Chapter One - Richard Lewis

and decided to send her into exile. Mantera slipped her enough money so that she could
continue her education at the same university Catra attended
There her latent political consciousness was awakened by injustices she could not
ignore. She joined the Communist Party, but the PKI leadership told her they wanted her
to be a sleeper agent. The party emphasis was on mass membership, but they had their
secret cells, including one in Bali. She was placed in the Bali Hotel as an assistant
manager, a perfect cover. She charmed guests and visitors and ferreted out nuggets of
information and passed on misinformaton. An undercover CIA agent named Reed Davis,
for example. At heart Reed was a good man, but misguided. Buying hair to secretly fund
the nationalists—typical CIA stunt, very Hollywood. He fell in love with a Gerwani
activist. Dr. Subandrio's goddaughter, no less. Very Shakespearean, complete with
tragedy.
After Arini's marriage to Catra, she tried her best to convert him to the true
revolution of the socialist cause, using his own brother Dharma as an example of greedy
capitalism masquerading as patriotism. But Catra was too soft for his own good. He
didn't have the steel to be a revolutionary. He adored Sukarno and did good works and
was naïve beyond belief, and stubborn as stone.
He was her husband, and for him she felt affection, but not the searing and
wounding of love. That love she would always have for Mantera.
Angry at Arini for scorning him, Dharma tried to get her father kicked off the rice
fields he was sharecropping for the palace, but his plan backfired. Mantera, who was now
the palace prince, not only threatened to fire Dharma, but increased the all sharecropper'
percentage of the harvest, meaning that Dharma's share as collector was less. Dharma
could only bow and hide his fury.
"Dharma," Arini said to Tina, "has always hated Mantera. In the Balinese manner,
he has hated him. Long and silently, brooding on revenge."
Arini's soft relentless voice filled Tina's mind like a storm fills the sky, sending
thoughts scattering. How foolish she'd been. Dharma had played her like a master
puppeteer, marching her to his strings.
"Sometime early in 1965," Arini said, "I became aware of various lists of
reactionaries, of nationalists and capitalists, who were going to be re-tooled. Including
those of for Batu Gede—"
"Wait. Re-tooled."
"That was the term. Today we would say re-educated."
"That smacks of concentration camps to me."
"I was a revolutionary. I was never naïve," Arini said, and there was steel to her
voice. "We would do what we had to do. But I also did what I had to do, as a human
being, as a woman."
Arini wrote a sealed note for Mantera and asked Catra to deliver it in absolute
privacy. Her cheerful, trusting husband asked no questions. She knew he would not peek
at the note. She took advantage of his trust to arrange an assignation with the one man she
had ever loved.
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