An Old Man by a Window

The old man was wandering again.

The other day, he was on a predawn trek up Mount Batur. As all his other trips here, it had been the same - the night air chilly, heavy with fog from the early monsoon rains, the jungle already awake with the steady rhythm of cicadas and sooty-headed songbirds, and the sun would peek out the horizon just in time as he would reach the summit. The little boy took the hike with him, wordless, as always. At the summit as they ate the packed food they brought with them, sitting beside the morning campers and the trail guides, he told him stories of his life, as mundane and uneventful as they were, but the boy never seemed to hear him, and never said a word back.

Yesterday, he was working on the resort by the beach on the south side of the island where most of the tourists from the airport were dropped off to. In here it was always summer, the midday equatorial sun enlivening the island’s appeal and filling the seaside dine-and-dive resorts with enthusiasts from all over. He spent his whole day touring a group of backpackers from Europe, a couple from Cayman and a woman from East Africa speaking fluent Balinese. He toured them around the property, the beachfront, and the roadside stalls to rent diving equipment, and in return they told him stories of where they came from and what brought them to the island. The little boy accompanied him everywhere, like a mute and observant shadow, but the old man did not mind. Occasionally, the boy would look at the tourists as he walked them to the white sands and discussed the life outside the island, but most of the time he just looked out the open water and gaze, as if longing to find out what’s on the other end of the ocean.

Today however, the old man found himself standing in a bedroom. It wasn’t his bedroom, he knew this much is true, but every detail in there is an unmistakable replica. The peeling in the granite-colored walls, the wooden bed frame with an uneven stand, the barely-standing personal closet filled with thick, dilapidated books - he recognize everything as his, but in here he knew nothing is real.

He never liked it when his mind wanders back in his bedroom, after all, the point of his causeless wandering is to reach places his frail, broken feet had never allowed him.

The first time the old man wandered in his bedroom, he would just walk around, jumping and running, like a kid on a park showing off his new shoes, taking strides in wide circles around the room. He would spend all his time doing all these until it was time to go back. His feet felt alive then, his legs breathing with energy, tireless and free. Over and over he kept going around, and after a while at both his feet had started to reject the fantasy. He could still feel his feet as he walked and jumped and ran, but underneath was a numb undertone, a subdued, lingering emptiness.

He found the little boy sitting by the window sill, idly gazing out. The boy never joined him as he jumped and ran, he would just always gaze, as if he knew deep down he also knew that none of this was real, nothing in here mattered, that he knew what inevitable future was written for him.

A soft moonlight illuminated the room, and the boy carved a giant shadow across the floor. The old man walked towards the window and leaned on the ledge beside him. The little boy paid no attention to him, and kept his gaze forward, his face with a sense of comforting familiarity with the surroundings. He sat perfectly still on the ledge the old man used to sat on, both hands down on his sides, feet swinging ever so lightly.

Wherever he wandered, the boy would always be there. On days he’d find himself taking a tour by the Institute of the Arts down in Denpasar, he would find the boy walking with him as they tour the Gamelan theaters and the wallpaper rooms. On some days he’d be sitting near the fishing boats by his grandfather’s dock, the boy would be sitting with him and watch the sun sink in the horizon.

In this room, he would always find him sitting in the same spot, gazing over in the same distance. Sometimes he would just walk up to him and lean on the window ledge and gaze into the night until it’s time his mind would reel him back.

The boy never showed expressions, but the old man knew that underneath his innocent facade was a deep-seated resentment on him, on himself, and the cruel world.

A few yards by the window stood an old banyan tree, its massive interlocked branches forming a foliage that dominated all the other trees surrounding it. Old wooden houses were knitted sparsely in the hills, a swath of peanuts, corn and soya plantation filling up the massive space between each. Under a soft moonlight and the occasional lamp lights along the only road cutting through their village in Karangasem, the nights are slow and simple.

Downhill continued the winding dirt road, traversing the gently sloping hills, towards the city center. A couple of miles would run before it connected to an asphalt road, where the bigger houses of steel frames, cement walls and tin roofs are closer to each other. A few more miles past these was the urban city of Denpasar, where the night life in the island is found, filled with cheap motels and five-star hotels, famous resorts, bars and restaurants with local food and famous attractions. Past those are white sands and then the boats and sea, and then the rest of the world.

“That’s where you wanted to be, when you grow up,” the old man said to the boy, not expecting a reply.

He knew the little boy full well, and what the future held for him.

