The Other Foreigner

The land poured away in great running ridges, dropping to cupped levels of rice field, then to standing ranks of pale palms and white beaches and empty ocean. South of this lost coastline there was nothing.

I stopped and parked my motorbike where the road skirted a ridge buttress amongst the trees. There was a long breeze moving everything and drying the sweat on my brow. The wind came from the south and might have run all the way from the pack ice of the Southern Ocean.

There was a village here. It was called the Hill of the Camel, but there are no camels on this island, and no one knew why it had that name. There were some twenty houses, ranged around the almond space of packed yellow earth where the graves were, and where the village dogs slept in the easy sunlight. The houses had great soaring, rocketing peaks, sweeping up to the height of the highest palms, hung with shaggy, mildewed thatch like the rotting haystacks that stand amongst rusted harrows and broken tractors on cold hill farms. The roof peak dropped through a sheer angle, then levelled in a narrow skirt almost hiding the bamboo platform and the tiers of flaky-dry buffalo horns that covered the rough-wood walls. The palms between the buildings moved in the wind, and it seemed that the tall roofs were moving gently too. In their swaying oval they made me think for a moment of Mevlevi dervishes, heads titled, eyes closed, palms loose, whirling into trance on the cold Anatolian steppe. But Sumba, teetering on the very brink of Indonesia, was far, far from Konya, and the people at the Hill of the Camel were not Muslims of any kind. Nor were they Christians. For up in the hollow of those rot-thatch roofs, among the smoke stains and cobwebs, above the yellowed pig jawbones that hung from the bamboo rafters, there were sacred heirlooms – old swords and tarnished bronze platters marked with lines and curves. And among the heirlooms dwelt the Ancestor Spirits. They dwelt there, above the cooking space, in the stream of the wood smoke and rice steam so they could watch what the family ate, and could intervene should times be lean.

The village was silent, but for the wind against thatch and palm leaves. Even the dogs could not raise themselves from where they lay on the worn limestone capstones of the village graves. I walked slowly between the buildings. Three small boys in dirty t-shirts and ragged shorts appeared. They stared at me for a moment, then bolted screaming. An old woman with straw-thick grey hair twisted above a shrunken face peered from a black doorway. She was wearing a sarong of heavy, hand-spun black cloth threaded with red and amber, and nothing else. Her chest and shoulders were marked with blood-blue tattoos. She barked something back into the gloom of the house.

Slowly, from her house and from others people emerged. They were women with mouths stained red from betel nut, and old men. Most of the women wore only the dark-weave sarong. Their shoulders slumped under loose skin. The men wore twists of purple cloth at their waists, and had bands of hand-weave tied around their foreheads. Each of them carried a long, tarnished blade at their side. Their cheekbones were high and their eyes glowed a little. They stared at me. The three children had re-emerged now, and were watching me with huge, round eyes, clinging to the legs of the women.

I asked for the house of the village headman.
“He is not here,” they said; he and all of the young men were at the weekly market in some other village.
I had brought sugar and cigarettes to give to them. One of the women took them nervously, then hissed something and someone with trembling hands held out a little box of woven grass towards me. “Sirih-pinang,” she said, and I took the box and helped myself to the raw betel nut and the sour catkin dipped in lime.
As I forced it into my mouth and pushed the numbing, bitter mess into my back teeth the oldest of the old men lurched forward towards me. He was almost as tall as I was and his back was straight, though his face was hollow and his hair was yellow-white, scraped back over his skull.
He waved a long, thin finger at me and said: “You are a foreigner.”
“I am,” I said, a little startled, feeling almost as though that fact had briefly escaped me.
“There is another foreigner,” he said, still waggling the finger. A murmur of affirmation moved through the rest of the crowd.
“I believe there are several of us,” I muttered.
“He lives near here,” the old man said, “in a village. He has lived there for a long time.”
“Where is he from?” I asked.
“From abroad.” The same affirming murmur –“Yes, yes! From abroad!”
“What a coincidence!” I said, “Just like me…”
Now discovering that I could talk, even with a mouth full of blood-red sirih-pinang, the three children had crept further forward, and now stood before the legs of the women, grinning. I spat the excess juice to the floor. That was the correct thing to do. The oval pinang represented the feminine, the phallic sirih, the male. And the white lime powder was obvious in its symbolism: without it there would be no scarlet spittle, no blood of childbirth to be returned to the earth, and the whole business of chewing the stuff would be worthless.
“The other foreigner has been here for 20 years,” the old man said.
“Longer than that,” someone hissed, “maybe…”
“He is married to a Sumba woman,” someone else said. They were growing in confidence now, beginning to babble.
“He has many children – how many? Ten? Maybe - certainly many.”
Another old man, this one shorter, with thin, iron-grey hair standing in tufts above his head-cloth, raised his own scrawny digit. “He wears these clothes,” he patted his own short sarong and headscarf.
“And speaks the local language with fluency…”
“Like a native…”
“And,” said one of the thin-shouldered women, “he is Agama Marapu, he is an ancestor worshipper.”
Questions, murmurs, dissent: Is he? Not a Christian? No! Are you certain? Certain! Is that possible? Possible!”
“He is like an original Sumba man – completely…”
Perhaps, I thought for a delightful moment, it was true; perhaps, I had really, encountered a case of an outsider who had truly gone native…

