Melati’s feet turned on the glassy tiles. Her hands held delicate poses as her arms drew upward and wheeled behind her. Her bare shoulder rolled forward and drew back, moved by the resonant drums; her fingers flicked with the tinkling bells in the air. Her eyes were peacefully shut as the rhythms pulled her muscles around the room. She loved the gentle burn in her shoulders and neck, as her joints were asked for their full range of motion by the gamelan. Her sternum popped gently with a deep, chest-filling breath, her nostrils drinking in the incense and dust and late afternoon sweat of the onlookers.
Tall, pale, pudgy and sweaty, the warang asing grinned like sick dogs at her and the musicians. Some of them nodded along, their Western minds struggling to find the pattern of the gamelan. Melati easily blocked them out and flowed with the many channels of the musical river carrying her along now. Her soft soles slapped lightly upon the tile as she hopped between steps. Her spine writhed, deliciously loose and powerful, like a naga: she grinned, imagining an enormous naga carving through the earth for a new riverbed to the tune of the gamelan. And when she saw this vision in her head, she too grew.
It felt like an itch in her bones and muscles as they thickened and lengthened, but a good itch, the way her toned calves ached after climbing the temple steps. She hummed quietly to herself, working out the stress of her shivering ribs while her organs swelled and nudged against each other. She planted her bare foot upon the smooth white tiles: rather than fitting neatly within one, now her sole covered three, ten, twenty-five of them. Just when the itch was about to drive her mad, it subsided and her whole body sighed, relieved. During the process she was careful to step and turn only in one small area, as her body felt it, not to lash out and fling the way her soul wanted her to.
Because when she opened her eyes again, the gamelan, her friends and fans, and all the gawking tourists were tiny figures encircling her feet. Those who knew her remained close; the warang asing reflexively stepped back, glancing at the locals for cues as to whether they should flee. Melati’s eyes went dreamy again as she swayed in place, countering the rock of her shoulders against the roll of her hips. The balls of her feet remained planted on the cool tile, drinking in the influx of heat from her muscles, while her calves tensed and relaxed and her heels rose and fell slightly. At her dimensions, somewhere under fifteen meters, the little people stood taller than her ankles and that was about it. She rocked her legs rhythmically, to the plonking, relentless beat of the gamelan, cycling in place to show the newcomers she meant no harm. When their tiny shapes stopped looking for the exit and rejoined the crowd ringing her feet, then it was time for her to dance again.
Anyone could perform this dance. Her friends were as good or better at it than she was, and she accepted this. She brought her modern interpretation to the bedhaya and srimpi that not everyone she knew was entirely approving of, and that was fine too. The one thing she could do that no one else in Jogjakarta could was grow into the raksasa wanita. From these dimensions, her movements took on new significance. When she raised her leg, turned, and stepped down again, it became a gesture of limitless power, the way her quads raised her mighty limb and how it broke through the air as she spun. The crowd witnessed how her huge calves bunched, stood out in rough-hewn angles, then melded into long, sweet curves from her heel once more.
And as this was a rehearsal day, she was not dressed in her traditional performance garb. Today she only wore a simple cotton slip that would have been fine for walking around Jalan Gading Sari II with her friends, looking for cute guys or a bowl of bakso. Though the sheath dress grew with her, the most disrespectful among the warang asing would peek (or leer) upward and realize that Melati didn’t care to wear anything underneath. Again, she placed this beneath her concern, letting small people do what they would, and gave herself over to the dance.
Now she was clear of the bamboo hut that held the gamelan (musicians), playing gamelan (genre of music) on their gamelan (instruments). She was clear of the warung, where surly young men in jeans ate egg rolls on their scooters, flanked by flapping vinyl banners proclaiming resto names and menus. Few of the tall, slender trees in thriving, deep green leaves came up to her thighs. Everything, everything was below and underneath her as she stretched her legs into the humid atmosphere, flinging her arms in wide, dramatic circles. This was what she loved, opening herself up to the world that remained enormous and beautiful no matter how large she became. The sun beat upon her, challenging her to endure its bold rays, but her long arms and bare shoulders and smiling face only drank it in, the burning now familiar and beloved to her as a fond childhood experience.
