Ngabuburit

I’m not sure if I’ve spelled the title correctly, because it’s a Sundanese expression and I’m not good enough at distinguishing the “ng” and “ny” sound (except when I was forced to practice the pronunciation of words beginning with these sounds in Sundanese class, and found “ny” was the much easier of the two to get my teacher’s “eh, good enough” rating on). It’s one of those perfect, delightful expressions where you think to yourself, “I wish there was a word for this,” and, to your surprise, you discover there actually is one.

So, ngabuburit (nyabuburit?) refers to that particular mood during Ramadan, which is wont to wax greatest in the late afternoon, where everyone’s waiting around (hungry and thirsty, obviously) for it to be sunset already.

My relationship with the concept of ngabuburit has evolved over the course of Ramadan, now with less than a week of the month left to us. For at least half the month I experienced ngabuburit very strongly. You don’t notice how much sheer interest value eating can add to your day until it’s not there. No noontime meal to convene around; no option of mindless snacking or, as is more my style, relentless water-chugging. Just when you’re hungriest there seems to be nothing to do to take your mind off of it. After all, food is the usual go-to distraction. Suddenly it feels like there are too many hours in the day, and worse, you’re so low energy you just waste them away. You’d like to get out of the house and go climb a mountain, but doing that in the heat with no prospect of hydration after is a total no-go. So you lie around doing mellow activities, wishing for something like the usual comfort of the clockwork of mealtimes to break up the hours, feeling a dry throat with every swallow and the edge of hunger in your belly, counting down the hours… That, to me, was ngabuburit.

At least for two weeks. Then, thankfully, my metabolism adjusted. I got better at eating a lot at the 3:30 pre-dawn meal, shoveling food into my mouth even though I was a tired zombie. I always get hungry at around 10-12, mid-morning, but that’s it. Any physical exertion helps immensely. One day I went for an hour-long walk and wasn’t hungry the entire day. Another day I went shopping with some teachers from my school in Bandung, and we went to a million different shops for a million different errands, which would have been tiring on any day. With no food or water, it was exhausting, but strangely I was neither hungry nor even thirsty all day.

So over time my awareness of living in a state of ngabuburit diminished significantly. With less than a week of “the fasting month,” as it’s known in Indonesian, left, I’d say I hardly have it at all. There’s no feeling of desperate need to have it be mealtime, and when I’ve finally got all the food in front of me, there’s no feeling of a backlog of missed meals that needs to be accounted for. But I do still have a kind of ngabuburit that kicks in around 3:30 in the afternoon—just a pleasant sense of anticipation. Not of food itself, but of getting to sit down with my host family and enjoy spending time together. The joy of the daily surprise of getting to see what my host mother has cooked for tonight’s meal (especially if I know she’s been baking something chocolatey in the morning—my bedroom is right above the kitchen, and I’ll wake up to heavenly smells of baking brownies, and yeah, that’s a way to make me food-sad!).

Let me back up quite a bit and give a rundown of the Ramadan routine. Ramadan is a month in the Islamic lunar calendar, which means it shifts each year in its timing with respect to the Gregorian calendar. It’s the holiest month in Islam, and considered a very special time of year for Muslims. Extra prayer, giving to charity, and good works are especially encouraged during this time (it’s said that good deeds carry double their usual weight when done during Ramadan); people are not supposed to speak ill of anyone, and are generally supposed to carry a charitable spirit in their hearts. They are also not allowed to eat or drink from sunup to sundown. (There are lots of other activities that are prohibited by religion during daylight hours, such as smoking and sexual relations, but I don’t know the full list.)

I decided to participate in the fasting in part because I’d always been curious about it: fasting is supposed to be good for the body now and then, and it’s certainly a good exercise in willpower. Mainly I decided to try it because my community is very strongly, and to my knowledge pretty uniformly, Muslim. I wanted to send a positive message to my community about how I feel about Islam.

