Originally written in 2025 and subsequently published in 2026 as part of Double Take: In Transit by Further Reading.

10 May. 7 a.m. Jakarta’s sole train station connecting towns and major cities across all of Java was trying to hold up hundreds of bodies jostling for a space in which to sit, line up and print their bookings, and gather pace as some rush towards three entrance gates whose newly-installed biometric scanners do not seem to cooperate with them, then on to the flights of escalators taking them to the platforms upstairs and then away from a hot, congested, expensive and overpopulated city on the brink of exploding from its capacity to contain more than 30 million people every day. Working people. Rich people. Hungry people. People busking near the lights. People in brand new cars. People with nowhere to go. No time. No resources. People with a lot of patience, and a lot of faith.

In his book Jakarta, Drawing the City Near, sociologist AbdouMaliq Simone explained that he understood Jakarta as a giant, fastmoving urban space with an infrastructure so neglected and poorly thought-out that, having adapted to being left to their own devices, residents become extremely skilled at finding the cracks amid their daily routines through which they can discover some sort of new meaning. This meaning can be anything; a new source of income, a small cohort unified by a mysterious common thread and motivation, or a personal goal directed towards bigger things and a better place.

If you live or have seen Jakarta, you will know that this is a reality evident in every corner of this city in which you find yourself. For example, the roadsides of many traffic hot zones will accommodate a line of humble breakfast stands made possible from folding plastic tables and small posters exhibiting their menus, whose target customers are frustrated commuters with vehicles slowly crawling inch-by-inch until they drive past the stoplights. These traders will be gone by the time you clock into your office, and return where they were the next sleepy morning.

The formal labour market is tough to get into and get out of, and most of the time, does not pay enough, so a mini economy emerges inside a larger one. This is not a unique phenomenon—there is a trend where, for example, employees casually offer homemade meals as catering services to their work colleagues, generating a web of extra income and new, unexpected social bonds.

Is this what AbdouMaliq Simone meant by spaces as a transitory state? That spaces are not simply locations hovering as you move through them, and not quite what you make of them as they expand and change, but a platform accommodating all kinds of transactions; the exchange and integration of energies, the possibilities they open up, the possibilities they reject. Possibilities beyond economic and cultural projections. Possibilities that invite a new life, new ‘versions of yourself ’.

Perhaps this is what he also meant by what cities—as primarily economic living spaces—can and cannot allow; do their infrastructures direct their residents to where they want to be? Do they allow workers to reach their destination on time? Do they allow women to walk the streets with relative comfort and men to return for dinner without cursing through their traffic back home? Do they let small traders run their businesses without fearing surprise raids and displacements? Does the city, whose very life and breath depend on the backbreaking work of its inhabitants, look after them? Or does it leave them in a dormant transitory state with no resources to carry them on to their next destination, wherever it might be?

I think of AbdouMaliq Simone’s interpretation of what happens inside Ojuelegba, Lagos, where a night market shelters all kinds of commercial activities imaginable; computer repairs, brothels, suya stands, with a group of local security in charge of maintaining order so that food can reach the table. Do crowded suburbs across the Global South all have this unique transitionary element to them? Perhaps this is also what ‘developed’ or ‘civilised’ perspectives could never quite grasp; life goes on at full speed and in omnicolour where I am from, regardless of how claustrophobic the spaces that contain it.

At the train station, the majority of people travel in groups. Mostly families. All the restaurants and mini marts accommodate noisy lines and pools of crowds except a Starbucks, which attends to a short queue. A quick Google search tells me that a consumer boycott against it took a toll on the company’s Indonesian operations in 2024. It’s good to know that my people stand for something.

The train ride was six hours long, its railway cutting across towns and tiny villages with diverse panoramic landscapes; some of them sandwiched between brown rivers, but most of them embraced by green paddy fields whose harvest had just begun to show itself. Rice farmers cycle on a narrow path of uncemented ground between the vast horizon and passengers watch them as the train speeds past, heading west and into Central Java, stopping at Yogyakarta, where my paternal grandmother and great grandmother were born, raised, imprisoned, and laid to rest.

My grandmother, who taught me how to journal at age 4, spoke three languages; her native Javanese, Indonesian, and Dutch. Her mother could only speak and understand Dutch. Both of them taught at schools, and my grandmother held a doctoral degree in psychology. Her life was quiet and well-structured, garnering respect. I thought, where did this leave me? A part of my disorganised life hollowed when she left.

Her home, the building in which I was partly raised in, now resembles uneven fragments of construction; almost flat to the ground. A businessman acquired it some six years ago and decided to overhaul its entire architecture before eventually abandoning the plan and leaving the home’s splintered foundations on their own. A makeshift tea and rice stand had a tradition of setting up shop on the pavement out front every evening and late into the night.

Its tent dimly lit with an oil lamp and a few candles, gathering a small crowd of four to six locals around its four wheeled wooden cart that doubled as a dining table—a view which blankets the majority of the province, an element of the province’s urban tissue that flies in Indonesians from across the country, and which contrasts so fundamentally with the modern Prawirotaman strip drawing in mostly European tourists who fancy beers in hot weather and exotic temples (remember Bali?). The traditional tea trader, who went by Le’ Jum, stopped showing up after my grandmother’s home was reconstructed, and I never knew where he went.

As I traversed my father’s hometown for the first time in four years, my thoughts split between my established routine in corporate Jakarta and a past life in crosscultural London; where something always happens on the commute underground and around the corner from your house and where not one sunny day passed without somebody blasting whiny music outdoors to appreciate some rays of light while they lasted. It is also a place where music is very deeply intertwined with almost every outing no
matter which subculture you feel you belong to. For a while, life felt a little less disjointed.

Early in the year in the capital, demonstrations crowded the street accommodating the towering presidential palace, where important legislation that could affect 300 million lives was coordinated and finalised with little consideration for the country’s working population. The impacts of a newly implemented law involving severe budget cuts across governmental departments have already been felt, with educational scholarships discontinued and a free school meal program causing food
poisoning among dozens of students—severing an already fragile relationship between the state and the people, who are anticipating the unfortunate possibility of a militarised government.

What does transition mean to us? For the country, not the city, is a transitional space, throwing its people entirely off balance.