On Saturday morning, the owner’s FM radio had moved on from mournful music to the news bulletins, and the empty seat among the republic’s chairs now had a timetable. On Wednesday 2 December, the People’s Consultative Assembly (MPR) will elect, swear in and ratify a successor in a single plenary session, as quickly as instant noodles. The letter asking the President for two names went out on Friday, after a closed joint meeting of about an hour; the doors were shut, but the water dispenser inside was surely left open. Reports differ on the deadline for submitting the names, some counting 18 November and others around 27 November, so I have put it on the plate marked unverified. The Assembly’s Speaker says the sixty-day limit falls on 10 January 2027, but nobody wants to use all of it, like a pupil given a week for homework who finishes it on the morning bus.
The retired schoolteacher repeated one line from the official video statement posted on Thursday: the office was only a temporary deposit. To the owner, who takes in helmets and bags for safekeeping every day, that made sense, apart from one thing: where is the ticket? The mandate is said to be handed back in full to the people, and the people, as the owners of the goods, receive it with no receipt, no attendant to check the contents are intact, and none of those clerks in hi-vis who usually say, careful, that mustn’t be thrown. In this warung a left-behind helmet is always checked for scratches before it is handed back; a country, surely, is worth more than a helmet.
The letter itself ran to only five paragraphs, according to the coordinating minister for law, and asks the Assembly to act under Article 8(2) of the 1945 Constitution. The Assembly’s Speaker and the minister both say no specific reason is written in it; according to the minister, what weighed on the decision were personal reasons and voices in society. Reasons that did not fit in five paragraphs apparently fit in a video of almost seven minutes: a personal decision, not about the diploma, educational documents complete and already submitted to the court, and no sign of incapacity. The claim that the documents are complete is the statement of the person concerned, and I cannot verify it independently. We are a nation adept at moving explanations from paper to screen, like bringing the washing in when clouds gather, and like washing, some explanations stay damp. A personal reason broadcast on two official channels remains personal, just as a diary posted online remains private.
The owner’s ledger records the sequence of events tidily. The day before, the former Vice-President said he was ready to fight and lay everything open at the administrative court. On that same Thursday, the Jakarta administrative court declared the suit over the equivalency certificate void because its subject had been revoked, ordered the claimant to pay Rp457,000 in court costs, and said no further appeal was possible; the judge said the ruling was meant to end a protracted controversy. His lawyers were reported to have considered an appeal, which I have not been able to confirm. We believe entirely that none of this is connected, for the warung teaches that two entries side by side are not always siblings, though they deserve to be set next to each other. A controversy of this size closed with a bill for Rp457,000; the cost to public trust has yet to be tallied by any cashier.
At the back table, the guessing game still turns like an old fan: five names, six names, seven names. The great political catchphrase, that no name has yet been agreed, means in warung language that there are plenty of names and the snacks are not finished. I would bet there was fried rice in that closed meeting, but a bet is not a fact. The Assembly’s Speaker reminds us that the Constitution says only that the President proposes two names, without saying where they come from, while according to the headline of one report, the coordinating minister for law says the candidates must come from coalition parties under the MD3 Law. I have yet to read the text and context of either; two people reading one text and finding two interpretations is common, like two cooks reading one recipe for soto. The verification and ad hoc teams are reported to total thirty-six members to examine two candidates: a reassuring ratio, provided this time the checking starts upstream with the documents rather than upstream with opinion. May the speed of a one-day plenary not rub off on the verification; instant coffee suits the morning, not the paperwork.
Some politicians and lawyers, according to reports, want the inquiry into the equivalency certificate to continue rather than stop because the political process is over. Whether any criminal proceedings are formally under way I cannot confirm, so I have put the request on a separate plate. I understand the demand: resigning closes a seat, not a question. Netizens, as usual, have already turned all this into memes with soap-opera soundtracks; we laugh, but not because we have forgotten. Laughter is how the people cope, and our memory outlasts any phone battery.
The way out is not grand. The Assembly and the President need only announce the criteria for candidates before the names, then publish a summary of the verification of both candidates’ documents before the plenary. The ministries and bodies concerned could publish a chronology of how the equivalency certificate came to be issued, so the chain of checks upstream is no longer full of holes. The parties proposing the candidates should also explain why a particular name was chosen, rather than saying merely that it came from consultation, and the media could mark guesses in a typeface plainly different from news. Whoever takes the seat, before being sworn in, we leave one simple request: give a ticket for every item the people leave in your keeping, and hand it back with a note, not merely a smile.
Waiting until 2 December reminds me of Father’s rule in our little kitchen. Coffee is made by the ears, not by restless hands. Listen to the water. Do not hurry. That was Father’s rule. Only later did I understand that what he taught was not how to brew coffee but how to live: to listen more than you speak, to be patient for longer than you complain, and to trust a process that human will cannot force. Of course that kind of patience does not mean keeping quiet: Father listened to the water to know when to pour, and we listen to the process to know when to ask. Waiting without a ticket is merely delay; waiting with a ticket is called brewing.
Towards noon, the owner gathered the grounds from the glasses and scattered them over the chilli plant by the door, noting the date on a biscuit tin: Wednesday, 2 December. The grounds at the bottom of my glass already knew the timetable by heart; this time they waited patiently, ticket and all.
That afternoon, once the grounds had been gathered, the owner’s FM radio played Somebody That I Used to Know by Gotye featuring Kimbra, and the whole warung fell quiet, like an audience watching somebody else’s break-up, though we had lived through this one for the better part of two years. The song tells a single parting through two voices and two versions, and so it was here: the Palace has its version, the Vice-President’s office has its version, and each is sure that only its own is right. We used to hear that name every morning, in headlines, in comment threads, even in the chatter on the warung bench; now it has moved into the category of ‘somebody we used to know’, with one difference: we have nothing to delete except the screenshots that stubbornly linger in our phone galleries. The retired schoolteacher nodded and closed the evening with the most useful advice of all: old acquaintances are welcome to leave, provided they leave the ticket behind. At the bottom of my glass, the grounds said nothing, like an old acquaintance who does not wish to be greeted but cannot be forgotten.
