Free Indonesia, Etc.: Exploring the Improbable Nation by Elizabeth Pisani Page A

other hand, had been feature of Jakarta life for as long as I could remember.
    Though the word is a mash-up of wanita – woman – and pria – man, waria live entirely as women, sometimes with a husband. Most still have all their male anatomy intact, though many take female hormones, and breast implants are increasingly common. Culturally, they play a very singular role. They are accepted in part because of a long heritage that stems from the Bissu priests who often sailed in the magnificent trading schooners built by the Bugis people of South Sulawesi. The Bissu are often described as ‘intersex’; they are said still now to be able to channel the gods when in a trance. Though the Bugis ethnic group is fiercely Islamic, they have always accepted this duality. ‘Well, of course God speaks through the Bissu,’ the wife of a sub-district head in the Bissu’s heartland told me: ‘Because God has no gender. Allah is not a man and not a woman.’ Minutes later – sitting in her doilied living room, wearing a pretty silk sarong – the senior Bissu in the area described how s/he cured white discharge from the penis with red onions, and asked my advice on what to do about genital ulcers.
    While the Bissu still perform quasi-religious ceremonies, most run-of-the-mill waria are more likely to feature in cabarets. Their ‘neither quite one thing, nor quite the other’ status once afforded them a political role. Not unlike the fool in Shakespeare’s plays, waria sometimes spoke truth to power when no one else was allowed to. Or at least to the wives of power. One of my abiding memories of the Suharto years was watching a cabaret in which a group of waria in a make-believe salon tended to their ‘clients’, puffing hair up into matronly helmets, pancaking on the make-up, and turning out perfect Ibu-Ibu : a replica of Tien Suharto’s circle. The salon chat among the clients was of the minister’s wife who was having an affair with the oligarch, of which foreign companies offered the best cuts for corrupt deals, of tips and tricks their husbands had developed for squeezing money out of Suharto’s kids. These were things that no one else talked about openly at the time. The audience shrieked with laughter, they clapped perfectly manicured claws in delighted recognition. Almost everyone sitting watching the show was herself a real, dyed-in-the-silk Ibu-Ibu .
    By the time I started planning the HIV survey, that special status had been eroded by the cacophony of free speech unleashed by the democratic reforms. The cabaret shows continued, but most waria made a living by working in a salon by day and/or selling sex on the streets after dark. So every night, I would go out with a team of interviewers, including three off-duty waria, and cruise the pavements, inviting people to participate in our survey. On the streets, waria specialize in blowing kisses and flashing body-parts, in shrieking and teasing prospective clients who cruise slowly past in cars or on motorbikes. They teased me, too, these biological men who wanted to be women, perhaps offended by my lack of femininity. Why couldn’t I walk in high heels? Why didn’t I ever have a decent manicure? ‘Here, allow me . . .’ and they whip nail varnish out of their clutch bags, and I’d be sitting on a pavement after midnight having my nails painted by a transgender sex worker. The evenings were punctuated by high drama; one night, shortly before local elections when the mayor wanted to show how tough he was on immoral behaviour, there was a sweeping of sex workers and half the research team got arrested. There were cat-fights between waria who wanted to be in charge of study recruitment in their area, study staff ran off with clients mid-interview, and I once came close to losing all the blood samples we had collected because the cops at a road block saw used syringes, pegged me for a drug dealer and tried to confiscate all my kit.
    They were busy nights, usually ending