It was from childhood that she gained her love of dance. Her mother, professor of Javanese literature at Universitas Indonesia, hoped for more for her daughter than to shake her hindquarters in time to the flickering Western images on their TV. It was her father who saw the potential for little Melati to tap into her culture. His interests centered on the slightly supernatural shadow-puppet show, wayang kulit, through which he related the traditional stories of the creation of the world and the formation of his people. Scraping some rupiah together, he got her started in ronggeng, the beloved and decidedly low-class traditional dance, where she made friends with the other dancers. Yet in time, they elevated to the courtly bedhaya and began to divide as her friends preserved the traditional form and Melati could not resist introducing the complex melodies of Janelle Monae and the irresistible beats of Nicki Minaj and Doja Cat. “She has a firm grasp of the fundamentals,” her father explained to her disapproving mother, “but I know as well as anyone there’s nothing wrong with adjusting one’s technique to modern audiences.” Though her mother strove for the preservation of their culture, there was little she could say to this, since her father was on the street, trying to appeal to the fickle tastes of sight-seeing, children-toting French and Germans or luring the Australians revelers who regarded Southeast Asia the way American college students treated Tijuana.
All these thoughts swam like soto ayam (chicken noodle soup) through her enlarged skull, threatening to throw her off balance. Their influence was weak at best: Melati simply trained her hearing upon the small shack by her feet, picking out the bells and drums over the dull drone of Jogjakarta streets, and reliving that joy she cherished since her childhood.
She rarely knew how long her performances lasted. Sometimes the tourists were kept for an hour while the giantess writhed in the air above them; other times, Melati returned to her normal size within ten minutes, generating much grumbling and few tips from the foreigners. It really wasn’t up to her. It was a combination of many elements: the feeling of the gamelan, the weather that wrapped itself around her, the good and evil spirits that visited and plagued her during the performance, anything at all.
Today she lasted quite a while, giving the audience all they could hope for and more. They watched her huge feet rise and slap against the pristine, glassy tiles. They ooh’ed and ahh’ed as her long limbs swooped through the soupy air with great whooshing noises. It was difficult for them to stare up at the raksasa wanita without violating her privacy, but they watched the immense creature twist and roll in the sky, writhing in an ecstasy they could only catch second-hand. Whatever was going on in that great skull of hers, they couldn’t begin to perceive. They only knew the sensuous allure of her toned, colossal limbs and the frisson of panic as her great feet slapped the ground not far enough from where they stood. The women exulted in her expressions of joy as the glorious woman lost herself in the dance; the men daydreamed of scaling her inner thighs or clinging to those bouncing, swinging breasts. At the end of it, there was enough money in the woven basket to take a break for a couple weeks, but Melati would be right back at it the next day, always seeking that perfect note, that graceful stroke of arms, waiting for the spirit of her nation to carry her away again in the unconventional marriage of her father’s and mother’s values.
The warang asing jabbered at her in their tongues, tripping over their pronunciation of “cantik” and “bukan main.” They took selfies with her—at her normal size, to their dismay—and they drifted off to the internet cafes and restos and villas until the next installment in their Eat, Pray, Love fulfillment voyage.
All except one: a bald man wearing circular glasses and a tight black T-shirt, only a little taller than herself. He was of milky complexion and muscular build, with a tight smile that somehow felt merely pragmatic. Melati recognized him from the performance: he was not among the skittish tourists. He stood boldly before her feet, staring up at her and not up her dress. Her toes, longer than his forearms, flexed and mashed against the tile; her broad soles lifted, casting him in shadow, and crashed to the floor again, and he’d stood in place, whether out of stupidity or implicit trust in the performer. It was the latter, she learned, as she got to know Otto.
“I wish I could say something more interesting than ‘you dance very well’,” he said. Due to her abundant experience with foreigners, she pegged his accent as likely German, though he spoke English to her. She thanked him politely and started to turn away.
“I was compelled, truly,” he continued. “The fact of your size is, of course, magnificent, but there is something in your movements that…” He smirked, nudging his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “Please pardon my forward speech, I don’t know how to say this any other way. I saw great potential in your performance.”
Melati smiled blankly at him, giving him nothing. Perhaps he didn’t know how insulting this sounded; perhaps he did and didn’t care, like a German, or else it was a translational error as they engaged in the lingua franca that was not their own. She decided to give him a little more time, if not any form of response.
“Please, have you had any lunch? Allow me to treat you.” To this she consented, and she learned all about the choreographer from Stuttgart, taking a break (yet never really taking a break) from his discipline to immerse himself in the Indonesian dream. Over nasi goreng and ikan bakar she suffered his story: his father conducted an orchestra and his mother was a ballet dancer. Rigid discipline was part of his DNA, and within these constraints he explored people’s capacity for expression and conversation through motion. While there was plenty of material and precedent to work with, the nascent Otto knew there was something else, something mystical and significant in the periphery of his art. “Make no mistake, I love my heritage and deeply respect its disciplines. Many times, I have felt no greater pride than to manifest the strictures of my predecessors.” Though his face was as flat as a sheer cliff wall, Melati sensed a kindred wryness to his words. Tradition was important and beautiful, but she recognized the germination of greater, radical ideas within this man’s chest, vines of revolution that sought to expand or burst its container.
