Part 2 (1/2)

And off we go again. When the second round of bleating dies down, I set off back to the hotel. The clothes I have been advised to wear make me feel like a tired librarian, but they are still a bit racy compared to what the other women in the street have on. An old Chinese woman in stretchy acrylic trousers comes right up and walks around me, with her hands behind her back, looking me up and down as if I am a statue or an object in a curio shop. I wave my arms at her to stop, but she will not scare, so I walk across to the other side of the road again. At the corner I turn back. The woman has gone, but my breakfast buddies are still watching me, so I give them a wave.

Good bye Vic!

Later that morning I am driven to the office where I meet the boss, a pale Englishman who gives me a perfunctory introduction and then disappears. The Indonesian staff are all right they seem very warm-hearted and friendly, helped along by the tradition of shaking your hand and then touching their hearts when they meet you but the ex-pats' office, which is where I will be stationed, has an immediate aura of musty resignation and defeat.

This year's programme is all built on aid money we are preparing people for overseas scholars.h.i.+ps, with the belief that they can come back and make a great difference to their country. The female students are covered from neck to wrist and all the way to the toes. Their faces appear to be terribly exposed and vulnerable without the softening effect of hair. They sit on one side of the cla.s.sroom and the men sit on the other. We survey each other with excitement and good will. This is the first Muslim cla.s.s I have ever had and I see that I am also a very new thing for them.

There is no excitement backstage, however. Most of the teachers have worked here in the same office for more than twenty years. There certainly doesn't appear to be anyone at all who would like to make a new friend. That's all right. I'm used to doing it alone. Walking through strange cities by myself and taking photographs is what I do a lot of these days.

21 February I wonder if anyone here has noticed that the materials are old. Not just the reading and research materials; the training videos feature people wearing burnt-orange s.h.i.+rts, long white socks and shorts, sideburns and moustaches. They look like Muppets. These, apparently, are the lecturers the students will be meeting when they get to their designated countries.

Will they be taking a plane, I ask anyone who will listen, or a time machine?

But most of the people here are as out of touch with things back home' as the teaching materials. At least, because of the bombs, the security is state of the art. We have fingerprint ID to get into the office and all bags and people are scanned at the entrance. The Bali bombings are the most infamous attacks in Indonesia, because of the large number of tourists killed there, but over the last five years there have also been several suicide bombings in Jakarta. The success rates have been relatively low so far, if killing foreigners has been the aim. The Australian emba.s.sy was bombed in 2004, with this message from the radical Islamic group Jemaah Islamiyah: We decided to settle accounts with Australia, one of the worst enemies of G.o.d and Islam ... and a Mujahadeen brother succeeded in carrying out a martyr operation with a car bomb against the Australian emba.s.sy ... It is the first of a series of attacks ... We advise Australians in Indonesia to leave this country or else we will transform it into a cemetery for them.

I had read all about this before leaving home. The suicide bomber had not even known how to drive a car until a couple of weeks before the attack. Someone had bought the little Datsun for him, and given him driving lessons. They had taught him how to blow himself up at the same time. All the people killed in the bombing were Indonesian: the driver of the car, of course, a gardener, a security guard and four policemen. The deaths of these people and the message on the website to Australians had disturbed me, as had the reports of the attacks on the Marriott Hotel, but now I am here I am even more disturbed by my colleagues' lack of concern about the bombs. They roll their eyes when I suggest a fire drill at one of our meetings and when I find that one of the exits has been blocked off by boxes full of stationery, they think it's funny.

5 March The first thing you must do when you are settling into a South-East Asian city is organise your transport I know that much from living in Vietnam and while you are doing this, you have to be very careful that your transport doesn't choose you. The terrible danger is that you can get stuck for several months with someone you do not like and cannot understand practically stalking you because they believe that you have an agreement. My preferred method of transport for short distances is motorbike taxi. Any closed vehicle has you inching along narrow streets in barely functioning air conditioning and will always get you there late. For the first two weeks, I commuted with a different motorbike taxi driver every day, and was careful not to be too friendly. But now, like a miracle, I have found a young man who speaks English and has a mobile phone, although it looked so decrepit he had to convince me that it worked. It had a matchstick wedged into the side of it and he had to hold it with both hands in order to make the text visible. I gave him my number and he asked if he could pick me up every morning, and upon phone request. He was very happy when I agreed, and rang me several times in the first week to check that I still had the same number and to offer me various services from other members of his family.

When my students saw me arriving on motorbike they were horrified.

You are grandmother! they exclaimed.

Actually, I don't have any grandchildren, I replied.

But that is not what they meant. In this place, thirty-nine is thought of as old.

In fact, in this place I am having trouble with people's thinking generally. It is a city of demonstrations, or demonstrasi, as they are called. They are a new-found freedom and an exhilarating expression of independence from the old regime. But I'm finding that this does not necessarily mean free speech, and certainly not free thought. The first demonstrasi I encountered on one of my walks was outside Indonesian Playboy, where people were throwing rocks at the windows.

I don't agree with Indonesian Playboy either, I tell my students later. They seem very satisfied, until I add: But should we throw rocks at people's windows when we do not agree with them?

The second demonstrasi I walked past was against Denmark. A newspaper in Denmark had recently angered the Muslim world by publis.h.i.+ng blasphemous cartoons of the Prophet. There had been reverberations around the world. I suddenly felt like it was the wrong time and place to have red hair and blue eyes and be tall. When I started taking photos in the street a man came up to me, shouting: Get out of Jakarta! Get out of Jakarta!

