The Horseshoe’s Shadow

 

Bhe aku wong opo?—What kind of person am I?

The question hung in the humid East Java air like smoke from a clove cigarette, thick and choking. Partu had asked it in that poem of his, but hell, wasn’t that the question they all carried around in Tapal Kuda? Like a stone in your shoe that you can’t quite shake loose.

The old-timers called it the Horseshoe—Tapal Kuda—because that’s what it looked like from above, if you were God looking down at a map. Or maybe the Devil. In a place where languages bled into each other like wounds that wouldn’t heal clean, where Madurese mixed with Javanese until nobody could tell where one ended and the other began, it was hard to say which.

Tommy Sukarno (no relation to the president, he’d tell you quick enough) had been living in Jember for thirty-seven years, ever since his grandfather had crossed the strait from Sumenep with nothing but calloused hands and a prayer. Tommy spoke Javanese with his neighbors, Madurese with his wife, and Indonesian when the government men came around. But late at night, when the langgar call to prayer drifted across the tanean lanjang—that long courtyard where his family’s houses clustered like wagons circled against some invisible threat—Tommy found himself whispering in a tongue that belonged to none of those places and all of them.

Mak ngunu? Why like that?

The phrase came out of him unbidden sometimes, mak from his Madurese blood, ngunu from the Javanese soil his roots had grown into. It was the sound of a people caught between worlds, and Tommy knew that sound intimately. It was the sound of displacement, of belonging everywhere and nowhere.

He’d seen what happened to people who lost their way in the spaces between languages, between cultures. There was old Pak Wijaya, who’d started mixing up his words so bad that his own children couldn’t understand him anymore. Found him one morning in his tobacco field, talking to the plants in what sounded like no human language at all. The doctor in Bondowoso had fancy words for it—dementia, dissociation—but the old women who gathered at the market knew better. Sometimes when you belong to too many places, you stop belonging to yourself.

The plantation ghosts were the worst, though. Tommy had heard the stories from his grandfather, who’d worked the Dutch tobacco fields back when Birnie and his colleagues were turning Tapal Kuda into their personal kingdom. Men who’d crossed the strait for work, seasonal at first, then permanent when the Depression hit in ‘29 and there was nowhere else to go. They’d cleared the land, planted the crops, built the infrastructure. And when the plantations failed, when the Dutch pulled out or went bankrupt, those men became shadows—too invested to leave, too displaced to truly stay.

You could still see them sometimes, if you knew how to look. In Lumajang, in the old tobacco processing buildings that stood empty now like broken teeth. In Banyuwangi, where the Osing people whispered about strangers who spoke in voices that carried the salt of two different seas. They were the pendalungan people—mixed like ingredients in that big pot (dhalung) that Prawiroatmodjo had written about, stirred together until the original flavors were lost.

Tommy’s daughter Sari was going to university in Surabaya, studying linguistics of all things. She’d come home last month talking about “cultural hybridity” and “linguistic accommodation,” ten-dollar words for what Tommy’s grandmother had simply called nasib—fate.

“Bapak,” she’d said, using the formal Indonesian word instead of the Madurese bhabbu’ she’d grown up with, “don’t you see how beautiful it is? We’re not lost—we’re something new.”

But Tommy remembered the old stories, the ones his grandfather had whispered when the tobacco smoke was thick enough to hide his words. About the first organized migration, when it wasn’t voluntary at all. About Madurese soldiers fighting in VOC campaigns, their blood feeding foreign soil for foreign wars. About the Agrarian Law of 1870 that opened the floodgates, turning human migration into human commodity.

Duh kah… Oh dear.

Sometimes, late at night when the gamelan music drifted over from the Javanese houses and mixed with the gambus melodies from the Arabic community, when the Barongsai drums echoed with something that sounded almost but not quite like home, Tommy would stand in his courtyard and feel the weight of all those stories.

The horseshoe shape on the map wasn’t just geography, he’d come to understand. It was a trap. Not a malicious one, maybe, but a trap nonetheless—the kind that held you not with bars but with the terrible comfort of being forever in-between. The Dutch had called it De Oosthoek—the Eastern Corner—and corners, Tommy knew, were places where things got stuck.

Gak usah sambat cen ngunu.

No need to complain, that’s just how it is.

But some complaints, Tommy thought as the night sounds of Tapal Kuda settled around him like a familiar but ill-fitting coat, were prayers in disguise. And some prayers were just the sound of people trying to remember who they used to be, before the big pot started stirring, before the languages started bleeding together like watercolors in the rain.

Bhe aku wong opo?

What kind of person am I?

In Tapal Kuda, that wasn’t really a question at all.

It was a haunting.