The first thing 14-year-old Tari saw on the morning of October 1 1965 were army tanks. They were parked on the roundabout outside her family home on Teuku Umar, one of Jakarta’s finest colonial streets – lined with embassies, the residences of ministers, and the homes of business and military elites. On a street where “nothing bad ever happens”, she saw “two tanks, three military jeeps and a dozen or so armed soldiers […] stationed on the roundabout”. She remembers: “The soldiers stand perfectly still, gripping their automatic weapons, their eyes casting suspiciously around. The flowers are squashed but that doesn’t seem to bother them.”The previous night, six generals had been killed in a coup attempt by a group of young army officers, led by Lieutenant Colonel Untung bin Syamsuri. Overnight, Untung’s mutiny was crushed by future president General Suharto, setting in motion a seismic shift in Indonesia.Review: My Neighbour, The Dictator: Coming of age in the shadow of Indonesia’s 1965 military coup by Tari Lang (Monsoon Books)These events are the opening of My Neighbour, The Dictator, Tari Lang’s memoir of growing up in Jakarta during the destruction of the world where her mixed-race, politically left-leaning family had, until then, thrived. Her mother, Carmel Budiardjo, was an economics researcher for the foreign minister. Her father, Suwondo Budiardjo, was deputy minister at the Ministry of Maritime Affairs. Tari Lang’s memoir charts the destruction of the world where her politically left-leaning family had thrived. Instagram In September 1968, six months after Suharto was installed as president, Tari’s parents were detained. Her mother was the only British woman imprisoned by the Indonesian military. Later, she would write a memoir about her experience, including three years in detention without trial, with 15 months spent in Jakarta’s notorious Bukit Duri prison. Aged just 17 when her parents were arrested, Tari was forced to become an adult.Life under a ‘creeping’ coupThe book’s title is literal. Suharto, who would gradually displace President Sukarno and establish the military-dominated New Order in Indonesia, moved in just a few hundred metres from Tari’s family home in 1967, soon after becoming acting president that March.Young Tari knew there were contradictions between her parents’ egalitarian convictions and their privileged lifestyle: a large house, good jobs and powerful friends. When her parents’ political life began to crumble, much of Tari’s social world continued to look reassuringly ordinary. Her parents, accused of being communists, lost their government positions almost overnight. They warned her not to visit the homes of certain friends, including the daughters of the chairman and deputy chair of the Indonesian Communist Party. Tari and her younger brother Anto had to move from their local government schools, but her new elite Catholic school was welcoming. The girl who befriended her there was the daughter of a minister in the newly installed government. But the building where Tari used to hang out and play in a youth marching band was now eerily empty. Some of the older boys and girls had “disappeared”.Tari herself was drawn into the clandestine effort to help people evade arrest, even being detained overnight in October 1966 and forced to witness the torture of her activist boyfriend. Her London-born mother stormed into the makeshift detention centre the following morning and secured Tari’s release.Tari’s routine life resumed. She was still getting piano lessons, making new friends, going out for noodles, attending parties, organising a fashion show for the elite and negotiating the awkward trepidations of first love.The book describes how Tari’s life was transformed bit by bit, through deception, confusion and lies. This happened in tandem with what some have called a “disguised” or “creeping” coup: a slow shift and consolidation of power into the hands of General Suharto.The young face of Indonesia’s coupAdolescent Tari gives the Indonesian catastrophe of 1965 a young face. She does not experience the destruction of the old political order through parliament, military headquarters or newspaper editorials. She experiences it in the street outside her house, in the disappearance of family and friends, in changes in the tone of conversations – and, ultimately, in the absence of familiar adults. It is reminiscent of the now-classic, controversial memoir of another political coup told through the eyes of a child: Loung Ung’s First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers. Published in 2000, it has become an important example of testimonial literature, reconstructing the Cambodian genocide through the consciousness of the five-year-old girl Ung was when the Khmer Rouge seized Phnom Penh in April 1975.For Ung, the catastrophe arrived as rupture the day the Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh, the city