In July 2021 the Indonesian photojournalist Muhammad Fadli drove with his cameras to a cemetery on the Jakarta outskirts and understood, again and more profoundly, how wrong he had been. Over a stretch of weeks during March and April, Fadli had let himself believe that life as he knew it was righting itself: He saw a nationwide inoculation campaign, markets starting to bustle again, malls reopening.
But no. It was like that lull in the horror movies, the brief fake serenity before the thing roars up again. Now in this new burial area, one of six commissioned when the pandemic filled the city’s main public cemetery, earthmoving machinery was clearing more ground even as mourners bent over fresh graves.
At the entrance gate, Fadli noted, hearses pulled up every few minutes to deliver the dead. Frequently they converged and had to wait in line for their turn. When drivers swung open their rear doors, Fadli realized that many of the hearses held more than one casket. “Some were carrying four,” he told me in early September, and as both of us paused to picture this, our phone conversation momentarily fell silent.