Most people I’ve met here that I know beyond a passing acquaintance have asked me what my views on Islam are, whether I think Islam equates to terrorism, what my views on Trump’s so-called Muslim Ban are, and what discrimination is like for Muslims in the U.S. These questions have yet to get easier for me to answer. Every time I’m asked these I feel an inner wave of anger and hurt, my cheeks flush, I consider my words carefully. The first question is easy enough. I’m happy to speak for myself, assure them I’ve never in my life equated Islam with terrorism, I get it… And as to the rest… What can anyone say? Yes, the president of my country has frequently made outrageous Islamophobic statements and promoted ideologies and policies furthering the same; yes, what he is has attempted to do with the Muslim Ban is illegal and horrendous; yes, discrimination and violence against Muslims in the U.S. is a serious issue which has only worsened; yes, America has some very deep-seated issues with racism and religious discrimination in general…

I’ll admit I always want to somehow end these conversations on a high note: But I have hope for our future! I am in fact optimistic about the American youth, who demographically tend to be much more liberal than their elders currently running the country and who are increasingly non-white and diverse in other ways. That doesn’t mean the systems and institutions they will inherit aren’t broken, weren’t founded on what they were founded on. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a very real, very horrific rising tide of racism and white supremacy coming to the fore socially, especially now. There’s really nothing to say to these questions but “Yes…” and wince. I usually add something like, “It’s a very sad thing, and I think it’s fueled above all by ignorance, by people who don’t actually know anything about Islam, who think in black and white, who want easy answers and accept the messages they’re given, who haven’t looked beyond their own little world.” Obviously it’s more complex than that. It’s also, at a certain fundamental level, as simple as that. Plato’s model of immorality: ignorance.

There’s one other sticky area I run into with Trump here. Indonesians know Trump is behind the Muslim Ban, so they don't tend to like him. When they ask me about him, I’m quick to note I didn’t and don’t support him, and while they are pleased to hear this, they often then ask me “Why?” I have to be pretty tempered in my response to this question. Because while Indonesians aren’t fans of Trump, there’s also a strong cultural value here of needing to respect authority figures, including elected government officials. In deference to this I try to keep my explanations very even-keeled and grounded in examples of policy, and I will sometimes add the caveat, “but I respect the democratic process.” (Which is my shorthand for saying: I respect the peaceful transfer of power and so I accept the outcomes of the electoral system as it stands [even despite the injustices of the Electoral College system, voting obstruction efforts, campaign finance laws, Russian election meddling and more...].)

But back to Ramadan. Actions speak louder than words, so I hoped that fasting was a good way to show my community my dedication to them, their culture, and my openness to their religion. It’s definitely been a good bonding experience. Breaking fast together is so much more special when you’ve actually been fasting. When you’re in the middle of a five-hour meeting and half the room looks pretty low-energy, you feel a lot of solidarity when you’re just as hungry and thirsty and sleepy. Likewise, when people around you seem to have boundless energy and move through their days as though they aren’t hungry and thirsty and tired, you feel a special sense of admiration. Oh, you think you don’t have enough energy to do anything but read? Look out in the fields at the workers who are going about their labors as usual…!

A typical Ramadan day starts at 3:30 am with the sahur meal. At 2:30 the mosque loudspeakers start going off, with very enthusiastic shouting of “SAH-HOOOOOR! Sah HOOOOOR! SAH, SAH, SAH-HOOOR!” I’m not sure why they start an hour early, unless it’s for the benefit of the people who have to get up earlier than the rest of the family to cook the sahur meal (generally the women). As for me, I set my alarm for 3:15 and get up at 3:20. I go downstairs at 3:25 and am always the first one in the living room. As I pass the kitchen I say good morning to my host mother, who’s always bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, finishing up the cooking with something crackling in oil in the big wok on the stove. I sit in the living room in my usual place, back resting up against the wall, sipping at my water. We eat all our meals on the floor. By 3:30 the rest of the household has found their way to the living room, and someone’s turned on the TV, which is helpful when you’re all way too tired to talk and need to wake up a little. We always watch Ini Sahur. This is the special Ramadan edition of Ini Talkshow (“This is a talkshow”), one of the most popular shows on TV whose best American analog would be something like Jimmy Fallon, except with two hosts and usually at least five guests, plus a never-ending cast of characters who dress in wild costumes for laughs.