emptied. Ung and her family were forced from their home. Their former identities became dangerous, the family was dispersed, and the physical and social world they knew was suddenly stripped away.By contrast, in Tari’s Jakarta, most schools remained open, as did most restaurants and cinemas. Her familiar social geography was not demolished in one convulsion. It was infiltrated, rearranged and made dangerous for Tari as the child of two politically active parents. Tari’s identity was unsettled when she had to keep her parents’ status as political prisoners a secret; she did not know who among friends she could trust at any particular point.Her leafy suburb was taken over by capricious, increasingly powerful military officers. Nonetheless, she was able to stay on in her family home through the intervention of Lieutenant General Ali Sadikin, her father’s former boss. Appointed governor of Jakarta in April 1966, he continued in the position for the next 11 years.This gradual change did not make the Indonesian violence less brutal. The mass killings of about half a million people in 1965–66, and the subsequent imprisonment of another million without trial, were catastrophic. But Tari’s memoir shows how politics can be entirely re-ordered while maintaining a veneer of social continuity. The dictator now lives round the corner, but her famous piano teacher offers to give her free lessons. The elite Catholic schools she and her brother Anto attend stop charging fees after both parents are arrested.Mother and daughter memoirsTari’s memoir finds its extraordinary companion in her mother’s 1996 account, Surviving Indonesia’s Gulag: A Western Woman Tells Her Story.Tari’s parents never shared the worst nightmares of their life inside the prison. Her mother’s memoir documents a world Tari saw only at some distance. Carmel Budiardjo’s account describes interrogation, physical and psychological torment, and the suffering of fellow political prisoners. It also reconstructs the political circumstances that led to her arrest.Tari saw the empty buildings, the missing people and the parents who had lost power in every possible way. Her mother saw the machinery that produced those changes. Tari was disconcerted by the confused secrecy around her. Carmel’s memoir shows us that secrecy and the veneer of normality were essential parts of Suharto’s creeping coup.People outside appeared not to know what was going on inside the prisons. Carmel describes the lengths officials would go to keep secrets: she never knew which prison she was going to, when, or why she was blindfolded between destinations. But once, when she was in a car caught up in traffic, her blindfold was snatched off by her guards due to a group of gawking school children on the footpath. The veneer of normality was all part of the systemic aberration.Reading the two books together, seeing through the eyes of a daughter and a mother, we find a teenager’s transition to adulthood and a national transition to military dictatorship can happen without too many people noticing. Lang sums it up: life continues as before. The ugliness of much of the country is invisible. The pain, brutality and ferocity of the military government’s treatment of big swaths of citizens remain safely outside their compound gates and security huts. I’m aware that I am part of this establishment universe, but I’m also part of the left-wing political world, much truncated and largely underground.In May 1969, after eight months attempting to support both themselves and their imprisoned parents, Tari and Anto were whisked out of Indonesia with the assistance of the World Council of Churches, into the security of their mother’s extended family in London. In November 1971, Carmel was able to join them, following diplomatic intervention from the UK. There, she established the human rights organisation TAPOL (an Indonesian acronym for tahanan politik – political prisoner), which lobbied unrelentingly for the release of all detainees and for international condemnation of the Suharto regime. Tari’s father was not released until 1978, when he too went into exile in London.Her neighbour, the dictator, remained in power until May 1998, when he was forced to resign by a popular uprising. His former son-in-law, disgraced general and the current president, Prabowo Subianto, controversially rehabilitated him last year with elevation to “national hero”.Lang concludes her memoir by summarising the fate of friends and family who appear in the book. Having detailed her own struggles to survive what she calls “the Suharto storm”, she saves her last lament for the “hundreds of thousands of families whose voices were silenced, whose memories stay hidden, whose histories remain untold”.Krishna Sen moderated a session at the 22-25 October 2026 Ubud Writers and Readers’ Festival that included Tari Lang.David T. Hill does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.