Jabodetabek

As if only to demonstrate to humans that they have perfected a method of flight that so easily distinguishes their species from others, sparking an instant recognition even in those for whom birds are of no interest at all, swallows dip perilously into a heavily trafficked Javanese road. Just as this same flight, diving and gliding over English village cricket grounds, betrays no experience of an African Savannah, so too here, the marks are borne silently of the colder climes from which were sought escape.

From the highest point of their flight it is possible to see the whole of Jakarta; stretching across a vast and simmering plain, 43 miles from the city's centre to its western most reaches and sprawling again without end to Bogor, 40 miles to its south.

From here they see a blue sky. And the point at which it is sacrificed. They see a thick smog rise; yellow, then grey, then pink. Dirt. Dust. Noise. They see the very few rich and the very many poor. Even at this height it is easy to tell the difference. They see the rivers, sewers, puddles, drains; blood, spit, bile and piss; and they begin their swift descent.

They see the trucks and the truck stops and the truck stop whores and the truck stop prayer rooms. They see the child beggars, old beggars, legless, armless, eyeless beggars; boxes, cups, tins, hands. On rickshaws eaten by rust, and driven by tired limbs, they see the men and their wares; men carrying chopped wood, used tyres, empty bottles, live ducks, dead chickens, stagnant disease. Car accidents, bike accidents, industrial accidents, sexual intercourse accidents.

The swallows fly low enough now to choke on the same dust and exhaust fumes and breathe in the same smell of shit as, for instance, a tourist on a bicycle.

They see a girl sleeping on the road. She is three.

Or maybe four.

What can be said for certain is that her torso is the same height, almost exactly, as the curb she is wrapped around, her head resting in her arms. Her feet point out toward the traffic. Except for the dirt on them, they are the same kind of tiny feet that are put into tiny shoes without laces or real soles. Perhaps she is not yet three.

The swallows see the tourist look. Then look again. Then carry on.

Banks, factories, slums. Swallowed towns. Cracked roads. They see the ice-cutters, steel-cutters, crack-cutters, ambiguously employed; smiles, scowls, shouts and stares. The scorching sun, the smacking rain, the dirty air; the fried food vendors, fresh fruit vendors, dirty old rubbish vendors; hoots, horns, whistles, the calls-to-prayer.

They see, and they are just above their heads now, the human-chickens scratching in the rubbish, and the human-chicken-children learning how to scratch in the rubbish. They see the barbed wire, smashed glass, loving thoughts, sinful acts, hard words, tired lives, broken dreams of Jakarta stretch beneath them as a young man walks through the middle of it all, with tangled hair and blackened skin, stark bollock naked, with cuts on his feet and a smile on his face. The smile suggests to onlookers that he may recently have fallen into a modern day garden of Eden and is currently enjoying the pleasantries of his stroll through the brave new wonders of it all. Behind him, though quite some way behind him, for we are still a very long way back in the queue for the poor people who want to become rich, glass tower valleys glint in the sun. And their glint and their promise might remind the swallows, though they will of course not speak of this on English cricket fields, of the shine in the desert of water that never comes.