At 4 o’clock I go back to bed; the rest of the household stays up till around 5. I could instantly drop off to sleep, except 4 o’clock is also exactly when the mosque right next to our house starts its broadcast of Quranic recitation. It’s too loud to sleep through even with earplugs in a very sleepy state, so I just lie in bed with my eyes closed and wait. It goes for about 35 minutes, and then it ends with the just-before-dawn call to prayer. This is the sound that lets everyone know the fast has officially begun: if you’re still eating after this time, you’ve already broken the fast for the day. I think that’s why most people have sahur a whole hour earlier than they technically have to, to just to be on the safe side, have absolutely no food left in their mouths, etc. As for me, once the azan has finished, signaling the mosque’s loudspeaker has finished, I quickly drop off to sleep. While I was still going to school, I would then set my alarm again for 6 am. It didn’t feel awesome. Now that school is finally out, as of this Friday, these last couple of days I’ve been sleeping in until 7 or 8, and it’s beyond luxurious.

If during the day I walk to the town square (it’s a basketball court ringed by vendors and minibuses a minute from my house) it feels busy enough, with lots of people out and about. The market, further down, is always bustling. So many people are buying and selling foodstuffs there you would be forgiven for not realizing these same people aren’t eating anything. But people still have to cook and stock up food for the house for the evening hours, so there’s still business to do. Small food stands, however, seem much more infrequent than I imagine they are at other times of the year. (Many of these are very small, just the width of a single person, and many families have one which can just be parked, empty, in front of their house until they want to sell out of it.)

In other areas you can immediately see that it’s Ramadan. When I visited a mall in Bandung recently, the restaurants and eateries were ghosttowns. Similarly, I stayed with my principal at his home in a tourist town, and the huge market was all bolted down tightly for “the fasting month.” But then, at midday we went to a nearby tourist attraction called “the floating market” which featured a long stretch of food stands on a boardwalk over an artificial lake, and the tables were packed with families chowing down for lunch—assumedly non-Muslims.

At around 5:30 pm everyone starts making their way to the living room to break the fast. The Arabic term for this is the iftar meal, but in Indonesian the term is “buka puasa” (“to open” the fast). This is by far the best part of the day. There’s a lot more food, and a lot more variety of dishes, for each of these post-sunset meals than for usual dinners, and it’s always exciting to see what will be spread out on the floor.

There are usually quite a few sweet dishes, which is what people start by eating. (Traditionally, the Prophet broke fasts with dates, and so dates and other dried fruits are typical for iftar meals around the world, but at least in this household we only had dates the first night.) Often that means sugary “soups,” like fruit soup, which is delicious fresh fruit in a sweet, milk-and-fruit liquid with ice; or a room-temperature sweet milky soup with soft chopped nuts and a mild ginger flavor. My host mother often has little baked goods too: chocolate cookies or brownies or tiny powdered-sugar cakes. Palm oil makes for a delicious flaky texture in baked goods that’s addicting. There’s usually fresh fruit, too, like pineapple, oranges, bananas, watermelon, papaya or mango. Currently there’s breadfruit in the fruit bowl downstairs. A couple days ago I tried mangosteen for the first time. Mangosteen looks interesting on the inside: there’s a layer about ¾ of a centimeter wide of soft, rather mushy reddish-purple pulp, and then sitting in the midst of that is a star-like formation, lobed like garlic, that’s pearly white. You only eat the white part. While it looks perfectly intact, like it was pressed in a mold, when you actually try to pull out one of the lobes they usually squish and get deformed instantly. The taste is delicious, a little sour and surprising.

(A funny linguistic note. So, in Sundanese, one of the more common everyday words is “mangga,” which means “please,” as in, “please sit,” “please eat,” “please come inside,” and so on. The word for “mango,” the fruit, in Indonesian is “mangga,” however. So what is the word for “mango” in Sundanese? It’s simply “buah”—“fruit.”)

Also on the iftar platter are lots of savory dishes, of course, and “gorengan,” (“fried things”) and rice. Talking on the phone with my dad about Indonesian food recently, he interjected, “You haven’t said a single word this whole time about rice. I mean, I’m assuming you eat rice, right?” My response: “Well, I don’t talk about drinking water, either.” The point: yes, rice is the staple food. Culturally rice is always the main dish, and everything else is a side dish. I’ll confess that while I of course eat rice for every meal, I don’t think I’ll ever view rice this way. For me it’s just the base layer that you can then pile other things onto. (My teacher in Sundanese language class had to repeatedly correct me as I betrayed my own cultural view of rice. I would be listing out food I had eaten for lunch and would always forget and tack on rice at the end, as an afterthought. No, no, no, you have to say “rice” first, he’d instruct. It’s not spinach with rice, it’s rice with spinach.)

