A Letter Without Sugar

Notes on a letter that emptied a chair without giving a reason, a guessing game that outran its own invitation, and grounds that would like to become a lesson

On Thursday evening, my regular warung was full of people claiming to have seen it all coming since Tuesday, and the fritters vanished faster than usual. The long bench now rested on a block of wood nailed up the night before, replacing cardboard that had surrendered to the damp. Phones reported that shortly before noon the Vice-President had gone to the People’s Consultative Assembly (MPR), handed in a letter of resignation, talked with the Assembly’s leaders for about twenty minutes, and left without a word to reporters. About three hours ahead of schedule, the House of Representatives cancelled the two o’clock plenary that was to have announced the motion on its right to state an opinion. The hundred and twenty signatures, so briskly stirred together the day before, stayed in their folder, never read out. Ironically, one sheet of paper emptied the chair faster than all that ink.

The retired schoolteacher at the window table read the letter through as if marking an exam script. The Assembly’s Speaker read it out to reporters: resignation from office at the Vice-President’s own request, with one line about guarding the nation and its people above oneself, and no cause given. Some reports say the Assembly’s leaders had at first not read it, but the sequence is reported inconsistently, so that goes on the plate marked unverified. In format it earns full marks; the box marked ‘show your working’ is blank. To me it is a letter without sugar: valid, brief, bitter, and leaving the whole warung to invent its own sweetness. An official who leaves without explanation leaves a hole, and holes fill quickly with gossip.

The business of the chair itself ran like a train afraid of being late. The Speaker declared the vice-presidency vacant from the moment of the resignation, and the Assembly has at most sixty days to fill it. The President summoned ministers and the Assembly’s leaders to the Palace, and the coordinating minister for law explained that one letter from the Assembly’s leadership to the President is enough to start the process. Dispatch is scheduled for Friday; from receipt, the President has fourteen days to put forward two names, while the Assembly prepares a team to verify candidates’ files and an ad hoc team to draft its decree. The President proposes, the Assembly chooses, and the people watch from the back bench. Beside a hundred and twenty signatures gathered in a day, sixty days sounds like a luxury; let us hope it is spent on checking, not merely on bargaining.

Before that invitation had even gone out, the guessing game was open. One outlet offered five names, another six, another seven; the lists swapped members like substitutes, and all spoke with confidence. A former coordinating minister named five on his personal channel, while a former deputy chair of the anti-corruption commission claimed to have heard that the choice would most likely come from within Gerindra. One customer even offered a packet of prawn crackers as a wager. All of it is conjecture or one-sided claim that I cannot check. In some lists the official now running the process has been tucked in too, which is again only media guesswork. We are quick to forecast who will sit, yet fumble when asked what qualifies anyone to sit.

The parties that were busy signing the motion yesterday are busy counting today. One researcher judges that the vacancy opens fresh room for bargaining between the President and the parties backing the government. Analysts can be wrong, but warung common sense grasps that an empty chair doubles as a negotiating table. Yesterday’s keyword was qualifications for office; today’s is composition. The right to state an opinion has drifted into the right to submit hopes. That is not forbidden, provided the haggling takes place in front of the customers rather than in the back kitchen.

What did not leave with the resignation are its questions. The Supreme Court’s ruling annulling the equivalency certificate still stands; who ought to have checked it upstream remains unanswered; and what it means for the past, nobody I have heard has explained. With the plenary cancelled, the Constitutional Court tested nothing. The schoolteacher shrugged: a pupil who transfers does not erase the school register, and the record of the move must still be tidied. Resignation closes the political chapter, not the governance one; the person has moved on, but the case is still on the table.

The way out is not complicated. The Palace and the Assembly need only post a single open calendar giving the date of the letter, the date the names are submitted and the date of the electing session, so that there are not three versions as there were this week. The President could announce criteria before naming anyone, then make sure both candidates’ educational records are examined by the verification team and a summary of the findings published before the session. The Assembly can turn the candidates’ duty under the MD3 Law to declare their readiness at its plenary into a forum for testing ideas, not a formality. The competent authorities should publish a chronology of how the equivalency certificate came to be issued, so the error is not repeated. The Vice-President who resigned is entitled to silence, but a short explanation in his own words would close the door on gossip without diminishing anyone’s rights. The media and we readers need only tell guesses from reports, and ask for criteria before names.

