The Suriname Lie

 

Chapter 1: The Werek Man

In the dying days of the 19th century, when the old world was crawling toward something new and terrible, there came a man to the villages of Kedu Residency. He walked with the measured gait of someone who knew secrets—the kind of secrets that could change a poor farmer’s life forever, or destroy it completely.

The locals called him werek, but that was just a word for what he did, not what he was. What he was, was something far more dangerous: a peddler of dreams in a place where dreams had withered like rice stalks in drought.

The man—let’s call him Sartono, though that probably wasn’t his real name—had eyes like chips of black glass and a smile that never quite reached them. He’d roll into a village just after the harvest moon, when bellies were emptiest and hope ran thinner than watered-down rice porridge. That’s when desperate people listen hardest to impossible promises.

“Suriname,” he’d say, letting the word roll off his tongue like honey mixed with poison. “South America. Dutch territory, just like here, but different. So different.”

The farmers would lean in close, their weathered faces catching the lamplight, children peeking from behind their mothers’ sarongs. Sartono knew his audience the way a snake knows which mouse to strike first.

“Sugar plantations big as entire villages,” he’d continue, his voice dropping to that conspiratorial whisper that made even the skeptics listen. “Timber companies paying wages you can’t imagine. Three years, that’s all. Three years, and you come back rich enough to buy your own land. Rich enough to tell the Dutch tuan where he can stuff his taxes.”

It was a good lie. Hell, it was a great lie. The kind that burrowed into a man’s skull like a tick and fed on his desperation until it grew fat and real.

Chapter 2: The Hungry Land

The thing about Kedu Residency in those days—Kebumen, Purworejo, Temanggung, all those places that sounded like poetry but felt like prison—was that it was dying. Not the quick, clean death of a man with a bullet in his brain, but the slow, grinding death of starvation.

Population had exploded like a tumor. The Dutch had their systems, their taxes, their ways of making sure every grain of rice had a destination that wasn’t a Javanese stomach. Land got divided and divided again until families were fighting over plots the size of graves.

Tepa slira—that was what they called it when neighbors looked out for neighbors, when community meant something more than just living close enough to hear each other’s crying babies. But tepa slira doesn’t fill empty bellies, and it sure as hell doesn’t pay the tax collector.

Marmo Sudirdjo had been farming the same plot his grandfather had worked, watching it shrink with each passing season as he divided it between his three sons. The soil was tired, worn thin as his patience, and some mornings he’d stand at the edge of his field and wonder if the earth itself was giving up.

That’s when Sartono found him.

“You ever hear of Suriname, pak?” the werek asked, appearing beside Marmo like smoke from a bad fire.

Marmo had, actually. Stories drifted back sometimes—Javanese men who’d made the crossing, letters that spoke of wages higher than a village headman’s salary. But those stories had a funny way of being vague about the details, like trying to remember a dream after you’ve been awake too long.

“I hear things,” Marmo said carefully.

Sartono’s smile widened. “I bet you do. And I bet you wonder if those things are true.”

The truth was, Marmo didn’t wonder—he needed them to be true. There’s a special kind of desperation that comes when you’re watching your family waste away one bowl of thin rice gruel at a time. It makes a man believe in things he’d normally laugh at. It makes him stupid in ways that can get him killed.

Chapter 3: The Train to Nowhere

The train that carried them west was older than the Dutch colonial government and twice as mean. It wheezed and rattled like a dying animal, carrying its cargo of human dreams toward what the passengers thought was a port city and a ship bound for South America.

Marmo sat pressed between his wife Sari and their youngest boy, feeling the train’s rhythm like a heartbeat under his bones. Around them, a hundred other families whispered prayers and counted what little money they had left. Children slept fitfully against their parents’ shoulders, dreaming perhaps of coconut trees and ocean breezes.

But as the hours stretched into a day, then two days, something started to feel wrong. Not wrong like a bad batch of rice wine, but wrong like walking into your house and finding all the furniture moved three inches to the left. The landscape outside the windows stayed stubbornly Javanese—no hint of coastline, no smell of salt air.

“Where’s the port?” Sari whispered, her voice thin with worry.

