A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [109]
Ann wanted Maya, like Barry, to be a serious student. “She hates me to brag, but I am forced to mention that she made high honors this term,” she wrote to Alice Dewey in February 1984. She made her expectations clear. “Ann was pretty strict with her,” Rens Heringa remembered. “I think she needed to be. Maya was too pretty for her own good. Ann talked to her, took her to task—to do her homework, to be a serious student, to not do the things that many of her classmates did.” She worked hard to pass on her values. On one occasion, she arranged for Maya to accompany a friend of Ann’s who was doing research in a slum area of Jakarta, then was upset when the colleague’s methods fell short of Ann’s exacting standards. Ann herself took Maya into the field and traveled extensively with her outside the country. In April 1984, Ann used her annual home-leave allowance instead for what she called a “grand tour” with Maya to Thailand, Bangladesh, India, and Nepal. “I had to spend five days en route at an employment conference in Dhaka, but the rest was vacation and great fun, despite beastly dry season weather and dust storms in North India,” she wrote to Dewey late that month. “Saw lots of Moghul palaces and forts, rode elephants, rode camels, bought heaps of silk and clunky silver jewelry and useless gew-gaws very cheap—altogether a most satisfying trip.”
Ten months earlier, Ann and Maya and a group of Ann’s friends had traveled to Bandungan, a hill resort near Semarang in Indonesia, to watch a total solar eclipse over Central Java. The government had campaigned for weeks to convince Indonesians to stay inside with their windows covered in order to avoid being blinded by the sight of the eclipse. The countryside was eerily empty, many Javanese having taken to their beds in fear. The group drove past mosques packed with men, all turned toward the interior, praying. From Bandungan, they made their way to a place where nine small eighth- and ninth-century Hindu temples sit one thousand meters up in the foothills of Gunung Ungaran. Reached by a trail through a ravine and past hot sulfur springs, the place offered one of the most dazzling views in Java, to the volcanoes in the distance. “We sat on the edge of the escarpment and watched the shadow of the eclipse rushing across the plain beneath us and engulfing us,” recalled Richard Holloway, who had gone along on that trip. The horizon turned red, according to a later description, “and in the half-light distant volcanoes usually obscured by the glare of the sun became visible. For the four minutes of total eclipse, the sun, almost directly overhead, looked like a black ball surrounded by a brilliant white light.”
Ann remained in regular contact with Maya’s father, Lolo. They spoke often by phone and met for lunch, according to Paschetta Sarmidi, the secretary who worked with Ann. “They tried to take care of Maya together,” Sarmidi said. But Lolo’s second marriage had changed Maya’s relationship with his family. His new wife was young and “not secure enough to bring me into the family—and certainly not Mom,” Maya said. “We stopped going to all family functions. There was a complete loss of contact.” Maya continued to see her father on his own, but he never took her to see his family or play with her cousins. Ann complained to at least one friend that Lolo, like a stereotype of a divorced parent, was lavishing Maya with luxuries, toys, and sweets. “That particular thing really irritated her,” her old friend Kay Ikranagara remembered. “She felt that he had grown up without material things, and now he put so much importance on material things. He was conveying