And in fact, forgetting the past was easy to do in Indonesia. Jakarta was still a sleepy backwater in those days, with few buildings over four or five stories high, cycle rickshaws outnumbering cars, the city center and wealthier sections of town—with their colonial elegance and lush, well-tended lawns—quickly giving way to clots of small villages with unpaved roads and open sewers, dusty markets, and shanties of mud and brick and plywood and corrugated iron that tumbled down gentle banks to murky rivers where families bathed and washed laundry like pilgrims in the Ganges.