Otto fastidiously scooped the long, transparent bones from his fish and stacked them on the edge of his plate. “I do not wish to flatter myself by saying I see something of this restlessness inside you as well. Your dance is neither mere sloppiness nor simple rebellion. There is something deeper inside you longing to be expressed. Yes, Western-influenced perhaps, but it is the kernel of that foreign influence embedded in the rich, volcanic Indonesian soil which I wish to see flourish.” He looked up at her, reached for her hand, withdrew his grasp. “A beautiful young woman such as yourself, you need space to grow and develop, and please overlook the pun. What I saw today was a little more than miraculous, I think. It was revolutionary. The final component of a gigantic, finely formed young woman…”
Melati sucked in her breath, politely looking away from the ranting man. His vision was accurate, in picking out her impatience with rising to fulfill her traditional dance structure, and going no further. The way his glasses glittered as she spoke of her “powerful thighs,” her “caramel-colored arms,” she did not care for. She was uninterested in the attention and priorities of foreign penises, all she wanted to do was dance, explore the boundaries of that dance, and break through those boundaries, over and over. Still, whatever else was going on in that cannonball-shaped German skull, Otto seemed to understand and appreciate something important in her chosen mode of expression. And when he asked his question, the inevitable question she saw as her big toe slid across the tile before his miniature Oxfords, she simply said “yes.”
In a gymnasium, the fortuitous nexus between their two cultures, Otto slowly circled his protegee as she went through the movements. “Back straight,” he advised, gripping his elbows. “Hold your back upright and lift your chin, here, like this.”
Melati found the position uncomfortable. It cramped her muscles in places she wasn’t used to using, or forced them to hold a position she wasn’t accustomed to. Any time she felt a twinge or a pull along her spine, she rolled her shoulders and sent a wave of motion down her back and into her hips. This relieved it immediately, but it also earned Otto’s disapproval. “You looked like you were about to fall over. Are you sure you’re feeling well? Is the heat getting to you?”
The question galled her, as she was born in this climate and savored it like the flap of the magpie goose’s wings or the little tree frog’s resonant croak. It was the German who always mopped his shiny, round head with his kerchief or stood beneath the gust of the AC unit. She enjoyed swaying and stepping further from the AC, compelling him to either holler instruction at her or else step out of his comfort zone.
“Don’t writhe so much, fraulein. Your spine twists this way and that, it’s no good.” He sighed, nudging his glasses back up. “Please, just for me, just this once. Here, observe. Left, dip, rise; right, dip, rise. And then left again, sweep your leg clockwise, right again, sweep your leg counter-clock— …no, the other one. Left leg, left sweep; right leg, right sweep.” Sweating in his uniform of black T-shirt and breezy traveler’s pants, he held his arms spread, tilted his chin up, and demonstrated the step.
Melati detested the movement. She felt that Germans danced as though they were balancing a tray of glasses in one hand and trying to see something over the heads of the crowd. This was not her way, even in her blended style. The vision of the squirming, restless naga was what pleased her and to which she aspired. The roll of her neck as her head scanned the heavens and swept the ground was her regal gesture, surveying all her countryside and the heavens above. The idea of her giantess-self positioning herself at right angles to the ground, ducking and swooping while balancing upright, created an ungainly, offensive image. It would be like one of the skyscrapers downtown suddenly coming to live and twisting like a screwdriver into the ground, attempting to demonstrate something beautiful. She wondered if there was something in German history to be learned by the way Otto held his head steady, his gaze fixed in one direction no matter what his limbs did, while he danced.
Yet his choreography was not without beauty, especially when he performed it. She enjoyed watching him perform the moves from his homeland. The way he held his arms aloft, how his strong legs lifted and bounced his upper body no matter what position he took, he almost looked as though he were floating in the water or hovering in the air. She saw the conviction in his movements, the way his face shifted from frustration at trying to control the snake-girl to confidence, even peacefulness, as his muscles pulled him through his gestures. She admired the controlled posture of his arms, angled like the crystalline structure of sugar, and the musculature of his legs, carrying him smoothly from one step to another. It really wasn’t so different, the way their legs bent and knotted to support their bodies, moving them forward and through their turns. Some part of her wanted to glimpse his strong legs, out of curiosity, to see the muscles bunched and pumping under his pale skin.
