Busted!

Enida had a motorcycle. She usually picked me up on her way to uni and dropped me off on the way home. In return we shared the gasoline cost.

One day we decided to check out a poster store after class. Enida got confused by my instructions and took a wrong turn. A traffic policeman on a motorbike was waiting for us around the bend. We were stopped. This kind of policemen usually expected money from people who got caught. I was not familiar with the procedure and I didn’t have much money with me anyway so I just stayed quiet. Enida didn’t offer him any money either. We were asked to follow him to a police station nearby.
Enida sulked throughout the ordeal. She didn’t argue with the policeman but she refused to surrender her driver’s license. She didn’t answer any of the policeman’s questions. She just clamped her mouth tightly together with an expression that said ‘I’m not talking to a scum like you!’ and ‘I’m going to tell my dad, you Bully!’ After almost an hour, the policeman gave up. He let us go with a warning.

The Reward

I was an average student throughout school, but at university I suddenly get a lot of As and Bs. I actually hated economics and I couldn’t put two and two together without a calculator. But since we were allowed to use calculator, I did just fine.

There were some hot shots in my batch at uni. You could tell who were hot shots by the way they strutted around campus. They usually had rich or influential dad, or both. I instinctively disliked these kids. I was naturally jealous because they had money and and were popular. I didn’t and I wasn’t. One of these kids was Rina. Her father was a successful businessman in Palembang. Rina asked me to help her with one of the subjects. I didn’t particularly like her, but she was nice to me so I helped her with some tutoring sessions. She treated me to a movie as payment.

When the result came out, Rina got a B. Not bad. As for me, I made a small but fatal mistake in the exam. I got a D and had to repeat the subject.

the village

When I was a teenager, Mom took me to a small village where she grew up. It was a tiny village in the middle of nowhere in Sumatra. After a long, tiring trip we arrived. We stayed in a quaint house on stilts, by a small river. I don't remember much of the trip. Just that people recognized me immediately as Mom's daughter. I must have looked just like her. I had the best fried chicken ever in that village. Things were going great until morning came. We took a shower in an outdoor bathroom. There was no roof, so everybody donned a sarong when bathing. If that was bad, the toilet was worse. It was at the back of house, at the end of a wooden plank, over the river. The toilet itself was a small cubicle about one meter in diameter, roofless, like the shower. If a person squated over the hole on the floor, he or she could still enjoy the surrounding view because the cubicle was only one meter tall. But the worst part was that there was a similar facility right across the river. You could practically chat with your neighbour while unloading. I took one look at the toilet, and abandoned all idea of trying it out. It was a torture but I managed to wait until we arrived at another relative's house in a small town half a day away. This relative's toilet is not much more than a hole on the floor, but at least it had proper walls and a roof.