The Takjil Hunters

 

I. The Calling

Rudi Taslim wasn’t Muslim, but that didn’t matter when the hunger came. Not the spiritual kind—though God knows that was part of it too—but the gnawing, twisting kind that made a man’s thoughts turn to gorengan and sweet kolak as the afternoon sun began its slow surrender to evening.

“Hunting for fried snacks is the fun part,” he told me, his eyes lit with something I recognized from the faces of men who fish or hunt or gamble. That peculiar gleam of anticipation, of the chase. Rudi had been doing this since he was a kid growing up in Kampung Melayu, that packed anthill of humanity in East Jakarta where the air always smelled of cooking oil and gasoline and too many bodies pressed together.

He’d grown up there among Muslim neighbors, had even worked as a “sandal keeper” at the local mosque—a detail that stuck in my mind like a splinter. I imagined young Rudi, arranging dozens of cast-off sandals and shoes outside the prayer hall, listening to the cadence of worship inside, feeling both apart from and part of something ancient and powerful.

Now he was a takjil hunter. One of thousands who emerged each Ramadan sunset like creatures from some collective unconscious, prowling the streets for the sweet and savory morsels that Muslims use to break their daily fast.

“War takjil,” they called it now. As if food had become the battlefield where modern Indonesia fought its silent wars of identity and belonging.

II. The Word

Words have power. My daddy used to say that, and daddy was usually right about such things. The Arabic word ‘ajjala meant “to hasten.” In Indonesia, that morphed into takjil—those little snacks Muslims eat when breaking fast. A language professor named Holy Adib had written about this semantic drift, how purists fought it every Ramadan like old men shouting at clouds.

“People want to define it that way, and no one can stop them,” Adib had written, with the resignation of someone who knows language belongs to the streets, not the academy.

But words change more than meaning. They change us. And the words “war takjil” were changing something in Jakarta, in all of Indonesia. Something was building, like pressure in an underground steam pipe. Not evil, necessarily. But not entirely benign either.

III. The Hunters

The late afternoon sun beat down on Benhil Market like God’s own spotlight, turning the pavement into a griddle that shimmered through my squinting eyes. Sweat rolled down my back, soaking my thin cotton shirt. Around me, the takjil hunters gathered—Muslims and non-Muslims alike—their faces taut with the particular concentration of predators.

A young Chinese-Indonesian couple checked their watches nervously. A group of office workers in wilted button-downs clustered near a stall famous for its lontong. Two teenagers—one in hijab, one with a cross pendant visible at her neck—compared notes on their phones about which vendor had the best es kelapa.

The vendors watched back, their expressions a complex mixture of anticipation and wariness. This was business, yes—good business—but something else lurked beneath the commercial exchange. A current of energy, invisible but undeniable, like the electromagnetic field before a lightning strike.

“Many Muslims miss out on takjil because non-Muslims buy it first,” an elderly man muttered beside me, his voice carrying just far enough for nearby ears. “Even though they are not required to fast.”

The words hung in the humid air, neither accusation nor observation, but something in between. I watched the non-Muslim hunters shift uncomfortably, caught between desire and propriety.

Rudi appeared at my elbow, materializing with the sudden presence of a character stepping from the wings of a stage.

“That’s bullshit,” he said quietly, nodding toward the old man. “There’s plenty for everyone. Besides, what does he think happens to the food? We don’t throw it away. We eat it. We enjoy it. We appreciate it. Isn’t that what matters?”

But his eyes darted toward the stalls, calculating angles and distances. The magic hour approached. Maghrib prayer would soon be called. The war was about to begin.

IV. The Breaking

The muezzin’s call shattered the tension like a stone through glass. For a moment—just one heartbeat of perfect stillness—no one moved. Then the surge began.

Bodies pressed forward, polite but determined. Money changed hands with practiced efficiency. Plastic bags of gorengan passed from vendor to customer, steam escaping like souls from the freshly fried parcels. Sweet scents of kolak and es buah mingled with the sharp tang of sweat and exhaust fumes.

