0001 Journey—001 Merdeka EN

Prologue

The Volcano Clears Its Throat

The volcano did not know anyone’s plans.

This is the first thing to understand about the night of Friday, 5 September 2026, and it is the thing nobody in Terminal 3 could bring themselves to understand for at least the first two hours. Anak Krakatau — the child of Krakatoa, the island that rose out of the sea in 1927 where its mother had blown herself into the sky — began to erupt at seven minutes past eleven, local time. Nobody in the departure hall heard it. Nobody felt it. The sky above Tangerang looked like any other Jakarta sky at night: orange at the edges, starless, faintly humming.

And then, one after another, the words on the departure board began to change.

DELAYED. DELAYED. DELAYED.

Then, a little after half past eleven, as if the board had simply lost its patience with everybody: CANCELLED.

Laras Ayuningtyas was sitting on her suitcase near Gate 7 when the flight to Doha turned red. She was twenty-three. She had a Master’s scholarship to the University of Birmingham, a visa stamped into a passport that still smelled of the photocopy shop, a backpack full of chargers, and — wrapped inside a supermarket bag, inside a second supermarket bag, inside a third, because her father trusted plastic the way other men trust God — a jar of sambal bawang made at four o’clock that afternoon in a kitchen in Surabaya.

She looked at the board. She looked at the people around her beginning to stand, the way a field of grass stands when a wind it cannot see arrives. She heard a man behind her say “Gunung? Gunung apa?” and a woman answer “Krakatau, Pak, di berita,” and she thought, with the absurd clarity that arrives only at the very worst moments: Of course. Of course it’s a volcano. Nothing in my life has ever been allowed to leave quietly.

She did not cry. She wants that on the record. She sat down again, on the floor this time, with her back against a pillar, and she opened her phone, and she did the thing every twenty-three-year-old in the world now does when the ground moves under them.

She read the comments.

Seven months earlier, in February 2025 — before the scholarship, before the visa, before any of it was real — Laras had posted a thread on X under a hashtag that half the country was using that week: #KaburAjaDulu. Just leave first. Figure out the rest later. It had been a joke, mostly. Mostly a joke. A list of ten reasons, written at two in the morning after her father came home from his eleventh hour on the motorbike and fell asleep in his jacket at the kitchen table. Reason number seven had been because I’m tired of watching the people I love work until they fall asleep sitting up. That one was not a joke.

The thread had travelled further than she had ever travelled. Forty-one thousand likes. Nine thousand quote-posts. A news portal had screenshotted it under the headline GEN Z RAMAI-RAMAI INGIN KABUR: SUDAH HILANGKAH NASIONALISME? — Gen Z Wants Out: Is Nationalism Dead? — with her face blurred, badly. Her aunt in Lamongan had recognised the blurred face. So had her aunt’s WhatsApp group.

Tonight, because someone had found her again and because the internet never throws anything away, the replies had come back to life under her old words like mould under wallpaper.

Kabur pakai beasiswa uang rakyat. Mantap.

Pengkhianat. Jangan pulang sekalian.

Semoga gunungnya tahu diri.

That last one was new. Someone had written it forty minutes ago. Hopefully the volcano knows its place.

She laughed, once, the way you laugh when something is not funny at all, and a little girl across the aisle looked at her, alarmed.

Then she opened the chat with her father. It was the chat she used least and read most: a long column of his messages, almost all of them the same three words — Wis mangan, Nduk? Have you eaten, child? — sent at six in the morning, at noon, at nine at night, never with a full stop, never with an emoji. She typed, deleted, typed again, and sent:

Dad, my flight’s cancelled. Krakatau’s erupting. I’m at the airport, I’m safe. Dad, I want to ask you one thing. Answer honestly. Am I a traitor if I leave?

Two grey ticks.

They stayed grey. In the house in Surabaya, her father was asleep in his jacket in front of the small television, and his phone was on the kitchen table, face down, where he always left it so that its light would not wake him.

She waited five minutes. Then ten. Then, because you cannot sit on the floor of an international airport at midnight looking at two grey ticks forever, she did the other thing everyone does.

She searched.

She did not know what she was searching for. She typed Birmingham Indonesia, because it was the city she was going to and the country she was leaving, and because some part of her wanted proof that the two words had ever belonged in the same sentence. The internet gave her what it always gives: a university page, a travel blog, a student association, a halal restaurant with four and a half stars. And then, on the second page, something she had not expected. A long list of boats. Boats with names. UK Boat, the list was called: a collection of four hundred and thirty-two narrowboats photographed along the canals of Birmingham between 2015 and 2017 by an Indonesian who had lived there.

Number one was at the top.

She read the date first, because the date was the thing her eyes were hungry for. 5 September 2015.

She looked at the clock on her phone. 23:52. 5 September 2026.

Eleven years ago. To the day.

Then she read the name of the boat, and put her hand over her mouth, and the little girl across the aisle looked at her again.

The boat was called Merdeka.

Chapter One

The Record

This is the part of the story that belongs to me, so I will tell it the only way I can tell it honestly: exactly as I recorded it, and no further.

Between 2011 and 2017 I lived in Birmingham, and in those years I ran. I ran along the canals — ten kilometres on an ordinary morning, twenty-two on an ambitious one — on the towpaths that wind through the middle of the city a storey below the streets. And on those runs I began to notice the names of the boats — because every narrowboat on the English canals carries a name, painted on its side by someone who chose it — and then to photograph them, and then to write a line or two about each one, and number them. By the time I left, there were four hundred and thirty-two.

Number one was Merdeka. Here is everything I wrote about her, word for word, on the day:

When I was jogging on 5 September 2015 along Birmingham canals, around Cambrian Wharf, I spotted this lovely boat. And her name is Merdeka. Merdeka means freedom, it’s our Indonesian national slogan from the time of independence struggling up to now. What a lovely moment!

Beside it, the name of the photograph: DSC00372.

That is the whole record. Four sentences and a file name.

I have been tempted, many times since, to add to it. A storyteller always is. It would be easy to tell you the colour of the morning, a heron on the far bank, what I felt in my chest, whether I knocked on the door of the boat, who answered, what they said. People would believe me. Some of it might even be true.

But I did not write any of it down, and eleven years is long enough for memory to start painting its own pictures and signing them with my name. So I will not tell you those things. What I can tell you is what the record already says, if you listen to it carefully.

It says lovely, twice — this lovely boat, what a lovely moment — which is not the word of a man who is composing a story. It is the word of a man who has just seen something that made him happy and does not want to make it more complicated than it is.

It says our. Our Indonesian national slogan. Not the. The first person plural slipped into an English sentence, in a city where, for years, almost nothing had been ours.

It says from the time of independence struggling up to now — which is imperfect English, and I have left it imperfect, because it is also exactly right. The struggle did not end in 1945. It is up to now. It is still going.

And it gives a place and a date. Around Cambrian Wharf. 5 September 2015.

Cambrian Wharf is a small basin at the top of the Farmer’s Bridge locks, where the water widens and boats moor in a row beneath the flats. The date was a Saturday. Nineteen days earlier, on 17 August, Indonesia had turned seventy.

That is all. There is no owner in the record. No conversation. No explanation of why a boat on an English canal should carry, painted along its side, the word that an entire archipelago once shouted at the end of a war. The record is a door, not a room. It opens, and you can see the word, and then it stops.

Every Indonesian who reads that note asks the same question immediately. It does not need writing down. Laras asked it on the floor of Terminal 3, with her hand over her mouth, eleven years later.

Who?