IN JAKARTA

CONSIDER this. You just bought a brand new red Honda Civic, but on your first ride through the city, you brush it ever so lightly against a wall while negotiating a tricky turn in a bylane. The result — a small dent to the car's posterior which is difficult to spot but manages to spoil the beauty of this gorgeous machine anyway.
 
Having spent a small fortune to buy the car, you are in no mood to spend a bomb getting the dent fixed. What then would you do?

If you are in Jakarta, you immediately drive to the outskirts of the city and park your car in a small, badly lit, hole-in-the-wall workshop and wait for the magic to begin!

As the workshop's doors close behind you, there is not a soul in sight. All you can hear from the adjacent waiting room is a faint knocking sound for the next hour or so, betraying the presence of people hard at work.

When the sounds stop and the door to the workshop opens again, you find your car all fixed, as though by magic, with no trace of the dent and not a scratch on its expensive paint job.

Welcome to the world of "ketok magic", a dingy, inconvenient garage of sorts, where a quick-fix car job takes half the time and one-third the cost — much to the joy of car owners in Indonesia, most of whom do not have insurance.

One of the mysterious "ketok magic" workshops in Indonesia.
PHOTO: Wahyudi Soeriaatmadja

"Ketok" means knocking in Bahasa Indonesia. It is believed that the first person to hone these skills was a certain Mbah Turut in East Java, who first started working his magic on bicycles in 1960s.

He passed on the secret skill to his heirs, but it was eventually leaked to the benefit of neighbours and close acquaintances.

Over time, these secret-keepers expanded their horizons and set up shop in other parts of the country. Now, the third generation of these skilled workers have graduated to fixing larger vehicles like cars.

These workshops have been an alternative to the conventional car body repair shops for decades, thanks to their very competitive pricing.

Their "ketok magic" title comes from the fact that they deliver a quick and effective service in a skilled and clandestine fashion. All you see in these workshops is a dingy room wide enough to park the vehicle.

The customer never gets to see these workers — as skilled as the mythical "shoemaker's elves" — who fix car problems, nor do they ever get to see the tools that are used to mend the vehicles.

But, it is believed that the tools are a wide range of hand-made objects, including hammers of different shapes and sizes, metal rods and sticks and other wooden apparatus, which cannot be easily found in the nearby Carrefour supermarket.

What these tools essentially do is knock the vehicle into shape, ever so gently and with finesse.

Different sets of manually-assembled tools are used to fix different types of problems. They are usually accompanied by patches used to protect the car's paint job while the ketok works its magic.

It is no exaggeration then that some compare ketok repairmen to wood carving artisans.

They remain popular with car owners in Java, especially among youngsters who need quick repair jobs to hide their reckless driving from their parents, all without having to drill a big hole in their pockets.

But, if other customers choose to overlook the inconvenience of location and the discomfort of the waiting room, "ketok magic" remains their most favourable option at an affordable price. Sometimes the patchwork does go wrong, but that is rare.

It is no wonder then that the workshops remain a popular option to its expensive alternative — automobile repair shops.