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It was later still that I came to understand that there was something in the character of Ekalaya that gave Ayah the strength to survive. After having at first been rejected by Dorna, Ekalaya had found his own way to study with the teacher. Every day, prior to his practice, this noble knight would bow before his teacher — even on that final day of instruction when the duplicitous Dorna asked Ekalaya for his thumb, which he willingly gave. Ekalaya knew that regardless of Dorna’s rejection, the world of bowmen would accept him. He was, after all, the best bowman in the entire universe — even if in the Mahabharata Dorna had awarded this title to Arjuna, his personal favorite. Ayah knew that even if the Indonesian government rejected him, he was not being rejected by his country. It was not his homeland rejecting him. And that is the reason he stored a pile of cloves in the one large apothecary jar and several handfuls of turmeric in the other one that sat on the bookshelf in his living room. From them emitted the scent of Indonesia.

Around the time I was twelve, after all the visa rejections, the clove-smelling ceremonies, and Ayah’s repeated reenactment of Ekalaya’s tale, I had to conclude that Ayah was Ekalaya. He might be rejected, but he would survive even if his steps were marked by wounds and blood.

LE COUP DE FOUDRE… Who believes in le coup de foudre ? Love at first sight is a romantic phrase held dear to the heart by those same people who think that Paris, City of Light, has a never-ending supply of amour .

I was born into the family of Laurence and Marianne Deveraux. My father is a man who believes in reason and that life ends when the heart stops beating and the oxygen tube for artificial resuscitation is removed. All those stories about life after death were, for my family, a romantic notion on the part of people who believe that humans are immortal beings. Such people want to extend life, something that is, by nature, finite. They don’t want the thread of life to be broken or for it to end in uncertainty. I believed then, and I believe now, that life is transitory, that it will end one day. My family were deviants among the Deveraux clan, Roman Catholics mostly who spent their Sundays going to church and sharing a communal meal.

Given this way of thinking among my immediate family, people who lived and worked for the day, I obviously did not believe in le coup de foudre . How could you fall in love with a person you’d only just met? Or someone whose eyes you’d only just seen? Not likely. Jamais!

According to Indonesians I later came to meet, my attitude was kualat . This word, originally of Arabic derivation, was one with no direct equivalent in French. Dimas tried to explain its meaning to me, which was, approximately, that I was in some way doomed to a particular fate because of something I had done or spoken. Specifically as regards to me, the situation did not prove to be calamitous. I was kualat because my own words turned against me.

May 1968 was an important time not only because of the students and workers’ revolution in Paris; it was also then that my arrogance was shattered and I was forced to believe in le coup de foudre .

It was the moment I saw him, that Asian man on the Sorbonne campus. I guessed he was from Indochina. With his brown skin, I thought he might be from Vietnam. But he was tall for an Asian man. And with his curly hair and aquiline nose he might even have been from the Middle East. From a distance, I caught him watching me; but when I looked at him he pretended to be busy puffing on his cigarette, as if that was going to help ward off the cold wind blowing that evening. He was standing at a distance, by himself, watching my fellow students who were huddled together against the cold and the government. I thought he might be a journalist who had ventured onto campus. There was no longer any artificial division between the students and citizens of Paris. Everyone mingled and mixed together. But no, he was alone, without a camera, watching history as it unfolded.

Some friends of mine and I had gathered beneath the statue of Victor Hugo and were waiting to hear Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a sociology student who was the student movement’s most vocal leader. There were so many people, all of them pushing their way forward, excited to see what was going on. There must have been thousands of people who had gathered there. But then my desire to hear Cohn-Bendit’s oration — and to glimpse his handsome face — suddenly withered, all because of him, that exotic-looking man, standing alone, undisturbed by both the mass of humanity and the brisk evening wind.

And then at that moment, for a second, and then two, our eyes met. And wow! How I managed to do it, I don’t know, but slowly, going against the tide of students moving in the direction of Daniel Cohn-Bendit, I eased my way from the crowd to walk in the direction of that man. That Asian man. And then came an unexpected bolt of lightning.

Le coup de foudre.

His eyes bore into mine.

I greeted him: “ Ça va? ”

SAINT-GERMAIN-DES-PRÉS, PARIS, APRIL 1998

Vivienne picked up the receiver of the telephone screaming impatiently at her. “ Oui ,” she said while stuffing lesson materials for that day’s courses into her large multi-pocketed leather bag. With the receiver clamped between her right cheek and shoulder, she filled the bag with books, folders, pens, a pocket diary, and a roll of mints. She grabbed her mug of coffee to take a sip but then suddenly stopped when she heard the name of the hospital the person on the other end of the line had just mentioned. Slowly, she placed her mug on the table.

“Dimas Suryo? Oui , that is my former husband. Pourquoi? ”

“Your name is listed as his emergency contact,” she heard the caller say.

Now was not the time for her to feel annoyed.

“Is there something wrong?”

“ Non, non , Madame. It’s just that we ran some tests on Monsieur Suryo two weeks ago and he still hasn’t picked up the results. We’ve called him several times, but he never answers the phone, so …”

“OK, I will make sure he comes to pick them up.” She took her pen and notepad. “Where in the hospital would that be?”

With that telephone call having ruined her morning, Vivienne lost her appetite for the mug of steeped luwak coffee she had just prepared. Steam from the cup rose and vanished in the air — like the story of her love for the man who had first introduced her to that wonderfully tasting coffee.

Vivienne picked up the receiver again, this time to dial Lintang’s number. She took a breath to calm herself before speaking.

“Lintang, c’est Maman .”

Love at first sight, a love that burns deep inside, and the wish to explore something new, foreign, and completely unknown are not, it turns out, enough to save a marriage. I realized that afterwards. As much as I loved Dimas and as great as my willingness was to give to him everything I had inside of me, to this day I don’t know whether he ever loved me as much as I loved him — even though he did write me a poem, which he gave to me as a gift at our wedding. In Indonesia, he said, when a couple marries there is always a brideprice to pay. And the price he paid for me was a poem whose first lines were “ Benarkah angin tak sedang mencoba / Menyentuh bibirnya yang begitu sempurna … Is it true the wind’s not trying / To touch such perfect lips… ”

He said the poem popped into his mind the first time he saw me, in May 1968, at the time of the student and workers’ movement. But did he ever really love me completely? And forever? My cousin Marie-Claire, an ever-cheerful person, always kind to everyone, told me that Dimas was an extraordinary man and would make a very suitable life partner. Mathilde, my other cousin, a much more skeptical sort, told me that Dimas was an exotic man who might be good for dating or as a lover, but not for marrying. Neither of my cousins quite understood that my attraction to and love for Dimas did not spring from some deep seated desire in me to explore a foreign territory that was exotic and unknown. Nor did it emerge from the urge to satisfy physical pleasure. Not at all. I sensed in Dimas a feeling of loss that I wanted to soothe and assuage. He had a sadness in his eyes I wanted to heal. And also, as I came to learn, he had an incredible ability to confront hardship and to survive, an ability to withstand and repulse life’s vicissitudes. At times, as I later came to see, the survival mechanisms he employed seemed to border on the obsessive; but, perhaps, such is the case of all political exiles, in every country throughout the world: their will to survive makes them obsessive about proving themselves.