quizzical and elegant at the same time. Like a curious old king, he looks at the whole
world from above his nose. His skin is lustrous, golden brown. He's almost totally bald,
but makes up for it with exceptionally long and feathery eyebrows which look eager to
take flight. Except for his missing teeth and his burn-scarred right arm, he seems in
perfect health. He told me that he was a dancer in his youth, for the temple ceremonies,
and that he was beautiful back then. I believe it. He eats only one meal a day--a typically
simple Balinese dish of rice mixed with either duck or fish. He likes to drink one cup of
coffee with sugar every day, mostly just to celebrate the fact that he can afford coffee and
sugar. You, too, could easily live to a hundred and five on this diet. He keeps his body
strong, he says, by meditating every night before sleep and by pulling the healthy energy
of the universe into his core. He says that the human body is made of nothing more or
less than the five elements of all creation--water ( apa), fire ( tejo), wind ( bayu), sky
( akasa) and earth ( pritiwi)-- and all you have to do is concentrate on this reality during
meditation and you will receive energy from all of these sources and you will stay strong.
Demonstrating his occasionally very accurate ear for English idiom, he said, "The
microcosm becomes the macrocosm. You--microcosm--will become same as
universe--macrocosm."
He was so busy today, crowded with Balinese patients who were stacked up all over his
courtyard like cargo crates, all of them with babies or offerings in their laps. He had
farmers and businessmen there, fathers and grandmothers. There were parents with
babies who weren't keeping food down, and old men haunted by black magic curses.
There were young men tossed by aggression and lust, and young women looking for love
matches while suffering children complained about their rashes. Everyone out of balance;
everyone needing equilibrium restored.
The mood of the courtyard of Ketut's home is always one of total patience, though.
Sometimes people must wait for three hours before Ketut gets a chance to take care of
them, but they never so much as tap their feet or roll their eyes in exasperation.
Extraordinary, too, is the way the children wait, leaning up against their beautiful mothers,
playing with their own fingers to pass the time. I'm always amused later when it turns out
that these same tranquil children have been brought over to see Ketut because the mother
and father have decided that the child is "too naughty" and needs a cure. That little girl?
That little three-year-old girl who was sitting silently in the hot sun for four straight hours,
without complaint or snack or toy? She's naughty? I wish I could say, "People--you want
to see naughty, I'll take you to America, show you some kids that'll have you believing in
Ritalin." But there's just a different standard here for good behavior in children.
Ketut treated all the patients obligingly, one after another, seemingly unconcerned by the
passage of time, giving all exactly the attention they needed regardless of who was
waiting to be seen next. He was so busy he didn't even get his one meal at lunchtime, but
stayed glued to his porch, obliged by his respect for God and his ancestors to sit there for
hours on end, healing everyone. By evening, his eyes looked as tired as the eyes of a
Civil War field surgeon. His last patient of the day had been a deeply troubled
middle-aged Balinese man complaining that he had not slept well in weeks; he was being
haunted, he said, by a nightmare of "drowning in two rivers at the same time."
Until this evening, I still wasn't sure what my role was in Ketut Liyer's life. Every dayI've been asking him if he's really sure he wants me around, and he keeps insisting that I
must come and spend time with him. I feel guilty taking up so much of his day, but he
always seems disappointed when I leave at the end of the afternoon. I'm not teaching him
any English, not really. Whatever English he already learned however many decades ago
has been cemented into his mind by now and there isn't much space for correction or new
vocabulary. It's all I can do to get him to say, "Nice to see you," when I arrive, instead of
"Nice to meet you."
Tonight, when his last patient had left and Ketut was exhausted, looking ancient from the
weariness of service, I asked him whether I should go now and let him have some privacy,
and he replied, "I always have time for you." Then he asked me to tell him some stories
about India, about America, about Italy, about my family. That's when I realized that I am
not Ketut Liyer's English teacher, nor am I exactly his theological student, but I am the
merest and simplest of pleasures for this old medicine man--I am his company. I'm
somebody he can talk to because he enjoys hearing about the world and he hasn't had
much of a chance to see it.
