Friday 27th October
I can’t believe it’s not Ramadan
With an odd mix of anticipation and trepidation I walk down Falatehan towards Top Gun. The place seems busy enough, the street’s packed with its usual complement of incompetently parked cars, taxis, bajays and ojeks - but it’s just too quiet.
Top Gun is full of guys, but alas there are very few Sweet Young Things. The word is that almost the whole of the Buncit contingent is out at one of the kampongs for a circumcision party - a family event of great importance (and even greater expense) - so we’re left with the flotsam of the Indramayu crew and the jetsam of the Betawi girls.
After a few games of pool I decide that I’m a better observer than a performer, and pull up a seat to drink at leisure and watch a couple of very skillful players take it in turns to thrash everybody else and then each other. During this interlude one of my old friends I haven’t seen for ages bursts into the bar with a mate, and they immediately liven the place up with their unique blend of boozy bonhomie and good-natured lecherousness. Good company, some fine pool to watch, a constant flow of ale - what more could any reveller ask of his early evening in Blok M?
But all is not well. As ten o’clock approaches the bar starts to thin out rather than fill up, and quite a few of the girls do their Cinderella act. Ah well, time to have a shufti at My Bar and see how it’s shaping up. At first sight the place is fine - the band is playing well, some of the Sweet Young Things are dancing, and there’s quite a crowd of guys. But something’s missing. A lot of the guys are drinking fairly heavily and absentmindedly groping their girls as they nod vacuously to the music. Most of the girls don’t seem to be interested in flaunting or flirting tonight, keeping instead in their little groups by the side of the dance floor. Even the barmaids lack their usual effervescent liveliness.
For the Blok M connoisseur, attempting to chat up a girl in this kind of ambiance is rather a waste of time - a bit like being forced to make polite conversation at a stuffy diplomatic reception. You go through the motions, but your heart just isn’t in it. So I throw in my chips at about one thirty, let the gang know that I’m on the prowl tomorrow night, and stride off in search of my regular bajay.
But as the Bard phrased it so nicely, “When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions” - and there’s no bajay in sight. Groaning inwardly I cast around for the least predatory looking and the most roadworthy taxi I can find, when suddenly one of the bus station bajays roars into life and chugs across the road to my normal pickup point. Such is the extent of the Reveller’s fame that all the Blok M night-time bajay drivers seem to know where he lives, and this guy heads there without any prompting.
As I chug along the deserted streets I reflect again that the essence of what makes the Blok so inimitable is its unpredictability; we just have to take the ups with the downs. There’s a French expression that sums it up very neatly - les défauts de ses qualités, ‘the defects of its qualities’. But there’s an equally pointed French expression that sums up my visceral feelings about this particular night - merde!