The Rainbow Troops Read Free

miscellany of our classroom—a wooden ruler, a sixth grade student's clay vase art project sitting on Bu Mus' desk, the old-fashioned chalkboard and the chalk scattered about on the classroom floor, some of which had already been ground back into dust—was absolutely amazing.
    Then I saw Lintang's father, the pine tree man, watching his son grow increasingly excited, with a bittersweet smile. I understood. This was a man who didn't even know his own birthday, imagining his son's broken heart if he had to drop out in the first or second year of junior high for the classic reasons of money or the unfair demands of life. For him, education was an enigma. For as far back as Lintang's father could remember, through four generations of their family, Lintang was the first to go to school. Many generations beyond his recollection, their ancestors lived during the antediluvian period, a time long ago when the Malay people lived as nomads. They wore clothing made from bark, slept in the branches of trees, and worshipped the moon.
    By and large, Bu Mus made our seating assignments based on who looked alike. Lintang and I were deskmates because we both had curly hair. Trapani sat with Mahar because they were the best looking, with features like idolized traditional Malay singers. Trapani wasn't interested in the class; he kept stealing glances out the window, watching for his mother's head to pop up every once in a while among the heads of the other parents.
    But Borek and Kucai were seated together not because they looked alike, but because they were both difficult to control. Just a few moments into the class, Borek already was wiping a chalk eraser all over Kucai's face. On top of this, Sahara, that small, veil-wearing girl, deliberately knocked over A Kiong's water bottle, causing the Hokian-Chinese child to cry like he had seen a ghost. Sahara was extraordinarily hard-headed. That water bottle affair marked the beginning of a rivalry between them that would carry on for years to come. A Kiong's crying nearly put a damper on that morning's pleasant introductions.
    For me, that morning was an unforgettable one that would stay with me for dozens of years. That morning, I saw Lintang clumsily grasping a large, unsharpened pencil as if he were holding a large knife. His father had bought him the wrong kind of pencil. It was two different colors, one end red and the other blue. Wasn't that the kind of pencil tailors used to make marks on clothing? Or shoemakers to mark the leather? Whatever kind of pencil it was, it definitely was not for writing.
    The book he bought also was the wrong kind of book. It had a dark blue cover and was three-lined. Wasn't that the kind of book we would use in second grade when we learned how to write in cursive? But the thing I will never forget is that, on that morning, I witnessed a boy from the coast, my deskmate, hold a book and pencil for the very first time. And in the years to come, everything he would write would be the fruit of a bright mind, and every sentence he spoke would act as a radiant light. And as time went on, that impoverished coastal boy would outshine the dark nimbus cloud that had for so long overshadowed this school as he evolved into the most brilliant person I've ever met in all the years of my life.
     

Chapter 3

    Glass Display Case
     
    IT ISN'T very hard to describe our school. It was one among hundreds—maybe even thousands—of poor schools in Indonesia that, if bumped by a frenzied goat preparing to mate, would collapse and fall to pieces.
    We only had two teachers for all subjects and grades. We didn't have uniforms. We didn't even have a toilet. Our school was built on the edge of a forest, so when nature called, all we had to do was slip off into the bushes. Our teacher would watch after us, just in case we were bitten by a snake in the outhouse.
    We didn't have a first aid kit either. When we were sick, whatever it was—diarrhea, swelling, cough, flu, itching—the