magic paintings. One letter is from a collector in Australia, praising Ketut for his painting
skills, saying, "How can you be so clever to paint with such detail?" Ketut answers to me,
like giving dictation: "Because I practice many, many years."
When the letters are finished, he updates me on his life over the last few years. Some
changes have occurred. Now he has a wife, for instance. He points across the courtyard at
a heavyset woman who's been standing in the shadow of her kitchen door, glaring at me
like she's not sure if she should shoot me, or poison me first and then shoot me. Last time
I was here, Ketut had sadly shown me photographs of his wife who had recently died--a
beautiful old Balinese woman who seemed bright and childlike even at her advanced age.
I wave across the courtyard to the new wife, who backs away into her kitchen.
"Good woman," Ketut proclaims toward the kitchen shadows. "Very good woman."
He goes on to say that he's been very busy with his Balinese patients, always a lot to do,
has to give much magic for new babies, ceremonies for dead people, healing for sick
people, ceremonies for marriage. Next time he goes to Balinese wedding, he says, "We
can go together! I take you!" The only thing is, he doesn't have very many Westerners
visiting him anymore. Nobody comes to visit Bali since the terrorist bombing. This
makes him "feel very confusing in my head." This also makes him feel "very empty in
my bank." He says, "You come to my house every day to practice English with me now?"
I nod happily and he says, "I will teach you Balinese meditation, OK?"
"OK," I say.
"I think three months enough time to teach you Balinese meditation, find God for you
this way," he says. "Maybe four months. You like Bali?"
"I love Bali."
"You get married in Bali?"
"Not yet."
"I think maybe soon. You come back tomorrow?"
I promise to. He doesn't say anything about my moving in with his family, so I don't
bring it up, stealing one last glance at the scary wife in the kitchen. Maybe I'll just stay in
my sweet hotel the whole time, instead. It's more comfortable, anyway. Plumbing, and all
that. I'll need a bicycle, though, to come see him every day . . .
So now it's time to go.
"I am very happy to meet you," he says, shaking my hand.
I offer up my first English lesson. I teach him the difference between "happy to meet
you," and "happy to see you." I explain that we only say "Nice to meet you" the first timewe meet somebody. After that, we say "Nice to see you," every time. Because you only
meet someone once. But now we will see each other repeatedly, day after day.
He likes this. He gives it a practice round: "Nice to see you! I am happy to see you! I can
see you! I am not deaf!"
This makes us all laugh, even Mario. We shake hands, and agree that I will come by
again tomorrow afternoon. Until then, he says, "See you later, alligator."
"In a while, crocodile," I say.
"Let your conscience be your guide. If you have any Western friend come to Bali, send
them to me for palm-reading--I am very empty now in my bank since the bomb. I am an
autodidact. I am very happy to see you, Liss!"
"I am very happy to see you, too, Ketut."
76767676
Bali is a tiny Hindu island located in the middle of the two-thousand-mile-long
Indonesian archipelago that constitutes the most populous Muslim nation on earth. Bali is
therefore a strange and wondrous thing; it should not even exist, yet does. The island's
Hinduism was an export from India by way of Java. Indian traders brought the religion
east during the fourth century AD. The Javanese kings founded a mighty Hindu dynasty,
little of which remains today except the impressive temple ruins at Borobudur. In the
sixteenth century, a violent Islamic uprising swept across the region and the
Shiva-worshipping Hindu royalty escaped Java, fleeing to Bali in droves during what
would be remembered as the Majapahit Exodus. The high-class, high-caste Javanese
brought with them to Bali only their royal families, their craftsmen and their priests--and
so it is not a wild exaggeration when people say that everyone in Bali is the descendent of
either a king, a priest or an artist, and that this is why the Balinese have such pride and
brilliance.
The Javanese colonists brought their Hindu caste system with them to Bali, though caste
divisions were never as brutally enforced here as they once were in India. Still, the
Balinese recognize a complex social hierarchy (there are five divisions of Brahmans
alone) and I would have better luck personally decoding the human genome than trying to
understand the intricate, interlocking clan system that still thrives here. (The writer Fred
B. Eiseman's many fine essays on Balinese culture go much further into expert detail
explaining these subtleties, and it is from his research that I take most of my general
information, not only here but throughout this book.) Suffice it to say for our purposes
that everyone in Bali is in a clan, that everyone knows which clan he is in, and that
everyone knows which clan everyone else is in. And if you get kicked out of your clan
for some grave disobedience, you really might as well jump into a volcano, because,honestly, you're as good as dead.
Balinese culture is one of the most methodical systems of social and religious
organization on earth, a magnificent beehive of tasks and roles and ceremonies. The
Balinese are lodged, completely held, within an elaborate lattice of customs. A
combination of several factors created this network, but basically we can say that Bali is
what happens when the lavish rituals of traditional Hinduism are superimposed over a
vast rice-growing agricultural society that operates, by necessity, with elaborate
communal cooperation. Rice terraces require an unbelievable amount of shared labor,
maintenance and engineering in order to prosper, so each Balinese village has a banjar-- a
united organization of citizens who administer, through consensus, the village's political
and economic and religious and agricultural decisions. In Bali, the collective is absolutely
more important than the individual, or nobody eats.
Religious ceremonies are of paramount importance here in Bali (an island, don't forget,
with seven unpredictable volcanoes on it--you would pray, too). It has been estimated
that a typical Balinese woman spends one-third of her waking hours either preparing for a
ceremony, participating in a ceremony or cleaning up after a ceremony. Life here is a
constant cycle of offerings and rituals. You must perform them all, in correct order and
with the correct intention, or the entire universe will fall out of balance. Margaret Mead
wrote about "the incredible busy-ness" of the Balinese, and it's true--there is rarely an idle
moment in a Balinese compound. There are ceremonies here which must be performed
five times a day and others that must be performed once a day, once a week, once a
month, once a year, once every ten years, once every hundred years, once every thousand
years. All these dates and rituals are kept organized by the priests and holy men, who
consult a byzantine system of three separate calendars.
