When I moved to Cisauk, Tangerang, almost five years ago, this area felt like it was in the middle of nowhere. There was little around except dusty roads and local people with limited access to education. I hate to say it, but that was the reality.
One day, I stopped by a small local shop and saw a woman handing out wedding invitations to others. She was younger than me, so I assumed the invitation was for her wedding, perhaps her second, as people in the area often married at a young age. But it turned out it was not hers. It was her daughter’s wedding invitation.
I was astonished. She was still young, even younger than me, which meant her daughter was barely a teenager.
“Sixteen,” she said. Her daughter was going to marry a foreman, who I assumed was a middle-aged man and had probably been married before.
“Is it legal here for someone underage to get married?” I asked, knowing that Indonesian law sets the minimum marriage age at 19 for both women and men.
“The neighborhood head made her older on her documents,” she replied, leaving me even more speechless.
Another time, a woman who sold nasi uduk told me that she used to live in Sampora, an area of Cisauk that has now become part of the new BSD center. She and her family sold their land, as did many other residents, and a well-known shopping mall, AEON, now stands on the land they once owned. It is a place where people arrive in luxury cars to shop, while the former landowners can only look around.
The nasi uduk seller was displaced and moved to a small settlement behind my housing cluster. I am not sure how long that neighborhood will survive, given how quickly the area is developing and how new housing complexes are springing up like mushrooms after the rain. It makes me sad to think that, someday, she may be displaced yet again.
After five years of living here, not much has changed for the local community, even as rice fields, gardens and vacant land have been transformed into housing developments filled with people from different parts of the country. Local people sold their land to developers, who turned it into housing clusters whose prices have risen severalfold, putting them far beyond the reach of the people who once owned the land.
Physically, Cisauk, once a rural community, has transformed into a “city,” while many of its original residents have been pushed further to the outskirts by rapid development, without adequate protection or support from the authorities.
