Chapter One - Richard Lewis

The boy bolted. Reed watched him go and said with faked exasperation, "You
scared him off. Thanks a lot."
"You are not welcome," Naniek said curtly English and turned away.
"Hey!" he called out. "Hey, Miss, excuse me!"
She looked over her shoulder. He had the Nikon up to his eye and snapped off a
shot. Lowering the camera, he asked, "What's your name?" He wanted her to tell him.
She put her clipboard up to the back of her head, as if to ward off his evil eye, and
stalked away, her canvas sneakers streaked with dirt. Practical shoes, Reed thought, and
my God, those impractical eyes.
More trucks unloaded their cargo of cadres. Naniek consulted her clipboard and
directed them to their places. When the rally finally started, Reed climbed up to the first
branches of a banyan to get a better angle of the dignitaries on the platform. Naniek sat
upon bench with others in a section whose aisle placard read "Batu Gede Gerwani." Their
chairwoman, Ibu Parwati, a small tidy woman with a big loose voice, thundered into the
mike that ninety percent of the Batu Gede rice fields were owned by one percent of the
villagers, an injustice that must be corrected, with fields seized and given to those who
had none. She called one of the women on the bench to stand up. The woman shyly rose,
hands clasped tightly, her head ducked down between her shoulders and her gaze fixed
on the floorboards, scrawny arms and legs poking like sticks from a donated khaki dress
much too large for her.
"This is Ibu Desak," Parwati said. "A refugee from the volcano who lives in the
mangrove slum. She has nothing except what she and her husband can scrape together
from the salt fields. Salt is worth almost nothing. It takes ten kilograms of salt to buy half
a kilogram of rice. Here before you," Parwati thundered, "is a living example of injustice.
Seize the rice-fields for Desak!"
The cadres roared their approval. Reed snapped photos. The PKI was obviously
turning Batu Gede into a showpiece, trying to shove a Red wedge into a staunchly
nationalist area. A boss cadre stomped around the far side of the ranks, pointing at Reed
in the tree and barking an order to six stout juniors. Reed quickly rewound the film,
dropped the cartridge into his trouser's hidden pocket and reloaded with a fresh cartridge,
quickly snapping off random shots. The cadres surrounded the tree and shouted at him to
get down. He showed them his international stringer photojournalist ID, but that didn't
impress them. These guys were well-trained, and Reed suspected that the boss looking on
was a BPI intelligence agent. The goons eyed his camera, but before they could snatch it,
Reed sighed with theatrical annoyance and opened the back, exposing the film. He tossed
the cartridge at them and strode off. They didn't follow.
Reed looped around an unpaved back street, lined by the mud walls of Balinese
compounds. Children pranced after him, giggling and laughing. Many were stark naked,
apart from ankle amulets, but they seemed healthy, without the bulging stomachs of kids
in poorer hamlets suffering crop failures.
At the village palace, a sprawling compound of eroded red-brick walls and
fronted by a towering gate that looked on the verge of collapse, three bare-chested lads
wearing sarongs sprawled in a courtyard hut. They broke off their conversation to stare at
Reed. "Why aren't you at the rally?" Reed asked.
One of the guys lifted a leg and broke sonorous wind. "That's what Communists
have to say," he said as the others laughed. "Come sit, talk with us."
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