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18 Surabaya, 1945–2010 18 2 Dinoyo Setting Two pieces of happenstance led me to Dinoyo. The first was the good fortune of a 12-month research visa that took me to Surabaya in January 1998, the year of Indonesia’s momentous economic and political crisis. The second occurred some weeks later as I sat in Surabaya’s Department of Immigration awaiting a temporary residency permit for the city. Here, I met a man whose wife knew of a house for rent in an apparently ‘real kampung’ called Dinoyo. I was keen to see what he meant by a real kampung and asked his wife to take us there. Finding our way to Dinoyo, a well-known inner city kampung, was easy. Entering was not. The man’s four-wheel drive was too large to enter the main alley, where clusters of becak drivers left just enough room for pedestrians and motorcycles to pass. Like everybody else, we walked into Dinoyo. My first impression was of the mingled smells of sweet bread and brackish water that filled the air from a large bakery on the main road and the muddy Kali Mas, which ran along the opposite side of the road. Soon after we entered the main alley, a woman dressed in brightly coloured shorts and singlet called out, urging us to be careful as an emaciated, cigarette-puffing old man cycled past in an empty becak. The street and its noise quickly faded. My attention focused on the birds in ornamental cages hanging from the eaves of most kampung homes and the elevated bird coops jutting out above the rooftops in the distance. Fifty metres farther along the alley at a small T-junction, men clad only in shorts and marked with tattoos gestured for me to join them as they shared a bottle of home-distilled alcohol; others gathered to wage bets on pigeon races. A sign hanging Dinoyo 19 just above them pointed to a small mosque hidden around a corner at the end of a narrow dirt alley of seven tightly packed houses. The house I would rent was one of them. My landlord was a middle-aged Madurese carpenter who lived with his wife and two children in a rented rattan shack in a nearby alley. With the help of neighbours, he had built the house after his wife had inherited the land from her deceased parents. Soon after my arrival, he appeared at the house and joked sarcastically about my relaxed and rather Javanese-like gait, noting that I should fit well in Dinoyo. He then opened the front door to a small room, which led to a water trough for bathing and a narrow wooden staircase up to the bedroom. Up there it was hot, but a balcony offered some respite. It was also quiet, despite the mosque loudspeaker positioned only metres from the balcony. “Neighbours here dislike loud noise,” explained the landlord, adding that there were no loud Koranic recitals or calls to prayer from that mosque. Residents did seem to dislike loud noise, at least from the mosque. Only a week before, during the Islamic fasting month of Ramadan, a neighbour had chased some young men down the alley with a knife after they had woken him with their relentless pounding of the mosque’s drum to sound the morning call to prayer. Recalling the event with much humour, these young men would later note how their tomfoolery that morning went beyond the limits of acceptable noise levels. Long Koranic recitals broadcast by loudspeaker were unknown in Dinoyo and would find a poor audience among a kampung population more renowned for the five Javanese prohibitions, or five Ms: maling (theft), main (gambling), mabok (intoxication), medok (promiscuity) and madat (narcotics). For Dinoyo residents, the five Ms, or molimo, were a symbol of their approach to the city. For Surabaya’s pre-eminent urban planner, Johan Silas, the molimo was an example of the ‘rebelliousness ’ that had for so long made Dinoyo awkward terrain for the interventions of the civil servants, religious bodies, student groups, political parties and NGOs of Indonesia’s development industry. Street sides are the kampung’s boundaries, where narrow openings at the start of alleyways lead into a world invisible from the street. The balcony of the house I rented provided a reverse view back out towards the street and across the sea of terracotta-tiled rooftops formed by Dinoyo’s kampung homes. This view was blocked...

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