I sip my bitter coffee on the terrace, letting its steam graze the wrinkles that seventy years have carefully etched across my face. The taste lingers longer now—like memory.
I was the second of four children, yet in the eyes of our Batak tradition, I was the eldest son. In our world, that distinction matters. Responsibility does not wait for birth order; it attaches itself to gender and expectation. Since the day I was born in Tarutung, an invisible weight has rested quietly on my shoulders.
Memory carries me back to a narrow alley called Gang Serayu in Pelita 4. The air there did not smell of coffee, but of rivalry—thick and unspoken. We lived under the roof of Opung Boru, the last surviving elder in the family. In that house, affection moved in hierarchies. It had its favorites.
My father was merely a civil servant—steady, modest, ordinary. In a family where titles shimmered like medals, ordinary felt insufficient. My uncle's position gleamed brighter; his voice carried further. Ours seemed to shrink into the corners of the room.
I remember Opung Boru's eyes. They softened for some, but hardened for us.
The sky over Medan was heavy that afternoon. My parents had stepped out briefly, and my mother had asked my cousin—my uncle's son—to take down the laundry if it rained.
It did rain. Hard.
The clothes remained outside, soaked and clinging helplessly to the line.
What followed was not anger at the rain, but a storm of words. "Incompetent," Opung Boru said sharply, her voice cutting through the house like a blade. All blame fell upon my mother, as if she were an outsider trespassing in her own home.
From the corner, I saw my father's hands curl into fists. That was the moment something shifted. Pride—wounded and trembling—boiled over.
"We're moving," he said that night.
It was not just relocation. It was rescue.
Leaving Pelita 4 meant salvaging my mother's sanity and reclaiming a fragment of dignity. My father's older sister—Kaka Tua—became our unexpected refuge. She handed us the key to her house in Perumnas Mandala with a simplicity that felt almost sacred.
"Live there in peace," she said.
Mandala felt like air after suffocation. The streets were wider, the sky more forgiving. No more measuring glances.
My father returned to routine—brown uniform in the morning, exhaustion in the evening. But Mandala awakened something in him. Often, strapped to the back of his motorcycle was a bamboo basket filled with village chicks.
Still dressed in office trousers, he would build coops from scrap wood. He numbered each egg carefully with a marker, tracking incubation with the precision of a clerk who trusted order.
"Ray, if we raise them well, we won't need to buy eggs anymore."
There was pride in his voice—quiet, hopeful.
For a while, we tasted modest prosperity. The yolks were deep orange, thick with promise. But our yard had no proper fence. The chickens wandered freely. My father marked their legs with paint so neighbors would recognize our clan's ownership.
It was not enough.
One by one, they vanished.
Then illness came—swift and merciless. The rooster he cherished most grew weak first. Within hours, the coop became a graveyard. I watched my father, hands once steady with paperwork, trembling as he tried to inject medicine into fragile wings.
Hope collapsed in days.
The empty coop stood behind our house like a monument to a dream too fragile for this world.
Yet Mandala gave something else to us children. The streets pulsed with life every afternoon. My sister found companionship. I found a kingdom.
A tall water-apple tree stood in front of our house, abandoned by its former owner. To me, it was a throne. Bare-chested and thin as a reed, I climbed higher than anyone else dared. From the branches, the world looked manageable. Smaller.
Up there, I was not the son of a man who would one day lose himself. I was sovereign. King of the water-apple tree.
Those afternoons were my oxygen. In the chaos of cracked pride and tightening finances, Mandala taught me resilience. It taught me how to lose without surrendering dignity—something my father was still learning in darker places.
I miss those days.
There was a time when my greatest fear was a broken sandal during a game of tag—not unpaid school fees, not whispered judgments, not the silent unraveling of a man who once believed he could build something lasting.
The coffee has gone cold now.
But the memory is still warm.