The other evening at sunset I rode my bike through the winding gravel paths and newly paved lanes behind our house. Some kids raced me on their brakeless dirt bikes, while mothers lounged in the shadows on makeshift wooden benches. Men headed to the mosque for prayers, their sarongs swishing against their ankles. The calls of “Hey Mister!” were more muted. This is the rhythm we’ve come to expect at the end of the day. A pause, to catch up with friends, to rest, to pray. And yet riding around, I also thought that nearly a year into our stay here my understanding of what goes on in the neighborhood and all around the city is only skin deep. I am a passerby, still, maybe always.

At dinner the other night, I was doing my best imitation of the ubiquitous local prayer call when one of our only Acehnese friends turned and said sternly, “Don’t do that. You can do that when I’m not around, but not now.” Growing up in the house of an Episcopal minister, we used to look at big salad and say “Lettuce pray” spontaneously. Here I was caught by surprise. Out of my depth.

It’s not that the Acehnese are cold or stand-offish. The opposite, in fact: looking back, I’m amazed by all the homes and games and benches I’ve been beckoned to by total strangers in remote villages and even the streets of Banda Aceh. “Silikan, duduk!” Please, sit down.

But what makes them tick? That’s an often-futile pursuit.

A few months ago, we pulled out our domino set at a local coffee shop and were five minutes into a game when the owner waved his hand and told us to pack up the tiles. We’re right across from a mosque and religious police could come and shut me down, he said. Why? Wherever there are dominos there is the remote possibility of gambling, which is punishable under Shariah law. To our ears this rings especially loony. But it’s just kind of accepted by the Acehnese, including a friend who was with us that night. They willingly spend whole concerts standing on one side of the room with only members of the same sex: the Shariah police insinuate that mixing with opposite sex is akin to pulling the dominos out of the box. Something untoward must be going on.

The Dominos Incident led to some serious soul searching. If we can’t reckon with something as simple as a game, Hayley said, how to fix the bigger problems in Aceh that the aid community has tasked itself with? To which I offered deafening silence.

What makes it frustrating is there’s a rich identity to know here. The Acehnese repelled the Dutch and then the Indonesian state repeatedly; they have such close kin with Islam that they call this place the Verandah on Mecca; they have lived in the company of elephants and tigers for time immemorial, they were once ruled by a succession of queens; and now, as always, they sit at the crosswinds of Southeast Asia, India and Arabia — before the Sultans adopted Islam and received Western trading emissaries around the Middle Ages, there were Hindu and probably Buddhist communities here.
The past is as little known as the present, “poorly served” by Western literature and academia, as Australian Aceh expert Tony Reid puts it.

But all is not a knowledge pothole. Last week, I met a local man who’d written three different theses about Acehnese art and culture and who helped me fill one of my notebooks with a blow-by-blow account of some recent political history. An American teacher told me that Acehnese women have begun to confide in her about their exasperation with cultural taboos. There’s a nascent idea afoot among some friends to start a café — a joint bulek-Acehnese venture — where books and ideas and coffee would flow freely back and forth across the cultural divide.

And yesterday afternoon, we went to a wedding reception of one of Hayley’s colleagues. Buleks don’t gain entre into the ceremony, but at the grand fetes that follow everybody and their uncle are invited, literally. In a tiny village back in the rice paddies, we ate big plates of spicy food — complete with succulent curried jackfruit the consistency of artichoke heart. We clucked at the bride and groom in their opulent traditional garb. (A sickle-shaped dagger sat in the groom’s belt, should things get unruly in the mounting heat). We drew few stares of our own, a feat in itself. “What do you think of Aceh?” the groom’s religious teacher asked as we sat together in the men’s section. “It’s fascinating,” I said.

Shaking hands with the father of bride on the way out, his glistening face scrunched with happiness, I thought he must have a zillion questions for me. Some day we may sort them out, his and mine. Today, he opened up his home and offered a seat at the wedding feast. That’s something to know.