Map of the Invisible World. Tash Aw

step out into the still-warm evening. No: what she felt now was not depression but something akin to boredom, though she was not bored either. She didn’t really know how she felt.

      ‘You’re always saying that,’ Din replied, not looking up from his paper. ‘So why don’t you get out of here? You at least have a choice.’

      ‘You mean, admit defeat? You know me better than that.’

      ‘I don’t really know you very well at all. And I’m serious: why don’t you leave?’ Din didn’t look up from the newspaper but continued to hold it up before him so that it shielded his face. The back page bore a picture of a badminton player, his thick black hair slicked back in imitation of American movie stars, his smile reflected on the swell of a polished trophy. The headline trumpeted: PRAISE GOD FOR THE THOMAS CUP. Margaret could not tell from his placid, monotonous voice what he truly meant. Only by watching for small signs like the faint narrowing at the very edges of his eyes (pleasure) or the slight indentation of his dimples (sarcasm or contempt) could she read what he meant.

      ‘For the same reason as you,’ she said. ‘The job here’s not finished. I can’t just abandon these kids.’

      ‘So you do sympathise with them.’

      ‘If that’s your way of asking if I’m a communist, you know what my answer is.’

      ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t intend any offence, and you know that I don’t care about politics. I’m just interested to know why you stay here instead of going home.’

      ‘The States? Boy, you know how to annoy me. I was conceived on one continent, born on another and raised on four – five if you count Australia. I lived in America for less than ten years, not even twenty-five per cent of my life. Would you call that home? Why don’t you go home? I’ve heard Medan isn’t so bad. Or you could go to Holland – again. They educated you, after all.’

      Din lowered his newspaper and Margaret studied his face for clues. There was nothing for a while, and then a completely blank, unreadable smile. It was something she’d begun to notice only recently and it made her feel uncomfortable. Her ability to discern moods in other people was something else she was proud of. She had been doing it – and doing it well – ever since she could remember, before she could talk, even. She thought of the opening line of her (unfinished) doctoral thesis ‘Tchambuli: Kinship and Understanding in Northern Papua New Guinea’, which lay in a locked drawer just below her left knee. That line read, ‘It is the nonverbal communication between human beings that forms the basis of all society.’ She had always believed that people (well, she) could read things that remained unsaid, just like tribes in the jungle who had little need for sophisticated language. She had never before come across someone like Din. Sometimes she found him completely Western, other times utterly Indonesian, sometimes primitive. She thought again of her thesis, locked away together with her passport at the foot of her desk. She had not looked at either in such a long time.

      ‘I have no family left in Sumatra and my Dutch was never very good,’ he said at last.

      Margaret stood up and made a cursory attempt to tidy her desk. ‘Hey, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. I don’t know why I’m so crabby these days. It’s just so frustrating.’

      ‘What is?’

      Margaret lifted her arms to gesture out of the windows, but then just shrugged, sighing. ‘Everything. You know what I mean.’

      Din nodded. ‘I think I do.’

      Margaret turned away from him and looked out the window across the low sprawl of grey buildings. Everything looked grey to her now in Jakarta. The new squat concrete shops, the flimsy wooden shanties, the six-lane highways, the dead water in the canals, the banners that were strung up everywhere across the city, whose whiteness dulled quickly from the dust and smoke and the exhaust fumes that choked the air. She did not know when she’d stopped noticing the colours and the details of Jakarta, or when this greyness had begun to form like cataracts that clouded her appreciation of the city. On the building across the concrete square hung painted banners that urged NO IMPERIALISM CRUSH MALAYSIA or FRIENDSHIP TO AFRICA or EVER ONWARD NO RETREAT IN THE NAME OF ALLAH. She felt a sudden surge of irritation: Why was it that everything in this city was written in capitals? Whenever she went to dinner at the Hotel Java the entire menu was in bold upper case, every item screaming its existence at her, insisting that she choose it and not something else, every dish jostling with its neighbour in a cacophony of advertisement. NORTH SUMATRAN FAVOURITE FROM BANDUNG EVER POPULAR DISH OF TORAJA KINGS. As if this assault were not enough, the prices too were announced in oversized numbers, though it wasn’t clear to Margaret if this was an advertisement of how low they were or yet another mild form of extortion, the like of which Margaret experienced every day. Maybe she could no longer deal with the noise and the crowds and the bullying and the corruption, and had, therefore, stopped wanting to see the city in detail; maybe this was why she had begun to see everything in terms of greyness. She mulled over the possibility of this sometimes when she picked unenthusiastically at a TYPICAL EAST JAVA DELICACY in the lavish black marble surroundings of the Hotel Java. Was Margaret Bates becoming soft? In the end she decided that it was the city that had changed. Margaret Bates had not softened with age. And that was the problem, she knew that. Adaptation is the key to human existence, she used to tell her students. The Ability to Adapt: that was another of her strengths, along with her Resistance to Emotional Instability and her Reading of Moods. Yet here she was, frozen in time, waiting for the city to change back into something she recognised. It would not happen. She had known a different country, a gentler country, she thought. She hated that word, ‘gentler’ – it was maudlin and sentimental; it reminded her of the way old white fools would talk about their plantations and their brown servants. Suddenly she hated herself. ‘I have to do something about this,’ she said to herself, almost audibly, as she continued to look out of the window at the dirty grey banners. I cannot go on like this. I must change, I must change.

      ‘What did you say?’ Din asked, folding his newspaper at last.

      ‘Nothing,’ Margaret said, turning round. She looked at Din’s clear, slightly watery eyes and felt guilty at having snapped at him earlier. She wished that she was able to think things through before saying them. ‘Let’s get an early dinner. Then we can go to the Hotel Java or somewhere fancy, you know, have some drinks – something strong and colourful with a little umbrella in it. We can watch all those ridiculous rich people with their prostitutes.’

      Din pulled his chair closer to his desk and flipped open a notebook. ‘It’s too early for dinner,’ he said, picking up a pen and removing its cap. He held the pen poised over the notepad but he did not write anything. ‘Besides, they won’t let me into the Hotel Java. Not like this, anyway.’ He held the collar of his shirt between his thumb and forefinger for a second before letting it fall.

      ‘I’m not taking no for an answer,’ Margaret said. She grabbed his hand and pulled him towards the door. ‘You’re with me, no one will say anything. It’s one of those disgusting privileges of being white in a place like this. Everyone says they hate Westerners, but as soon as an orang putih walks into the room they give them whatever they want. Every other blanquito I know breaks the rules and behaves badly, and tonight I intend to partake of this disgusting orgy.’

      They crossed the highway on the overhead walkway. Beneath them the never-ending traffic beeped and hooted and revved as usual, a river of bashed-up, rusting steel whose current flowed everywhere and nowhere. The sun had begun to calm slightly, hazy now behind the perpetual layer of cloud; the sky was a dirty yellow, a yellow overlaid with grey, and soon, when the sun was setting, it would turn mouse-coloured and finally – swiftly – black. There was never any blue, nothing true or clear.

      They walked along the road for a while trying to hail a taxi, but there seemed to be none today so they settled for a becak, ridden by an ancient Javanese whose face was so fleshless that they could see the outlines of his skull under the old-leather skin. He rode with surprising speed and agility, passing men and women pushing their cartloads of peanuts and scrap newspaper and fruit. Stallholders along the road cried out to them as the rickshaw went past; they offered