I sought refuge in a nearby mall.

Jesus, I didn't draw the cartoons, I said to the kind woman who had seen what happened and bought me a cup of tea. It just doesn't make sense.

The next week a Catholic nun was shot in the back in Somalia, which had some kind of link to the cartoon protest. This one I brought to the cla.s.s and one of the students tried to explain: If I am a bee and you get in my way I will sting you.

They often seem to come up with a small, trite phrase like this one, as if a clever metaphor is all you need to back up any argument, and I begin to wonder if this is the way people are taught here at the mosque.

But you are not a bee; you are a rational human being with many ways of making a protest. A bee's sting is a pure, irrational, defence mechanism. It kills the bee, actually, in the end.

Eyebrows are raised. I am a woman and a non-believer. They're only going to give me so much credibility.

13 March I teach one cla.s.s of police officers who are happy to tell me about the culture here. My favourite is how the female officers are tested for virginity before they can be accepted into the police force. I can't believe it.

How does that make you a good policewoman?

It shows you have a good character.

What if you are already married?

It seems that married female police officers are required to have a letter from their husband stating that they were virgins on their wedding night. The letter is kept on file and used afterwards as support doc.u.mentation in applications for promotions and such. I feel the need to point out the double standard here, but am met with a reply that completely stops me in my tracks.

Teacher, unmarried men will also have their virginity tested before becoming police officers.

Now I'm on thin ice I want to know how the h.e.l.l that is possible, but I'm talking to a group of Muslim men. I decide to push ahead anyway, carefully.

Is anyone willing to tell me how this is done?

After a silence, the youngest student cups his palm and makes a squeezing motion.

I see. I see, I reply. And how does doing this indicate that the man is a virgin?

It is what happens when they are touched. They will go back.

The student's cupped hand makes a small contracting motion. No one has smiled, or even moved one facial muscle since the little story began. I have to go on.

You do know that this method is complete and utter nonsense?

Yes, of course.

They are all nodding now.

Then why do you put up with it?

If we don't do it they will say we are afraid to do. Because not virgin.

14 March Over time I have found that the students and I have more in common than I had imagined, and even when it is clear that we are in disagreement, it is never really hostile. We marvel at the differences in perspective and the many possible ways that people can see things, or at least I do. This is more than I can say for the staffroom, which is a cesspool of petty grievances and power struggles and more than a splash of downright madness.

I've taught in a lot of places in South-East Asia, and all of them have the same unmistakable odour of excess and ruination. The availability of cheap s.e.x and alcohol for men draws a steady stream of drunks, s.e.x addicts, drug addicts, fallen school princ.i.p.als and fallen diplomats, men who are only there for the boys, and the odd one who fits into all of those categories. It's so easy to get cheap booze and s.e.x, and it isn't hard to get a job as an English teacher: you can even buy a degree off of the streets if someone points you in the right direction. I've worked with men who have impregnated the students, teachers who curry favour by scoring drugs for the boss, men who can't go home because of pending warrants, and also a couple of paedophiles. I had been expecting pretty much the same from this place, and I have not been disappointed. There are some people who, regardless of their predilections, I can talk to. But others, I have quickly learned to avoid.

The female teachers are a different story. For a start, while there is no end of s.e.x available to white men in a country like this, it is not so easy for Western women. There are too many good-looking, poor, young females around. Who wants an old white bird with the financial resources to walk out on you at any time? Who wants an independent woman who will not tolerate infidelity, nor take care of all of your cleaning and cooking needs? Marion, the senior teacher on the staff, has already confided in me that she has not had s.e.x for eight years. In fact, it was one of the first things she told me when I started and was I settling into my desk at the back of the room. At fifty-five, she has converted to Islam and then back again, and married and divorced a gay chauffeur. All to no avail. She is cast adrift in a sea of loneliness and anxiety, and this makes her dislike the women in the office, while fawning upon the men. They can say anything to her and she will take it with a schoolgirl's giggle.

Where's Gabriel today, Ricky? she will ask with a breathless tremor.

Up Jack's a.r.s.e picking strawberries!

Ricky the Pom is obsessed with vulgarities, as well as having a special interest in c.o.c.kney slang, although he has not been home for at least twenty-five years. Marion will listen eagerly and chuckle in turns as he trots out his lists of rhyming slang or his favourite insults from North America or Serbian translation, or as he ranges round the staffroom waving student papers, magazine articles and personal emails under everyone's noses and demanding attention.

Gabriel was not up Jack's a.r.s.e picking strawberries on that particular day, but he could have been doing something along those lines with the security guard in the storeroom, where they have sometimes been known to retire. The office is divided into straight men, gay men and women (mostly, unhappy eunuchs). While the gays are usually talking amongst themselves, the straights are usually talking loudly about football. The women are either standing on the sidelines joining in where possible, or wearing headphones.

29 March After less than two months in my new job, I have begun to wear headphones while in the office. I also wear them at night, to block out the terrible noise of the kost. It begins at eleven, right about when I need to go to sleep to prepare for a six o'clock start. It is mostly workers arriving home from evening s.h.i.+fts and maids playing and giggling in the next room. The traffic, of course, is another a.s.sault on the ears, but definitely the office is the worst by far the sound of unlikeable, lonely people clamouring for attention in a wilderness of dust, smoke and disappointment.