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Kayu Putih, Northeast Jakarta

I wake up on New Year’s Day to a world underwater. Or at least it feels that way: the neighborhood has sunken overnight in an opaque brown liquid dotted with moving heads. Two women move their arms in a breaststroke motion, chest-deep, one holding a Ziploc bag with her phone above her head. The neighborhood bakso seller floats by on his rickshaw, elbows splayed out beneath his head like he’s lounging in a lazy river. The frangipani out front stretches its limbs out of the water, wild and skeletal. The murky sky fades into water on the horizon. It’s hard to detect a vanishing point.

I’d slept through the storms but can vaguely remember shifting in bed to percussion-spiked dreams: moving boxes hitting the roof, tree trunks spinning in the wind and thwacking the windows. My flight back to the States is this afternoon. It’s my last morning in my family home before we sell it off, so this is a parting gift from the city. A biblical flood. A city-wide powerwash. I already know that this is a story I’ll be reciting years from now. Leaving Jakarta for the last time on New Year’s Day, ushered out by the floods.

The story as I tell it starts here, with my mother fanning herself in the living room with crumpled newspaper, me scrolling obsessively on my phone—the neighborhood is out of power, but with my remaining 5G I see my flight is still scheduled to leave on time. The airport is on higher ground a forty-five-minute drive away; planes will depart unaffected. I Google jakarta flood 2020, scroll through pictures of mosques sitting in water. Overnight, several people living in makeshift housing have died. They are still counting. Beneath that report, a quote from Governor Anies in The Jakarta Post: Just enjoy the floods, he says. Two thirds of the human body is water, anyways. We’re always excreting it, from our heads, from our eyes…

We are debating the tactics by which I might evacuate: waiting until the water levels are lower to wade out onto the shallower main roads, but that could take hours. Rafting out on the air mattress—I’d taken inspiration from someone floating around on theirs earlier this morning—then hailing a cab and shipping out the other stuff later, but I’m too cowardly to try something so adventurous. My mother’s penchant for schemery is useful in moments like this. She locates and dials every relevant phone number in her contacts list, paces through the house in flip-flops and khaki shorts, running a hand through her blunt bob and tilting her head back as she talks. Within an hour of frantic texts and phone calls, she tracks down Pak Ari: a neighbor and GrabCar driver who could use some extra cash.

Pak Ari is drenched when he walks into our garage, glistening with street water, gold piercings tracing his right ear. He’s confident he can get me and my suitcases to the airport in our Mitsubishi Pajero. It’s a four-wheel drive. Just relax. United Airlines has denied my flight change requests twice. The flight leaves in eight hours. Pak Ari estimates that traffic might add a couple hours, and my mother insists I go now, just in case. He changes into dry cargo shorts from his bag and a Nirvana Nevermind T-shirt, the one with the baby in a swimming pool—fitting—then motions for me to enter the car. I kiss Mom’s cheek and leave her. She’s staying in the house for a few more weeks to finalize the home sale. She’ll text me when the power’s back on.

My mother leans against the doorframe as she watches us back out of the driveway. Light from the kitchen shrouds her shrinking silhouette from behind. Ghostly and angelic. I look away.

 

Hour One

Pak Ari plunges the Pajero into water like it’s not there at all—like waves aren’t breaking against the dash, creating currents in every direction. Our self-made waves rattle tree branches, crash against homes. We are the only car on the road. I am in the back seat, anxiously pulling on the door handle in an attempt to help seal it shut, watching Pak Ari steer us through a city mid-apocalypse. He laughs. Relax. Just relax.

His tone is so good-natured that the imperative doesn’t feel patronizing. I remove my hand from the door and place it over my other hand, let my fingers wring each other dry.

My mother held onto our house in Kayu Putih as long as possible before deciding to sell. My civil engineer father had designed it; I remember him carefully plotting out the garden with the frangipani, the tall lofty windows, the switches for elaborate light fixtures he planned to install, the crucially elevated living room to guard against floods. But he passed away before he had the chance to fully realize the life he imagined in that house, and my mother and I were never fully tapped in on the vision. We taped over the superfluous light switches we didn’t understand. We shared a bedroom and kept the others empty. In the years we lived there together, our laundry would mysteriously vanish from our lines in the front yard; our doors would slam without reason. After moving to the States for college, I worried about my mother living there alone, had nightmares of her shrinking figure in that haunted house. When she announced that she’d sell the house and live with my sister in the States for a while, I told her I thought it was a good idea.

