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The tiny Indonesian island of Pulau Bungin is not familiar to most travelers. Off the northwestern shore of rugged Sumbawa Island in West Nusa Tenggara, it is an artificial island built on layers of dead coral constantly replenished and expanded by its 2,800 residents.

Legend has it that Pulau Bungin was originally a natural coral bed jutting up from the water. In the early 19th century, it was discovered and subsequently settled by sailors from Sulawesi taking refuge from their domineering enemy, the Dutch fleet.

Present-day inhabitants see themselves as an amalgam of the seafaring Bajau and the Bugis of South Sulawesi and, unlike the Sumbawa mainland people, use the Bajau language as the vernacular.

Today an 800-meter pebbly causeway links Pulau Bungin to the mainland. Walking along it, one is treated to a peculiar panorama of tightly packed houses along the land’s edge. Many are old, creaky structures, thoroughly weathered by salt water. Some are new and many are still being built. Unused wooden boats are scattered over the craggy shore.

Bungin’s inhabitants do not particularly warrant immediate curiosity. But with that many people rubbing shoulders with each other on an area of just eight hectares, Bungin is becoming one of the world’s most densely populated islands.

The islanders observe an age-old tradition: that the young people stay and proliferate on the island. According to tradition, young couples who want to start up a family must first acquire a plot of land and build a house on it. Unless the house is built, the marriage may not proceed.

“The rule applies, too, to any men from other places who are wooing Bunginese women. I’m one such guy,” confesses Ibrahim, an aging fisherman who himself came from a neighboring village and now has several grandchildren.

As for Bunginese bachelors, as long as they’re not marrying a native woman, they’re free to leave the island. Few, however, do so.

“We’re very tight-knit in terms of families and friends here,” says Ali, a bachelor who has no intention to relocate, although he is currently dating a teenage girl outside the village.

With Pulau Bungin already crammed with houses, it is no longer possible to build homes for would-be brides in the interior of this nut-shaped island. Just like their forefathers, the young, marriage-ready Bunginese must spend months, and likely years, to collect enough rock, dead coral, and other material to fill up a patch of water until it is reclaimed into land.

This habit has proved favorable to the environment. While many neighboring coastal communities continue the destructive habit of throwing their garbage to the sea, here on Bungin garbage is accumulated to be used as landfill.

“This is possibly the only island in Indonesia that keeps growing in area,” observes Dyan, a woman in her 20s who sells stationary in one of the island’s crowded and narrow alleys. “But that’s what makes our village unique, no?”

Pulau Bungin’s outward growth has been going strong for decades.

As the soil is mainly composed of coral, grass naturally doesn’t grow here. But bizarrely enough one sees goats in front of nearly every house on the island. The goat, it turns out, is one of Pulau Bungin’s tourist attractions because of its adaptability. Pressed by the scarcity of grass, Pulau Bungin’s goats manage to live off anything their human counterparts throw away. Be it a scrap of paper, a tattered plastic bag, or a crumb of organic garbage, they will chew it obligingly.

Virtually every family relies on small-scale fishing for sustenance. Men venture out to sea for days or weeks at a time. The responsibility to take charge of the family in the meantime falls to the women. They open small stores (as Dyan has done), run simple eateries, or take to the boats in search of shellfish, which they haul home by the bucketload every late afternoon.

When they get home from school — there are two elementary schools on the island but no secondary or high schools — the little kids and teenagers who make up half of Bungin’s population help their mothers with chores. They uproot tubers from the more fertile mainland soil, peddle homemade cakes and snacks or make nets for their fathers’ fishing expeditions. When work is done they get together to play sepak takraw (kick volleyball) and, increasingly, video games.

In the afternoons a pick-up truck selling ice-cream cones is always swarmed with children. The truck brings the ice cream from the thriving subdistrict town of Alas, less than 10 kilometers from Bungin. Lovestruck teenagers take walks to the quiet pier to enjoy the milky sunset sky. Women returning to shore bring in catches of sea cucumbers, clams, oysters and a melange of small reef fish.

They leave the big ones in the more distant waters for the men, who often fish with explosives and come home with thick wads of cash.

In spite of the strong enforcement by the water patrol, recent education by environmental activists and bloody deaths at sea resulting from the timing malfunctions of the rudimentary bombs, this habit is proving hard to change. Don’t bother to plunge into the water to see the coral here, unless you are prepared for a heartbreaking sight.

People living in the houses closest to the causeway sit on a bamboo platform in the twilight. An orange flame flutters above the firewood in front of them, observed with great intent by several children. They are boiling fist-sized clams freshly harvested by their mothers. Inside a bucket, a helpless blue-spotted stingray, its long tail cut off, slouches together with some black sea cucumbers, waiting to be cooked.

“Come in,” one of the loosely-clad mothers says, an invitation to dinner. “The clams are especially delicious.”

Inside their homes, mothers and children are having seafood for dinner, their gaze fixed to the TV. Since electricity reached the island years ago, the villagers have filled their homes with electric appliances. Television and parabolic antennae are now ubiquitous.

As the noisy neighborhood turns quieter in the darkness, the only discernible sound will be from these hypnotic boxes. Far away in the open sea, ,their fathers float solitarily, their gaze fixed to the flickering starlight, waiting for the fish to finally stumble into the traps they have contrived.