He knew he dreamed of working in the city when he grows up. His uncle worked as a tour guide and diving instructor for the Dune Atlantis, and he would visit him every weekend just to watch him work. Bali was teeming with tourists already, even back then, and he thought he could easily find a job like his. The uncle was an educated man, studied business for five years in Jakarta before we went back to this island to work for full-time with his wife in the Dune. The boy would follow him around as he shared local tips to tourists on temple-hopping from Tanah Lot to Petitenget, and suggested great hidden diving spots just outside Tulamben, and in return they would tell him about the current political unrest in Italy, or the updated internal engines of that year’s iteration of Chevrolet Corvette. The Dune would welcome all rich foreigners who stayed from two-day weekend vacations to four-month retreats, and the boy would want to know all about them.

“You won’t get to leave your home. You’ll be staying right here. But it’s okay. It’s not your fault.”

It all would start at his community school’s celebration of Nyepi, an ordinary afternoon. In the middle of the parade he would lose his balance and he won’t be able to stand. He’d be sent home early just before lunch time, and by the following morning he would not be able to walk. In a span of three weeks his knees would begin to weaken, and he would lose his ability to stand without a wooden cane to lean on. In two years, the sickness would spread to his entire feet and he would gradually lose all sensation on them. In another three, everything from his waist down would be numb. The little boy would not want any of this, the old man knew, but he did not have a choice.

A visiting volunteer physician would mention a neurological condition, another one would suggest a bad fall from the previous year that may have eventually weathered the spine. A shaman from Culik would pass by to check him, only to remark something that may have displeased the goddess Dewi Danu in his previous life.

“Decades will pass and you still wouldn’t know why, and why it should be you.”

It would be a dismal five years of scouting the whole island for an answer, but no one would be able to help him as the sickness consumed his legs. He would learn to depend on the wooden wheelchair his father constructed from makeshift caster wheels and rattan body. In time, the sickness would cause the muscles on the rest of his body to lose their strength, and by then even the task of pushing his own wheels to move around would be enough to leave him panting.

The boy was smart and quick as a student, and it would be a feat for him to finish a few more years of elementary, but the nearest high school at Rendang was too far and the road too jagged to allow him to continue. Schooling was the only thing thing in the boy’s life what would remind him of normality, a fantasy of being just like every other kid, and being left out by his peers would drain him of whatever remained of his spirit.

The boy’s mother and father were devout followers of Hinduism, and he was taught everything they knew. As his illness took away his legs, his parent’s faith would be at the strongest, and they would spend every hour out from working in the fields to devote and serve. They would take him for weekly pilgrimage to Besakih for six months for a priest’s ritual in hoping that their devotion is enough to cure their only child, or at least halt the spread of the disease. His father would tirelessly carry him on his back from the courtyard as he took the hundred-step up the stairs to the main temple for prayer and blessing.

It would be pointless years of effort, offerings, and a follow-ups to city physicians as the illness would eat away his parent’s faith and life savings. They would then give up devotion to instead work in their cattle herd and coconut farm as they both chose to stay home and take turns looking after their housebound child.

“Your parents were angry for a long time, but never at you. Never at you.”

After the schooling stopped, the boy would shift his focus on finding something for pass his time. He would take over the duties of maintaining the their handed-down bamboo home, for as far as his wheels and strength could allow him. From time to time his uncle would bring him old history books and foreign magazines from the mainland, and resort brochures and keepsakes from backpackers he had made friends with. The boy would keep them all in his room through the years to keep him company.

The bedroom window would be a solitary companion for the boy. The banyan tree by their front yard towering down on the dirt road passing right by their house would grow right in front of him over the years. Daily delivery trucks of homegrown produce to Abang and Kubu would drive by, as did the everyday life of his village would play out as he gazed out, unable to participate. His cousins and old schoolmates would graduate from college, find new and exciting jobs, meet new people while he would just sit by the same window. The local radio broadcast is his only way of knowing what the rest of the world has been up to, and he would fill his head with fantasies of the life outside the island.

In his view, trees would be cut down before his eyes to give way for brick houses and convenience stores as rural modernity would creep through the village. His old best friend’s house would be erected, his uncle’s house abandoned and left to rot and ruin as his family eventually relocated closer to Ubud. People came and went, born and died, and time mattered to everyone else but to the boy, who would have been a young man by then, unwillingly rooted in place just like the banyan tree by his window, longingly staring back at him all those years.

The coming decades would change the village and the people, but for him the very ground would still be the same in his eyes. The hills would remain as they did, slanting down, steadily out to give way to the mainland valley and the beaches that even from his window, was almost visible. The backyard fields owned by marginal families would remain intact, tended by the next generation of cinnamon and palm oil harvesters. These locals would choose to stay, fulfilled with settling down and living out of what their parents had saved up and left for them.

“You won’t be anything you might have wanted. But none of it was your fault.”

