They say some places have memory. Not the kind you or I
have—the kind that recalls birthdays or where you left your car keys—but
something deeper. Something that sinks into the soil and waits, patient as the
grave.
In Bandung, there’s a place like that. A school where the
ghosts don’t howl, they litigate.
Dr. Hendri Sulaeman could feel it the moment he stepped onto
the property at Ir. Juanda Street No. 93. A weight pressed against his chest,
not painful but present, like when you know someone’s watching you from across
a crowded room. The 8,480 square meters of land beneath SMAN 1 Bandung was
calling to him, whispering through cracks in the concrete.
Mine, it seemed to say. Mine again.
He straightened his tie, the cloth suddenly too tight
against his throat, and thought about the lawsuit he’d filed on behalf of the
Christian Lyceum Association. Case number 164/G/2024/PTUN.BDG. Just numbers and
letters, but they had power. The kind of power that could displace hundreds of
students, that could erase a school that had stood for generations.
The kind of power that made hashtags bloom like black
flowers across social media: #SAVESMANSABANDUNG.
(But you couldn’t save what was already claimed, could you?)
---
The metal sheeting around the old Dago Christian High School
complex glinted in the afternoon sun, a makeshift barrier between the living
and whatever was slowly reclaiming the abandoned buildings inside. Weeds pushed
through cracked foundations. Vines strangled empty doorways. The white banner
warning “No entry without permission” flapped weakly in the breeze, its edges
frayed and darkened with mold.
Pak Wiranto, the security guard who’d worked at SMAN 1 for
thirty years, wouldn’t go near the fence after sunset. Not since he’d heard
singing from within the empty complex. Children’s voices, he said, reciting
Dutch lessons in perfect harmony.
“The same damn verse, over and over,” he told anyone who’d
listen, his eyes bloodshot from insomnia. “Like they’re waiting for someone to
grade them.”
No one believed him, of course. Why would they? The rational
mind has little room for phantom schoolchildren.
But then, the rational mind hadn’t been here in 1927, when
Het Christelijk Lyceum first claimed the land. It hadn’t witnessed what
happened when the ownership changed hands through the years—from Dutch
colonizers to Japanese occupiers, from The Joe Twan’s family villa to the
Allied hospital where so many had died in those tumultuous post-war days.
Some said the ground was soaked with more than just
rainwater.
---
Hans Go had known. Even back in 1948, when he was just a
scared Chinese kid trying to get an education in a world that saw him as
less-than, he’d sensed something wasn’t right.
“We were prototypes,” he wrote decades later, fingers
trembling as he typed his memoir for the Chinese Indonesian Heritage Centre. “Marginal
men among the many. Our identities questioned, our sense of self adrift.”
What Hans never wrote about—what he couldn’t bring himself
to commit to paper—were the dreams. The ones where his classmates appeared to
him with dripping wet hair, skin pruned and pale, asking why they couldn’t swim
in the pool reserved for Europeans. In these nightmares, their eyes were
hollow, and behind them stood the math teacher, Manusama, reciting equations
that somehow always equaled zero.
Zero like the sum of their belonging.
Zero like the space they were allowed to occupy.
Hans was lucky. He got out, became successful, ended his
days as the supervisory director of GoTan BV. But sometimes, in the dark hours
before dawn, he’d wake up convinced he was back at Christelijk Lyceum, the only
Chinese face in a sea of thirty students. And the building around him would be
creaking, settling, remembering.
---
When PT Graha Multi Insani partnered with the Christian
Lyceum Association to “handle” the land dispute, their executives started
having the dreams too.
It began with Marco Tanujaya, GMI’s project lead. Just
flashes at first—children in old-fashioned school uniforms, standing in perfect
rows. The Joe Twan’s family, hosting elegant garden parties on the villa
grounds. Japanese soldiers transforming classrooms into holding cells.
“It’s just stress,” his wife told him, pressing a cool cloth
to his forehead. “This lawsuit is too much pressure.”
But the dreams got worse. Now, when Marco closed his eyes,
he saw the land itself—not as dirt and rock, but as something alive. Something
that had been carved up and distributed like a carcass, its pieces given to
SMAN 1 Bandung, Dago Christian High School, National High School, Pembangunan
High School.
And it wanted to be whole again.
“We have legal claim,” Dr. Sulaeman assured him during their
weekly meetings. “The nationalization was improper. The land belongs to the
Association.”
Marco would nod, his mouth dry. He never mentioned how, when
he reviewed the property maps, the parcels seemed to pulse like organs. How
sometimes, if he stared too long at the boundaries, they blurred into the shape
of a mouth—open, hungry.
