Adam Fletcher

In the northwest of Indonesia is a crocodile-shaped island called Sulawesi. In its jaws is an unspoilt, rarely visited, really odd region called Tana Toraja.

My tour of it began on a narrow, twisting path. My guide, Samuel, stopped at a point where it widened below high chalk cliffs. “You might have heard the expression ‘life is expensive, death is cheap.’” He laughed quietly. “Well, in Torajaland, it’s the opposite. All our lives we save for our deaths.”

He looked up at those cliffs. I followed his lead, but while his face barely changed, when I saw what he was looking at, mine blew open like a barn door in a storm.

“Cave graves,” he said, flatly.

In the rock face above us, some ten metres from the ground, a collection of narrow openings had been cut into the rock, each covered with a small wooden door. “Behind the doors are dead bodies. Family grave.”

Near those doors were three terraces cut into the rock, each about a metre deep and four metres wide. These were filled with rows of wooden figures dressed in traditional ornate clothing and hats. They were like large puppets without strings, secured in the terrace by a single wooden bar that ran across its centre. Most of these figures held their palms open and upwards, as if imploring the heavens to rain.

It was an eerily beautiful sight, like looking at the world’s most macabre advent calendar. Every response to it felt weird and inappropriate when I tried it out in my head, like saluting a rain shower. Samuel grinned, enjoying our uncertainty. “We call these figures tau tau. Anyone buried properly can be represented this way.”

“What does properly mean?” Martin asked. I was touring with two other Berliners, Martin and his wife, Ute.

Samuel put his hands in his pockets. “We believe that at death, the soul of the person becomes a kind of semi-god. This semi-god can only go to Puya—our version of heaven—when accompanied by the soul of a buffalo. It’s like a kind of entrance ticket.”

I traced Samuel’s expression looking for any hidden lines of mirth. While I appreciated the imagination shown in creating such an elaborate post-life reward system, this one seemed both devoid of logic and cruel to buffaloes. Unsure what to do with what I was being told, I hid behind my culture’s default disguise: humour.

“Puya’s so popular, people are dying to get in.” I winked at Martin and Ute. No one laughed. I cleared my throat. Samuel shuffled on the spot. “Once this soul makes it to Puya, it brings luck and wealth to the whole family.”

“How much is a buffalo?” Martin asked.

“Around twenty-five hundred dollars.”

“But you just have to kill one?”

“No.” Samuel’s eyes sparkled. He was about to pull us down the rabbit hole. “It depends on the class of the family. Many families need to sacrifice twenty-four buffalo. And noble families need special buffalo that can cost up to five thousand dollars each.”

Ute and I exchanged a look of narrow-eyed disbelief. “And if you don’t sacrifice the buffalo?” she asked.

“Then the family member can’t get into Puya.”

“So then it goes to hell?”

“It’s more like it’s stuck in purgatory. There, it brings shame and bad luck to the family. Until the family can afford the funeral, the dead live with us at home.”

“For how long?” Ute asked.

“Months, years sometimes.”

I looked up at the cute figures. “Why do they all have their palms out like that, like they’re begging?”

Samuel moved his palms up and down. “They’re saying, ‘Where are my sacrifices? Give me them so I can go to Puya.’”

Keeping dead relatives in your home was a little macabre, but was it any weirder than paying thousands a month to house the heavily medicated, nearly dead in nursing homes they hated? Unsure, I scratched my head—my other regular coping mechanism. Martin took out his vaper and sucked on it, staring up at the tau–tau terraces. Samuel hummed a little to himself.

“How do the families afford it?” Ute asked, holding her own palms out. “Twenty-four buffalo at twenty-five hundred each, that’s sixty thousand dollars!”

“Yes.” Samuel frowned. “My uncle just died. For him, we need to sacrifice six buffalo. We’ll have to take out a loan.”

“A buffaloan?” I quipped, to no reaction. “Nothing? Really?” I was wasted on these people. I looked back up at the rock face, my hands in my pockets. “Does all this . . .” I blew out a long breath as I grappled for the tact I wanted to show. I dropped my gaze back to Samuel. “Does all this make sense to you? Taking out a loan to buy buffalo just to kill?”

“Yes.” He squinted. “Because when the person gets into Puya, they return good luck and wealth to the family. So, it’s like an investment. You get the money back in a good harvest or your buffaloes being protected from disease.”

“They need protecting from sacrifice,” I said, not waiting for the laughter I knew wasn’t coming. “All this must be changing though, right? Surely young people don’t want to keep spending all their money on dead relatives?”

