The noise did not even need to be strong to be a nuisance. At first I lived in a kos a shelter made of single room accommodation. The best of these places often had walls so thin plywood or chipboard, air to be mere gestures. A friend once told me how two people fighting in the room next to her broke through the wall, still punches to another.
Although I almost never laid eyes on the man living in the room next to mine, I knew intimately the sounds he makes (and no doubt he knew me by my own). I knew when he dropped a coin, removed his shoes, put my pen broke wind. I often felt that if I returned to my side in bed, I see his face on the pillow was staring at me.
When he installed a hi-fi system in full swing, I fled to another kos . This one was more upscale, with the rooms arranged around a quadrangle of grass and each with its own veranda base. I was perfectly content. I drank tea and read a lot. But it was not to last. A resident from donated his television to the staff who, without their own room to put it in, placed on a table in the center of the lawn.
Television sets are everywhere in Jakarta, waiting rooms sidewalks rear taxi headrest. But from the number of viewers attracted donated this TV every night until the early hours, you would have thought it was some sort of alien device that had crashed to Earth from space. So powerful was the attraction that brought out, even those who had a set of their own television. They gathered around him and gawped.
Even at low volume, Indonesian soap operas are quiet affairs. A volume deemed appropriate for outdoor viewing, they sound like they are put in pens ape amplified with the screeching, gibbering cast pushing each other with electric prods. And dwarf buck teeth is always the strongest. Until it is interrupted by the heartrending advertisements for powdered milk, creams for skin whitening and instant noodles. Tired of trying to sleep with my pillow wrapped around my head, I fled again, this time at a friend's spare room.
Unfortunately, with its common semi-open design in the tropics, and being located away from the road with a tightrope of a roadway, the house of my friend welcomed the noise and received a lot of she. Bajaj , these little farting three-wheel taxis from India, were a constant din. Their two-stroke engines makes the buzzing road outside sound like a chainsaw revving competition held on a runway the plane occupied First World War.
In Jakarta, God is strong and so far the largest cacophony comes from local mosques. I had been in the city for three years and thought heard worse. I went once an alley with perfect hearing and out at the other end temporarily muted because I had not noticed the giant megaphone bolted to the wall halfway, the cable winds to the adjacent mosque. It was as if I had activated tripwire if it had just been bad timing with the call to prayer from. Maybe the preacher tried to wake the dead.
The house of my friend was at the center of the four mosques, excessive given the tiny size of the district. At the time, I was a younger man, and the call before dawn to prayer coincided with my ride in the bed after a night out. Only in most paralytic life-threatening conditions was I able to fall asleep in the middle of the amplified amplitude.
There was not complaining to anyone. It was not prudent to take matters into his own hands. Many a foreigner was beaten and imprisoned for careering into a mosque, a sleepless state apoplexy, begging for mercy and yanking the plug from the speaker.
It was when the lamentations of mosques nightmares about being hunted by zombies I moved house again triggered. This time, I lived in a closed Chinese parent. I thought I had finally found refuge. There were no mosques, Chinese Jakarta generally being either Christian or Buddhist. They tend to lose interest in foreigners was not a bad thing either. Indeed, it was liberating to walk among the people and feel invisible.
But I had not counted on the dogs in cages, or dogs tied to stakes - and all the gardens were - barking, meowing and howling all night. Unless I wanted to expand my resume serial killer dogs, prowling the neighborhood after dark raw steaks and distribution laced with strychnine, I have to move again.
I rent a modest apartment behind a convenience store, which screened balcony almost under my window. On it were some old battered chairs and a giant water tank orange plastic. Occasionally, a staff member materialized on one of the chairs for a quiet smoke. The problems started when the tank valve system stopped working and the water overflowed. I'm not talking gossip of a stream or the net stream. This was the noise made by the water on the plastic and cement. It drove me crazy.
A handyman finally seems to ease my torture, what I thought, because rather than repair the mechanism, as you might expect it to do, instead he hammered a drainage hole in the corner of the balcony floor, allowing the overflow water to wade and splash and drip - very strong - on the concrete floor of the echo disused building below. Out came the packing boxes again.
A caged bird was the problem with my next visit. What made it particularly galling was that the owner had bought the bird with money from the rental of my first month, and hung by my window. Is he trying to chase me so early? I do not agree with being caged birds. They should be free to spread their wings in nature as expected.
My sympathy for this particular bird, however, has been eroded by sharp sound singing and chirping, which destroyed my concentration during the day. I began to plot ways to kill him; perhaps subtly with poisonous seeds, or perhaps a little less subtly throwing the cage and its occupant on the road. Complaining to the owner produces only self-conscious giggles that indicated he was embarrassed not quite understand what was wrong.
And this is the heart of the problem. The majority of people in Jakarta accept noise or really are not bothered by it. The noise is part of the landscape. It's easy to be cruel and that some people are not bothered by noise simply because there is nothing in the head for trouble. But we will not go. We'll just shut up and be quiet and do not add to the noise.