When I think of the insides of the homes in Jakarta, and when I think of literature as part of the houses, I recall significance of leaf litter rather than of bookshelves — of printed pages, paperbacks, hardcovers, some ancient and some recent, lying where they had been laid, read or yet to be read, weighing on, squeezing each other, moldering (in that climate), as if growing out of the rest. Always there were some textbooks, old and new indiscriminately in the pile; there might be an issue of Newsweek, for instance, left by a foreign visitor before me. Magazines and newspapers predominated, and often the hosts used them to wrap a present, a piece of fruit, a bottle of herb medicine, a piece of batik cloth, to send me on my way: “As all vagrants know, newspapers keep you warm.”3