“You see?” he barked, snapping Melati out of her daydream. “This is the proper form. I’m not asking you to make a career of it, but … how do we say … One must learn the rules before one breaks them.” Stiffening, he bowed slightly and dumped his open palms toward her. But she did not feel like performing for him just now.
It was not often the young giantess, at any size, condescended to speak to those around her, but now she did. If she didn’t speak, she would have to break something or set something on fire, whether a neighbor’s house or the self-satisfied choreographer wiping his temples on his shoulders. “I think there is something you’re missing, in my style of dance, the way I was taught.”
Raising his eyebrows, Otto very nearly smiled as he asked her to elaborate.
“It is a feeling in our dance. You have it too, sometimes. I can see it in your eyes as you perform. But it is not the same as our spirit.” Her bottom lip pouted as she considered how much she should reveal to this outsider. If she was going to work with him, if she was going to hang around for much longer, then there was something intrinsic to her that he needed to understand. “We call it rasa. It’s … this feeling.” Melati knew the words would run out, so she let her body take over. Her arms reared as her torso twisted, shoving her ribs this way while her hips did something else. The way he danced, with simple moves that mirrored themselves, was completely incompatible with the expression of her soul in her movements. “It’s open, you open yourself to it,” she murmured. “You don’t memorize a pattern and perform that pattern. Do you see?”
She felt the German’s eyes upon her, studying her, straining to understand rather than to critique. With gamelan in her head, she lunged this way and melted in that direction. Her hips thrust to the Western off-beat, while the naga churned her in a slow circle upon the floor. She lifted her arm, twisted her hand, and her smiling face followed its track, then retreated and reversed. In that sense, her moves were not entirely unlike the patterns Otto relied upon in his execution, maybe. “I’ve given a hundred performances,” she said, alluding to a much larger number, “and I don’t think I’ve ever moved the same way twice. It’s just how you feel, how the musicians are behaving that night, what you ate and what you talked about with your mother, dancing while the birds swarm before the mosquitos arrive, followed by the bats until the stars fill the sky.” It was difficult for her to put it into words, but not hard at all to contrast it to the rigid positions he wanted her to memorize and stumble through in correct order.
Otto’s nostrils hissed. He never raised his voice with the Jogja woman, and he never swore. He never so much as stood and trembled with barely suppressed rage. At his worst, he gusted two lungs of air through his pinched nostrils and waited a couple seconds before speaking. “Slowly, I’m beginning to understand, perhaps. And yet as different as our dances appear, perhaps they are not so unalike, yes?” He listed the aspects that she herself had noticed, how his disciplined choreography brought out a shining light from within him, at its embodiment and mastery, not unlike the vision of the huge, beautiful naga that she tried to emulate, bringing out the raksasa wanita at last. It was a different path, generating the light within as opposed to following the light’s call, but the destination was the same.
They spoke much longer, shifting from defending their heritage to seeking out the points in common. She moved her fluid arms, he cast waves from his shoulder to his wrist. Her legs bent and turned, bending with the elusive frequency that flowed all around her, and his steps and stomps created a personal resonance to fill his body. Melati aped him briefly, showing him how silly it looked to hold her spine so stiff, until she turned and stepped backward and bobbed forward and found herself in a position befitting Indonesia’s historic ruling class. Bordering on offensive, Otto gesticulated a loose, random dance styling he thought looked like her bedhaya style, when suddenly his shoulders rolled in a counter-rhythm to his swinging fists, punctuated by his Germanic stomps. He stared at his limbs, not recognizing them for a moment. “That felt really good,” he said quietly.
“It looked really good,” Melati said, and it did. He tried to replicate it and failed, but her quick eyes soaked the sequence in readily and they practiced it together. When it would ever come in handy, who could know, but it was a fun move to have in their collection. She noted, without wanting to make him feel self-conscious, that he had come dangerously close to smiling.
Melati practiced a little while longer, earnestly wanting to understand some of what Otto was trying to get across. “I think we have found some moves that aren’t entirely conflicting,” she said. “How about this: I will practice and perform some of your steps that we find compatible, but you must leave me room to pursue my spirituality.”
His jaw fell open at her words. “My dear, the last thing I would ever want to do is crush your spirit.” He stepped close, reached out for her cheek, then withdrew his hand.
Melati was surprised to feel her heart leap in anticipation of that touch.
Aborigen 
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