In our hours together on this porch, Ketut has asked me questions about everything from
how much cars cost in Mexico to what causes AIDS. (I did my best with both topics,
though I believe there are experts who could have answered with more substance.) Ketut
has never been off the island of Bali in his life. He has spent very little time, actually, off
this porch. He once went on a pilgrimage to Mount Agung, the biggest and most
spiritually important volcano on Bali, but he said the energy was so powerful there he
could scarcely meditate for fear he might be consumed by sacred fire. He goes to the
temples for the big important ceremonies and he is invited to his neighbors' homes to
perform weddings or coming-of-age rituals, but most of the time he can be found right
here, cross-legged upon this bamboo mat, surrounded by his great-grandfather's palm-leaf
medical encyclopedias, taking care of people, mollifying demons and occasionally
treating himself to a cup of coffee with sugar.
"I had a dream from you last night," he told me today. "I had a dream you are riding your
bicycle anywhere."
Because he paused, I suggested a grammatical correction. "Do you mean, you had a
dream that I was riding my bicycle everywhere?"
"Yes! I dream last night you are riding your bicycle anywhere and everywhere. You are
so happy in my dream! All over world, you are riding your bicycle. And I following
you!"
Maybe he wishes he could . . .
"Maybe you can come see me someday in America, Ketut," I said.
"Can't, Liss." He shook his head, cheerfully resigned to his destiny. "Don't have enough
teeth to travel on airplane."
82828282As for Ketut's wife, it takes me a while to align myself with her. Nyomo, as he calls her,
is big and plump with a stiff-hip limp and teeth stained red by chewing on betel nut
tobacco. Her toes are painfully crooked from arthritis. She has a shrewd eye. She was
scary to me from the first sight. She's got that fierce old lady vibe you see sometimes in
Italian widows and righteous black churchgoing mamas. She looks like she'd whup your
hide for the slightest of misdemeanors. She was blatantly suspicious of me at first-- Who
is this flamingo traipsing through my house every day? She would stare at me from inside
the sooty shadows of her kitchen, unconvinced as to my right to exist. I would smile at
her and she'd just keep staring, deciding whether she should chase me out with a
broomstick or not.
But then something changed. It was after the whole photocopy incident.
Ketut Liyer has all these piles of old, lined notebooks and ledgers, filled with tiny little
handwriting, of ancient Balinese-Sanskrit mysteries about healing. He copied these notes
into these notebooks way back in the 1940s or 1950s, sometime after his grandfather died,
so he would have all the medical information recorded. This stuff is beyond invaluable.
There are volumes of data about rare trees and leaves and plants and all their medicinal
properties. He's got some sixty pages of diagrams about palm-reading, and more
notebooks full of astrological data, mantras, spells and cures. The only thing is, these
notebooks had been through decades of mildew and mice and they're shredded almost to
bits. Yellow and crumbling and musty, they look like disintegrating piles of autumn
leaves. Every time he turns a page, he rips the page.
"Ketut," I said to him last week, holding up one of his battered notebooks, "I'm not a
doctor like you are, but I think this book is dying."
He laughed. "You think is dying?"
"Sir," I said gravely, "here is my professional opinion--if this book does not get some
help soon, it will be dead within the next six months."
Then I asked if I could take the notebook into town with me and photocopy it before it
died. I had to explain what photocopying was, and promise that I would only keep the
notebook for twenty-four hours and that I would do it no harm. Finally, he agreed to let
me take it off the porch property with my most passionate assurances that I would be
careful with his grandfather's wisdom. I rode into town to the shop with the Internet
computers and photocopiers and I gingerly duplicated every page, then had the new,
clean photocopies bound in a nice plastic folder. I brought the old and the new versions
of the book back the next day before noon. Ketut was astonished and delighted, so happy
because he's had that notebook, he said, for fifty years. Which might literally mean "fifty
years," or might just mean "a really long time."
