Without Rice Fields, Without a Fixed Salary: How We Survive on the Edge of the Southern Regency

Chapter 3

The following days flowed in a rhythm that seemed calm from the outside, virtually without a noticeable ripple for anyone merely passing by the front of their house. Yet, for Sumi, that feigned tranquility was merely the surface of a frozen lake; beneath it, the rumble of anxiety never truly subsided, spinning in a vicious circle that grew more suffocating with each passing day.

Every morning approaching nine o'clock, after Slamet tossed the remainder of his daily wage onto the warped, dry wooden table—tattered notes never exceeding forty or fifty thousand rupiah—Sumi’s dance of survival officially began. Her rough, dry, and soot-stained fingers moved with dexterity yet trembled with apprehension. The fifteen-thousand-rupiah note was immediately set aside without mercy, folded tightly and meticulously until it was the size of a matchbox, and slipped deep into a dusty spice tin hidden behind the thinning rice bin. That money was the mandatory tribute for Mas Anto, the Bank Titil agent whose arrival was always impeccably punctual, like an unseen executioner appearing just as the alleyways grew quiet, cleared of the men who had gone out to seek odd jobs.

"Here, Mas," Sumi whispered one morning, sliding the folded money across with a palm damp with cold sweat and a gaze that kept darting wildly toward the end of the alley, terrified to death that a nosy neighbor might catch them in their daily transaction.

Anto accepted it without many words, without the friendly smile he wore on the first day he ensnared her. With a mechanical, cold, and well-practiced motion, he crossed out a line in his tattered pocketbook, its pages beginning to yellow and smell musty, and stamped a small, faded blue ink mark.

"Twenty-two payments left, Bu," he stated flatly without the slightest glance into Sumi's eyes, before turning the ignition key and firing up his noisy moped engine, leaving behind a thin plume of alley dust in the scorching morning air.

Sumi let out a long breath, tasting a relief that was stretched paper-thin—a fleeting moment of artificial satisfaction bought at a heavy price. Yet, that peace was terribly short-lived—never lasting more than five minutes. The remaining money from Slamet's handout in her grip was now down to thirty thousand rupiah, even though the sun had just climbed higher and the day was still long.

In the cramped, dark, and stuffy kitchen, with thick black soot caked onto the unplastered brick walls, she stood facing a rarely used kerosene stove and a single rusty gas burner. Her brain immediately went to work, spinning like an old machine running out of oil, assembling a complex calculation that drained the remaining peace from her head:

One liter of rice: Rp13,000 (lowest quality, the grains frequently mixed with broken bits and tiny black pebbles)

A quarter kilo of loose cooking oil: Rp4,500 (poured into a thin transparent plastic bag tied tightly with a rubber band)

A small block of tempeh: Rp4,000 (sliced paper-thin like playing cards so it would suffice for both lunch and dinner)

A budget bundle of chili and shallots: Rp5,000 (consisting only of a few dull shallots and yellowish, wilting bird's eye chilies)

Remaining money: Rp3,500 (the sole wiggle room left for the allowance of Rian, her only child in the third grade of elementary school)

There was no room for even the slightest error, miscalculation, or unexpected expense within this mathematical equation of poverty. If her child came home from school whining for a five-thousand-rupiah ice pop, the entire financial architecture of that day collapsed. If the three-kilogram LPG cylinder—the rusty green "melon" tank with its peeling handle—suddenly hissed empty halfway through frying the thin slices of tempeh in the pan, a micro-scale economic disaster would officially detonate in that household.

Meanwhile, Slamet never bothered—or perhaps deliberately chose to close his eyes and ears—asking how the gas cylinder in the corner of the kitchen always stayed filled, or how the bowl of vegetable soup on the rickety wooden table could still steam with a savory aroma despite lacking even a single piece of meat or fish. In his mind, forged hard as a true Pandalungan man, a breadwinner who squeezed sweat beneath the scorching sun without rest, his primary duty was complete the moment the leftover daily wage was dropped onto the bamboo bench.

"Wong jenenge bapak-bapak, Sum. Sing penting wis kerja," Slamet remarked one night in a patronizing tone, blowing a sharp, dense cloud of clove-cigarette smoke toward the ceiling of rotting, soot-stained bamboo. "Out there it's hot, lifting a hundred sacks of cement until your spine feels like it's going to snap. You're just at home taking care of the kitchen and the kid, how can you not manage something like that?"

Sumi remained silent, not uttering a single word. Her lips were tightly sealed, swallowing raw the suffocating tightness constricting her chest. Her rough hand gently stroked the back of her child, who lay fast asleep on a thin, hardened kapok-fiber mattress that had grown lumpy in places. She never dared to talk back or offer a single syllable of rebuttal. Within the strict patriarchal order and culture deeply rooted in their environment, talking back to a husband who had just returned from breaking his back was equivalent to sparking a major argument—a social catastrophe she desperately wished to avoid at all costs, given that their walls were merely hollow unplastered bricks that obediently leaked every whisper of anger into the ears of the neighbors on either side of the house.