Those Cast Away in the Sixties

“FATHER, MAY YOUR ASHES REACH THE SHORES OF INDONESIA”

by Denny JA

(In the year 2024, a daughter scatters her father’s ashes into the sea, fulfilling his final wish. Though his body was forbidden to return—banished by the storms of politics in the 1960s—he hoped his ashes might find their way home to the shores of Indonesia.)

⸻

“Go now, Father…
Let the sea carry you home.
O ocean, mother of waves,
bear my father’s ashes
to the shores of Indonesia,
to the soil where he was born.”

Her tears fell—
mingling with the tide.
Rina, daughter of Baskara,
stood upon the deck,
holding a small bundle of ashes
wrapped in white cloth.

The waves pulled away,
carrying her father’s dust.
And the daughter became a bird,
flying beside the drifting soul.

This was Baskara’s final wish:
“If I cannot be buried in Indonesia,
let my ashes return—
tossed by the sea
until they rest
upon my homeland’s shore.”

Indonesia—where he was born,
yet forbidden to rest.
All his life,
Baskara was an exile.

⸻

Beijing, 1965.

He was twenty-three,
young, full of purpose.
Sent by Bung Karno
to study agriculture—
a seed of knowledge
to be planted one day
for his beloved land.

But fate turned cruel.
The September 30th Movement erupted.
Baskara was stranded in a foreign land.
His passport seized,
his citizenship erased.
He was no longer Indonesian—
though his blood,
his longing,
still pulsed for that soil.

“Why did they take away my right?”
Baskara would ask—
but no answer came.
He lived unseen,
a man unmoored.
His friends who dared return
vanished without trace.

He heard whispers—
those who came home were tortured,
imprisoned, erased.
And his father—
accused of being leftist,
Soekarnoist, communist—
disappeared into the dark.
Yet the old man was only
a simple farmer.

He heard faint rumors:
his father was killed somewhere,
unnamed, unmarked.

⸻

In Beijing,
Baskara became a tree without roots,
his body wandering a foreign land,
his soul stranded in Indonesia.

Seven years he waited—
forgiveness, recall, redemption—
none came.
The nation that once sent him forth
now cast him away.

Unable to bear
the weight of statelessness,
Baskara became a citizen of Sweden.

⸻

In 2015,
he tried to return—
to visit his mother,
to search for the father
who never came home.
But he was deported,
accused of rekindling
the ghost of communism.

⸻

In his old age,
he sat upon his porch in Sweden.
The wind hummed
an old keroncong tune—
the one his mother sang
while cradling him as a child.

Above his home,
the Swedish sky
unfolded memories of the past:
a patch of rice field,
the drizzle of childhood rain,
his laughter chasing the dusk
with his mother and father.

Baskara longed for home.
He longed for Indonesia.

⸻

Now, the sea cradles his ashes.
Perhaps one day,
the wind will bear him back—
to the shore he has never ceased to love.

⸻

Jakarta, September 15, 2024

(Inspired by the real-life story of Tom Iljas, an exile of 1965 who was separated from his homeland by the tides of political change.)