The morning sun had just begun casting its glow behind the rows of shady ketapang trees in the front courtyard of the Faculty of Humanities. The campus looked lively that Friday morning, filled with students hurrying to their morning classes or simply relaxing in the café along the corridor. In the first-floor student reading room, the aroma of instant coffee mingled with the papers scattered across the long wooden table where senior students usually gathered.
Rian sat in one corner of the reading table, staring at his laptop screen with a deeply furrowed brow. Beside him lay an untidy pile of reference journals on linguistics and postcolonial literature. But the bespectacled young man’s focus was not on his own undergraduate thesis draft. It was on a small note belonging to Aisyah that had been left on the table the day before.
As Aisyah’s close friend and cohortmate who had known her since their first semester, Rian harbored feelings for her that he often kept tightly concealed behind his everyday jokes. He was always the first person to listen to Aisyah’s complaints about the chapters of her undergraduate thesis that Dr. Jonathan had revised beyond recognition. Yet over the past few weeks, something had begun to trouble Rian.
Rian picked up Aisyah’s note and reread the girl’s handwriting about her choice of material for her undergraduate thesis research. Aisyah’s study focused on the deconstruction of local historical narratives and 1990s novels that explored urban social conflict and past agrarian disputes in the city.
At first, Rian had considered the topic unremarkable—a common literary theme chosen by students interested in cultural studies. But the oddities began to emerge when he compared Aisyah’s theoretical framework chapter with the specialized reading recommendations Dr. Jonathan Wijaya had given her personally.
“Wait a second,” Rian murmured to himself, his fingers scrolling through a PDF of an old archival journal he had downloaded from the university library portal. “Why do Professor Jonathan’s recommended comparison texts narrow in on land-dispute cases and subversion allegations from the late nineties? Wasn’t Aisyah’s original focus purely on the stylistic and structural aspects of the texts?”
Rian recalled several strange scenes he had witnessed around campus lately. The department’s notoriously perfectionistic young lecturer, who was usually known for being cold and maintaining professional distance from all his students, had suddenly begun paying extraordinary attention to Aisyah’s data analysis chapters. Their advising meetings often ran past class hours, and on several occasions Rian had caught Aisyah and Dr. Jonathan leaving the classical library with conversational gestures far more intense than those of an ordinary academic relationship.
His suspicions were not driven solely by personal jealousy as a friend who had fallen for her. They also came from the critical instincts of a literature student accustomed to reading patterns beneath the text. There was a hidden relationship that went beyond the usual adviser-and-student dynamic. Even more so after Rian overheard snippets of conversation from several senior students in the administrative corridor a few days earlier about Dr. Jonathan’s extended family background, which apparently had close ties to the history of major corporations during the Old Order and Reform eras—the exact same periods depicted in the novels analyzed in Aisyah’s undergraduate thesis.
“They’re hiding something,” Rian whispered, slowly closing his laptop.
His eyes went distant as he stared through the reading room window toward the rector’s building and the eastern wing of the faculty offices, where Dr. Jonathan’s office was located.
Inside his chest, curiosity mingled with anxiety and began to churn. Rian realized that the undergraduate thesis Aisyah was working on was not merely an ordinary requirement for completing a bachelor’s degree. A dangerous thread was being drawn out little by little, connecting the pages of postcolonial literary theory to deeply buried secrets from the past, hidden beneath the shadow of the Wijaya family’s prominent name and the filing cabinets belonging to Aisyah’s family.
Rian shifted slightly farther away from the crowd of underclassmen busy discussing their morphology course. The long table in the corner of the central library had always been his favorite place to spend his free time, but that morning, the calm he usually felt seemed to evaporate completely. In front of him, page after page of Aisyah’s advising notes lay scattered beside the dimly lit keyboard of his laptop.
He looked again at Aisyah’s neatly written notes in black ink. The sentences contained analyses of collective memory, historical trauma, and how a work of fiction from the 1990s had attempted to record the social clashes concealed by the powers of the past. Rian knew Aisyah’s intellectual abilities well; she was one of the brightest students in their cohort. But what made him feel that something was wrong was not Aisyah’s writing ability. It was the specific direction taken by the data analysis chapter.
Normally, students who chose a modern literature concentration focused on the aesthetics of language, intrinsic structure, or reader-response theory in general. It was rare for an undergraduate student to voluntarily dig into archives of local agrarian disputes, outdated newspaper documents from the 1990s, and the chronology of a major plantation company’s collapse as the sociocultural and historical background of the fiction they were studying. What was more, none of these additional references had come from Aisyah’s own initiative at the public library. They had been handed to her directly by Dr. Jonathan Wijaya in the form of a specialized bibliography.
“Why that case?” Rian muttered again, tapping his fingers against the dark-polished wooden surface.
His thoughts drifted back to a brief conversation in the faculty café a week earlier, when he had asked Aisyah how their thesis adviser had commented on the draft of Chapter Two. At the time, Aisyah had seemed somewhat flustered, trying to hide it behind a faint smile as she said that Dr. Jonathan was extremely meticulous about the historical context of authors. But Aisyah’s awkward behavior could not fool Rian’s observant eyes. Some invisible burden shone through his friend’s expression whenever the name of her thesis adviser came up in everyday conversation.
Rian opened the browser application on his laptop and began typing several keywords into a digital archive search engine for old regional newspapers. He entered the names of old corporations listed in Aisyah’s undergraduate thesis references, along with the names of several central figures involved in regional land disputes during the Reform transition. The monitor displayed row after row of outdated headlines digitized from newspapers printed long ago.
The farther Rian scrolled through the digital archive, the more he felt that some pieces of the puzzle did not fit. The names of prominent business families that had dominated the city’s economy at the time kept appearing again and again, including the Wijaya family—the same family behind Dr. Jonathan, the most respected young lecturer in their department.
Rian froze for a moment. His breathing grew slightly labored. He suddenly realized how complicated the social structure was behind the walls of the campus where they pursued their education. Until now, the students had seen Dr. Jonathan as a brilliant young scholar, untouched by practical political intrigue and wholly devoted to modern literature and postcolonial literary criticism. No one in the department had ever dared connect the lecturer’s prominent name to the dark history of corporations or past disputes involving the city’s most respected families.
But why would a lecturer of Dr. Jonathan’s stature give such specific attention to—and personally guide with extraordinary intensity—the undergraduate thesis draft of a senior student dealing with such sensitive themes? Was it merely an academic coincidence? Or was there a hidden thread deliberately being drawn behind the curtain of Room Thirteen?
Rian slowly shook his head, trying to dismiss the dark suspicions beginning to rage through his mind. He closed the old-archive search tab on his laptop, then gathered Aisyah’s notes so they would not be seen by the other students beginning to approach the reading table. Even so, the strange feeling refused to disappear. Deep in his heart, Rian knew that what Aisyah was working on under Dr. Jonathan’s guidance was not simply an ordinary scholarly work written to fulfill the requirements for her undergraduate defense. It was a dangerous crossroads between buried family history and secrets that would gradually rise to the surface.