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 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 foresaw as her big toe slid across the tile before his miniature Oxfords, she simply said “yes.”