thesis

Writing at home

With just over two months to go, I’m in thick of the writing stage. I wake up early every morning, often at call to prayer, and as the day lightens, I move next door to work in Dave’s old house that was destroyed by the earthquake. The house would have been beautiful once, but now, two years after the earthquake, it has a bit of an eerie abandoned-house feeling. Much of the roof is still standing but many of the wooden frames and windows have been looted; there are huge cracks in the walls. The trees look a little overgrown, and chickens with their trailing flocks of chicks scratch and flick through the rocks. The unswept ground is covered in huge leaves and looks very unkempt in a Javanese sense, compared to the immaculately swept dirt in every habitated house in the village. The house is located next to a cemetery full of frangipani trees, and hasn’t been lived in for years. But it is quiet and perfect for studying, compared to Dave’s current house with its constant distractions ranging from the perpetual stream of visitors to the large turtle living in the fishpond that we bought in the fresh seafood section of the supermarket, who recently bit off the head of the smaller turtle that came from the petshop.

The house once featured an open-air dining room, which was a simple raised platform underneath a tiled roof, surrounded by a deep moat with concrete pillars as stepping stones. The moat has long been empty, and the smooth concrete platform is now covered in dirt and debris that falls through the little windows of light in the roof. The dining room was part of the open garden space in front of the house, and is now visited by flocks of chicken scratching in the dirt. One morning I had a rather embarrassing chicken incident, in which I made an alarmed flock of chicks flap into the empty moat and get stuck. The lot of them were making such a racket, especially the large mother hen. I eventually found a rotting piece of long bamboo matting to drag over and most of the chicks climbed out, except for one, and I had to get Dave’s pembantu (maid) to walk over and help out. She caught the chick in about 30 seconds, I was impressed by her expertise. She followed it by an odd cross-cultural moment of humour when she stuck the chick underneath her elastic waistband of her pants, and was like “Hey! Where’s it gone?”. I was even more impressed, never having seen the chick-in-the-underpants-goes-quiet trick. As soon as the tiny chick got out it bolted for the trees in a mad zigzag dash and didn’t stop running …

So I sit every day in an overgrown corner of the crumbling wall between the silent house and the rice paddies, underneath a huge ginger flower plant, next to paths of red ants traversing the mossy bricks. There are white butterflies during the day, and fireflies in the rice fields at night. A pot of red Yunnan tea to sip from throughout the day nestles into the overgrown rubble; a teacup rests on the half-wall of bricks. The narrow beaten-down path between the house and the rice fields is lined with coconut trees, and takes a slow stream of older people in sarongs with scythes, food and old bicycles during the morning harvest. Through the coconut trees I watch the slow progression from dewy green growth, to golden swathes of leaves and grain, to the bald clumps of stalks in the dry fields as the harvest moves from sawah to sawah.

It’s a beautiful place in which to write a thesis.

© Kim Williamson 2008