Samuel bounced his shoulders, looking as if he wanted to agree with me but just couldn’t quite manage it. “No . . . not really. In our society, the elders set the rules and enforce tradition. For example, when I was young, I needed money to pay for my school. I went to my father to ask for it but he said no, we didn’t have it. The next week there was a funeral in the village and he gave money to sacrifice a pig.”

“Did that upset you?”

“Yes, then. Not today. I forgive him.”

“But what about your kids? Will you do the same?”

“No, I will give them the money.”

Ute tilted her head. “Why a pig and not a buffalo?”

“Oh, we sacrifice pigs too. Four pig souls are worth one buffalo.”

Our next stop was a tree full of dead babies. Samuel rested a hand on it reverently. “Only babies who died before getting a tooth can be buried inside this tree. We believe their souls are still pure and burying them like this fuses their souls with the tree and then they can go to Puya.”

“No sacrifices?” Martin asked, between further puffs of his vaper.

“No.”

“Don’t tell the buffalo that, or it won’t just be dingoes killing babies.” I laughed. I was the only one. “I’ve seen quite a lot of old people with no teeth. If you die with no teeth are you seen as pure?”

Samuel shook his head. “Probably just a big smoker.”

It was the closest he’d come to making a joke. Maybe I was rubbing off on them after all.

“Do people still put babies in trees?” Ute asked.

“Not so much now, no. Mostly they just use normal graves.”

Normal? Nothing about the Tana Toraja was “normal.” And it was about to get weirder yet. “Ready for the funeral?” Samuel asked.

The path plunged into a wide, flat field about the size of a football pitch. Between us and it stood dozens of Torajans wearing black clothing. They were talking and smoking and watched us closely as we walked towards the field. I hurried my step to catch up with Samuel. “Is it definitely okay we’re here?”

“Yes. It gives honour to the dead.”

With each step a very unpleasant wall of sound intensified in volume. What began as a high-pitched squeal grew into a loud, shrill screeching—unmistakably the sound of animals in pain.

A Torajan funeral is the main event of any visit to Torajaland; which isn’t to say it’s the highlight. We stood at the edge of the field, in a row, our eyes scrambling to take in the spectacle below us.

“Oh mein Gott, Martin,” Ute said, as Martin and I exchanged a look. Our mouths swung like saloon doors. Some things defeated words, and we’d already seen three that day: Tongkonan, the cave graves, and now this.

The field was rectangular and full of both people and traditional red-and-black Torajan buildings with their gorgeous, swooping roofs.

On the field’s longest edges sat raised, single-storey seating areas on stilts, divided into numbered sections from one to forty. At each of the shorter edges was a larger, more ornate traditional building. The middle of the rectangle was empty space where only a buffalo stood, tied to a pole. It looked like the site of a music festival.

I guess it was, of sorts.

We walked down the slope, stepping carefully on the straw and bamboo mats placed to stop the field from becoming a muddy bog and passing clusters of mourners. The sound grew louder. As we approached the first raised seating terrace I saw what was responsible for this noise: a pig lay strapped to thick bamboo poles dying of thirst and exhaustion, wriggling to free itself, screeching and grunting.

“Watch out,” Martin said, moving me to one side to let a group of men pass. They were carrying more pigs on more poles, strung up between their shoulders. A pig was unceremoniously dropped at my feet, close enough it could nuzzle my flip-flops. We stood in the shade of seating-area twelve, which was buzzing with mourners sitting on the raised floors, talking, drinking coffee, and eating fried snacks.

Two more pigs were dropped at my feet, their screeching cutting me like glass. I puffed out my cheeks. I had wanted to see this, right? A shout of “AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA” rang out over the PA system. I looked for its source and found, in the ornate building on the southern edge of the field, a man in a gold hat and sunglasses shouting into a microphone. “The master of ceremonies,” Samuel said, following my gaze as another “AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA” flooded the speaker system—the sort of unhinged noise a cartoon villain might make while pushing a big red button to blow up the moon.

“He leads the event and announces whose turn it is to visit the family. And he keeps the energy up.”

Not that of the pigs, though.

In front of this pimply decorated individual lay a large leather-bound book. “What’s with the book?”

“It’s a record of which families and villages have made offerings. Everything is properly taxed, of course.”

“Wait, what?” I took my glasses off and rubbed my face. “The government takes a tax each time they kill a pig?”

“Or buffalo.”

“Why?” It seemed a strange thing for the government to have dominion over, if we assume that governments don’t consider everything their dominion.

He grunted softly, unlike a dying pig. “It has always been this way.”

I looked down at the writhing, panting pig nearest my feet and saw a little green ticket taped under one of the bamboo poles. It was absurd, but then so were a lot of things here. And back home.

