The sun had climbed high enough, sending down heat that bounced off the asphalt road above.
Anom walked along the edge of the rusted train tracks toward a low building that looked like a pile of junk forced into becoming a house.
It was Mpok Lela’s food stall.
A place that was the only harbor for empty stomachs that had no ID cards but still had a few leftover coins in their pockets.
Anom walked with slumped shoulders, but his grip on that blue plastic bucket stayed firm.
He carried no hope in his head.
For him, life was a punishment he had to serve day after day without questioning it anymore.
He had been chased away too many times, looked down on too many times, just because of his ragged clothes and his smell mixed with river mud.
In a world that cared so much about appearance, Anom was visual trash whose existence was deliberately erased from sight.
Anom’s footsteps stopped right in front of the stuffy stall’s door.
He breathed in the savory smell of nasi uduk, a smell that felt very foreign yet very desired by his nose.
He quickly reached into his pocket, making sure the money from selling the fish earlier that morning was still there.
The money felt damp and dirty, just like him, but it had enough weight to buy a moment of dignity on a tin plate.
Mpok Lela, who was busy pouring hot tea into a plastic glass, turned around with a face that immediately scrunched up.
She wore a faded housedress and a small towel wrapped around her chubby neck.
Sweat flooded her forehead, making her look fiercer than usual.
“You still dare to come here, Anom?” Mpok Lela’s voice sounded like rough wood being scraped.
“Your debt in my notebook already fills a whole page.
If you’re just here to ask for leftover rice scraps, you’d better leave now before I call the market thugs.”
Anom didn’t overreact to the insult.
He was already full of all forms of social humiliation since he was a child.
To him, Mpok Lela’s harsh words were just background noise, no more painful than a stomach twisting from hunger.
He wasn’t afraid of Mpok Lela’s anger, because he had nothing valuable left to protect or fear.
He stepped forward and put a few crumpled bills on the oily wooden table.
“I have money, Mpok,” Anom said quietly.
His voice was flat, with no tone of arrogance or begging.
“Pay a little of the debt, and I want one portion of nasi uduk.
With an egg.”
Mpok Lela snorted, but her hands still moved quickly to take the money.
She counted it fast, her lips moving a little.
She swept the money into her table drawer, then took a ceramic plate that was already a little chipped on the edge.
“Sit there,” Mpok Lela ordered, pointing to a long bench with one leg propped up by a piece of brick.
Anom sat in silence.
He watched as Mpok Lela scooped the still-steaming rice onto the plate.
On that table, he saw a few other people eating in a hurry.
They all had the same pattern as most hardworking men when they eat: no talking, just the sound of spoons hitting plates.
In this place, eating wasn’t about enjoyment.
It was about refueling, so you wouldn’t faint while working later that afternoon.
A plate of nasi uduk, one blazing red egg with chili sauce, and a few pieces of fried tempeh were placed a little roughly in front of Anom.
He didn’t eat right away.
He stared at the food with a very sharp look.
Since he was a child, because he was often quiet and left out, Anom was used to noticing details that other people missed.
He watched how the steam from the rice rose slowly, how the chili oil started to soak into the white rice grains.
He started eating.
The savory coconut milk and spicy chili exploded in his mouth.
For a moment, he felt alive again.
But in between every bite, the image of the woman he met under the toll bridge that morning kept bothering his thoughts.
The dull woman, who smelled like the deepest swamp mud, and whose eyes seemed to carry the weight of thousands of years.
Anom knew that the woman wasn’t ordinary, even though she looked like the most miserable homeless person in the world.
There was something different about her aura, something that felt like eternal sorrow.
“Mpok, pack one more.
The same as this,” Anom said after finishing half of his portion.
Mpok Lela, who was wiping the table nearby, stopped suddenly.
She looked at Anom from head to toe with a wrinkled forehead.
“Takeout?
For whom?
Do you have a friend now?
You, who usually only cares about your own stomach, suddenly want to be a late-night hero?”
Anom didn’t answer.
He didn’t feel the need to explain anything to Mpok Lela.
He just pushed the remaining coins in his pocket toward her.
“Just in case I get hungry later this afternoon,” Anom answered briefly.