It’s not like you’re going to come back and live here one day anyways, she said. Right?

I sensed she hoped that I’d assure her otherwise. I thought of all the hours in Jakarta sitting through floods and power outages, waiting for gridlock to dissipate. I thought of the clockwise sense of order that America brought with all its infrastructure and wealth.

No, I told her. Probably not.

Then it’s better to use the money and enjoy life, she said, forced nonchalance raising her pitch.

 

Hour Two

Water has melded the four-lane main road into a single thigh-deep mass. We drive slowly with the AC turned off, windows rolled down for airflow, a one-car parade. Pedestrians film us on their phones as we drive by, waving and clapping at the single vehicle dumb enough to sink itself, and I film them in turn. We’ll all want to remember the absurdity of this situation. In the shallow-watered distance, I see someone inexplicably mount a horse. I remember my mother’s childhood lectures about the End Times and the Rapture, keep an eye out for angels and trumpets and seven-eyed lambs. Just relax, Pak Ari keeps repeating, his eyes soft in the rearview mirror. You wouldn’t be able to stop the water if it got in anyway.

Pak Ari makes conversation to pass time: he has three sons who are still young enough to get excited by flood days, by the rafts and life vests, the flurry of excitement and urgency in the air. It’s the biggest flood of their lifetimes, a real event. But the adults are never as excited. Surely not Pak Ari’s wife. And she’s not a city boy like him; she’s from a coastal town in Java where water is briny and clear, nothing like the sewage water currently permeating their neighborhood, coating the kitchen floors. Both of us are Jakarta transplants, linked to this place by the people we love. Our connection leaves me uneasy with guilt. I say as little about myself as possible, explain to him only that I’m flying back to finish my last semester of school. An English major. I like to read. Surface biographical details. I don’t describe the world I’m flying out to, the Gothic buildings and tulip endowment at my fancy East Coast college back in the States, as if I can dissolve the differences between our lives by omission. I steer the conversation toward Pak Ari’s Nirvana Tee instead.

But we do share this sinking city. Kayu Putih has been sinking for the three decades my family has lived there. It sounds like a dramatic sentiment until water is forcing you out of the house. One year the water had started coating the living room floor, clean and clear, until a murky brown soup filled the ground floor, waist deep. My older sisters were hoisted up onto the countertops, thrilled: no school! They tipped their pet beta fish out of the tank and let it swish around in the real world. Our father spent the rest of the year repairing the damage while we stayed in short-term rentals. Or rather they did, my family. I wasn’t born yet. I’ve just heard the story so many times that its images have set in my mind with a haziness that mimics true memory. Sometimes I bring this anecdote into my repertoire, forgetting it isn’t even mine to tell.

Nobody with the means or common sense moves there anymore; our corner of Northeast Jakarta is too mired in water. In the way some people mark their kitchens with the heights of their growing kids, we can measure time with the rising water stains on the walls, the books that have crisped up with floodwater. In any case, decades later, we keep returning, a naïve homesick tribe pulled by sheer stubbornness and the gravity of a home.

Pak lights a Djarum Black and rests his cigarette arm out the window. The stub floats away when he’s done.

 

Hour Three

In the flood-ridden capital of this politically tumultuous, fault-line-dotted nation, disaster punctuates our years, acts as a kind of astrology. I was born four months after the May 1998 riots, so I’m a Riot Baby. That’s why you have so much angst, I can hear my mother saying. The way being born during a flood might create a sense of melancholic detachment. Or an earthquake might make a baby with a temper. It’s always felt more logical than the placement of a distant star.

On the city’s storm-tossed backroads, kids slosh around playing games. Mopeds putter aimlessly. Middle-aged men in colorful rain ponchos amble with their hands clasped behind their back, pleasantly assessing, playing weather-tourist. It almost looks like they’re enjoying this. Life goes on, just slower, liquefied. Life goes on—is that the cliché I’ll lead with when I tell this story to my American college friends from the East Coast? I am already planning my script. I imagine their grimaces when I tell them about packing to sell the house my dead dad built, their awkward titters about the tragedy of climate change as I recount my journey to the airport. I think of ways to frame my world so that it will sound less depressing and more virtuous: the resilience of Indonesians, their cheery generosity despite all the—ugh. Corny and tone-deaf. Manhattan is sinking, too, this is a universal problem and nobody is immune—too somber and lecture-happy. Natural disaster is a great equalizer, unites a city in shared experience—the greatest bluff of them all. Just enjoy the floods. Most of the human body is water, anyways.

