Fire Earth Flower

It was twelve at noon. The sun was straight up high in Denpasar, Bali. The shadow of trees along the street had shrunken, allowing light to heat up the air. Then, out of the blue, came along an old woman offering to carry my backpack. I rejected her silly offer as she kept insisting on her mission. “Thanks, but no thanks,” I said. She looked up at me. “Please, Mister. I just need to eat today,” She begged. She was so short that I had to look down at her. “Please don’t call me, Mister,” I said. “My name’s Ni Luh,” She introduced herself. Her eyes were so dark that I could see a big blackness like a labyrinth. “How come you ended up in this market?” a writer's instinct suddenly tickled me to get the story. She looked down. “It was a long story,” She calmly said. She started to unfold her story. Ni Luh was seventeen when she married a local boy from a small village in the north of Bali. “His name was Agung,” She added. It didn’t take long for Ni Luh to find out that Agung was an army at the Indonesian Air Force. “He joined the Air Force in 1963, or few years earlier,” She huskily said. He was a helicopter pilot that once was at his pride to fly Soekarno, Indonesian former President, to any rural places in Java and Bali. One day after the horrible communist rebellion in 30 September 1965 that kidnapped and killed seven Generals, the General Soeharto decided to clean up the Air Force from communists that he thought, had infiltrated the body of Air Force. Ni Luh had to follow him, starting their new life in Madiun, An Air Force Based little town in East Java. It was the day that changed her life forever. It was five thirty in the morning that she was about to raise her hands for the prayer as she heard footsteps were simultaneously stamping heavily in front of her house, followed by continuous knocking at the door. She rushed in to the door, found out a group of men in black was before her. “We’re here to get your husband. This is Allah’s willing. The communists had to be taken from this land,” Yelled one of them, having a sharp shiny sickle on his hand. They dragged him like a hunted boar into the back of the truck. Since then he never came back. Ni Luh was a woman made of steel. Her eyes had long been keeping a secret of the past. As we got in the taxi, I looked back at her. I heard her sing a Hindust Ramayana epic, the battle between divine heroes against evil.