How I fell in Love with Indonesia

The country revealed itself to me in pieces, the way you come to know a person — not through their grand statements but their small, unguarded habits. The way the whole village went quiet and gold in the hour before dusk. The way rain didn't fall so much as arrive, all at once, drumming on the tin roofs until conversation gave up and everyone simply sat and listened. The way no one, ever, ate alone if they could help it. Grief was shared here, and so was joy, and so was the last handful of rice — as though the dividing line between mine and yours had been drawn somewhere much further out than I was used to, or perhaps never drawn at all. There were harder truths beneath the beauty; I don't want to pretend otherwise. I saw how thin the margin was that Pak Adi lived on, how a bad harvest or a sick relative could undo a year of careful saving. I learned that the generosity I found so moving was not innocence but a kind of wisdom — a bet these people made, over and over, that kindness given out would find its way back. That in a place where you couldn't count on much, you could at least choose to be someone others could count on. On my last evening, months later than I'd ever planned, Sri walked me to the road to wait for the bus. The terraces were doing their trick with the light again. I told her I didn't have a word for how I felt about leaving. She thought about it, then took my hand. "Rindu," she said. "You will have it before the bus reaches the city. Now you understand it. Now it is yours too." The bus came. I climbed on, and I have been homesick for that valley ever since — a homesickness for a place that was never mine, given to me by people who gave me everything else besides. I fell in love with Indonesia the way you fall in love with anyone worth loving: not for how it looked in the light, though it was beautiful, but for how it insisted, gently and completely, on making room for me.