Garnisun

Other children are named after saints, or grandfathers, or a feeling their mother had one afternoon in the second trimester. I’m named after a car.

I was born in Papua. There weren’t many vehicles around, and when it was time to take my mother and me home from the hospital, my grandfather found one. It was a military patrol vehicle, the kind they called a Garnisun, after the garrison. I’ve never seen a photograph of it. I picture something green and square with a canvas roof, a soldier at the wheel who did not sign up for this, and my grandfather in the passenger seat looking very pleased with himself.

Somebody in the family liked the word. They cut it down, the way Javanese families cut everything down, and it became Ganis.

So that’s my name. It’s short for a patrol car.

I tell this story at new-hire meetings. When you run a company long enough, you end up doing a lot of new-hire meetings, and you need material. For years mine was a game called Two Truths and a Lie. I’d stand at the front of the room and say:

I have reached Mythic rank in Mobile Legends.

I studied economics, not computer science.

I have run a 42 km marathon.

Then I’d ask the new engineers to pick the lie. They’d look at me, a soft man of five foot six with slightly blurry vision, and most of them would pick the marathon. The rest picked Mobile Legends, on the grounds that no managing director would admit to it. I’ve never decided which group to be offended by.

Then I’d tell them they were all true. There’s no lie. I’d say this is a lesson about assumptions in product development, which it is, a little. Mostly it’s a lesson about me, which is that I’ll make up a game for the pleasure of watching people lose it.

The patrol car came later in the session, once the room had relaxed. It usually got a laugh. It’s the only part of my biography that gets a laugh without me trying.

It’s not the only joke in the family. My father had one he was very proud of, and he told it to me roughly a thousand times.

“What fruit has money?” he’d ask, in Indonesian. Buah, buah apa yang berduit?

“Durian,” I’d say, because durian is expensive. I was a child who believed questions had answers.

“No,” he’d say. “Buah-pakmu.”

It’s a pun. Buah is fruit, and bapakmu is “your father”, so “the fruit with money” is your dad. It doesn’t translate, and to be honest it doesn’t fully work in Indonesian either. I once put it on my list of jokes for Novemberfest, our company party, with a stage direction in brackets: (insert smug face). Two hundred people, one pun, one face. I’d like to say it brought the house down. What it did was get passed on, which is what fathers’ jokes are for.

My father also gave me the habit of writing everything down. He kept notes. I keep notes about the notes. My journal has a line for almost every hour of almost every day, including the ones where nothing happened, which is most of them. When people ask how I remember so much about my own life, the truthful answer is that I don’t. It’s all in a file.

My name is short for a car that kept watch. I can’t keep watch over anyone else’s name for more than about twenty minutes.

I’m bad with names. It’s on a list I keep called What I Suck At, between “I don’t feel the need to hydrate” and “I keep losing my wallet”. I meet someone, we talk for twenty minutes, I like them a great deal, and by the time they’ve reached the car park their name has left my head and gone to live with my wallet.

So I keep a field guide. There’s a note on my phone called “Tekoff Coffee Crew”, after the coffee shop I go to. It says, in full:

Mas Imbu. Buzzcut. Mas Echa. Roastery. Mas Dana. Long hair.

Mas Imbu has no idea he’s in my phone with a description of his haircut. If he reads this, I’m sorry, and also, you should know, it’s working. I’ve said “Morning, Mas Imbu” with total confidence for a long time now, and I’ve never once had to look at your hair to check.

I know how this sounds. A man named after a vehicle, keeping a spotter’s guide to his baristas. It’s admirable, sort of, the way a dog doing something human is admirable, and also concerning.

Here is the part I don’t usually tell at new-hire meetings.

My grandfather, Mbah Kung Diman, went to Papua from Java to work. He worked his ass off, which is how my family describes it and which I’ve never found a better phrase for. When money ran out, my father took me back across the sea to be raised by my grandparents in Malang. I was two. The ship was the KM Rinjani, which was also two. We spent five days and four nights going west together, two toddlers, one of them considerably bigger.

My mother, whom I call Mamak, finished high school and never went further, and she decided I would. She didn’t say it like a wish. She said it like a schedule. I’m not sure I’d have made it to university otherwise, let alone through it, and I wouldn’t have studied economics, and I wouldn’t now be standing in a room in Yogyakarta telling a group of twenty-four-year-olds that the marathon was true.

For a long time I thought of myself as a late starter. I have an idea in my notebook for an essay called “I Was a Failure Until Thirty”, and I’m still not sure whether the title is a joke. A patrol car doesn’t get anywhere fast. It goes around and around the same streets, slowly, looking at everything, until it knows them by heart.

That turned out to be my method for most things. I run mostly the same loops. In business I relearn mostly the same lessons. And I keep mostly the same people, whose names I write down because I’m afraid of losing them.

Tomorrow morning I’ll go to Tekoff. If I’m lucky it will be open; this is Yogyakarta and it’s before eight, so I won’t be lucky. When it opens I’ll walk in and say, “Morning, Mas Imbu,” and I won’t need to look at his hair to check.

It isn’t much of a patrol. But it’s my route, and I know it by heart.