In Jakarta, a Rooftop Choir Sings Over the Rationed Hours

JAKARTA — Every evening at six, when the district's taps close for their scheduled hour, a hundred people climb to a school rooftop in Tanah Abang and sing. The choir began two summers ago as a way to pass the dry hour and has become something the neighborhood organizes its day around. "We could not fix the water, so we decided the hour would belong to us instead of to the shortage," said Sri Wulandari, a schoolteacher who conducts with a flashlight as the heat breaks. The repertoire is half old lullabies, half songs the members write themselves about the city as it is now — the queues, the heat, the neighbors who left for the northern corridors and the ones who arrived. It is not relief in any measurable sense. It is, the singers insist, a refusal to let the shortage set the whole tone of a life. The taps reopen at seven. By then the roof has emptied, and the songs, they say, carry down the stairwells for a while.