Marmo had been wondering the same thing, but admitting it felt like inviting disaster into their compartment. “Must be further than we thought,” he said, but the words tasted like ash.

The werek men who accompanied them—there were three now, Sartono and two others with the same black-glass eyes—kept walking the aisles with reassuring smiles and empty promises. “Soon,” they’d say. “Very soon now.”

But “soon” stretched like taffy, and the train kept chugging west into country that looked nothing like the approach to any port Marmo had ever imagined.

Chapter 4: The Valley of Lies

When they finally stopped, it wasn’t at a harbor. It wasn’t even at a proper station. The train wheezed to a halt beside a wooden platform that looked like it had been hammered together by someone who’d heard about train stations but never actually seen one.

Beyond the platform lay a valley surrounded by hills thick with jungle. No ships. No ocean. Just green silence that pressed in from all sides like a living thing.

“This isn’t right,” someone said—Marmo couldn’t see who. The voice came from the crowd of confused families now milling around their meager possessions like cattle in a slaughterhouse pen.

Sartono appeared at the edge of the platform, still smiling that same empty smile. “Welcome to Suriname,” he announced, and the lie was so baldly obvious, so impossibly brazen, that for a moment nobody could speak.

Then the questions started coming like bullets:

“Where’s the port?”

“Where are the ships?”

“This is still Java!”

“You lying son of a—”

“Now, now,” Sartono said, raising his hands like he was blessing them instead of destroying their lives. “This is the inland processing station. Very important work here. The coastal facilities are… under construction. You’ll be taken there soon enough.”

More lies, but what choice did they have? They were hundreds of miles from home with no money for train tickets and no idea how to get back even if they could afford them. The werek men had made sure of that—collected their remaining cash for “processing fees” and “transportation costs.”

They were trapped as surely as if they’d been locked in a cage.

Chapter 5: The Coconut Prison

The plantation that became their world sat in a fold of hills like something cancerous growing in the earth’s armpit. Rows upon rows of coconut palms stretched toward jungle-covered ridges, their fronds rustling with secrets in the humid wind.

The barracks were long, low buildings that had been constructed for function, not comfort. Families were packed into spaces barely large enough for sleeping mats, privacy provided by hanging cloth that did nothing to muffle the sounds of despair, anger, and gradual resignation that filled the nights like a symphony of the damned.

Marmo lay on his mat that first night, listening to his wife’s quiet sobs and his son’s restless sleep-talk, and felt something cold settle in his chest. Not fear exactly, though there was plenty of that. Something deeper. The recognition that they’d been swallowed by something vast and patient and completely indifferent to their suffering.

Outside, the Cikarang River gurgled like a throat full of blood, cutting them off from the Sundanese villages beyond. The locals spoke a different language, worshipped at different shrines, looked at the new arrivals with the mixture of pity and suspicion reserved for the obviously doomed.

The work was backbreaking—climbing palms that scraped your skin raw, cutting coconuts until your hands were more blister than flesh, processing copra under a sun that felt like God’s own magnifying glass focused on their backs. But it wasn’t the physical pain that broke people. It was the slow, creeping realization that this wasn’t temporary. This wasn’t a way station on the road to something better.

This was it. This was their life now.

Chapter 6: The Long Dream

Years passed like fever dreams. Children who’d arrived as babies grew up thinking that Jaringao was Suriname, that the jungle-covered hills were the South American coastline, that the Sundanese voices they heard across the river were Dutch colonists speaking some unfamiliar European tongue.

The older generation kept the lie alive because it was easier than facing the truth. What would be the point of admitting they’d been suckered, that their children were growing up in a prison built from their own gullibility? Better to maintain the fiction, to tell stories about the homeland they’d left behind in Java, to speak of someday returning to Indonesia as if it were an ocean away instead of a few hundred miles by train.

Some tried to leave. They’d slip away in the night, following game trails into the hills or trying to ford the river. Most came back within days, defeated by terrain they didn’t know and languages they couldn’t speak. A few never came back at all, and nobody talked about what might have happened to them in the green darkness beyond the plantation boundaries.

The coconut palms grew taller, their trunks scarred by decades of climbing. The barracks weathered and sagged but didn’t fall down—just like the people inside them. The river kept running, carrying away topsoil and dreams in equal measure.

