Drive-by Saviours by Chris Benjamin

two. They had two themes: improving one’s social status and keeping Indonesia united, traditional and uninfluenced by foreigners.
    Although the depth of the stories and the fluency of the language remained excellent, Bumi felt he had learned about social climbing and unfettered sovereignty as well as he could. He was ready to move on. He asked Ibu Nova if there were any books at the school about anything else, which earned him a rapping of the knuckles at the front of the class.
    The punishment touched that hard part of his heart belonging to Yusupu and brought a strange mix of longing and the pain of betrayal, which was multiplied by the laughter of his jealous friends. The ones he’d once led in childhood role-play games had turned on him.
    But the physical punishment and the laughter of his cohorts was nothing compared to being made to sit with the others and raise his hand before answering a question. And by ignoring his madly waving hand Ibu Nova assured his eventual non-participation. Bumi instead learned to sit upright with eyes wide and mouth shut while his mind reworked the stories he knew: the novels, the news, Arum’s interpretations, Pram’s war, his uncle’s fishing stories, all into an epic tale of his rise against Ibu Nova’s oppression, and later against Allah Himself, with Alfi standing defiantly by his side staring at clouds as if they held their own significance and God was but an afterthought.
    As the weeks passed and Bumi’s requests to visit Rilaka on their day off went unheeded, the fantasy got bloodier. First Ibu Nova got it in the neck with a fountain pen. Then the communists who tried to make Bumi stupid and ignorant like his classmates were executed with WWII Japanese machine guns. Then, for some reason or other, Yusupu died of a fish spear through his heart. In the end, Bumi always returned to Rilaka and married Alfi, the two became King and Queen of the Island, and people came from all over Indonesia to hear his stories and advice, the end.
    These dreams were the highlight of Bumi’s school life. When class was not in session the boys just wanted to play soccer and the girls just wanted to watch, despite Ibu Nova’s encouragement that they, and Bumi, join the game. Bumi tried to start up some Monsters of the Deep, but it was too island specific and remembering that other life allowed for the surfacing of better-left-buried emotions. Besides that, no one wanted to take orders from a loud-mouthed, know-it-all troublemaker.
    His development into an outcast made escape a real possibility. Instead of planning logistics for fifteen, Bumi had only himself to think about. Within two months his classmates had forgotten all about visiting Rilaka. Their parents never bothered to show their faces at the school residence.
    In the Makassar newspaper Bumi had seen an ad for trips by a great big bus with cushy seats and air-conditioning. The cost of a trip to the mountain district of Tana Toraja was three thousand rupiah and Bumi hadn’t seen or touched money since he’d begun his new existence at school. His best chance, and the only one he could think of, was Arum.
    By getting ‘lost’ during a bus transfer on a class trip to the WWII Museum, Bumi managed to take the ‘wrong’ bus to the market instead, where he quickly found Pram in the old spot behind the street meat. Pram jumped to his feet to embrace the boy with such fervour he lost his balance and projectile-vomited onto the sidewalk. “Bumi!” he cried, wiping puke from the corners of his mouth. “Where have you been?”
    Bumi was about to explain when the skewer vendor charged at them waving a long, sharp, two-pronged fork hollering, “Away from my customers you sacrilegious bum!”
    Bumi, who was adept at dodging disciplinarians, grabbed and pulled Pram’s hand, running hard. They ran two blocks before realizing the vendor had dropped his pursuit early. Pram puked