I think of how I’ll mask the obvious privilege of having access to a car and driver to escort me out of these floods, away from all the chaos. The fact that I have the option to leave makes me feel less deserving of a story to tell. I want to translate my life in a way that feels honest, but from this gilded Pajero my greatest suffering takes the form of boredom, heat, the inconvenient prospect of finding another flight home. Meaningless, ignoble malaise. In a few hours I will be on an airplane to the richest country in the world and Pak Ari will start this car journey over again in the other direction.

 

Hour Four

Neither of us has said a word in the past hour, comfortably silent in our shared misery. Pak Ari is on his second Panadol Red, the one with a dose of caffeine. We’ve made it onto the toll road—finally, higher ground—but apparently every other car in Jakarta has, too. We are stuck. Pak Ari settles into place and turns off the engine. He repeatedly runs the back of his skull against the beaded head rest. Other drivers on the toll road have left their vehicles to wander, leaning against their respective cars and smoking. I have to pee.

What time is your flight again? Pak Ari asks, breaking our longest stretch of silence yet.

5:15 p.m. I’m boarding in three hours. We’ll definitely get there in three hours, right?

I expect him to tell me to just relax. Instead, he sits there for a few seconds, tapping his fingers on the wheel, before humming an equivocal mmm.

When the Dutch built the capital of the East India Company, they set to work demolishing the existing city, Jayakarta, and building up Dutch Batavia, their Amsterdam of the East. But they neglected to properly maintain the city’s canals, and the waterways quickly became a vessel for tropical disease. Batavia became Amsterdam’s rotted, pungent double. The Dutch fled for an elevated refuge south of the disease-ridden city center, where they pumped groundwater instead.

Indonesians reclaimed the city for themselves when they gained independence in 1945, reverting to a modernized version of the city’s original name: Jakarta, meaning victory. But they were left with a segregated capital city whose limited clean water had been made available only to its European minority. The faulty water infrastructure the Dutch had established still leaves most of Jakarta reliant on groundwater. To this day, the city keeps pumping, and the marshland it was built on continues to give way. Today the money in Jakarta has also drained south, the way the Dutch did when their canals went rotten. Indonesian textbooks inform students that the flooding is little more than the consequence of their own littering. Stinky, obsolete canals still line most of Jakarta’s main roads, and on days like today the canal water mingles with fresh rain and pours into the street. Water. I really need to pee.

 

Hour Five

From my backpack, I pull out a tin of nastar cakes I had planned to bring back as a souvenir and place them on the center console as an offering. We eat together: Pak Ari takes a polite amount, intermittently brushing off the buttery residue on his shorts; I eat mindlessly, until the richness makes me woozy. It will be dark in a few hours. My mother hasn’t texted. I wonder if the electricity is back on in Kayu Putih. With signs for the Soekarno-Hatta Airport in sight, I apologize profusely and make Pak Ari promise not to look. He turns on the radio to drown out the sound, and I squat on the car floor and pee into the empty nastar tin to the tune of a soft-pop ballad, paired with the steady sound of my piss as it hits the base.

 

Hour Six

At the six hour and fifty-minute mark, we pull up to Soekarno-Hatta with nearly an hour until takeoff. What did I tell you! Pak Ari says, charged with new energy, even though he’s said nothing for the past few hours. I disembark and babble out a string of thank yous. He helps me pull my luggage from the trunk and breezily tells me he’ll hang out for a bit and get some food and return home with time to spare, it’s all good, he’s used to this. I am not convinced.

He props himself against the car and watches me go through the security entrance with more kindness than I deserve. I set my gaze straight in front of me and into the terminal.

