At Christmas, all the malls had decorations in them. It was a big thing. Little Muslim children lined up to sit on Santa’s lap. Whenever I asked, people shrugged and told me that Christmas wasn’t really about religion in Jakarta.

On Friday nights, the malls are packed. The fashionable kids, speaking a mixture of English and Indonesian, flood the white marble floors. The malls have very loud music, and sometimes DJs.

The malls have food courts in them. Just about everything is meat, and just about everything is fried. All the American fast food chains are there. They look like food courts anywhere.

A burger and fries costs about 40,000 rupiah, which is US $4.50. This is very expensive food in Jakarta. The people who work in the mall do not eat in the food court. They eat in the “kantin” out back, a long shack full of traditional food stalls where a meal is five times cheaper. Average income in Indonesia is about $350 per month.

Malls are not for the rifraf. There’s nowhere to sit unless you’re buying. Otherwise everybody would hang out there, because it’s clean and comfortable and smacks of status. You can’t sit on the floor either. Malls are for the middle class, but the middle class is the elite in Indonesia.

Malls have security theatre, because Jakarta has had bombings. Their entrances are guarded by metal detectors. Bored guards check your bags by patting them carelessly, and ignore the metal detectors when they beep. Other guards wave metal detectors uselessly over the truck of each taxi. You can bypass the guards in almost every mall by walking in through one of the shops.

You can also largely ignore security if you’re white. Sometimes it seems like everybody wants to be white. Every pharmacy in Indonesia sells skin-whitening cosmetics. Actually, this happens everywhere in Asia. Maybe it’s because white people are rich.

I spent a lot of time in Jakarta malls. They were comfortable, the food was recognizable, and they had wifi. The blandness depressed me, because I’ve lived in environments that weren’t built for profit. But in Indonesia — and Malaysia, and Turkey, and India, and China, and a great many other places I’ve been — malls represent the future. They’re clean and efficient and astonishingly modern. It makes me sad that consumerism is the vanguard of civilization for so many people.

America was once this way. Witness the 1957 promotional film In The Suburbs, courtesy of the Internet Archive:

Yes, this is real. Was real, an icon and instigator of the shining consumer culture that Kerouac critiqued even in its nascent state. Today, the notion of the white plastic suburban wasteland is so mainstream in the West that we can easily forget its intrinsic appeal; modern marketing is all about being unique and different, but it was once enough just to be new and middle class.

But the other billions still want this! They want to drive their new cars (thank you Tata) to the new mall. In the developing world, Middle Class is the holy grail. It’s a deep, almost universal aspiration that seems shallow to us only because we already have it. While I drink imported wine with my friends and ponder global economics, neuroscience, and avant-garde electronic music, most of the world just wants to be rich enough to shop somewhere air-conditioned — and in quantity.

The shopping centers see these young adults as people whose homes are always in need of expansion. People who buy in large quantities, and truck it away in their cars… It’s a happy-go-spending world!

“What’s the fastest you’ve ever driven on this road?”

The street is full of cars, trucks, cows, bikes, bicycles, pedestrians, oxcarts, everything. I tell him, well, the traffic moves at about 40 kilometers an hour.

“I’ve gone 87,” he grins. Then a grimace. “It’s not a good idea.” But you can see how he really feels about it.

Jai yells at the mechanic to hurry up, then turns back to me with his childish smile. He’s 18 and I don’t think he’s ever worked in his life. His father makes a good salary and his mother is sad all the time. Their house is a surprisingly empty apartment. Chairs and a sofa-bed thing in the living room, a desk and a bed and a wardrobe for each child. A big gleaming refrigerator, a polished dining-room table. But nothing on the walls. No knick-knacks, no debris and clutter.

“We’ve been here almost a month,” says Jai. “This is our temporary home. We’ll leave it when we go back to Punjab.” His father is involved in managing the construction of a new hydroelectric dam an hour or so away. He visits once or twice a week. They’ve been in Siliguri two years now. Temporary home.

The mother dotes. She speaks very little English and talks only through Jai. She promptly prepares a huge meal of briyani rice, daal, raitha, aloo gobi, and stuffed chipati served steaming. “My mother cooked all of this in ten minutes,” Jai beams, but I think it must have been the maid. I’m never introduced to the maid.

Mother apologizes, through Jai, on the plainness of the meal. She didn’t know I was coming, you see.

Jai’s sister is called Jaina. She is a beautiful, wispy, smiling 16 year old. I try really hard to avoid “what grade are you in?” and other such blandness but I have no idea what to talk about with a middle-class adolescent Indian girl. We end up talking about television, of course. It turns out she loves to watch Hannah Montanna on the Disney Channel.

“Do you have internet?” she asks seriously. I tell her I do.

“I love the internet,” she says. “I spend all day on it.”

“What do you do on it?”

“Mostly chat.”

“And you like TV, too? Hannah Montana?” ”

“Yes.”

“What about books?”

“I don’t read books.”

Maybe the newly literate nations will skip paper entirely.

“I have to get to a pharmacy later,” I tell Jai as we finish lunch.

“Why, do you need medication?” And I end up explaining my heart transplant, the whole story. He turns around and translates this for Mother, who looks suddenly stricken. Like she’s about to cry.

“Is she all right?” I ask Jai.

“She’s just thinking what a hard life you’ve had.”

I explain that actually, it changes one’s perspective to have a new life in that way, but mother is still near tears. She often seems near tears, as when we discuss Jai leaving home to go to university. Though actually, the plan is that the family will follow him wherever he studies.

Her husband earns the money. The maid does the housework. She does not seem like a happy woman.

I ask Jai how to eat the daal – with a spoon? Or pour it over the rice?

“Sure, you can both, with a spoon or on the rice. Have you seen the people in South India eating with their hands? Just scooping it up?” Jai mimes shoveling food into his mouth.

I spent two months in Tamil Nadu. I’ve seen plenty of Indians eating with their hands, there and elsewhere.

“It’s disgusting,” he says. Mashing it all around on the plate, and your fingers get all sticky…” He gestures wildly, makes a face.

After lunch, Jai jumps up from the table with teenage energy. “Maybe I’ll have a drink from my can,” he says, and sure enough the container he retrieves from the fridge is labeled “Pepsi My Can”. It freaks me out a little to hear him call it that, to say the slogan out loud without irony.

And then Jai takes me back to my guesthouse. I hang on to the back of his Pulsar, tense, as he talks about being a rebel, about finding his own way. He takes a tight low U-turn and rides against oncoming traffic for for half a block. “I need to do something wrong before I can digest my meal,” he yells back over the slipstream — no helmets. (“It’s normal for India.”)

I ask him what he wants out of life.

“Happiness is more important than wealth. Happiness is everything,” he tells me over the wind. Like he rehearsed it. He’s going to study business administration.

“Is that what you wanted to study?” I yell into his ear, over the stench of diesel and cow shit and the screech of poorly muffled trucks.

“Yes!” he yells back. “My parents wanted a BComm, but I chose BBa.”

“So what do you like doing? What do you actually want to do with your life?”

He thinks about it for a minute as we dodge cows. Then: “The trouble with Indians is they don’t spend. They make all this money and don’t do anything with it. You have this super rich guy and he drives a basic car, lives in a little house. If I had money, I would spend it.”