I REMEMBER visiting her home in Tomang after school back in our high school years. Some schoolmates came from filthy rich families, but had I ever thought this particular friend as one of them until that very day! Her family, of 3 children including herself, gave me a shock. They had five cars: one car for every member of the family. Why that many? What a great share to the congestion. Out of either innocence or ignorance, I snapped those remarks, in a teenager's spontaniety that was never to condescend her nor her family. If her reactions at that time failed me, well, they still do. I did not apologize.
Thousands of days must have passed since that day and plus one today. We have never met again. After lunch at the office foodstall today, I instead met an acquaintance, a finance manager with an auto leasing company. In our fleeting, less than three-minute, chitchat he spoke of the anomaly of our age in this country. He said that every day some 1,600 new cars were flooding this country's roads. In this old mean city Jakarta alone, over 700 new cars, every day! My instinctive response ruled in a flash: surely great for your line of business, but I was wise enough to hold my tongue. Besides, this man did not seem jolly as he spilled the bin, only concerned. Though I had read about this info in some reports, the cold facts coming from the mouth of a man in the business sent chills right down to my spine. I think I gave him a grin from my feeling of powerlessness. I waved him a silent goodbye on my way back to work.
In the elevator that brought me to the seventh floor where I work, memories of that high school friend emerged to the foreground from a long buried past. Then I remembered that afternoon visit. I felt more convinced than ever today, that something has been grossly wrong in my country. Of course, it was never my friend's fault, nor her family's. But I knew there is a good cause for an apology, the next time we meet again, maybe.