I asked if I could copy the rest of his notebooks, to keep that information safe, too. He
held out another limp, broken, shredded, gasping document filled with Balinese Sanskrit
and complicated sketches.
"Another patient!" he said.
"Let me heal it!" I replied.
This was another grand success. By the end of the week, I'd photocopied several of the
old manuscripts. Every day, Ketut called his wife over and showed her the new copies
and he was overjoyed. Her facial expression didn't change at all, but she studied the
evidence thoroughly.And the next Monday when I came to visit, Nyomo brought me hot coffee, served in a
jelly jar. I watched her carry the drink across the courtyard on a china saucer, limping
slowly on the long journey from her kitchen to Ketut's porch. I assumed the coffee was
intended for Ketut, but, no--he'd already had his coffee. This was for me. She'd prepared
it for me. I tried to thank her but she looked annoyed at my thanks, kind of swatted me
away the way she swats away the rooster who always tries to stand on her outdoor
kitchen table when she's preparing lunch. But the next day she brought me a glass of
coffee and a bowl of sugar on the side. And the next day it was a glass of coffee, a bowl
of sugar and a cold boiled potato. Every day that week, she added a new treat. This was
starting to feel like that childhood car trip alphabet-memory game: "I'm going to
Grandma's house, and I'm bringing an apple . . . I'm going to Grandma's house and I'm
bringing an apple and a balloon . . . I'm going to Grandma's house and I'm bringing an
apple, a balloon, a cup of coffee in a jelly glass, a bowl of sugar and a cold potato . . ."
Then, yesterday, I was standing in the courtyard, saying my good-byes to Ketut, and
Nyomo came shuffling past with her broom, sweeping and pretending not to be paying
attention to everything that happens in her empire. I had my hands clasped behind my
back as I was standing there, and she came up behind me and took one of my hands in
hers. She fumbled through my hand like she was trying to untumble the combination on a
lock and she found my index finger. Then she wrapped her whole big, hard fist around
that finger and gave me this deep, long squeeze. I could feel her love pulsing through her
power grip, right up into my arm and all the way down into my guts. Then she dropped
my hand and limped away arthritically, saying not a single word, continuing her
sweeping as though nothing had happened. While I stood there quietly drowning in two
rivers of happiness at the same time.
83838383
I have a new friend. His name is Yudhi, which is pronounced "You-Day." He's
Indonesian, originally from Java. I got to know him because he rented my house to me;
he's working for the Englishwoman who owns the place, looking after her property while
she's away in London for the summer. Yudhi is twenty-seven years old and stocky in
build and talks kind of like a southern California surfer. He calls me "man" and "dude" all
the time. He's got a smile that could stop crime, and he's got a long, complicated life story
for somebody so young.
He was born in Jakarta; his mother was a housewife, his father an Indonesian fan of Elvis
who owned a small air-conditioning and refrigeration business. The family was
Christian--an oddity in this part of the world, and Yudhi tells entertaining stories about
being mocked by the neighborhood Muslim kids for such shortcomings as "You eat
pork!" and "You love Jesus!" Yudhi wasn't bothered by the teasing; Yudhi, by nature,
isn't bothered by much. His mom, however, didn't like him hanging around with theMuslim kids, mostly on account of the fact that they were always barefoot, which Yudhi
also liked to be, but she thought it was unhygienic, so she gave her son a choice--he could
either wear shoes and play outside, or he could stay barefoot and remain indoors. Yudhi
doesn't like wearing shoes, so he spent a big chunk of his childhood and adolescence life
in his bedroom, and that's where he learned how to play the guitar. Barefoot.
The guy has a musical ear like maybe nobody I've ever met. He's beautiful with the guitar,
never had lessons but understands melody and harmony like they were the kid sisters he
grew up with. He makes these East-West blends of music that combine classical
Indonesian lullabies with reggae groove and early-days Stevie Wonder funk--it's hard to
