Black Waves of Senjakala

BLACK WAVES OF SENJAKALA, is the story of an American Eurasian graduate student, Kirana Nindita, who has taken a leave of absence from her university and traveled to Indonesia to become in engaged in anthropological fieldwork in a remote and dangerous area. A chance meeting has led to Kirana moving to Indonesia to study the language and prepare for her challenging assignment. As the novel opens, Kirana is in jungly East Java; by that night, she has journeyed to Bali, to meet her employer, Kamolmal Sceve: in person, the plan being that Kirana will then immediately depart for the extreme eastern region of Indonesia. Kirana accepts a challenging anthropological task in Maluku Tengara, the Southern Moluccas, which islands once struck fear in the hearts of the Dutch colonials, who had tried to seize them 300 years earlier. By 1974, not much had changed. Isolated animistic societies with intricate beliefs and strange rituals are what Kirana has been sent to study and draw images of. She is to be well-paid, it is dangerous work, it will be a feather in her cap when she returns to graduate school. However, her employer has a very dubious reputation among the long-term, seasoned, and hip Bali residents Kirana happens to know. All of them urgently dissuade her from setting out on this journey: she would be nothing more than a plum to be swiped and sold out there. In the 1970s, following the immense political upheavals in Indonesia in the 1960s, all outer parts of the country were closed to tourism. Journalists sneaking out there were shot: a permission letter from Jakarta was essential. There was no tourist industry among these thousands of islands, back in time, some still upset about the Japanese occupation of World War 2. An older gentleman, a trusted friend, tries to stop her from going. Good luck, this young lady means business, off she goes. Alone, she traverses wild, tangled West Bali, on foot, and boards a questionable tramp steamer on the north coast. This is where the juggernaut she is unkheading into starts: she gets on the wrong boat. This boat is sunk by pirates off Komodo, and Kirana, goes through a chaotic escape that leaves her circling her death on the edge of a huge whirlpool, from which she is rescued at the last instant. Thereafter she is taken way off the beaten path, down to Sumba Island, with unsavory people eager to see an animistic horse-and-spear battle called Pasola. Kirana has an unnerving long journey on Sumba; and during this time she begins to learn that she going to have to fight to be left alone every second, that she will have to see things coming, and that she will not have the luxury of getting tired and wearing out; because the science of survival in unregulated outlands is unceasingly threatening, even worse in a war zone; and the pressing of tasks, solving of problems is never-ending. From Sumba she is 'rescued' onto another coastal chugger, which hauls her from the lowest latitude of Indonesia, way up into the ocean expanse of the Central Moluccas, where she is imprisoned in a fugitive port for use of the men. Thereafter Kirana is forced to nearly prehistoric Wetar, and here the intensity of a tough story goes up about four levels; next, to war-torn East Timor; and into the turquoise coastal waters of Irian Jaya, where just as her end seems certain, the odds suddenly swing in her favor, and she is lifted out of an ordeal so relentless and harsh she could never have imagined it.