Tambora: sample chapter

[Derek]

9. BIMA AND THE ANTI–SULTAN
In Bima the kraton is no longer the sultan’s home, although he still uses it for ceremonial or festive occasions. Most of the time the kraton is kept as a museum, which is usually open to the public. Unfortunately, when we arrived the doors were closed because the sultan had died only a few weeks before, and the kraton was still under the official forty–day period of mourning. However, the open gate had been welcoming, and no one took any notice of our arrival as we rode through them. Several young couples sat together in the shade of some giant trees, giggling like young couples everywhere and large numbers of deer roamed freely around the grounds.
Built in 1927, the kraton is a large two–story house. Huge verandas, supported by thick pillars, had wrapped the sides. Some faded black and white photos hang in simple frames on their walls, so we wandered up the stairs to look closer. The photos mostly showed groups of people at ceremonial occasions of the past or traditional musical instruments.
On an impulse, I tried the front door, and the rattle of the handle quickly brought an old man from inside.
“Good morning, Bapak. We know you are closed. Do you think we can come in and have a look? We have come a long way.”
And so, as simply as that, we were invited into the kraton museum. Its entry hall is large with a steep wooden staircase leading upstairs. A hallway led off both to the left and right and gave access to the lower rooms, which were now mostly empty except for a few dusty display cases showing some old clothing, a few porcelain pots, two small, plain sedan chairs, a couple of old rifles, and some chain–mail but little else. Oddly, two vases of beautiful fresh–cut flowers stood on either side of the staircase.
We were led upstairs. This is where the recent sultans had lived with their families. Still furnished in a 1930s era decor, the bedrooms had wardrobes and chest of drawers from Europe, carved Chinese armchairs, and four–poster beds. The rooms weren’t large, and water marks on the ceilings and faded peeling paint belied the fact that this was a royal palace. The last sultan, who was the seventeenth of his lineage, had moved to a house a few hundred metres away, and it seemed few funds have been spent on maintenance since then, although the old man who was our guide did mention some restoration in 1973.
Looking out the windows from the upstairs corridors, I could see across an open park (known as the alung) a flat–roofed shade tent with rows of white plastic chairs on the road in front of a house where the sultan had actually lived. This was where mourners could come and join in the daily prayers to farewell the old sultan.
The palace was slowly succumbing to neglect. I passed the toilets and bathrooms and entered what would have been a servants’ area. It was without a ceiling, and I was interested to see the roof joists and the wooden skeleton of the building, but the old man called me back immediately because the floor wasn’t safe to walk on.
There was an ancient handwritten Koran open on a chest of drawers in the sultan’s bedroom, and we could picture him standing there reading it. Iben posed in front of it for a photo, pretending to read. In the hall were plastic mannequins wearing old clothes. I stood between two and posed for my own photo, and the old man took a topi off the head of the mannequin beside me and placed it on mine. “Spot the dummy,” I said.
There was very little of any real value in the museum, and with the low security we’d witnessed, we could understand why. According to our guide, the sultan’s family kept valuable items under lock and key elsewhere.
Iben had told me weeks earlier that we might have been able to meet the sultan, who was a keen amateur historian himself, so his death was untimely in terms of our visit. After the old man ushered us outside, we sat on the front veranda to discuss what to do next. A short stocky man proudly growing three or four long black hairs from a mole on his face joined us. Iben knew him and introduced him to us as the “Assistant Sultan,” which I correctly took to mean ‘assistant to the sultan’. He is a pleasant man, then in his mid–fifties, and Iben apparently knew him quite well. They talked for a while, and Iben announced that we would be able to meet with the “anti–sultan” that afternoon. I didn’t know what an anti–sultan was but figured that maybe he was standing in before the new sultan was proclaimed. The future Sultan (the eighteenth) was still a student in Jakarta, so perhaps there’d be a year or two of rule by the ‘anti–sultan’ whilst he was still studying. Curious, I asked Iben if this was what was happening, but the Assistant Sultan distracted him, and I let it slide because the mystery would clear itself up when we made our visit. However, plans changed again when we were told that the anti–sultan was in prayers with the mourners and not available. He would, however, be happy to meet with us the next morning.
After we’d finished at the museum, we rode up the hill named Dana Taraha which overlooks Bima, the location where most of the seventeen deceased Sultans are buried. Sultan Abdul Kahir, the first sultan, who reigned from 1630 until his death in 1640, had a simple hemispherical concrete bunker grave, which looked so much younger than 374 years; I suspect it had been rebuilt. Iben entered it briefly to pray.
Metal bars caged the grave of sultan number, but others were simple constructions marking a patch of earth. The occupants’ graves were labelled with laminated, faded paper signs, which announced their names and dates of burial. Buried there too was the last sultan, the seventeenth. He had a blue tarpaulin above his grave for shade, and the clay of his grave was already hardening. There were a few flowers around but no real indication of what the grave will look like when it is a permanent construction. The Bimanese are Muslims, of course, and unlike the local Chinese who maintain massive mausoleums to their ancestors, most Muslim graves remain simple affairs. It appeared that even the sultans followed this custom.
