THE photo is like a surrealistic painting, half disturbing, half comic: you see a city, but without any pavements and streets. Connecting things is the brown water flooding through the openings in the fancy buildings, as though someone has cast a spell on space, making it fluid, and thousands of occupants hold up their hands in supplication to some force who-knows-where.

But this is Jakarta. There is no other capital city in the world like it. Thi