The darkness before dawn in Rangkasbitung had teeth, thought
Sutrisno as he hefted his sack of cassava onto his shoulder. Four in the
morning was the devil’s hour—too late for honest sleep, too early for God’s
work. But here he was, like every morning except Monday (Monday was cursed,
everyone knew that), waiting for the train that would carry him and his
neighbors into the belly of the beast they called Jakarta.
He wasn’t alone in the pre-dawn gloom. They gathered like
moths to a dying flame—old Pak Harto with his bundles of banana leaves tied
neat as coffin ribbons, Ibu Sri clutching her petai beans like rosary beads,
and maybe two dozen others whose names he knew but whose stories he didn’t care
to learn. Some stories were better left buried, especially the ones that drove
a man to rise before the roosters and ride the iron snake to the city.
The KRL commuter train wheezed into the station like a dying
thing, all rust and resignation. Inside, it was worse—fluorescent lights that
buzzed like trapped flies, bench seats that had absorbed twenty years of sweat
and desperation, and the smell… Christ, the smell. It was the smell of broken
dreams and small hopes, of people who had to share space with men in neckties
who looked through them like they were ghosts.
But they weren’t ghosts. Not yet.
Sutrisno squeezed his bulk into whatever corner the train
offered, arranging his goods with the precision of an undertaker laying out a
corpse. The other farmers did the same—a silent choreography that spoke of
years of practice, of making themselves small in a world that had no room for
them. They moved like shadows between the office workers and commuters,
invisible as smoke.
The train lurched forward, and Sutrisno felt that familiar
knot in his stomach tighten. Not from the motion—hell, he’d been riding this
death trap for more than twenty years—but from the knowing. The knowing that
each day he climbed aboard, he was gambling with more than just his goods. He
was gambling with his soul.
The city ate people like him. Chewed them up slow and
methodical, the way it had been chewing since the Dutch first laid those iron
rails back in 1867. Those colonial bastards hadn’t built the railway for people
like Sutrisno—they’d built it to move sugar and coffee and tobacco, to strip
the land bare and ship the bones to Amsterdam. The fact that locals could ride
it was just an accident, a glitch in the master plan.
But accidents had a way of becoming something more.
Something darker.
The train car swayed, and Sutrisno watched a businessman in
a pressed shirt recoil as a sack of corn brushed against his briefcase. The man’s
disgust was naked, raw—the kind of look you’d give a leper or a madman. And
maybe that’s what they were, Sutrisno thought. Maybe riding this train at four
in the morning, carrying their loads like pack animals, had driven them all a
little mad.
The businessman got off at Tanah Abang, hurrying away from
the farmer’s car like it carried plague. Which it did, in a way. The plague of
the forgotten, the disease of the invisible. The Dutch had called their special
cars pikoenlanwagen—cars for the pole-carriers, the ones who balanced
their whole world on wooden sticks across their shoulders. A century and a half
later, and they were still pole-carriers. Still invisible.
But invisibility could be a kind of power too. It let you
see things others couldn’t. It let you watch the city’s hunger up close, see
how it devoured everything in its path—forests, rivers, villages, people. The
New Order had been the worst of it, closing railway lines like arteries,
forcing everything onto the roads where the trucks could bleed you dry with
fees and bribes.
Hundreds of kilometers of track had gone dark in those
years. Banjar–Cijulang, Secang–Parakan, Babat–Tuban—names that sounded like
incantations for the dead. And maybe that’s what they were. The lines had been
lifelines once, connecting small towns to the beating heart of commerce. When
they died, the towns died too. Slow starvation, economic cancer.
Now KAI was talking about bringing back a farmers’ train.
September 28th, they said. Their 80th birthday gift to the forgotten. Sutrisno
had heard the whispers, seen the blueprints. Wider aisles, side-facing seats,
doors big enough for a man to carry his burdens without scraping his knuckles
raw.
It sounded too good to be true, which in Sutrisno’s
experience meant it probably was. But still… the thought of a train that was
actually built for people like him, that didn’t make him feel like a criminal
for existing—it made something twist in his chest. Something that might have
been hope, if he still remembered what that felt like.
The train pulled into another station, and more invisible
people climbed aboard. A young woman with children’s clothes to sell, an old
man with a basket of salak fruit, a teenager who looked like he was carrying
the weight of his family’s survival in a canvas bag. They all had the same look
in their eyes—the look of people who knew they were riding something more than
just a train.
They were riding history. Riding the ghost of what Indonesia
used to be before the highways carved it up like a corpse. Before efficiency
became more important than humanity. Before the railways became just another
way to separate the worthy from the worthless.
Outside the windows, the city sprawled in all directions
like a cancer. Somewhere in those streets, in those gleaming towers, men in
air-conditioned offices were making decisions about who mattered and who didn’t.
Who deserved smooth transport and who could make do with scraps.
But the train kept rolling, carrying its cargo of dreams and
desperation toward another day of small hopes and smaller profits. And
maybe—just maybe—toward something better. Something that remembered that
railways were supposed to connect, not divide. Something that understood that
the true measure of a civilization wasn’t how fast it could move the
privileged, but how carefully it carried the forgotten.
The sun was finally starting to rise, painting the sky the
color of old blood. Another day was beginning for the invisible people of the
early train. Another day of carrying their burdens through a world that didn’t
want to see them.
But they would keep riding. They would keep rising before
dawn, keep arranging their goods in whatever corners the world offered them.
Because that’s what the invisible do—they endure. They persist. They haunt the
margins until someone finally notices they were never ghosts at all.
They were just people trying to get home.
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