‘Miss! Come in and meet my granny!’ The invitation came some twenty years ago from a smiley young man who had spotted me tramping along a dirt road in the obscure south-eastern Indonesian island of Sumba. It was skillet hot and ashtray dusty, and I was very thirsty. His granny probably had tales to tell, and she’d certainly be good for a glass of tea or two. Why not? I had clambered up a ladder onto a bamboo veranda where other youngsters were making unrestful noises with gongs and drums, then ducked through the low doorway and blinked into a windowless darkness. Eventually, by the tiny grains of light that sprinkled through the bamboo-weave of the walls, I made out a poster of Jesus and the Sacred Heart. There was a bag of dirty laundry on a bamboo chair. But the room was otherwise deserted; no sign of granny.
‘Just a second!’ The young man fiddled around with the laundry bag, untying it and peeling back the napkin on top to reveal Granny. She had died the previous day, and would be receiving guests each day until her funeral four days later, as was the local custom. ‘It’s an honour for her to meet you,’ he said. And we sat and drank tea.
Twenty years after taking tea with a dead grandmother, I dumped my bags in a dispiriting hotel room, asked the staff to sweep away the dead cockroaches and set out to explore…
[…] The first village I spotted was Tarung. From the road, all I could see was a bit of thatch, a few pointy roofs teetering above a patch of jungle. As I scrambled up a rocky path towards the village, the scraps of thatch resolved themselves into a group of bamboo houses built on thick wooden stilts. Each one had two doors opening on to a wide bamboo veranda, and each was dwarfed by its roof, which started broad and low over the veranda, sloped gently up towards the centre of the house, then narrowed and shot high into the air. It made me think of a child wearing a dunce’s cap jammed down over a thick fringe. I kept climbing, weaving past runaway chickens, piglets and children, and emerged suddenly into the centre of the village. A ring of houses decorated with the skulls of long-dead buffalo stood guard over a large oval clearing studded with megalithic tombs. On the carved top of one tomb, a fire raged. At its centre was some kind of animal.
Elizabeth Pisani, Indonesia Etc.