There are thirteen major rites of passage for every human being in Bali, each marked by a
highly organized ceremony. Elaborate spiritual appeasement ceremonies are conducted
all throughout life, in order to protect the soul from the 108 vices (108--there's that
number again!), which include such spoilers as violence, stealing, laziness and lying.
Every Balinese child passes through a momentous puberty ceremony in which the canine
teeth, or "fangs," are filed down to a flat level, for aesthetic improvement. The worst
thing you can be in Bali is coarse and animalistic, and these fangs are considered to be
reminders of our more brutal natures and therefore must go. It is dangerous in such a
close-knit culture for people to be brutal. A village's entire web of cooperation could be
sliced through by one person's murderous intent. Therefore the best thing you can be in
Bali is alus, which means "refined," or even "prettified." Beauty is good in Bali, for men
and women. Beauty is revered. Beauty is safety. Children are taught to approach all
hardship and discomfort with "a shining face," a giant smile.
The whole idea of Bali is a matrix, a massive and invisible grid of spirits, guides, paths
and customs. Every Balinese knows exactly where he or she belongs, oriented within this
great, intangible map. Just look at the four names of almost every Balinese citizen--First,
Second, Third, Fourth--reminding them all of when they were born in the family, and
where they belong. You couldn't have a clearer social mapping system if you called your
kids North, South, East and West. Mario, my new Italian-Indonesian friend, told me that
he is only happy when he can maintain himself--mentally and spiritually--at the
intersection between a vertical line and horizontal one, in a state of perfect balance. For
this, he needs to know exactly where he is located at every moment, both in hisrelationship to the divine and to his family here on earth. If he loses that balance, he loses
his power.
It's not a ludicrous hypothesis, therefore, to say that the Balinese are the global masters of
balance, the people for whom the maintenance of perfect equilibrium is an art, a science
and a religion. For me, on a personal search for balance, I had hoped to learn much from
the Balinese about holding steady in this chaotic world. But the more I read and see about
this culture, the more I realize how far off the grid of balance I've fallen, at least from the
Balinese perspective. My habit of wandering through this world oblivious to my physical
orientation, in addition to my decision to have stepped outside the containing network of
marriage and family, makes me--for Balinese purposes--something like a ghost. I enjoy
living this way, but it's a nightmare of a life by the standards of any self-respecting
Balinese. If you don't know where you are or whose clan you belong to, then how can
you possibly find balance?
Given all this, I'm not so sure how much of the Balinese worldview I'm going to be able
to incorporate into my own worldview, since at the moment I seem to be taking a more
modern and Western definition of the word equilibrium. (I'm currently translating it as
meaning "equal freedom," or the equal possibility of falling in any direction at any given
time, depending on . . . you know . . . how things go.) The Balinese don't wait and see
"how things go." That would be terrifying. They organize how things go, in order to keep
things from falling apart.
When you are walking down the road in Bali and you pass a stranger, the very first
question he or she will ask you is, "Where are you going?" The second question is,
"Where are you coming from?" To a Westerner, this can seem like a rather invasive
inquiry from a perfect stranger, but they're just trying to get an orientation on you, trying
to insert you into the grid for the purposes of security and comfort. If you tell them that
you don't know where you're going, or that you're just wandering about randomly, you
might instigate a bit of distress in the heart of your new Balinese friend. It's far better to
pick some kind of specific direction-- anywhere-- just so everybody feels better.
The third question a Balinese will almost certainly ask you is, "Are you married?" Again,
it's a positioning and orienting inquiry. It's necessary for them to know this, to make sure
that you are completely in order in your life. They really want you to say yes. It's such a
relief to them when you say yes. If you're single, it's better not to say so directly. And I
really recommend that you not mention your divorce at all, if you happen to have had one.
It just makes the Balinese so worried. The only thing your solitude proves to them is your
perilous dislocation from the grid. If you are a single woman traveling through Bali and
somebody asks you, "Are you married?" the best possible answer is: "Not yet." This is a
polite way of saying, "No," while indicating your optimistic intentions to get that taken
care of just as soon as you can.
Even if you are eighty years old, or a lesbian, or a strident feminist, or a nun, or an
eighty-year-old strident feminist lesbian nun who has never been married and never
intends to get married, the politest possible answer is still: "Not yet."77777777
In the morning, Mario helps me buy a bicycle. Like a proper almost-Italian, he says, "I
know a guy," and he takes me to his cousin's shop, where I get a nice mountain bike, a
helmet, a lock and a basket for slightly less than fifty American dollars. Now I'm mobile
in my new town of Ubud, or at least as mobile as I can safely feel on these roads, which
are narrow and winding and badly maintained and crowded with motorcycles, trucks and
tourist buses.
In the afternoon, I ride my bike down into Ketut's village, to hang out with my medicine
man for our first day of . . . whatever it is we're going to be doing together. I'm not sure,
to be honest. English lessons? Meditation lessons? Good old-fashioned porch-sitting? I
don't know what Ketut has in mind for me, but I'm just happy to be invited into his life.
He's got guests when I arrive. It's a small family of rural Balinese who have brought their
one-year-old daughter to Ketut for help. The poor little baby is teething and has been
crying for several nights. Dad is a handsome young man in a sarong; he has the muscular
calves of a Soviet war hero's statue. Mom is pretty and shy, looking at me from way
below her timidly lowered eyelids. They have brought a tiny offering to Ketut for his
services--2,000 rupiah, which is about 25 cents, placed in a handmade basket of palm