You’ve heard me say before, and I’ll say it again: Indonesian food is great! Every meal is a pleasure, and that’s a gift I never take for granted.

Sometimes after dinner I join my host mother for tarawih, which are special extra, optional prayers performed during Ramadan, either 11 or 23 sets. (A once man asked me which I had done; I said, “I don’t know, but it takes an hour,” and he said, “Ah, that’s 23, then.”) Tarawih starts just after the isya (last of the five daily prayers) azan, around 7 o’clock currently. We usually go to the small neighborhood mosque right next to our house, though a couple times we went to the largest mosque in the village a couple minutes away, next to the town square. Women bring personal prayer rugs and their prayer robes (I forget the word for them) and sit in a section behind the men separated by a curtained partition. An imam stands in front, facing ahead in the direction of Mecca like everyone behind him. 

The imam keeps the pace of the prayers: his “Allahu akbar”s determine everyone’s timing of the sequence of motions. Prayers are in sets of two. You start in a standing position, and then bend at the waist in a bow. Then you return to fully upright. Then you go from standing to kneeling with your forehead touching the floor. Then you move from that position to sitting upright, legs bent beneath you. From there you once more bend forward so that your forehead touches the floor. This is one set. Then you immediately stand upright again and go through another set. At the end of the second set, there is a short break where you remain seated. As a way of distinguishing the first set from the second in a cycle the way the imam intones “Allahu akbar” is different: at the end of the first set, there’s a little pressure behind it, like an unfinished sentence; at the end of the second set, he says it with a sort of exhale.

After tarawih, as people are standing up to leave, everyone “shakes hands” with the people around them and tells them “peace be upon you” in Arabic. I put “shakes hands” in quotation marks, because Sundanese hand shaking is different than what you’re probably imagining when I use that phrase. It entails holding your hands out in front of you, fingers extended and pressed together, as in Christian prayer, bent at the wrist so your fingers are pointing towards the other person, who is doing the same. Then you very lightly bring the tips of their pressed-together fingers between the tips of your fingers. You then bring your hands, still in the praying-position, up so that your fingers point up to your chin. I know Javanese “hand shaking” is slightly different, but I’m not sure how.

(Note, actual shaking of hands is also common here, but it’s extremely light, barely touching the tips of someone’s fingers in your hand, and then bringing your right hand up to touch the middle of your chest: you have “brought the person into your heart.” Once some students at my school were asking me about cultural differences between Indonesia and the U.S.: do students in America also salim* their teachers? they asked me. No, I said, there’s no salim’ing; not between parents and children either, for that matter. And handshakes are very different. I demonstrated my usual American handshake, which I’ve gotten praised for in the U.S. for its firmness, and my student was positively shocked.

*Salim: when a younger person bows over an older person’s hand and brings it up to touch their face, usually their forehead or cheek. It’s a sign of respect. At school, students must salim their teachers, and usually every time they pass a teacher. Children salim their parents, in lieu of hugging and kissing between parents and children; wives sometimes salim their husbands. Personally, I’m often unsure of when I should be salim’ing. I salim much older people without a second thought, but I’m unsure with middle-aged people. I’ve been salim’d quite a lot at school, and the most fascinating thing about it for me is that every person has their own style with how they do it, and there’s quite a range. Some people will even kiss your hand.)

After Ramadan it’s Lebaran, the Indonesian word for Eid al-Fitri, the holiday that ends the month. I’ll have a lot more to say about Lebaran once I’ve actually experienced it in a few days, but I’ve heard a lot already about some of its most salient features. Namely, there’s a lot of food and eating, and getting together with extended family is important. It’s traditional to “mudik,” or return to your childhood home, to be with your family during this time. Since a lot of people move to big cities from rural areas, during Lebaran time and the weeks leading up to it the mudik-related traffic gets insane, especially between big cities like Jakarta and Bandung and the surrounding countryside. Someone told me 30 million people are going between Jakarta during this time. Needless to say I’m trying to hold off on travel until after the holiday is over.

Ramadan Mubarak, everyone!