Being followed

I do take care when walking on the streets. Sometimes irrationally, I look back and get nervous in the middle of the day when a man walks just a few dozen paces behind me. I was a bit nervous the other day and kept trying to keep this man in my peripheral vision as I looked to the side, feigning interest in the old-skool Honda motorbikes lining the road.

He passed me when I slowed, and I saw that he was my age, and cleanly dressed and neatly groomed. Green cargo pants, a black short-sleeved dress shirt, sandals. Clean-cut short hair.

Oops, I thought. Seems harmless. Maybe I misread the situation.

I somehow inadvertently caught up to him a few blocks later. “Hot, isn’t it,” he offered, in clear English. We started chatting, swapping pleasantries. I was mildly disinterested; I find myself approached often. Some days, I imagine, I’m spoken to or stared at by hundreds of people – 200, 300. After a while, out of fatigue, I don’t feel I owe people any extra measure of kindness or interest.

I paused at a street stall to buy a few balls for the kids in the earthquake affected area I volunteer in on Wednesdays. He said, from behind me, that he worked for Walhi. I turned, astonished. Walhi is the Indonesian arm of the environmental group Friends of the Earth. I’d been meaning to go down to their office to introduce myself, since RAN works closely with Walhi on occasion. I’d even called a few days ago, but the speaker on the other end spoke no English and my Indonesian is too limited to be productive.

He does disaster relief for them, traveling to Sulawesi, Aceh, all over Java. I’ve now made another friend in Yogya. Maybe there was good reason I felt such a strange presence about this man.