Woman braves 'end of the world' toward light

Zakki Hakim, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Sari Puspita was lying unconscious on the floor of the Sailendra Restaurant. When she finally woke up, she could not believe what she saw -- total darkness and thick black smoke.

"This must be a dream," was her first thought.

Reality could not be that horrible, the 36-year-old mother of two told herself while still crouched on the ground.

Sari, a secretary at oil company PT Dharma Muda Pratama, actually thought that God had given her a premonition of the end of the world.

She completely forgot that she just been at a business luncheon with a group of clients at the Sailendra in the JW Marriott Hotel's lobby.

Then she remembered that a blast had occurred and she realized it was not a dream. So, she forced herself to stand up. It took her a while before she steadied herself.

As she started trying to walk, she saw a man sitting on the floor leaning against the wall. His body was covered in blood and his eyes were wide open. She was sure he was still alive so she pulled his hand. The man somehow came out of shock and got unsteadily to his feet. He and Sari then tried to find their way out of the hotel.

Only then did she realize that her buttocks, groin and thighs were severely burned, and that her own body was also covered with blood from wounds to her head and other parts of her body inflicted by flying glass.

Amazingly, Sari and the man managed to get out onto the road where they were helped onto a security guard pickup, which took them to the Jakarta Hospital, South Jakarta.

In the hospital's emergency room she asked someone to contact her husband, Mustainbillah, 37, who immediately left his office in Bendungan Hilir, Central Jakarta, to be with Sari.

"I could not believe that I was capable of doing this," she told The Jakarta Post at the Pertamina Hospital in South Jakarta, where she was transferred a day after the blast to receive treatment in the hospital's burns ward.

She said she had no idea about the magnitude of the incident until she saw the television later that evening. She thought it was just an exploding stove that had started a fire in the restaurant.

"On the television I could see that the fire was quite big, but I was not aware of it at the time. I must have been unconscious for hours," she said. According to her husband, however, Sari had arrived at the hospital within less than an hour of the blast.

So many volunteers had been going back and forth to help the victims, she said, it was amazing that nobody had found and helped her.

"I was really disoriented," said Sari, whose office is located in the Menara Rajawali building, next to the Marriott.

Ten days have now passed and she is still in the hospital -- the same hospital where some of her colleagues attending the same business luncheon are also being treated.

Sari, the mother of Sarah, 7, and Fauzan, 3, was waiting on a trolley for her turn to be treated in the burns unit when she spotted her colleague, Zaenal, nearby.

Both Sari's and Zaenal's heads had been shaved to allow the doctors to remove glass fragments from their scalps.

When they saw each other, they both laughed like children, and both yelling out, "Shaolin monk!"

Nevertheless, their laughter was tinged by sadness.