I watched Rudi navigate the crowd with the expertise of a veteran. His movements seemed choreographed, hitting each vendor in an order known only to him, smiling and chatting briefly with each, exchanging cash for treasures that disappeared into the canvas bag slung across his shoulder.

The non-Muslims hungered differently, I noticed. There was an urgency to their purchases, but also a strange reverence—as if they were participants in a ritual they understood only imperfectly. Some bought more than they could possibly eat, distributing packages to friends or even strangers with a generosity that seemed part penance, part celebration.

A light rain began to fall, sudden as revelation. The drops hit the hot pavement and rose again as steam, shrouding the market in a ghostly mist. Through this veil, the war takjil continued, now with added urgency.

“Some miss out because of the rain,” Rudi said, materializing again beside me. “Others because they come too late. That’s the thing about war takjil—you have to commit. You have to understand the battlefield.”

His eyes were bright in the gathering darkness, reflecting the string lights that vendors had hastily covered with plastic sheets. In that moment, he looked neither Muslim nor non-Muslim, neither insider nor outsider, but something else entirely—a man who had found his place in the liminal space between worlds.

V. The Fasting

Later, in a coffee shop far from the market, sheltered from the rain that now fell in earnest, Ruth Medjber told me her story. Catholic mother, Muslim father, and she herself an atheist who nonetheless fasted each Ramadan with a dedication that would shame many believers.

“Ramadan feels familiar,” she said, cradling a cup of coffee she wouldn’t drink until the proper time. “I grew up with it. In my family, it was as normal as Christmas, and it always made sense for me to do both.”

She spoke of clarity found in hunger, of priorities reshuffled by abstinence. Of charity and empathy and the strange control that comes from voluntary deprivation in uncertain times.

Across town, Alexander Sless—a 26-year-old agnostic from Texas who’d started fasting on a TikTok dare—was experiencing the same hunger, the same clarity, the same sense of belonging to something larger than himself.

And in cities across America and Europe, non-Muslims fasted in solidarity with communities under siege from prejudice and fear. Their empty stomachs a silent protest, their parched throats an offering to gods they might not believe in but whose followers they couldn’t bear to see suffer alone.

I thought of Rudi then, of his canvas bag filled with takjil meant for breaking fasts he never kept. Of the sandals he once arranged outside a mosque where he never prayed. Of belonging and not-belonging, and the strange territories in between.

VI. The Light

The rain stopped sometime before dawn. I walked the empty streets of Jakarta as the first prayer call of the day rippled across the city. The air was clean for once, washed of pollution and cooking smells, filled instead with the particular stillness that comes before a city wakes.

Lights glowed in windows where the faithful prepared their pre-dawn meals. In some of those windows, I knew, were the non-Muslims too—the fasters, the takjil hunters, the curious and the committed.

And I understood then what all of this was about. Not appropriation or commercialization or even tolerance, though those elements existed. It was about hunger—not just for food, but for connection. For meaning. For some small evidence that in this fractured world, we might still find ways to recognize ourselves in one another.

The war takjil wasn’t a war at all. Or if it was, it was the kind of war where everyone wins, where the battle itself is the victory. Where hunger leads not to hatred but to its opposite.

I thought of what that study had concluded: that war takjil demonstrated how people could coexist despite religious differences. But that wasn’t quite right. It wasn’t about coexisting despite differences. It was about connecting through them. About finding in our distinct hungers the common appetite that makes us human.

Somewhere across the city, Rudi Taslim was probably sleeping, his dreams filled with the fried snacks he’d hunt again when evening came. And in those dreams, I imagined, he arranged sandals outside a mosque where everyone was welcome, where every hunger was sacred, and where every breaking of bread—or gorengan, or kolak, or dates—was an act of communion that required no god to sanctify it.

Only us. Only our shared hunger. Only the night falling and the fast breaking and the strange miracle of finding ourselves, against all odds, at the same table.

THE END