The God of Small Things

Entering 2020 I got a lot of goals to be achieved. Among those goals are all of my articles, essay, journal, or whatever I have written, got translated into English. I found this is the easiest way to push myself drafting. I do give a fuck with grammatical or spelling, but I don’t want to strictly make it perfect.

#1. The God of Small Things, Sunday 20^th October 2019

Traveling home to my parents' house at Sukabumi now becomes my new habit. As the distance is relatively close, compare to 2 years ago when I still living in Surabaya, I at least take a short 3 to 4 hours journey in every 3 weeks. It was 28^th September 2019 when I took the last journey. At the point I sat down on the train 3 weeks ago, until I found myself inside the same train this morning, I saw the city change bit by bit – I was amazed by how my little city grow.

It takes more than a year after graduating from college until I realized that I was challenged. But by whom?

I shall face the truth, a pretty and enchanting reality that I am NOTHING, while In front of me are thousands of doors from which I shall start over. What I have to do is to decide which door I want to open. I did a lot of mistakes in the past of how I bring myself: I turned to another direction for no good reason and abruptly change my plan. Now every single hesitance, even a thought to start doing a new thing, can easily put me into dejected feeling. I face a big deal problem of how to be an adult, which I rarely given a fuck at before. I realize that a decisive change shall be taken, although I have a lack of resources to understand even the smallest thing, such as a simple rule of thumb of how I have to pay every single stupidity I’ve done.

When randomly took a book from my bookshelf this morning, I found The God of Small Things novel. It belongs to my sister. I don’t remember how it finally ends up there but I steal her books so often, then it makes any sense. The book that told the story about British colonial era in India reminds me of Pramoedya Ananta Toer works, but in another version with different cultural backgrounds. Nevertheless, I found a subtle similarity in how the cruelty is going on.

I’m not going to make a review of the book here. But, there is something slip into my mind just by reading its title and it feels like someone slaps my face.

How I can expect the big thing will happen, if I always ignoring all of little thing scattered around?

I heard about this very often, yet it never put me into this feeling before: to bring myself in such a manner that I never ignore all the little thing.  I never really understand that the trivial can bring the most important thing in my life, or even show me the turning point.

I can’t simply ignoring the daily small act such as praying in mosque, answer my mother’s chat in WhatsApp immediately, or push myself to attend monthly religious talk at my working place. 

I found that taking such things into account, in a serious way, is somehow similar with witnessing my little city growing.