Dreams from My Father

“You never know what these people will eat,” she said firmly. My mother sighed, but Toot tossed in several boxes of candy to win me over to her side.
    Finally, we boarded a Pan Am jet for our flight around the globe. I wore a long-sleeved white shirt and a gray clip-on tie, and the stewardesses plied me with puzzles and extra peanuts and a set of metal pilot’s wings that I wore over my breast pocket. On a three-day stopover in Japan, we walked through bone-chilling rains to see the great bronze Buddha at Kamakura and ate green tea ice cream on a ferry that passed through high mountain lakes. In the evenings my mother studied flash cards. Walking off the plane in Djakarta, the tarmac rippling with heat, the sun bright as a furnace, I clutched her hand, determined to protect her from whatever might come.
    Lolo was there to greet us, a few pounds heavier, a bushy mustache now hovering over his smile. He hugged my mother, hoisted me up into the air, and told us to follow a small, wiry man who was carrying our luggage straight past the long line at customs and into an awaiting car. The man smiled cheerfully as he lifted the bags into the trunk, and my mother tried to say something to him but the man just laughed and nodded his head. People swirled around us, speaking rapidly in a language I didn’t know, smelling unfamiliar. For a long time we watched Lolo talk to a group of brown-uniformed soldiers. The soldiers had guns in their holsters, but they appeared to be in a jovial mood, laughing at something that Lolo had said. When Lolo finally joined us, my mother asked if the soldiers needed to check through our bags.
    “Don’t worry…that’s been all taken care of,” Lolo said, climbing into the driver’s seat. “Those are friends of mine.”
    The car was borrowed, he told us, but he had bought a brand-new motorcycle—a Japanese make, but good enough for now. The new house was finished; just a few touch-ups remained to be done. I was already enrolled in a nearby school, and the relatives were anxious to meet us. As he and my mother talked, I stuck my head out the backseat window and stared at the passing landscape, brown and green uninterrupted, villages falling back into forest, the smell of diesel oil and wood smoke. Men and women stepped like cranes through the rice paddies, their faces hidden by their wide straw hats. A boy, wet and slick as an otter, sat on the back of a dumb-faced water buffalo, whipping its haunch with a stick of bamboo. The streets became more congested, small stores and markets and men pulling carts loaded with gravel and timber, then the buildings grew taller, like buildings in Hawaii—Hotel Indonesia, very modern, Lolo said, and the new shopping center, white and gleaming—but only a few were higher than the trees that now cooled the road. When we passed a row of big houses with high hedges and sentry posts, my mother said something I couldn’t entirely make out, something about the government and a man named Sukarno.
    “Who’s Sukarno?” I shouted from the backseat, but Lolo appeared not to hear me. Instead, he touched my arm and motioned ahead of us. “Look,” he said, pointing upward. There, standing astride the road, was a towering giant at least ten stories tall, with the body of a man and the face of an ape.
    “That’s Hanuman,” Lolo said as we circled the statue, “the monkey god.” I turned around in my seat, mesmerized by the solitary figure, so dark against the sun, poised to leap into the sky as puny traffic swirled around its feet. “He’s a great warrior,” Lolo said firmly. “Strong as a hundred men. When he fights the demons, he’s never defeated.”
    The house was in a still-developing area on the outskirts of town. The road ran over a narrow bridge that spanned a wide brown river; as we passed, I could see villagers bathing and washing clothes along the steep banks below. The road then turned from tarmac to gravel to dirt as it wound past small stores and whitewashed bungalows until it finally petered out into the narrow footpaths of the kampong. The house itself was modest stucco and red tile, but it was open and airy, with a big mango tree in the small courtyard in front. As we passed through the gate, Lolo announced that he had a surprise for me; but before he could explain we heard a deafening howl from high up in the tree. My mother and I jumped back with a start and saw a big, hairy creature with a small, flat head and long, menacing arms