‘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.

Bodomaroto

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…
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