This novel begins with 16-year old Adam hiding behind a bush and seeing his foster father Karl being taken away by soldiers. Adam is greatly shaken up and he misses Karl, who is a Dutch and very keen to make his son Adam attend school. He tells Adam, “What you need to learn isn’t contained in textbooks. You need to learn how to live with other people of your age-how to be like everyone else. You mustn’t become too privileged.”
Adam knows that he is not like everyone else on the island of Indonesia. On his first day in school, Adam has a very unpleasant experience. One of his classmates throws a scrunched up piece of paper at him, some others examine his canvas satchel, some tear the pages from his textbooks and atlas to fold into airplanes and throw at him. When he returns home, Karl asks him about his experience, but Adam says nothing. However, Karl realises that things could not have gone well for his son.
Next day Adam befriends a Madurese girl named Neng. Gradually he grows up and so does his curiosity to find out about his real parents. He questions Karl about it. Karl tells him that people in their village had told him that a young girl, possibly from Jakarta, had come with two sons to leave at the orphanage and had gone somewhere after that. Adam learns that his brother is called Johan.
The scene shifts to Adam sitting with Margaret, who at one time had been Karl’s close friend. Karl and Margaret had been in love but Karl left her behind to go back to his ancestral home. The story now moves back and forth in flashbacks. Karl has been taken away as prisoner by Indonesian troops for they know he is a foreigner and white skinned and not to be trusted. Both Adam and Margaret go out in search of Karl. Margaret even visits President Sukarno to seek Karl’s release. Adam, on the other hand, goes out in search of his brother Johan and undergoes many adventures besides building very useful friendships. Margaret is worried about Karl’s welfare and feels helpless – “a state of helplessness which was not terrifying as she’d always feared it to be. It brought with it something worse than terror: an eerie unease, a feeling that the worse was yet to come.”
Margaret looks back on her life as Karl’s friend and thinks that even if she were to learn of Karl’s passing away or his not coming into her life again, it would not affect her. But, on not getting any news of Karl’s well-being, “she did not feel calm now; nor relieved; nor liberated. She had lost Karl, she was sure-hoped that he was out there. The years ahead of her were filled not with calm, but with a horrible uncertainty. And it was all her fault.”
One day Margaret receives the news that Karl has been found. She and Adam rush to the place and they find Karl standing at the threshold of a door, holding on to the door frame. She nurses him back to health and they all return home happily.
– MG
(HarperCollins Publishers India, A-53, Sector 57, Noida-201 301 (UP))
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