Saad Shaikh, MD

  I took this photo while wandering through a quiet alleyway in Yogyakarta, Java, in March 2025. I was en route to visit Borobudur, the world’s largest Buddhist temple, and later Prambanan, where I had planned to watch an open-air Ramayana performance under the stars. Yogyakarta offered more than just temples. I spent my days exploring local bookstores, browsing batik masks, and photographing alley murals—an interest that echoes in my living room, where canvases by El Seed hang like visual sutras. In one of those alleys, I came across this piece of street art. As a physician during the COVID pandemic, I found it uniquely striking: a figure in traditional wayang costume aims not an arrow but a vaccination syringe at the virus. The archer is Arjuna, or Arjuno in Javanese, one of the most beloved heroes in Indonesia’s shadow puppetry tradition. In Javanese wayang, the archer with the distinctive headgear, slender form, and poised longbow is almost always Arjuna, a figure culturally r...