The New Threads

 

The sun beats down on Jakarta like God’s own spotlight, turning the narrow alleys between vendor stalls into rivers of sweat and anticipation. It’s three days before Lebaran, and Tanjung Priok Market has transformed into a beast with a thousand hungry mouths, all of them screaming for your money.

Abdul wipes his brow with a handkerchief that gave up being white sometime during the Suharto administration. His fingers shake slightly as he counts the rupiah in his wallet. Not enough. Never enough. But his children need new clothes for Idulfitri, and what kind of father would he be if they showed up at the mosque looking like something the neighbor’s cat dragged in?

You know what kind, whispers the voice in his head, the one that sounds like his dead father. The kind that puts food on the table instead of fabric on backs. The kind with sense.

But sense has nothing to do with tradition, and tradition in Indonesia is a monster with roots deeper than the oldest banyan tree. You don’t fight monsters like that. You feed them, year after year, until they swallow you whole.

***

The tradition stalked into Indonesia sometime around 1596, when the Banten Sultanate was young and hungry. Back then, only the royal bloods and the kiss-ass nobles could afford new threads for the holiday. Regular folks—the ones who actually broke their backs in rice fields—had to play seamstress with needle and worn cloth, trying to make last year’s rags look marginally less pathetic.

“On the eve of the holiday, people were busy making clothes, so much so that it was said that everyone became tailors,” wrote some Dutch observer named Willem Lodewycksz. The poor bastard probably thought he was recording simple cultural curiosity, not realizing he was documenting the birth of a monster that would grow fat on the wallets of generations yet unborn.

The same unholy ritual sprouted up in Mataram Kingdom like a second tumor. Maybe it was coincidence. Maybe it was the dark telepathy that connects all traditions designed to separate the common man from his money. Either way, the beast had two heads now, and both of them were hungry.

When the Dutch colonizers came with their pressed uniforms and superiority complexes, they might have sneered at the natives’ customs, but they recognized a fellow predator when they saw one. Snouck Hurgronje—a name that sounds like something you’d cough up after a bad flu—noted how similar this Lebaran madness was to European New Year celebrations. Different packaging, same racket: dress fancy, visit relatives who secretly hate you, pretend you’re starting fresh while dragging all your old sins behind you like tin cans tied to a mangy dog’s tail.

The Dutchman also noticed how the economy in Batavia would convulse before Lebaran, with folks emptying their pockets for clothes, food, and firecrackers. Some colonial pencil-pushers called it wasteful. They weren’t wrong, but they missed the point. Tradition isn’t about sense; it’s about the weight of a thousand dead ancestors pressing down on your chest, whispering that if you don’t buy that overpriced koko shirt, you’re not just cheap—you’re failing your family, your culture, your God.

Even the goddamn Japanese occupation couldn’t kill the tradition. With the whole world burning and food scarce as hen’s teeth, the Japanese authorities still had to hand out second-hand clothes for Lebaran. Think about that—in the middle of a world war, with death knocking on every door, people still worried about what they’d wear to the mosque. That’s not tradition anymore. That’s a sickness.

***

“Daddy, is this one pretty enough?”

Abdul’s daughter holds up a pale pink gamis that costs what he makes in three days. Her eyes are wide and hopeful, like a deer’s before the headlights hit. He feels his resolve crumbling, that familiar internal foundation shifting like beach sand during a storm surge.

The mall is air-conditioned to arctic temperatures—cold enough to preserve corpses—but Abdul still sweats. Around him, the middle-class of Jakarta flows like a river of consumption, each person carrying shopping bags like trophies from some retail battlefield. The muzak playing overhead sounds like what angels might hum while watching a civilization drown in its own excess.

His phone buzzes: a text from the bank. His account balance cowers below what he’s about to spend. But his daughter is still looking at him, and behind her, his wife holds another shopping bag—this one containing a koko shirt for their son.

“It’s beautiful, sayang,” he says, his voice like gravel under tires. “You’ll be the prettiest girl at the mosque.”

The cashier’s smile is professionally empty as she scans the barcode. Abdul hands over his credit card like a man extending his wrists for handcuffs. One more month of debt. One more year of tradition satisfied.

Outside, the afternoon call to prayer rises above the city smog. Abdul wonders, not for the first time, what Allah thinks about all this. The Prophet Muhammad said to wear your best clothes for Idulfitri, not bankrupt yourself for fashion that will be outdated before the next Ramadan. But who listens to the actual religious teaching when there are Instagram posts to be made?

A billboard looms over the plaza: a beautiful family in matching Lebaran outfits, all of them smiling with teeth as white as the moon. The tagline reads: “New Clothes, New Beginnings.” Abdul looks at it and sees not a promise but a threat. The monster of tradition smiles back at him with those same perfect teeth, belly full of rupiah, always hungry for more.

Behind him, his daughter clutches her new gamis to her chest like it’s made of pure joy. For her, maybe it is. For now. Until she’s old enough to feel the weight of tradition herself, to understand that some monsters don’t live under the bed—they live in our customs, our expectations, our desperate fear of being the only one wearing last year’s clothes when the morning of Idulfitri finally dawns, bright and merciless as judgment day.