A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [124]
Suarjana was twenty-eight the year he met Ann—one year older than Barry. Ann was turning forty-six. For an Indonesian man, he was tall, nearly six feet, with a taut, high-cheekboned face that reminded Ann of Mike Tyson, the heavyweight boxing champion. He was the fifth of seven children of a Balinese poet, journalist, and politician, Made Sanggra, who had been a nationalist fighter against the Dutch. (The name is pronounced mah-day.) Suarjana had grown up in Sukowati, a crafts center in Bali, where his mother had a business buying and selling Balinese clothing. The family was Hindu. As a child, Suarjana had learned Balinese dancing, music, and woodcarving. He had studied Indonesian language and literature at university, married in his early twenties, and become a father three years before he met Ann. His relationship with Ann, he told me, was “a romantic-intellectual relationship,” the exact nature of which, he said, would remain between them. The connection was deep, he said, and rooted in shared interests. There was no limit to what they could talk about, no difference that could not be bridged. She volunteered little about her past and, on a visit to Honolulu, even stopped her father from showing Suarjana photographs of her when she was young. She never directly told Suarjana her age. When the question arose by chance in a conversation, she refused to answer—then handed him her passport. Intellectually, the relationship changed him. Perhaps Ann was changed less by him than he was by her, he said. But he was sure he’d left a mark.
They talked about Indonesian art and culture, gender roles in Bali, the reasons for declining production in Kajar. Were government programs flawed in concept or in implementation? Was there a relationship between the salaries of government ministers and corruption? Ann was the scholar in their conversations; Suarjana was the cynic. She spoke from the head; he spoke from the gut. “Oh, Made, please,” she would complain, in exasperation. She was also the optimist, her mind always bending toward practical solutions. She would assert nothing, it seemed to him, without evidence to support it. She had the spirit of a teacher, a jiwa guru. Whatever Ann knew that Suarjana did not know, she would offer to teach him. She gave him a four-volume set of books on English grammar and usage. “How far did you study?” she would invariably ask. Then she would administer a pop quiz on the spot. She corrected his essays in red ink in his spiral notebook. She insisted each of them speak the other’s language. If he spoke to her in Bahasa Indonesia, she might refuse to answer at all. She recommended him for a workshop for journalists at the East-West Center and paid his tuition at an English language institute at the University of Hawai‘i. From her example, Suarjana said, he learned how to be open-minded and to recognize shades of gray. He learned to look at batik differently, too: In his mind, its importance was no longer strictly cultural and economic. Woven unmistakably into textiles were the lives of the people who made them.
“You’re an eccentric,” Ann told him. He was not sure what the word meant. But it was a compliment, he was sure of that.
If Ann had a weakness, he thought, it was that she too easily trusted strangers. Her generosity and her compassion got the