Volltext - ub-dok: der Dokumentenserver der UB Trier - Universität ...

prompting her to prove her mettle and eat the fruit. This apparent victory for Alex is,
nevertheless, really Sinclaire’s. She is recognised for her good Bahasa and familiarity with
local custom, until she realises that she is being debased by the affair. Sinclaire, on the other
hand, indulges himself in this ‘brutalisation’ he calls ‘going troppo’ (MD, 165-68).
Alex, now exhausted, irritable and dirty, is further dehumanised by the market children
who pinch at her arms and legs with their ‘grubby, thieving fingers’ until they rush off to
harass a crippled horse. She rushes to defend the horse, but is then attacked by the children.
Sinclaire drags her back to the car, and calls her ‘a mad white woman’, though it is for having
done what is good instead of what is right. He accuses her of having rejected both foreign and
Indonesian communities, telling her ‘These are vile times’, and, when he says she would ‘be
better off back in the clan’, he means that only through identification with an ‘in-group’ and its
perspectives and attitudes can she gain the sense of right and wrong, which she lacks, to offset
the sense of good and evil, of which she arguably possesses too much. Then, while she is at
her weakest, he shows just how Machiavellian the clan’s sense of right from wrong is by
betraying her with the falsified procès verbal which is to destroy not only her loyalty to Maruli
but to her own feelings.
11.2.2. The Kiss of Betrayal
The final kiss, representing a victory of Sinclaire’s sense of right over Alex’s sense of
good, comes appropriately with Alex wearing the black dress Sinclaire bought for her, in the
darkness and shadow of the Ramayana Bar. Read as a modernist, feminist, or post-colonialist
novel, Alex must be a failed character. In the many battles of gods and demons of the great
Ramayana epic, however, evil takes many victories when the cycles of the mandala put it on
the ascendant. The epic’s end, the defeat of the demon, reflects the strategy of the Indian saint,
which is to wait for a favourable shift in the time, shed the ‘hindrances’ which would weaken
him against the demon, and conclude the battle when fate is on his side. The ultimate goal of a
Hindu saint, however, is still to break out of the cycles of time, thereby attaining enlightenment
for himself and for his evil brother as well.
- 265 -