Near closing time, the owner poured a fresh glass for the last customer without asking who would win. The soil in the chilli pot by the door looked darker for last night’s grounds. The customer had ordered coffee without sugar. She served it without comment, merely setting a small spoon beside it in case he changed his mind. An empty chair, she said afterwards, is no excuse to let the table gather dust; what matters is that whoever sits down eventually brings their own papers. At the bottom of my glass the fresh sediment was settling slowly, and this time I did not rush to stir it.

While waiting for further developments, the customers and coffee-sippers no longer stared at their phones. The owner turned the dial of her old FM radio until the needle settled on a mournful frequency, and from it flowed Cavatina, composed by Stanley Myers and now better known as the theme from The Deer Hunter. The piece was originally written for another film in 1970, then reused by this one eight years later, and its journey is recorded as tidily as the owner’s receipt book: who composed it, what it was made for, when it was used again, all clear without a single equivalency certificate. The pedigree of a melody turns out to be better documented than the history of the frying oil in our tray; may other origins take lessons from it. The owner’s choice felt apt: the film is about ordinary people from a small town, pressed by great events beyond their control, and it ends in a bar, when words run out and old friends choose to sit together, then sing softly. The letter without a reason, too, leaves feelings unspoken. Of course our commotion is not a war; I am only borrowing the mood. The broadcast faded for a moment, swallowed by hiss, rather like those claims I cannot check: there is a signal, but not necessarily any content. The song ended, and the announcer merely read the weather forecast, sunny intervals, no official announcements. Nobody complained; at least that was news one could check by glancing at the sky. At the bottom of the glasses, the grounds settled without a sound, waiting and listening too.

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Grounds that Refuse to be Forgotten

On Wednesday evening, the long bench in my regular warung, a roadside coffee stall for those reading from elsewhere, was still propped on yesterday’s cardboard, now soft with steam from the flask. The customers were bent over their phones, awaiting news of uncertain brewing. It arrived all the same: a hundred and twenty members of the House of Representatives, from eight parliamentary groups, had signed a motion to use the House’s right to state an opinion on the Vice-President. The minimum is twenty-five members across the groups, so the motion cleared the bar easily, and the House leadership scheduled it for Thursday’s plenary session at around ten in the morning. Earlier this week the tally stood at about fifty from six groups, and at Tuesday’s plenary the motion was not read out, the Speaker offering no explanation. A surge that brisk put me in mind of instant coffee: tear, pour, stir, never wait for the granules to settle.

At the table by the window, a retired schoolteacher was reading the Supreme Court judgment published on Tuesday. The equivalency certificate numbered 9149/D.D1/KS/2019, dated 6 August 2019, had been annulled because it equated a school following a foreign curriculum with the national level without any diploma or graduation certificate, an act the judges called careless. ‘Care,’ the old man muttered, ‘is a rare commodity, sought only after the glass has broken.’ Paperwork long dismissed as trivia is now rattling the second-highest chair in the republic. The certificate was a condition for registering in the 2024 presidential election and has only now been tested; who should have checked it upstream, from the issuing office to those vetting candidacies, nobody has yet answered plainly.

Meanwhile the Palace kitchen, the Vice-President’s office and the government’s spokespeople stirred one recipe into flavours that contradicted one another. The State Secretary said the intention to resign had been voiced, that the President had not refused but offered advice, and that the Vice-President had asked for a chance to prove his documents before the administrative court. The Vice-President himself said the President’s advice was to fight his corner there. The coordinating minister for law, Yusril Ihza Mahendra, judged that pointless: the Constitutional Court’s ruling is final and binding, the Supreme Court’s is final too since nobody can seek a review, the education ministry seemingly will not seek one and will instead carry the ruling out, and the dispute in the administrative court concerns the same subject. He left the choice of route to the Vice-President and, according to one report, stressed that the rulings do not automatically void his office. The government communications agency then denied that the President had advised going to that court, citing the minister. The office thus sits between two official sentences, no legal route left yet nothing to end it, like a waiting room that hands out no queue numbers. A few hours after the intention to resign was announced, the Vice-President was still at the President’s side at a state event. An intention without a deadline is a glass left on a table: nobody knows whose it is, or whether it is safe to drink.

