text: I grew up on the Nusa Tenggara islands in Indonesia, just east of Bali. The early part of my childhood was difficult, but this isn’t something you realise when you’re young. To me, growing up was full of fun and adventure on a tropical island. My young father wasn’t with us very often. He had enough smarts and luck to get into university in Jakarta. My mother would have to take care of me and my little brothers but when she had to go to work she would leave us with an old lady in the village. We called this old lady Odah, but she wasn’t really our grandmother. She would sell fruit from her little shack during the day while my brothers and I would cause trouble in her makeshift backyard. To keep us amused, and I’m sure to stop us from destroying her house, she would tell us old stories. I knew all of the old folk tales from the village, but her stories were different. Some of them, she admitted, she’d heard from the Dutch when she was a little girl. But most of them were from her own creation. She said she often just had stories in her head but because she couldn’t write them down she memorised all of them. As a child, I loved her stories. Sometimes I would even go back just to ask her to tell me a specific story and she was always more than happy to. Eventually my father came back and managed to get a job in Bali. After a few years he had made enough money and we all moved to Bali where our lives improved significantly. My brothers and I were all sent to a good school and we were all able to get a good education. During school breaks my mother would still take us back to the old village and I would always visit Odah. She was getting older and weaker but when I would ask to tell me a story her eyes would light up and we’d both be transported back to a time when I was a small child. After I finished high school I was accepted into the Universitas Indonesia in Jakarta. Odah’s stories had instilled in me a lifelong love of literature and so I studied arts at university. I decided to give something back to Odah. I had heard her stories for many years and had memorised all of them and so I wrote them down. With the little money I had, I had them professionally bound. Over the four years I was at university I gave Odah dozens of her stories which she kept all piled up in a special corner of her shack. She loved them so much and she even told me that she was learning how to read them. In 2013 a tropical cyclone hit the Nusa Tenggara islands. I was in Singapore at the time working as a journalist. There was no way I could get back right away but as soon as it was safe to do so I went back to the islands. I’ll never forget what I saw. The main street in the village was destroyed. Their wooden houses were knocked down and debris lay everywhere. It was difficult to recognise where Odah’s house was but as I got closer I could see it. The roof had caved in and fruit was floating on the flood waters. The water around her house was black and looked like a river of ink. Remnants of the books lay in pieces around the house. I asked around if anyone had seen Odah but everyone was worried about their own families. I tried looking for hours but I had no luck. Odah had no funeral. I don’t even know if anyone really missed her. But I did. I got back to Singapore and started rewriting her stories. I had written them down in the original Balinese but this time I translated them to Indonesian. After months of trying eventually some of my connections in the publishing world came through and I got her stories published. I used the pen name Odah Tengarra. After all, these were her stories, not mine. Shamelessly I wrote a story about Odah which my editor, probably due to my grief, agreed to publish in our magazine. It wasn’t a big piece but it did draw attention to her collection of short stories. The public were touched and soon the stories became widely read in Indonesia. Our readers in Singapore were curious about these stories and so they were also translated to Singaporean Mandarin, Malay and English. I had included some of the stories she had heard from the Dutch and so her stories were read in Europe as well. The collection of stories wasn’t exactly a bestseller but it was making money. I took the profits and donated it back to the old village. I had a library built in her honour and I could even employ some teachers to teach the local children how to read. In front of the library I commissioned a statue to be built of Odah reading to a young child. This was the least I could do for the greatest woman I had ever known.