Mpok Lela snorted loudly, showing her dislike for an answer that didn’t satisfy her curiosity.
But money was money.
She took a piece of brown paper and started wrapping the nasi uduk with slower movements, as if purposely trying to test Anom’s patience.
Anom took the still-warm package.
He paid until his money was completely gone, leaving nothing for tomorrow.
He walked out of the stall, ignoring the stares of some people who were surprised to see him carrying a package of what they considered fancy food.
He walked back toward the toll bridge, through the street dust that stuck to his sweaty skin.
The walk felt slower this time because he tried to keep the rice package from getting damaged.
When he arrived under the giant, dark, damp concrete, he saw the woman was still in the same place.
She hadn’t moved at all, like a statue made of mud.
She sat leaning against the concrete pillar, her eyes staring into the distance with an empty look.
Anom approached without hesitation.
He sat on a piece of concrete in front of the woman, placing the nasi uduk package on a piece of old wood that served as an emergency table.
“Eat,” Anom said flatly.
The woman slowly shifted her gaze toward the package in front of her.
She stared at it for a long time, as if trying to understand what this thing actually was.
She showed no signs of joy or appetite.
Instead, she looked very lazy, as if even moving her hand was an exhausting effort.
She was a goddess who had once healed thousands of wounds in the heavens, but now she felt like a snakehead fish trapped in thick mud.
But Anom’s presence gave a different feeling.
This was the first human who didn’t look at her with disgust, nor with fear.
Anom looked at her as if they were two equal creatures in the face of the world’s misfortune.
The woman slowly opened the rice package.
The savory smell of nasi uduk escaped, trying to fight against the mud smell stuck to her body.
She took a little rice with her fingertips, put it in her mouth with very slow movements.
“Who are you?” the woman asked.
Her voice was very thin, almost lost to the wind blowing between the concrete pillars.
“Anom,” the man answered.
“People call me that because they think I’m strange.
I’m nobody in this world.”
The woman looked at Anom again.
She saw honesty in the man’s eyes.
She saw the same exhaustion she felt.
In the silence under the toll bridge, a bridge began to form between the two of them.
“What’s your name?” Anom asked back.
The woman was quiet.
She almost said her real name, Dewi Chan Sria, a name once respected in the land of Dewantara.
But that name now felt very heavy and painful.
She felt that name wasn’t hers anymore in a dirty place like this.
“I…
don’t have a name,” she whispered.
Anom observed the woman.
Her hair was stiff like swamp grass.
Her dull skin.
And the way she seemed very unwilling to move reminded him of something.
He remembered the snakehead fish he often found in the swamps on the edge of town.
Fish that looked lazy, sitting at the bottom of the mud, but actually had a hidden power to survive.
“If that’s the case, I’ll call you Inem,” Anom said in a casual tone.
The woman stopped chewing.
“Inem?” she repeated softly.
A name that sounded very down-to-earth, very human, and very far from any sense of godliness.
“Why Inem?” she asked.
“Because it’s a good name for someone who just woke up under a toll bridge like you.
Simple, not heavy, and it seems to fit you, who looks too lazy to move, like a snakehead fish in the mud,” Anom answered with a small smile.
Inem wasn’t offended.
Instead, she felt the name gave a little relief.
With the name Inem, she didn’t have to carry the burden of being a failed figure.
With the name Inem, she was just a poor woman eating nasi uduk next to a man named Anom.
She continued eating with a slightly lighter feeling.
“Why did you give me food?” Inem asked after her last bite.
She looked at Anom with a deep stare, trying to find the motive behind this man’s kindness.
In the place she came from, there was no free kindness.
Everything was a transaction.
Anom looked away toward the murky river near them.
He shrugged indifferently.
“Because I know what hunger feels like.
It’s not nice.
And in this crazy world, there’s nothing wrong with sharing some rice once in a while.
Besides, if you were in my position, I think you’d do the same thing,” Anom answered honestly.
Anom wasn’t looking for reward or recognition.
He just did what felt right at that moment.
That honesty made Inem quiet.
She saw in Anom something she had never found before: a pure sincerity from the bottom of the mud.
Night began to fall, covering the toll bridge with thicker darkness.
The two of them sat together in a long silence.