A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [78]
She went on to describe what struck her as a particularly telling moment.
One scene of Pak Sastro and his wife stands out in the author’s memory and expresses the poignancy of his relations with the other villagers. While returning from household interviews one evening in 1978, the author passed by Pak Sastro’s house. He had just purchased the first television set in the village, and was able to pick up programs broadcast from Jogjakarta. Since the village electrification program had not yet begun, the first sets used in rural areas were battery-operated. Pak Sastro and Bu Sastro had tried to watch the set in their own home, but hundreds of other villagers crowded uninvited into their house in order to get a glimpse of this strange new phenomena. Finally, in exasperation, Pak Sastro was forced to place the set in the window of his house, facing outward toward the house-yard. As a sign of their superior status, and the fact that the set did in fact belong to them, Pak Sastro and Bu Sastro were allowed to sit on two chairs placed in the yard in front of the set. The rest of the village stood up to watch, crowded around behind them in the yard.
Kajar’s charms and mysteries, natural and supernatural, fascinated Ann. There were three sacred springs in the village. One, shaded by a large and sacred banyan tree, was to be avoided at night because the Javanese believe that ghosts and spirits live in banyan trees. At the base of another was a flat stone on which one could see coloration in the shape of the wavy-bladed Javanese dagger, the kris, or keris, in Indonesian. “Villagers consider this image of a keris as proof that the men of Kajar are fated to be smiths, and that men from neighboring villages do not share this fate,” Ann wrote in her dissertation. Blacksmithing was considered sacred; so were the forge, the hearth, and the nail-shaped anvil, which resembled a lingam, the stylized phallus worshipped in Hinduism as a symbol of the god Shiva. Smiths were revered, and old smiths were believed to have special powers. Before opening a new forge, a smith would prepare an offering of molded rice, fruit, and flowers to be burned along with incense in the smithy. There were offerings to the anvils on the first day of the Javanese week. Every year, on the first day of the first Javanese month, all the smiths would dress formally in sarongs, high-necked jackets, and small folded batik turbans. Walking in single file and each carrying a tray laden with food offerings, they would circle the village and climb one of the limestone hills behind it to the graves of the two original smiths. There, they would make their offerings and meditate or pray. “Whenever villagers have a problem such as illness or sterility, or when they are looking to improve their luck, they bring offerings of rice, flowers, etc. to those graves,” Ann wrote. When she developed an eye infection on one occasion, she was advised to rinse her eyes in the waters of the sacred spring. When the infection persisted, villagers suggested a pilgrimage to the top of the limestone hill and offerings to the smiths’ graves.
In June 1978, Ann learned of an elderly kris smith living in Kajar. In Javanese tradition, the kris is an object of extraordinary importance and power—a weapon, an heirloom, a mark of rank, a male symbol, an item of male ceremonial dress, an art form, a sacred object with protective powers and a life of its own. “There are numerous stories of kerises rattling about in their cases, wanting to get out, or of kerises flashing about in mid-air, independently attacking their owner’s enemies,” Ann wrote in the early 1980s. According to the Solyoms, who have written extensively on the kris, a man might go so far as to trade his car or his house for a kris that he senses is right for him—one that makes him feel spiritually complete and personally content. The makers of krises were believed to be descended from the gods. Like wizards or magicians in Western cultures, master kris smiths possessed