***

Long ago, in Nepal, I met an Englishwoman who insisted that India was her spiritual home. She told me that she believed that she was really an Indian, born by some fault of the karmic system into a middle class family in the south of England. She used to work in sales.
She had spent two months in an ashram in Rishikesh – like the Beatles – and had found her “balance”. She had a dab of vermillion on her brow to show that she had been to some temple that morning. She was sitting at the table across from me on the rooftop of a restaurant in the Kathmandu tourist ghetto of Thamel. I was eating glorious palak paneer. It was a Punjabi rather than a Nepali dish but they made it well. The lumps of cheese squeaked a little between my teeth as I bit into them; they were cool and creamy and the spinach sauce was a vivid, buttery, silage-green flecked with chilli-red. I was reading a pirated copy of an Ernest Hemingway novel, with wonky pages and an absurdly incongruous photograph of Hrithik Roshan on the cover.
She was reading the Bhagvad Gitta and eating a pizza.
“I just love the spirituality of India,” she said; “it’s definitely where I belong. And Hinduism is just such a peaceful religion, although I consider myself to be more of a Buddhist.”
I talked to her about where she had been on her journey, interested to hear her impressions of the Subcontinent.
She hated India with a passion. The food made her sick; she found the heat unbearable. The people were idiots, every one of them, forever trying to steal from her, con her, scam her. She despised the Indian attitude towards women (a man on the bus to Nepalganj had tried to touch her breast) and couldn’t understand why she had to pay more than the locals for everything. She had arrived in Kathmandu two days earlier and gone straight to the airline office, and although the staff were idiotic and useless she had managed to change her ticket. She was flying back to England the next morning and was very, very happy.

In Dharamsala I saw a bulky, bearded Frenchman dressed in the purple robes of a Tibetan Buddhist; six weeks later I saw him again, in Udaipur, dressed as a Hindu Saddhu. He told me he was going to Pakistan.

Wilfred Thesiger, with a sharp pen and a romantic heart, claimed to despise the modern world. He called himself the last true Bedu, and when, years later, he went back to the Gulf States he was horrified by the skyscrapers now lining the Trucial Coast. He found that the achingly beautiful young boys who wore no shoes and didn’t cut their hair and rode with him through the Empty Quarter forty years earlier, were now fat and bearded and owned pick-up trucks. He grumbled petulantly that they were no longer Beduin; he alone was a true desert nomad.
Then he put his tweed jacket back on and returned to England and died in a nursing home in Surrey.

It is impossible.

***

But perhaps I was wrong.
Even the village dogs had stiffly dropped from the graves and padded across the yellow mud to stare at me with tilted heads and raised ears. The crowd was discussing the other foreigner loudly amongst themselves, debating the exact number of his children, wondering how his Ancestor-worshipping faith worked in practical terms. Had the Sumbanese Ancestors adopted him, or had they taken into their own ranks a long-nosed, white skinned spirit, just as their descendents had done the foreigner?
The old man was still holding his finger erect, waggling it as though he was telling me some cautionary tale. “He is just like us…”
Then I must be wrong, for I found that I believed him with something like revelatory delight. “What is his name,” I said, somewhat wondrously. “This foreigner, what is he called?”
The babbling ceased and the villagers glanced at one another. The old man leaned further forward towards me and pointed at my chest. “His name,” he said, and the rest of the crowd nodded with unanimous conviction; “His name, is Tourist…”

© Tim Hannigan 2008