---
The judge presiding over case number 164/G/2024/PTUN.BDG
lived alone in a modest apartment fifteen minutes from the courthouse. Each
night, after reviewing the day’s proceedings, he’d pour himself two fingers of
whiskey and think about his ruling.
The evidence was compelling. The Christian Lyceum
Association had documents dating back to colonial times. There were
inconsistencies in the nationalization process. The government’s case wasn’t
airtight.
But lately, something had been interfering with his
concentration. A sound like chalk on blackboard, coming from the empty bedroom
down the hall. The room he’d planned as a nursery before his wife miscarried
and eventually left him.
He told himself it was the pipes. Old buildings made old
noises.
But last night, he’d gotten up to investigate and found wet
footprints leading from the bedroom to his office. Small prints, like a child’s.
They disappeared beneath his desk, where the case files were stacked neatly in
a manila folder.
When he opened the folder, a drop of water had fallen onto
the Christian Lyceum Association’s certification of ownership, spreading like a
tear across the ink.
---
The social media campaign grew louder. #SAVESMANSABANDUNG
appeared on t-shirts, protest signs, graffiti across the city. Students held
candlelight vigils on the school steps, their young faces serious in the
flickering light, unaware of how the shadows behind them seemed to stretch and
reshape themselves into figures from another time.
Reporters interviewed alumni, teachers, local officials.
They all spoke about community and heritage, about the importance of education.
None of them mentioned the weight that seemed to press down
when you entered the campus. Or how the drinking fountains sometimes ran brown
for a second before clearing. Or the way voices echoed in empty hallways long
after the speakers had gone.
Still, some of the older teachers avoided certain corridors.
They knew which classroom doors tended to lock themselves from the inside,
which windows showed reflections of people who weren’t there.
“It’s just an old building,” they’d say with forced smiles. “It
settles.”
(Places settle. Memory settles. Ghosts settle. Lawsuits,
sometimes, do not.)
---
Three days before the final hearing, a construction worker
at the Dago Christian High School complex was found wandering Ir. Juanda Street
at 3 AM, his clothes soaked despite the dry night. He was babbling about
swimming lessons and permission slips, about a pool where only certain people
were allowed.
“They’re all there,” he kept saying to the police officers
who picked him up. “All the students who never graduated. They’re waiting for
class to resume.”
He was taken to a hospital and sedated. The doctors
diagnosed acute psychosis brought on by overwork and possibly drugs. The
toxicology report came back clean, but no one looked too closely at the water
samples from his clothes—water that contained chemical traces matching the
composition of pool treatments from the 1940s.
That same night, Dr. Hendri Sulaeman woke up gasping,
certain someone had been sitting on his chest. In the dark, he thought he saw a
figure standing at the foot of his bed—slight, Chinese in appearance, wearing
the kind of school uniform that hadn’t been used in seventy years.
“You were never supposed to come back,” the figure seemed to
say, though its mouth didn’t move. “This place remembers who abandoned it.”
By morning, Sulaeman had convinced himself it was just a
dream. Just stress from the case.
But when he reached for his briefcase, he found a small
puddle of water inside, the ink on his legal papers running in thin blue
rivers.
---
The final ruling came down on a Tuesday. The judge, dark
circles under his eyes, hands trembling slightly, ruled against the Christian
Lyceum Association. The students of SMAN 1 Bandung would keep their school. The
land would remain as it had been divided all those decades ago.
“Insufficient evidence,” the ruling stated. “Historical
context suggests the nationalization was appropriate for the time.”
Dr. Sulaeman accepted the decision with a tight smile that
didn’t reach his eyes. The executives from PT Graha Multi Insani nodded and
packed their briefcases, relief washing over their faces like cool water.
None of them spoke about what they’d seen in their dreams.
About the children with wet hair who stood in formation on the grounds of Het
Christelijk Lyceum. About the math teacher whose equations had started to make
a terrible kind of sense.
About the land that remembered, and waited, and would be
there long after they were gone.
Because some lawsuits end, but memory—the kind that sinks
into soil and stone—that goes on forever. Patient as the grave.
And in Bandung, at Ir. Juanda Street No. 93, the students of
SMAN 1 return to their classrooms, unaware of the other pupils who sometimes
sit beside them, visible only from the corner of the eye. Unaware of the
history that breathes beneath their feet.
Unaware that sometimes, at night, the drinking fountains run
with salt water, like tears of relief. Or perhaps, of warning.
Because they say some places have memory.
And memory, like the law, can always find new ways to make
its case.
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