The first thing 14-year-old Tari saw on the morning of October 1 1965 were army tanks. They were parked on the roundabout outside her family home on Teuku Umar, one of Jakarta’s finest colonial streets – lined with embassies, the residences of ministers, and the homes of business and military elites.

On a street where “nothing bad ever happens”, she saw “two tanks, three military jeeps and a dozen or so armed soldiers […] stationed on the roundabout”. She remembers: “The soldiers stand perfectly still, gripping their automatic weapons, their eyes casting suspiciously around. The flowers are squashed but that doesn’t seem to bother them.”

The previous night, six generals had been killed in a coup attempt by a group of young army officers, led by Lieutenant Colonel Untung bin Syamsuri. Overnight, Untung’s mutiny was crushed by future president General Suharto, setting in motion a seismic shift in Indonesia.

Review: My Neighbour, The Dictator: Coming of age in the shadow of Indonesia’s 1965 military coup by Tari Lang (Monsoon Books)

These events are the opening of My Neighbour, The Dictator, Tari Lang’s memoir of growing up in Jakarta during the destruction of the world where her mixed-race, politically left-leaning family had, until then, thrived. Her mother, Carmel Budiardjo, was an economics researcher for the foreign minister. Her father, Suwondo Budiardjo, was deputy minister at the Ministry of Maritime Affairs.

In September 1968, six months after Suharto was installed as president, Tari’s parents were detained. Her mother was the only British woman imprisoned by the Indonesian military. Later, she would write a memoir about her experience, including three years in detention without trial, with 15 months spent in Jakarta’s notorious Bukit Duri prison.

Aged just 17 when her parents were arrested, Tari was forced to become an adult.

Life under a ‘creeping’ coup

The book’s title is literal. Suharto, who would gradually displace President Sukarno and establish the military-dominated New Order in Indonesia, moved in just a few hundred metres from Tari’s family home in 1967, soon after becoming acting president that March.

Young Tari knew there were contradictions between her parents’ egalitarian convictions and their privileged lifestyle: a large house, good jobs and powerful friends. When her parents’ political life began to crumble, much of Tari’s social world continued to look reassuringly ordinary.

Her parents, accused of........

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