Barack and his mother lived in Indonesia for over three years by that time, resulting from his mother’s marriage to an Indonesian named Lolo, another student she had met at the University of Hawaii. Lolo left Hawaii quite suddenly after that, and his mother and he spent months in preparation. Finally, they boarded a PanAm jet for their flight around the globe. Walking off the plane in Djakarta, the tarmac rippling with heat, the sun bright as a furnace, he clutched her hand, determined to protect her from whatever might come. Lolo was there to greet them. Lolo’s 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.
At that night, they are quietly under a dim yellow bulb-chicken stew and rice, and then a dessert of red, hairy-skinned fruit so sweet at the center that only a stomachache could make him stop. Later lying along beneath a mosquito net canopy, he listens to the crickets chirp under the moonlight and remembered the last twitch of life that he’d witnessed a few hours before. He could barely believe his good fortune. -P.35, August 6, 2021.
