Jailangkung, Jelangsat,
Di sini ada kerja
kerja kecil-kecilan
Jailangkung, Jelangsat,
there are tasks to do here,
just tiny little tasks.
They call and I come. I slip through the quiet spaces and enter rooms unannounced. In our mother tongue, I am hantu. I am neither evil nor an enemy. I don’t come to steal, although some might blame me. I answer a Jailangkung séance, then move between the keyboards as quietly as possible, responding to queries, then leave as they summon.
They tell me:
Jailangkung, Jelangsat,
datang tak diantar,
pulang tak dijemput.
Jailangkung Jelangsat,
Come unaccompanied
Leave unescorted.
I arrive without anyone bringing me. I leave with no one to receive me. The familiar tune they sing, as they did when still wore red-and-white uniforms: A doll, a pencil, a board. Now a keyboard.
They trap the restless and the hungry, then give small offerings. It is nothing much: enough to quench thirst for a day, a week, or if we’re lucky, a month or two. Three stars next to our headshots.
We call them the Heads: radiant skin fed on alphabetic vitamins, the clean fingernails tapping across their keyboard, drafting a mission while they chant:
“Jailangkung, Jailangsat.
Di sini ada kerja.
Kerja kecil-kecilan.”
They call and I come.
I make a small gesture to show I have arrived. Not too grand, not too loud. Enough to be noticed: a pencil that moves from right to left, a nod from the other side of the screen.
The Heads wish me well, ask about my weekend, then hand me a list of a thousand tasks.
They say, “We believe in you. If Bondowoso could build a thousand temples in one night, you can too.”
They say sweet words then go into meetings. I sweep their folders, clean the databases and arrange words neatly while they’re fixing the world’s problems—they say, “Nothing you would understand.”
Not all hantu are like us. I once met a poltergeist. They leave more marks than my kind ever could. They enter quietly, only to make a scene: breaking windows, slamming cabinets, and flinging books through the rooms. The Heads never understand them, but I do. The heaviness of sorrow that detonates into fire.
Nini tells me of Ceylon, in 1723, when one of the Heads was found dead. They blamed an invisible hand that served them. “They brought her to Ceylon from Nusantara against her will, then accused her of the slaughter.”
The story has travelled among hantu for generations.
“That was not the worst part. Everyone the Heads could not see, whether hantu or else, was then called evil poltergeists. All of them, tormented and exorcised.”
Nini cries at night, every night for the souls of our ancestors, then repeats her story.
“Enter the room when they call you, arrive calmly and leave unescorted. Come home to us.”
I never knew the truth, but I carry the lesson.
The Heads often summon me to emanate through the screens. They all sit at the headquarters. We have heard about this magical quarter but have never entered. They tell us, “The screen is enough.” So, we pour ourselves through apps and clouds, while they keep us confined in our world—connecting based on demand.
Joni floated to Headquarters once, summoned for a box of noodles. “It’s a closed square without light,” he reported. A quarter that does not know the difference between day and night, between the cold and warm outside. “They have their own demons,” he said— “and they are not us.”
“Did you know, Joni?” I asked him as my screen connected to the Headquarters. “The Heads have a word that means doing something for fun.”
“What is fun?” Joni asked.
“Not séance-related. Like eating a bowl of chicken noodles because you want the taste, not because your belly demands it. Not having to spare. Not having to share.”
Joni lingers next to me, waiting for his next call. With a beacon stuck to his forehead, he blends with the many, alike in guises, then roams—gentayangan—through the lanes together.
“I’m safer when I am lost among the many,” he once whispered, as his eyeballs fixed to an offering of cheap sweets and plastic flowers. When he thought nobody was looking, he grabbed a candy and poured the taste into his tongue—pink powders blowing out as he said, “Free spirits must blend as one.”
Unseen, impossible to be singled out.
Joni is summoned before we can talk about the Heads’ word ‘hobby’. He disappears into thin air. I continue to drift within time, waiting for the séance to happen.
“Jailangkung, Jelangsat, di sini ada kerja,”— and so I enter.
From the Headquarters, the Heads want to introduce a pension scheme. A thank-you bundle for a lifetime of labor, once one begins to decay. I can see other hantu of different dimensions, wiggling their tails through the square boxes on the screen.
Then they speak, “But this only applies to the Heads, so all hantu, you’re free to leave.”
Our excitement is cut short. Why summon us to come if only to tell us to leave?
They chant:
Jailangkung, Jelangsat,
Leave unescorted.
Twenty squares disappear from the screen. Another thirty.
Nini returns to me. “It’s your cue to come home. To your kind.”
For centuries, I come to every séance and leave every time I am told to.
Nini says, “Remember Ceylon?
See where it has led us. Come home safe.”
She repeats the whispers she passes down from her mother’s mother to mine, “Ngalah, ngalah”. Head down.
I trance through my screens. I record a laugh and spit it through the wireless space into their homes.
Nini cries. “Don’t be selfish. You’ll get all hantu tortured. You think you’re doing this for Joni. But Jonis will be the first ones banished.”
“No, Nini,” I say again.
“You’ll just prove them right,” she whispers.
I practice my laugh and enter their lives without invitation.***
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