Travels with a Teakwood Desk

Reflections in floodwaters So much of this story is based on re-discovered letters. Then there are also my research notes. Notebooks and more notebooks of handwritten and folders of typed notes – copies of what might turn out to be useful data – boxes of stuff that I never found a way to write about in a meaningful, academic, way. I struggled with, or against that, for years –until finally, I abandoned the effort, and twenty years later, most of the notes. I am writing this in my house in Chiang Mai in Thailand, where I have now lived for many years. I am just recovering from a flood which ripped through my house. Ironically, the flood has carried away those last months of letters from Indonesia which, had lain silent in their folder for 40 years. Finally, I had brought myself to read them, and to re-live that interlude in Indonesia. They had been sitting on my desk which floated and capsized as the floodwaters filled my living room. They are gone, but it does not matter – strangely, I had ‘processed them’ just in the days immediately before. I can let them go. How the gods do play with us! These letters of mine to Beattie, surfacing after more than forty years, lead me first of all to recall the pleasure I had found in discovering ‘old’ East Java: learning to live the tension between the related but opposing cultures of Hindu-Buddhist Java and Islamic Java, which means also the tension of the political rivalry that had ended in bloodshed in 1965-66, the aftermath of which was still palpable in the East and Central Java which I encountered in 1970. I read through the letters with only passing interest until I come to realise the rising ‘tension’ in the letters of the final four months which culminated in a dreamlike trip to Bali enroute back home. After skimming that series of last letters – I put them in a folder, put the rest back in the bag full of other ‘memories’, and start transcribing. It brings memories surging back, what had happened to me – why I had found myself in love with Java and something of why I found myself ultimately unable to produce the dissertation that I was at that time so seriously committed to.