The addendum hadn’t struck me as overly important, but it should have.

My teachers had referred to the language as ‘baku’, or ‘standard’, in class, emphasising that it was this version of Indonesian, the nation’s official language, we were learning. ‘ Bahasa Indonesia baku’, I thought to myself – textbook Bahasa Indonesia. She handed me my meal wrapped in newspaper, the text of which I could understand. I wondered what her life was like in this city, how she felt about escalating political and cultural tension in this young democracy and the world’s most populous Muslim-majority nation. I did make out familiar words, but painfully rarely. Yet after hundreds of hours of classes, I couldn’t understand what she was saying.Įverything she said sounded to me like it had half a syllable. It was to chat with people like her that I had moved to Indonesia and enrolled in intensive language study.

She was curious about me, full of questions, and the feeling was mutual.

Mixing everything in a peanut sauce, she handed the salad, called lotek, to customers who puttered up on motorbikes and waited on blue plastic stools. The woman stood in her roadside stall in a quiet neighbourhood in the Indonesian city of Yogyakarta, chopping tomatoes, beans and spinach, plus one red chilli.

Lies 1998 sub indo full movie