The parties, too, are adept at playing in the gaps. Gerindra, which on Tuesday morning said none of its members had signed and left its cadres free to decide, was later reported to have supplied eleven signatories; I mark that unverified, since the report itself confused two parties. From the Golkar camp, a senior figure stressed that the right belongs to each member, not the group, and that this is only a beginning. By the rules, perfectly true. Still, those of us sipping at the tables want the official taste of the brew, not merely the name of whoever spooned in the sugar.

At the warung, sugar is always the troublemaker. Two spoonfuls disguise the bitterness; three erase the coffee itself. Statements sweetened by self-interest do likewise: pleasant for a moment, until the tongue forgets the true flavour. The House leadership had said it was waiting for the official copy of the Supreme Court ruling; the copy appeared on Tuesday, and the signatures flowed on Wednesday. Respect for procedure deserves praise, provided it does not become an excuse to wait for tempers to cool.

On a separate plate I set down the fritters with no label. A constitutional-law scholar speaks of a closed agreement among the elite that ties the intention to resign to legal protection for a certain family, and there is an allegation of wiretapping by a former senior police officer, said to have stoked the talk of impeachment. A foreign news agency judged the wiretapping story apparently unconnected to the intention to resign. I cannot yet check the evidence for either, so both stay on that plate, still allegations, not served as a main course.

The headlines peddle only two items, resign or be impeached; a third, staying on while awaiting clarity, is never chalked on the board, though it is the dish most often ordered in this country. The second route, however, is a long road: after a plenary attended by at least two-thirds of the members, the matter must still go to the Constitutional Court and then to the People’s Consultative Assembly. A signature is only the gate, not a verdict; a hundred and twenty names have removed no one. We, the sharers of links, add to the din by forwarding snippets we never opened.

The way out is modest and needs no hero. The Vice-President and the Palace need only announce a decision, whether resignation or staying on while pursuing the legal route, by a set deadline and through one spokesperson. The House should read the motion out in public, let the Vice-President explain himself, and declare each group’s position officially, not through the side door. The education ministry should carry out the order to revoke the certificate and explain its consequences in writing, while the competent court settles retroactivity once a case reaches it. Those vetting candidacies at the next election could check documents upstream against a published checklist. Parties had better state their official stance before Thursday and leave the vote to conscience rather than the coalition meeting. The media could separate fact from allegation in plain type, and we readers could finish a story before sharing it. To defend one’s own documents is justified, to question them is normal; what is unbecoming is a situation left hanging.

The owner gathered the grounds from the glasses and scattered them over the chilli plant by the door. Grounds that are admitted to be grounds, she said, can become fertiliser; those hidden beneath cardboard only turn into a smell. At the bottom of my own glass, the black sediment had gone cold, waiting its turn for the pot.

Near closing time, the old radio in the corner of the warung was playing the adagio of Joaquín Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez. My ears, raised on cowboy films, had always taken that melody for the soundtrack to a high-noon duel: two gunslingers facing each other on a dusty street, the whole town peeping through the gaps in its shutters. Tonight I caught something else. In that adagio there is only one guitar, small and easily drowned by a hall-sized orchestra, yet it is the orchestra that holds back each time the guitar speaks. The people in this warung are that guitar: no pistol in hand, no chair in the string section, merely keeping one note alive until it reaches the ear. The players out in the street, whether resigning, holding on or impeaching, may pull the trigger whenever they please; all we ask is the habit of a good orchestra, which is to know when to come in, know when to rest, and never cut a melody off before its note has finished. The owner switched off the radio. The last note lingered a moment, like the grounds at the bottom of a glass: black, bitter, honest, waiting to be planted rather than thrown away.

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