.” We were constantly being confronted with evidence that all three religious belief systems still had a hold on the same people—up and down the Indonesian social and educational scale—depending on the circumstance. All Javanese little boys were circumcised according to Muslim rites, and almost all marriages involved dances and puppet shows that were visibly derived from the Hindu-Buddhist court traditions prevailing on Java until the spread of Islam chased the courts eastward to Bali where, for the first time, the court religion became the popular religion too.
In daily life, however, it was animism—called agama jawa (Javanese religion)—that seemed to have the most direct hold on the island of Java’s more than sixty million people. Westernized Indonesian friends of ours were always holding selamatans or calling in a dukun (shaman/sorcerer) to deal with problems attributed to spirits. A young Javanese friend who went on to study international law at Yale was one of the many to warn me, seriously, not to wear green on the southern beaches of Java, for fear that the goddess of the sea there might get jealous and drown me.
Even the embassy had to pay attention when word spread through the politically active community that President Sukarno’s mystic invisible bird, which by the 1950s was widely believed to sit on the president’s shoulder, a symbol of his divine authority to rule, had not been seen lately. I remember there being rumors sometime in late 1959 or early 1960 that the bird had turned up on the shoulder of Sukarno’s most widely respected potential rival, the Sultan of Yogyakarta. John and, no doubt, other junior officers in other embassies in town were assigned to track down where the mystic bird had been sighted most recently. Within a week, John told me it was back on Sukarno’s shoulder, and the panicky rumors died down.
. . .
Learning how modern Javanese men and women thought at that time about religion was perhaps the most useful knowledge I acquired during three years in my first foreign country. It taught me that people of other cultures who seem to think like us actually have all sorts of different thoughts, beliefs, and reactions that are utterly foreign. That discovery would not have come to John and me if we had not been able to communicate with local people in a local language and if we had not had the chance to get to know, at least slightly, a wide variety of local people. Nowadays, for security and other reasons, the United States has reduced the number of diplomats it sends to posts