From the hill, we headed to the waterfront for coffee. Bima sits beside an enormous, picturesque, sheltered inlet several kilometres across. A small volcano named Mount Orambuha stands on the far side of the bay from Bima and it stops any view from there of Tambora, only 65 kilometres away as the crow flies. Unfortunately there was so much haze that day we could hardly even see Orambuha.
As it was malam minggu—the Saturday ‘date’ night—weekend stallholders were setting up sitting places around the water where people could meet with their friends, drink coffee, and eat noodles. Some of the stalls were fenced metal and concrete constructions with roofs, the size and shape of the pens you see at Australian country fairs built to hold competition livestock. They were stretched right around the bay, and in a strict Muslim city, such as Bima, they may well be major venues for the high points of Friday and Saturday night entertainment.
We enjoyed hot steamy Sumbawan coffee and watched the world pass us by for an hour before heading back to Subhan’s house for the night. On the way, Hughen and I bought some takeaway beer from a local warung, and, having an aversion to warm beer, we also picked up a bag to take with us as Subhan didn’t own a fridge.
The next morning we were getting ready to leave to meet the anti–sultan. Hughen asked Iben if he would need to wear long trousers and boots rather than his sandals. Iben nodded.
“Old ladies, you see. More respect,” he said. I had visions of the royal court—the anti–sultan sitting on his throne, old ladies in waiting attending to his needs, glancing with horror at Hughen’s hairy knees.
“Gotta have respect,” I added smugly.
We loaded up the bikes because after our audience with royalty the plan was to ride the full length of the island back to Taliwang.
“I wonder how old she is,” mused Hughen.
“Who?” I asked.
“The aunt,” he replied. “She must be quite old if her father died in 1951.
“Whose aunt?”
“The sultan’s aunt, the woman we’re about to visit.”
“What? Ah I see...” In a flash, it was all suddenly clear. In the same way Iben had introduced the assistant to the sultan as the ‘assistant sultan’ he had also described the sultan’s aunt as the ‘aunty sultan’. There is no such thing as an ‘anti–sultan,’ and it’s quite likely always been that way. We started the bikes and set off for Bima with me feeling like a fool. Hughen mumbled something about me having cloth ears. I didn’t even try to explain my misunderstanding to Iben.
We arrived at the aunt’s house a little after 8.30. It is a normal, though large, suburban house on a reasonably busy street. Some of the rooms on the right side have been turned into a small museum, guarded by the obligatory old Dutch canon. In the garden and facing out to the street there was a giant political poster for a woman running for election. Her photo was over a metre high, but in the corner of the poster an older woman’s photo caught my attention. Was this the aunt?
We took off our shoes on the porch, and Iben led us to the open front door. Inside a woman with heavy makeup and a peach–coloured head scarf sat next to an old lady, posing for a photograph, so we waited quietly on the side. The room clearly belonged to an old lady, and I remembered many like it owned by my own great aunts decades ago—full of aging furniture, hundreds of books and photos, doilies, and cut flowers. Three tennis racquets hung on one wall and there were several trophies. A row of plaques, of the type which are commonly presented at special events in Indonesia, were propped open in their boxes along one bookshelf, and vases of flowers stood among the various souvenirs and knick–knacks she had collected over the years.
Hughen recognised the woman being photographed from the poster outside—this was a candidate for the next election. After her photographs were taken, she was ushered away to sit on chairs across the room and forgotten. From her body language, I could tell she was mightily annoyed, but by then we were being entertained by royalty, so I didn’t give her another thought until she huffily said her goodbyes and stalked off a few minutes later.
Iben formally introduced me to Ibu Siti Maryam, daughter of the 16th Sultan of Bima, a putri, or princess. She was tiny, with the age–bent body and slow movements of the elderly. Iben bowed and touched his forehead to her hand, and Subhan, Hughen, and I both followed his lead and did the same. She seemed fragile and there was something about her that immediately made me feel protective—and I wasn’t the only one as later, when she moved across the room, we almost fell over each other to be her steadying hand. But none of us could compete with Subhan. A Bimanese himself, this old lady was his royalty, and he clearly had great affection for her—if she needed care while we were there, then he was just the man for the job. I thought he’d probably fight me for the honour.
“Nice to meet you,” she said to me in English but, although I suspected she could speak English fluently, she used very little after that. She sat on a couch beneath photos of a younger version of herself visiting Versailles and Paris, Jerusalem, and London, and she talked briefly about her travels. She had grown up in the kraton in Bima, and I wondered, but didn’t ask, if she ever compared the opulence of Versailles with her own palace upbringing. We had visited her austere childhood bedroom upstairs in the kraton only yesterday, and it was even a poor comparison to the bedrooms many modern day Indonesians have in their big city houses......

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