The largest, most ornate building, at the northern edge of the field, was empty. “That’s where the family accept guests offering their condolences.”

In front of that building stood a full-sized tau tau—a smiling elderly woman dressed in white. The person stuck in purgatory waiting for enough animal souls to lead her into heaven. I mean Puya.

“Her name was Dana Tirana. She was eighty and lived for a full year inside the home of her family.”

There was that curious use of the word living again. Suddenly, the MC screamed wildly as a hundred people from a nearby village arrived escorting a buffalo and six more pigs. Behind us, in a section of the seating area, a group of women drummed bamboo poles into a giant stone bathtub.

BOOM BOOM BOOM SQUEAK SQUEAK

It became too loud to think.

“ARGHARGHARGHARGHARGH!” the MC hollered as relatives of Dana’s, dressed in white, appeared from behind his building. They walked across the field in single file carrying gold urns past the chained buffalo and took their places in the structure behind the tau. Fifty men in orange polo tops then manifested from somewhere or another while I was adjusting my flip-flop. It was action packed, this funeral. These men surrounded the buffalo.

“They will perform a sacred dance now. They only do this dance when slaughtering buffalo.”

CHANTING BOOM SQUEAK CHANTING SQUEAK BOOM BOOM

“ARGHARGHARGHARGHARGH”

I covered my ears. The men held hands and did a lacklustre, lead-footed, sideways shuffle-and-finger-click motion, which they repeated a dozen times. They deserved the blank look the buffalo gave them. I removed my glasses again and wiped at my face as the humidity wrapped us up, like day-old sandwiches in cling film.

BOOM SQUEAK BOOM SQUEAK BOOM “ARGHARGHARGHARGHARGH” SQUEAK SQUEAK

The dancers left, replaced by five men who encircled the buffalo. They attached a rope from its foot to a sturdy tree. Samuel leaned in so we could hear him over the noise. “Sometimes if the cut is not right, the buffalo runs away and can injure people.”

Mercifully, this buffalo seemed oblivious to its impending demise. Its executor—a man in a black T-shirt emblazoned with the words Trust your dopeness—unsheathed a blade from his belt. As the buffalo saw it, it pulled back. The man grabbed the rope attached to the ring in the buffalo’s nose, lifted its head towards the sky, and, with one short, sharp movement, slashed it across the throat. Blood sprayed, and the buffalo bucked, trembled, staggered, and then dropped to the ground, gushing its life force into the mud.

Sick rose in my throat. I vacillated wildly between wanting to look anywhere else and feeling I must meet its eyes, that it shouldn’t be alone in this moment, as the lights of its existence dimmed. Not that it was alone. Several hundred sets of eyes watched, but I’m not sure they were of much comfort. The tragedy here was not the death of a single animal in a country that killed millions a day to satisfy the hunger of its population of 260 million. It was that a bereaved family was indebting themselves for that death. A two-thousand-dollar stream of scarlet flowed from the buffalo’s punctured neck, the first tributary in what would become a fifty-thousand-dollar river of financial sacrifice.

Samuel got out his phone to show us pictures from a cave-grave ceremony that had taken place the previous summer. In these festivities, they removed the dead from their lofty resting places, put bamboo poles down their backs so they could stand, and passed them around to party with the living, who gave them a change of clothing so they “stayed in fashion.”

In the first photo, a long-dead and partially decomposed woman stood topless; three people posed with her. In the next, she wore new clothes and was positioned alongside three other similarly skeletal family members, as if posing for a posthumous album cover (I will resist making a Grateful Dead joke here). In the final photo, two of the living held a mummified dead baby next to her head. Surrounding the dead were the living—smiling and taking photos. I could feel my brain trying to work out what to do with what it was seeing, searching for somewhere logical to file it, some connection it could make to something else, some place it could anchor it in the harbour of my mind. Finding none, it shrugged, pushed it in a berth marked Assorted Anecdotes, and considered that a job well done.

I handed Samuel his phone. “How often does this happen?”

“Every few years. But not everywhere. Only in some villages. You have to be lucky to see it.”

This would stretch most people’s definition of luck. “They don’t mind people watching?”

“No.” He smiled. “It’s a happy day!”

Ever since we arrived at the funeral, there had been a heaviness in my chest, as if I were breathing underwater. What we were experiencing seemed to affect Martina and Ute less, perhaps because they could share it, perhaps because they’d not come here with the same expectations I had. Expectations are disappointment’s foreplay. I’d wanted the Torajans to teach me how society could handle death more respectfully. I reflected on the past days, and whether they’d done that.

No, I concluded.