Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 35, No. 10, October 1990

By the fourth day I had seen the obligatory tourist attractions. I had visited Old Batavia, bailiwick of the early Dutch colonials. I had duly observed the massive monuments erected at crippling expense by Sukarno in the 1960’s. I had seen the waterfront. I had seen the spectacular Istiqlal mosque, Southeast Asia’s largest. I had perused any number of markets, museums, and exhibits. I had toured batik and rattan factories. Interesting, yes. But enough already.

It was time to venture off the beaten track.

Which, of course, required the services of a becak.

The Hotel Indonesia was located on Jalan Thamrin, a manic ten-lane throughway that was Jakarta’s main drag. The hotel was partially responsible for my off-the-beaten-track itch.

Remember The Year of Living Dangerously, the Mel Gibson-Sigourney Weaver movie set in 1965 at the time of the attempted communist coup? Living dangerously was putting it mildly, and the journalists covering the event hung out at the hotel.

I’d like to be able to report that I could still smell the intrigue. But that would be a lie. It seemed to have become a quiet venue for visiting delegates attending various conferences and seminars. In other words, bureaucrats. Boring.

Which brings me to the becak. More or less pronounced bet-jak, it is a three-wheeled pedicab. The driver sits above and behind his passenger, who sits in a padded seat under an awning. Once there were in excess of a hundred thousand Jakartan becaks. Now the number is below twenty thousand and dropping rapidly.

The becak was vanishing by government decree. It created a bad image for a modern and metropolitan international city. It was a backward, inhumane eyesore. It was a vestige of colonialism, the native wracking his body to tote his better. It was a nuisance.

All true. No argument. But the becak was also the conveyance of the poor who could not afford a taxi or even a bus. The becak was integral to mainstream Jakarta.

Long banned in the city center, the becak was being scooped up in a widening radius by government trucks, like so much garbage. They were dumped into Jakarta Bay, where they served as a fish reef. Total eradication was the goal.

So I couldn’t just step out of the Hotel Indonesia at high noon and hail a becak.

But there was a way.

Jakarta was a restless and vibrant twenty-four hour per day city of night owls and early birds. People were up late or early, visiting, doing things, ducking the ferocious midday sun. The government trucks, however, did not patrol at night. Becaks could ply their trade close to the affluent core and fade into the back roads and alleys when the sun and the trucks appeared.

I walked into the pre-dawn. Four blocks from the hotel, on a secondary street of small shops, I found my becak driver.

He was short, leathery, and smiling. His name was Malik. Through a combination of gestures, handbook Indonesian, and a smattering of English and Dutch and generic pidgin we managed an agreement. For a price he would be my transportation and my teacher.

At the outset, before the trouble, it was a mutually satisfactory arrangement. He was grateful to have an exclusive passenger who was paying him relatively well, I to have an insider as a guide.

We toured the neighborhoods, which were actually a patchwork of self-contained villages known as kampungs. Over the years, people had migrated from the countryside, essentially bringing their kampungs with them. They ranged from modest middle class to squalid, but were generally quite tidy, considering the numbers of residents shoehorned into them. Kampung streets were often little more than footpaths, barely wide enough for a becak. Canals built by Dutch colonials homesick for Amsterdam provided another means of kampung transportation. I won’t tell you how the canal water had taken on the color and aroma it had. The common denominator, though, was the people. They were almost without exception friendly and sincere.

I asked Malik about the government crackdown on becaks. He shrugged and said what else could he do? I said I’d read that the government was retraining drivers to be shoemakers and blacksmiths and vegetable vendors and so forth. He laughed and said that he was fifty-three years old, and that the average life expectancy of an Indonesian male was fifty-one. Let them make cobblers and peddlers out of the young, he said; I’ve been statistically dead for two years. And besides, Malik added, he ate and slept in his becak. What would he do for a home? He came from a rural village, but hadn’t been back there for years.

I told Malik he was lucky they hadn’t already confiscated his becak. His smile widened into a grin as he pointed out a rust spot on the otherwise immaculate framework. They had grabbed his becak. He had paid a fisherman to locate, hook, and reel it in.