In the boy’s future, Mount Agung would eventually erupt, and a hundred thousand people would be relocated from the hazard zones and down into the valley. The volcano first showed unrest for weeks, and within minutes of the first sign of ash fall, the evacuation immediately took up in their village, and that was the only time he would ever get to leave. He‘d be carried in the military rescue trucks, together with the father and the mother, sirens blazing as the red-orange boiling lava would spew out the caldera and smoke would rise out for miles above the crater, all vividly visible right from their house.

The next seven weeks in the island’s east evacuation zone would be the longest time he’d be ever out. Agung would settle back down before the year ends, and luckily their village would just be outside the deadly lava flow, and by January they were let back in.

Weeks after they returned and the debris had been cleared up, both the man’s parents would fall ill with heavy coughing from the ash fall inhalation. The mother would die in a week, and the father followed not long after.

“You’ll be angry. You’ll turn your back from the world because you’ll think it’s the world’s fault. You’ll loathe everyone, this island, this life, yourself especially. But there’s nothing else you can do but to accept it. Accept it. It’s not your fault.”

He was a smart boy, and he was smart enough to know how different his life could’ve been if the illness never worsened. He knew he could have studied well enough to earn a scholarship in a university, maybe in the capital, and then he could’ve went back here to help his parents. He thought he could save up just enough to own a small resort down Kuta and bring them down there with him. He could have worked with his uncle at the Dune, or maybe teach history at the Udayana and get tenure. He could have started a family of his own down in the city, to live a normal life, just like what his friends would have been having. He had these options, the opportunities for a full life.

The young man would blame himself as his parents could have been still alive if they weren’t stuck with living in Karangasem, if only he had not fallen ill that day, if only he got better.

“You have dreams, I know. I’m sorry you can’t fulfill any of them. I’m sorry you won’t get to leave.” The boy said nothing. Not a twitch, no recognition, no response.

“This could’ve happened to anyone else,” the old man pleaded, “this should’ve happened to someone else, not you. Not you.”

The boy would have had one chance to live, a single opportunity to make something out of himself, but now the old man knew the future would only make him an unsmiling, bitter man, left back alone by the decades in his own home, having done nothing with his time but to look at the future who left him behind. He would live alone, left with the remnants of the dreams of a kid he used to be.

“Your dreams will soften into dust, and you’ll never leave here. There’s nothing you could have done. Nothing but to accept it.”

The boy would not like any of what would happen to him, the old man knew. A precious, innocent little thing, and he wouldn’t understand any of these. For a long while he would hate everything and everyone around him, but would mostly cast the anger onto himself, selflessly claiming the blame for circumstances he had no control of. All of this the old man knew. The little boy’s spite against his world would be dampened by the years, eroded leaving an empty shell of potential and promise. But deep down a remainder of the boy’s hatred would endure, the exact one the old man has, a meaningless wage of war against single cruel happenstance. The boy would become a solitary man, devoid of anything to care about and live for. Tears ran down the old man’s eyes as he spoke to the little boy, to that little boy in him that still looks out by the same window.

“You’ll stay here, and it’s fine. Nothing for you to do but to accept it.”

When the window became way too familiar to look out of, the boy would wander out of the village, out of the island, out of his own life to a different place out of time, a corner of his mind where he’s living as the man he could have been. In his wanderings, his legs had always worked just as anyone else’s, and he would have to deal with mundane problems just like everyone else. There’s nothing left for the old man to do but to dream how things could have been, and he’d try to live in content with this, and he’d continue to keep trying. The old man knew all this.

The boy kept looking out. The old man knew the boy’s fate, and he wished he knew what would have happened to him when he was him. In all his wanderings, it was the little boy in him that was there with him, a rendering of his youth he can never get rid of, from his pipe dream of going back to a time where he was whole and just like everyone else, and not a blank canvas, a figment of the old man from another life when he was still untouched by cruel fate.

The boy kept looking out, and then, wordless, the old man did the same.

He felt that it’s time to go back. The whole place was starting to slip and bend as his other senses are rushing up, bringing his consciousness back to reality.

The boy sat unbothered as the fields and night sky and the grass twirl into a swath of bright colors, filling the void with blinding sunlight. The trees and the houses warped and blended into the ground as the city turned to burning cinders of glow, all unfolding right in the little boy’s eyes, and for a brief surreal moment everything felt visceral and true. In that moment the man was a boy, now an old man that boy would’ve turned into, in a different life where his illness had been nothing more than a bad week, a fading scar, he’s a farmer, a temple guide, a salesperson in the city, a father of two - a somebody. For a brief moment, he was all he had ever thought of being, and the old man would choose that moment over anything. For in another time, in another place, the old man’s mind would wander out again, and wherever he would end up in, he knew the little boy would still be there with him.

Photo by Maksym Ivashchenko on Unsplash