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development and management of human resources.
    There had been nothing from Adi about deschooling and Ivan Illich—that was the modernity and academic line of yesterday. In Adi’s current analysis the huts and squawking yards of the pesantren were as rustic and limited as they might have appeared to an uncommitted visitor. And a whole new set of approved words or ideas—elitism, religious feudalism, accountability, collective decision-making, the mobilizing of people, and, of course, human resources—were used, figuratively, to beat poor old Mr. Wahid about the head.
    And to beat, too, but only in my own mind, the figure called up from memory: the small, hunched, white-capped and white-clad figure in the sight-baffling gloom of Mr. Wahid’s backyard or garden, the eighty-cents-a-month man (at present rates of exchange more like a twenty-five-cents man), called from his very dim verandah and his chanting class in Islamic law to stand before us, and meekly with bowed head to accept my rebuke for knowing only half the Koran at the age of thirty, when he had so little to do, and the village had built his narrow little house for him and kept him in such food as met his modest needs: an unlikely successor, in half-converted Indonesia, of the early Islamic Sufis and, before them, the monks of Buddhist times.

    Islam and Europe had arrived here almost at the same time as competing imperialisms, and between them they had destroyed the long Buddhist-Hindu past. Islam had moved on here, to this part of Greater India, after its devastation of India proper, turning the religious-cultural light of the subcontinent, so far as this region was concerned, into the light of a dead star. Yet Europe had dominated so quickly here that Islam itself had begun to feel like a colonized culture. The family history that a cultivated and self-awareman like Mr. Wahid carried in his head—a history that true family memory took back only a century and a quarter—was at the same time a history of European colonialism and of the recovery of Islam.
    The first time we met on this trip Mr. Wahid talked, but only in a glancing way, of his family history. I was taken with what he said and I felt I wanted to hear more. I went to see him again.
    We met in the main offices of the NU. They were on the ground floor of a simple, old-fashioned building on a main road, with a cleared yard at the front for cars. The rooms—not at all like Adi Sasono’s—were like railway waiting rooms, full of that kind of heavy, dark furniture, and with that kind of tarnish.
    I wanted to sit on a high, straight-backed chair so that I could write. All the chairs in Mr. Wahid’s office were very low. An assistant said that in another room there were chairs that would serve, but people were there, talking. Mr. Wahid, like a man who had suffered for too long from these talkers, said they were to be chased away. And they were chased away with such suddenness that coils of warm, undissipated cigarette smoke still hung just above the middle air when we went into the room. The cigarettes were Indonesian clove cigarettes. The smoke was heavy with clove oil, and there had been so much of it in that room, that after my afternoon there with Mr. Wahid, the clove smell remained on my hands and hair for days, resisting baths, like an anesthetic after an operation; and it never left my jacket all the time I was in Indonesia.
    Nothing had remained in my memory of Mr. Wahid from 1979. And I was surprised now to find that he was only fifty-one or fifty-two; so that in 1979, when he was already famous and of great authority, he would not have been forty. He was a short, plump man, perhaps about five feet three or four inches. As everyone said, his eyes were not good, but his physique and general appearance suggested someone with other problems as well, cardiac or respiratory. He was casually dressed, with an open-necked shirt. He would not have stood out in an Indonesian crowd. As soon as he began