And in the outside world, empires rose and fell, wars were fought and won, independence movements stirred like sleeping giants. But none of that penetrated the bubble of lies that surrounded Jaringao. Time moved differently there, like light bending around a black hole.

Chapter 7: The President’s Visit (That Never Was)

When news of Indonesian independence finally reached them—carried by traders and traveling officials who looked at the plantation with barely concealed amazement—it came wrapped in another layer of mythology.

“President Sukarno himself has visited Sukabumi,” someone said. Maybe they’d heard it from a government clerk, or a merchant passing through, or maybe they’d just dreamed it and convinced themselves it was memory. In a place where reality had been so thoroughly corrupted, the difference between truth and wishful thinking became academic.

The story grew in the telling, as stories do. Sukarno hadn’t just visited Sukabumi—he’d specifically come to check on the Suriname workers. He’d asked about their welfare, praised their contribution to the independence struggle, promised that their sacrifice would be remembered.

It was a beautiful lie, the kind that wraps around your heart like a warm blanket and makes you forget how cold the world really is. And like all the best lies, it contained just enough truth to be believable. Sukarno had visited Sukabumi, after all. Just not their part of it. Just not them.

But slowly, incrementally, like a cancer patient finally admitting the lumps aren’t going away, the truth began to seep in. Conversations with Sundanese neighbors who spoke of places and people that sounded suspiciously familiar. Maps glimpsed in government offices that showed their location still firmly planted in West Java. Young people asking questions that the old stories couldn’t answer.

Chapter 8: The Revelation

The moment of truth, when it finally came, wasn’t dramatic. There was no thunderclap of realization, no collective gasp of horror. Just Marmo’s grandson, now a young man who’d grown up believing he was Indonesian-born but Surinamese-raised, coming home from a trip to the district capital with a dazed expression and news that would shatter three decades of careful self-deception.

“Grandfather,” he said, his voice hollow as a gourd. “We never left Java.”

The words hung in the humid air like a curse waiting to take effect. Around the small gathering of elders, faces went through the stages of grief in fast-forward: denial, anger, bargaining, depression. Some would never make it to acceptance.

“That’s impossible,” someone whispered.

But even as they said it, they knew it wasn’t. The pieces had been there all along—the landscape that looked too familiar, the languages that sounded almost like home, the complete absence of anything that actually resembled South America. They’d just been so invested in the lie that they’d woven explanations around every contradiction, built elaborate justifications for every inconsistency.

The truth was simple and devastating: they’d been tricked into becoming plantation slaves in their own country, separated from home by mere geography instead of an ocean, kept isolated not by distance but by shame and carefully maintained ignorance.

Epilogue: After the Lie

The aftermath wasn’t healing so much as it was learning to live with an amputated limb. Some of the older generation never recovered from the revelation—they’d invested too much of themselves in the Suriname story to survive its collapse. They’d sit in the shade of the coconut palms they’d tended for decades, staring at nothing, their minds probably still crossing an ocean that existed only in their memories.

But life, as Stephen King knew better than most, has a way of asserting itself even in the darkest places. The plantation that had been a symbol of exploitation slowly transformed into something resembling home. Children who’d grown up between cultures became bridges between communities. Javanese traditions blended with Sundanese customs, creating something new and resilient.

The Cikarang River that had once been a barrier became just a river. People crossed it in both directions, carrying stories and recipes and songs that belonged to everyone and no one. The coconut palms kept bearing fruit, but now the workers had stakes in the harvest, shares in companies that paid real wages instead of subsistence rations.

And sometimes, on very quiet nights when the wind was just right, you could almost hear echoes of the old lie—voices speaking of Suriname as if it were just beyond the next hill, just across the river, just one more train ride away. The ghost of a dream that had become a nightmare that had finally, impossibly, transformed into something like truth.

Because that’s what stories do, in the end. They change, they evolve, they find ways to survive even when the world tries to kill them. And the people of Jaringao had learned, perhaps better than anyone, that sometimes the most important thing isn’t whether a story is true.

Sometimes the most important thing is whether it finally sets you free.