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When I suggested to Nurdin that it was perhaps dangerous for him to be seen so much and so openly with me, a foreign journalist, he responded in his ever-calm, quiet voice that he was only as free as he acted.
And, he said, he was determined to be free.
It took some time before he told me in detail about the terribly rough years of unfreedom that he’d gone through.
He had spent some years in prison as a supporter of Aceh Merdeka in the 1980s.
The military had tortured him, attaching electrical wires to the most sensitive parts of his body and breaking his toes and fingers with a hammer and heavy chair legs and pulling out his toenails and fingernails with pliers.
It had permanently damaged his health.
I had heard similar stories in West Papua and East Timor and had seen photos taken by the Indonesian military of their torture. But his stories still took my breath away.
The other thing that struck me about Nurdin was that he would talk about his own experience and that of others without a tear ever coming to his eye.
It wasn’t that he lacked feelings or empathy.
Indeed, he was one of the gentlest, most empathetic people I ever met and he would tell me of the hardships that one person or another or one entire village or other had suffered the previous week at the hands of the Indonesian military.
But he was constitutionally upbeat even in the midst of very bad things going on.
I, meanwhile, found myself often near tears or in tears for what seemed weeks or even months on end in the several years I spent in Aceh, living in the rural areas of the province and seeing the war up close.
While other Acehnese gave me a hard time about crying so easily, Nurdin never did.
Instead, he would often put his hand on my shoulder and tell me that it let the Acehnese know that I cared deeply about them.
Anyway, Nurdin and I became good friends, and whenever I was in Banda in those years before I was jailed and kicked out of the country we would meet up.