TRAVEL

The Train At Midnight

Reverie in a sinking city

Uncertain if the children of the slums are aware of what they’re gesturing. Photo by Refhad on Unsplash

The warm intention I woke up with at 4am was to write a travel piece. About time, I thought, I made decent about my eight-hour train ride from Jakarta to Yogyakarta, Indonesia, a trip where I laid eyes on Borobudur and Prambanan.

For years I struggled to find the right words to describe the excursion, the open air night ballet watching the Mahabharata and Ramayana enacted to life under a full moon. Call it kismet. I was lucky. It wouldn’t be the same otherwise. It was too magical of an experience, I feared the spirits of the ancient kingdom would curse me if I wrote it less than what it deserves. The struggle remains.

There’s a myth about the temples, something only the locals strongly believed in, that its hallowed grounds are cursed. Unmarried couples who visit the temples, namely the one created for Lord Shiva, would break up. I went there with my husband around 2010. It’s been a running joke in the family ever since, because albeit we were married, we broke up in 2013. Was it the curse? Who knows, but it was the best thing to happen to me and my family, so an offering of thanks goes to all aspects of the supernatural that conspired to make that ballet happen.

But Jakarta itself was an eye-opener. A city that leaves me with insatiable hunger. Every…