This Is How We Roll.

You cannot say that you have lived in Jakarta until you’ve tasted, smelled and felt what the public transportation system is like. I don’t mean the legendary traffic jams where cars really do slow down to the speed of a nonagenarian with arthritis in its knees and bunions on its feet. Combine that with the mass rapid transit and now you know how to really live. So let me describe what the transportation system is like:

At 6 o’clock I must leave the house. At best, I can leave at 6:15 because at 6:30 EVERYBODY gets in to their car and make their way to work at the same bloody time and I would be very late. I flag an angkutan kota, a tiny tin can on wheels to take me to the main road at Pulo Mas for Rp 2000. With the rise in fuel prices, it’s costing me Rp2500 now. You do the math okays?

Then I take Transjakarta all the way to Harmoni. The Bus Way, as the local calls it, is an adorable bastardization between a tram, a bus, a subway and a regular train. I’m probably confusing you. Let’s just say that it operates on an exclusive dedicated lane like a tram, but it is demarcated with bricks. Buses travel on them. It has automatic doors like a subway. It has a dude who guides people out and regulates the people coming in like a train station master. Tada!

At Harmoni, I get off the bus and join the mass of people heading over to Block M, one of the primary corridors. Here you really notice urban planning at work…. Or rather lack of it. Both the administrative and financial centers congregate along Thamrin-Sudirman stretch and Rasuna-Said which lies parallel to it. Those many cubicles need to be filled somehow! Gigantic portions of Indonesia’s largest earners funnel their way into this small area. The little people stuff themselves on to their Bus Way, the Bis Kota and the Mikrolet. Those higher up in the food chain come rolling in their cars because once you can afford the installments for an air-conditioned rhinoceros, public transportation is oh-so-beneath you. Oh you won’t go back.

Morning traffic is regulated in parts of these areas where you can only enter if you have at least 3 passengers in your car. Evening traffic is not regulated. These cubicles have to empty themselves at the end of the day remember. Thus we trickle out on to the streets to join the molasses of tins and wheels.

In the evening, all of these people unite at Harmoni again. Harmoni interchange, as sweet as it sounds, is a small tin can of death suspended on metal stilts over putrid grey waters. Overcapacity is not a quantifiable limit by weight or by number of commuters. Overcapacity is a fervent prayer that these sheets of metal would not fold unto itself like a house of cards. I laugh but it wouldn’t be very funny really.

The queue here is like human Tetris, each piece filling whatever empty space before them. These little sardines push their way with their baggage, their insecurities and their weary self so they can get a little closer to home. It’s a test of patience. You feel so utterly helpless. All you can do is step a little forward as the mass moves along. There really is no point in getting angry or sad. It would be a waste of energy. You want to learn Zen? Here’s the best battlefield.

Clutching your bags and fearing for pickpockets, you sway along as the bus careen forward and swerve into clumsy curves. I expect my biceps and triceps would be well toned by the end of all of this. They better be.

It takes up a huge chunk of my day, like every single one of orang Jakarta. This is how we live. So pardon me sir if we haven’t thought about these faceless enemies of terror. Our daily terror lies on our roads. I hope in time you’ll see that we’re not so dysfunctional after all but that we operate excellently on the margins.

There are some things that do not require an explanation. I’m not sure why I’ve chosen to accept to get paid at less than 5 dollars a day and get physically assaulted by the transportation system daily. I had the choice to stay comfortably numb or to have my head and my cardiac muscles ache a little too much each day. This was a calculated whim. I trust the powers of cognitive dissonance to tell me that there is no place I should be but here.

It’s working.

Dangnabit.