A house for Sumi

A house for Sumi

Dewi K.

Trembling, 18-year-old Sumi carried her baby, less than a year
old, her eyes fixed on the group of uniformed men carrying clubs.

She could not understand why these people had ruthlessly
destroyed her house and anything inside it. Her neighbors said
they were the local administration officers in charge of
maintaining order.

Sumi sat in silence, sadness stabbing deep into her heart.
Her husband, Yoyok, and all their neighbors were angrily trying
to prevent the men from destroying the whole neighborhood.
Vehement shouts and hysterical cries echoed that fateful
afternoon in the hullabaloo of the house demolition.

Sumi could only tightly hug her baby and quiveringly pray to
God for help in this ordeal.

Sumi and Yoyok had had to work hard day and night before they
could get the house. Yoyok was a construction worker while Sumi
roamed half the city as a scavenger. After several years of toil,
they could finally buy a small house in an area formerly intended
for a factory compound. The neighborhood was made up of people
like him: construction workers, street vendors, scavengers,
beggars and the like.

Like their neighbors, Sumi and Yoyok worked even harder after
buying the small house. Sumi wanted to collect more money so that
she could return to her village and break the happy news to her
family. She walked farther and farther every day as a scavenger,
sifting through garbage to find what she needed.

When night came, she often reminisced about her life in the
village. She and her five siblings crowded into a small house
with their parents, who worked as farm hands. Sumi and her
siblings had barely any elementary school education, for Sumi
left when she was in the second grade.

Her parents were only too happy to accept the marriage
proposal from Yoyok although Sumi was only 16, especially because
Yoyok had got a job in Jakarta.

"You will have a nice house in Jakarta, Sumi, like what we
usually see on the television at the village head's office," said
her mother.

"You will stay in a house with concrete walls and tiles on the
roof," added her father.

When she first came to the capital, Sumi was amazed at
everything around her. Wide streets, bright lights, skyscrapers;
it seemed to her that the city was bright round the clock. But
her dream of living in a decent house vanished when Yoyok took
her to a shack behind a shopping compound somewhere in West
Jakarta.

"Don't worry, Sumi. We'll work hard and save money for a small
house. Jakarta gives you everything if only you want to work
hard."

Sumi believed her husband's words. He toiled on a construction
site, often until late into the night. Sumi learned from the
people in her new "neighborhood" that there was a suitable job
for her, as many of them were scavengers and were able to earn
enough to buy their own television sets.

Days went by and Sumi, with great perseverance, roamed the
city collecting whatever might prove valuable from the city's
garbage. She could not bring herself to beg at street corners or
at traffic lights for she could not stand people staring at her
in contempt or out of pity.

Then one day Yoyok told him that there was a small house for
sale nearby. It was on a plot of land formerly designated for a
factory site. It had been neglected since the economic crisis hit
the country several years earlier. Many semipermanent houses had
sprung up there.

The house they decided to buy was small -- three meters by 4
meters -- and looked more like a bedroom in a decent house. For
them, it was much better than their makeshift house behind the
shopping compound.

The walls were made of wooden boards. The floor was cemented
and, more importantly, like what her father used to tell her back
in the village, the house had brown roof tiles.

"I will raise you here," she told herself proudly time and
again, stroking her swollen belly.

But that day all her dreams about the future crashed into
pieces as the men in the uniforms brought down her house. They
said the house was illegally built on state-owned land. They told
her a thousand legal reasons that she could little comprehend.
What she knew was that they had to work hard day and night to buy
this small house.

She was afraid because the uniformed people told her, her
husband and their neighbors that they would be arrested if they
continued to put up resistance and put in prison.

Sumi was afraid because she did not think she had quarreled
with anybody. She was afraid because did not think she had done
anything wrong. She and her husband toiled to collect money and
they had bought the house out of their own savings.

Her body shivering in fear, Sumi watched how the uniformed
people flattened the houses to the ground. She watched some of
her neighbors beaten up because they resisted. She watched her
husband shouting himself hoarse at the uniformed people.

Sumi hugged her baby even closer. "I don't know where we
should stay tonight, child. I don't know where to raise you."

She heard the uniformed people shouting to them that they had
to vacate the place that very day or face arrest.

Night descended. Sumi, her baby and her husband were still
roaming the city, looking for a spot where they could put up a
makeshift hut. She was carrying her baby while Yoyok hauled two
bundles of their belongings. Cars sped past, their bright lights
dazzling her eyes. Sumi stared emptily at the brightly
illuminated mansions they passed along the way.

Her small, crowded house in the village suddenly emerged
before her eyes. It was there that her child should be raised.
Stars were twinkling in the sky, far, far away.

Translated by Lie Hua