My last views of Jakarta are from the window seat: first the bloated streets, then the rust-colored tile roofs, then the glass-tipped towers before we rush into the sky. Gray and hazy, the city is shrouded in smoke like it’s already a memory. A few months ago, President Jokowi announced his plan to move the capital city to a new island eight hundred miles away. He got sick of bailing out a drowning ship with tablespoons. His new city will have it all: houses on stilts, a dazzling presidential palace, a road with six one-way lanes inspired by his recent trip to Moscow, an American school for the grandkids to take their AP classes. The digital renderings show a wide green field and an electric tram breezing by a plaza. The sky is Internet Explorer blue. They promise that they haven’t forgotten about Jakarta, of course; they’re building an extravagant Garuda-dragon-shaped landmass along the coast to protect against rising sea levels, and it will be epic and symbolic, so we’re not to worry. 

Back in America, I lie on my back in my college apartment and scroll through images of Kayu Putih on the news. The pictures bleed with headline misery, click-generating misery, humbling-case-study-in-climate-change misery. I’m a voyeur of my own city. I close the tabs.

Years later, I move to New York, another sinking island, just wealthier, slower to drown. I walk down Houston Street as it bursts with geysers of streetwater, watch people on the bus dodge water streaming down the aisle,  a single plastic water bottle outside orbiting a sewer grate. People on Twitter bounce the word dystopian around. The neighbors retreat upstate and their dog cowers under my bed, annoyed and scared by all this rain. It’s okay, sayang, I coo, smoothing out her head. It’s okay, cantik. English is my most functional language, but I always smother pets with honeyed Bahasa rhetoricals and affirmations of beauty, the way my ears are tuned to remember fondness.

Here in New York I often hear myself repeat the story of leaving Jakarta. Over drinks, at picnics, at dinner tables—partially because people tend to lean in with interest, my Connecticut-bred college friends whose eyes widen with incredulity. They’ve only ever flushed ice cubes down the toilet hoping for snow days. They’ve never heard of something like this.

But also because I can never quite get it right. Maybe if I repeat it enough times, it will make sense to me, too. I pull out the video clip with the man on the horse treading water and narrate what’s happening, the facts shifting a little each time.

I’ve become too saturated with the lies of storytelling. The artifice leaks out of my ears. So to confess: It was a full car. My mother and sisters were crammed in next to me. We weren’t on our way to the States just yet—we’d planned a last trip to Bali together. But this retelling is too noisy, feels less like elegiac and more like a chaotic vacation story among the sisters who hadn’t even lived in the city when I had. This version turns a story that I want to be mine into theirs, lowers the stakes into a silly vacation with a central character who’s more privileged and complicit than I care to be. I’ll sweep out these details.

And Pak Ari and I had been close. He had driven me to school for years. We’d spent hundreds of hours sitting through traffic together. But I won’t be able to bear this version of the story, the version where all that time he’s spent shuttling me back and forth culminates in my flat farewell. Where I can’t even remember if I waved or shook his hand. He’d called my cell at the gate and said hello, then let the line fall silent, his throat catching. I hung up, thinking the connection had failed.

I’m too ashamed of my privileged indifference. So I’ll erase our connection. It’s easy to do in storytelling, and even easier to start believing my own lines. One version is simpler, more flattering, more tragically melancholic. It flows downstream with my existing neural pathways while upholding my sense of self. Every time I retell the story the images shift, start to erode the harder facts. Benjamin Labatut: Everything that comes from a writer is fiction. What’s one more fabrication?

And it makes no difference to my friends around the dinner table, who are cheersing to Mai Tais and just looking to be entertained. I am the only one defensive over my emotional truths and protective of the video I’ve just shown them, self-conscious that I’m feeding them yet another Southeast Asian sob story, the kind that Americans clamor towards. That must have been really hard, one friend says, a perfectly kind and normal thing to say. My face grows hot. But I forge ahead, talking about leaving Jakarta and moderating to keep the tone light so I have control as a confident reliable narrator and nobody is uncomfortable, like it’s just water, the same water that runs through our bodies, anyways.

 

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MAY TENG is an Indonesian-American writer based in New York. May’s fixations include fragmented narratives, portraits of place, boundaries and borders, and collective memory. Her writing is featured in AGNI and Literary Hub and has been supported by the Vermont Studio Center, the Civil Society Institute, a Periplus fellowship, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. May holds a BA in English from Georgetown University and attended the University of Iowa’s MFA program in Nonfiction Writing, where she taught creative writing. Find her on Instagram @maytengo.

Featured image by Kelly Sikkema, courtesy of Unsplash.