I've decided to begin this story on the night train to Yogyakarta because everything that happened before that point was markedly uninteresting.
Anyhow, I was sitting in the business class section, which basically means there's a single squealing fan in the centre of the carriage and the lights are dim as apposed to non existent. I was using ointment to nurture the atrocious amount of mosquito bites acquired in Jakarta. I can't read Braille, and hopefully I'll never have to learn, but as I ran my fingers over the myriad of raised lumps on my biceps and deltoids, I would conservatively estimate there were enough of them to write out the Bible in full.
Soon an overly keen yet friendly looking Indonesian youth arrived (interrupting my medical routine) and asked if he might sit next to me. Within seconds he attempted to strike up a conversation in English. As soon as we began, it became evident that the level of his English was extremely low. Nevertheless, I spent some time last year learning French in Paris, and as memories of hundreds of painfully awkward conversations rushed into my head I immediately felt a deep sympathy for the boy and was determined to oblige his thirst for language for as long as i could.
The labour soon became impossible. As we moved away from the simpler subjects such as names, siblings and ages, i was lucky if i understood two words in a solid minute of dialogue. We were both aware of the fact, and he was becoming visibly anxious as he strained to form English syllables with his inexperienced mouth. So hard was he trying that beads of sweat were forming on his wrinkled forehead. I had to put him out of his misery. I needed to change the language, and decided that asking him to teach me some Indonesian was the only way out.
I considered breaking off the conversation by telling him his English was good, but I was certain that he knew as well as I did that was an outright lie and I didn't want to offend the keen student. Instead I tried asking him outright, and fortunately I only had to rephrase the question four times before he grasped my meaning.
He began by opening the book I was reading and translating the sentences he could read. He opened at a random page and offered me such enlightened phrases as "The ugly little bastard has only one nipple." While amusing, I was dubious about the practical value the sentence offered .
Some food vendors had boarded the train, and I asked him how I could ask for fried rice. "Saya ingin nasi goreng". I buy fried rice, "Saya membeli nasi goreng". A baby began to cry and he told me that the word for "child" is "Anak" and "children" is "Anak anak", owing to a peculiarity in Indonesian grammar by which pluralisation is as simple as saying a word twice.
The Indonesian lesson he gave me was undoubtedly more successful than the English conversation I tried to conduct, but soon my teacher had to disembark. I sat in the rumbling half silence of the train carriage reflecting on my lessons. A frown slowly emerged on my face as i realised the extent of what I'd just been taught.
I had long since forgotten how to say the thing about the one nippled child, and since i already knew the indonesian for fried rice (nasi goreng), I was left only with two new constructions to use: "I want children" and "I buy children".
If we had been in a genuine school setting, I may well have been put on report for failing to conduct a successful English conversation, but I'm pretty sure he'd have found his way onto the sex offenders' register after the next OFSTED inspection for his efforts.
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