Of Taxi Drivers and Tropical Thugs

My taxi driver, with no more intense questioning than that of his wellbeing, tells me in a confessional tone I’ve always associated with candles and churches that he was once a preman, a thug. I like the way the Indonesian word slips off the tongue on a boat made of rolled Rs and the sinister edge it has like the crushed bones of the arms he used to break when loans weren’t met. “I broke them in such a way that they would have a scar like a tick,” he motions with his hands, the invisible image of correctness. He had to mark them, he explains, so he could recognise them later, as though the concept of their contorted faces embedded into his mind on arrows of shattered bone was outrageous. When I ask him if he’s ever broken his arm and he laughs, lifting one hand from the wheel and pulling up his sleeve to display a jagged rip in his flesh like a tear in the very fabric of his being. My stop rolls around and his laughter is still blocking the rest of the story from exiting his mind, so I now guess I’ll never know.