How strange to be here again, in this old hotel on the coast of Java. The air conditioner clicks overhead in the cheap, spacious room, while children play in the alley. Boxes are stacked in the hallway by an ancient television set and a dusty pool table. Another room is filled with Chinese deities, altars, and incense, while ashtrays and cracked green upholstery adorn the karaoke rooms.
Outside, sidewalks are in disarray, with moss and missing slabs—openings, fetid water below. Roots, rubble, and garbage. At night, one walks in the street, glancing back at oncoming headlights. The alley is teeming, intense, especially after sunset, with trucks, motorcycle carts, mounds of jackfruit, a stench of rot mingled with soundtracks of dangdut, the working-class music of Indonesia. Rows of storehouses, with bodies sitting, cutting, hauling. In front of the hotel, motorcycles use the sidewalk to bypass traffic. Men stand behind glass cases full of watches. A beggar with a headscarf and a bandaged nose sits on the eroded steps to a bridge. Children play video games in a rough, brown, cavern-like space with rows of televisions and electric fans. A neon spire rises over the hotel.
The nightclub is upstairs. A sticker on the door says the military is forbidden to enter. One recalls the former master of ceremonies, a tall man from Papua in black leather. A bottle of Guinness is opened, the hospitality of a Javanese man from Semarang. The singers are radiant. Last year, a drifter requested a song by Elvy Sukaesih, the elderly queen of dangdut, and a young woman sang.
Later, I return to my room. Music from the nightclub floods the hallway. Dangdut seeps through the locked door, gamelan through the window. I pull the curtain and a rat runs across a power line. Below is a lively, ramshackle urban village. In the morning we’ll hear the call to prayer from the mosque.
Surabaya, 2018