Ibu Ari was a new bride in December, 1965 when a group of nationalist paramilitaries entered her family home and took her husband and her younger brother away, never to return. Soon after these two men disappeared, another one came to see her: Bli Made, a neighbour and village PNI leader who was rumored to have had his eye on Ibu Ari for years. No one in the family compound dared to deny Bli Made entrance that afternoon, when he marched in wearing the heavy boots of a soldier, accompanied by half a dozen of his thugs, saying he was there to carry out an 'inspection' [periksa], searching for proof of the family’s communist allegiances. When he ordered Ibu Ari to climb up the ladder to her family’s rice barn, when he followed her up and closed the door behind them, no one, they now say, could move or speak or see for the hour until the door opened again. And when Ibu Ari came down from the rice barn, clutching her kamben across her breasts, she said nothing, and her family never asked. 'We knew that she couldn’t tell us what happened,' says one of her cousins, a woman a few years younger than Ibu Ari. 'How could we speak of it? Death we could speak of; death was different. Even if we were afraid, death was something ordinary [umum]. But ‘inspecting’ women, who could speak of it? We were afraid of the words themselves.'
Ibu Ari still says nothing about that afternoon, only shakes like a tree in a storm if someone mentions Bli Made, who now appears regularly on television after having become a member of the Bali Provincial Legislature from Megawati Soekarnoputri’s PDI-P party in 1999. Ibu Ari doesn’t speak about it, but everyone in the family remembers what no one knows happened or not, so they say nothing when suddenly, in the midst of the daily women’s work of weaving ritual offerings, Ibu Ari will sometimes start speaking to no one they can see or hear, gripping her hands together in front of her chest, closing her eyes and rocking back and forth with the motions often used by women in trance to welcome deities into their bodies. Behind her back, though, some say that Ibu Ari is crazy, the kind of crazy, maybe, that happens when an unquiet history returns to inhabit the present....