Dancing Out of Bali

by John Coast

  "But of course, Wayan."

  "Tuan, I don't like my name—Pegil. It is not the name for a boy of my age. It's a child's name. So when I went to this school I took another name. I gave my name as Wayan Kusti. Could you perhaps call me Wayan Kusti in future?"

  Naturally, we agreed. This was, apparently, a very common Balinese custom. But Pegil had chosen very subtly, we thought. For he was a boy of low caste, and the name Kusti sounds very much the same as the high caste title, Gusti. We appreciated and admired our child's cleverness.

  Outside our gateways the village lane was full of ruts and flinty potholes, and little wooden stalls, called warongs, lined the road together with scores of the wicker domes of the fighting-cocks' cages. From early in the morning the stall women sold rice and spiced dishes to their customers, who would stroll up, lean against the stall or squat on the ground nearby, unfold the banana leaf wrapping, idly swallow the food, wipe a casual hand on the sarong, throw the leaf down on the road, and without a backward glance walk away. Round these stalls pi-dogs and scavenging pigs, hung-bellied and grey-black, fought for the scraps.

  Just before midday the men would begin coming back from the rice-fields, where they had been working since soon after five, their legs now stained with mud, their sireh pouches and knives at their sarongs' waistbands, and near the village bate to the south they would buy tuak, the smoky toddy brought around at that time of day in long bamboo containers, fastened by the vendor to the front of his bicycle.

  Soon the men would tuck up their sarong ends between their legs, crouch down in front of the cage of some favourite fighting cock, unlatch the cage, gently lift the bird out, and then, holding it with one hand under breast and belly, would squat down again, relaxed and content. Then the massage would begin, dreamily given, the man getting as much satisfaction out of the process as the bird.

  He would hold the bird in his right hand, and his other hand would caress its back, starting at the head and neck, massaging it with sweeping movements down over its tail. The bird would preen and pretend to struggle, and the massaging would go on for ten steady minutes. Then the man would hold the cock's head in his left hand, fondle and examine the comb and the eyes, blow sharply down its beak, and, after a few moments, still supporting it with his right hand, he would start bouncing it up and down on the ground to exercise its leg muscles, and each time the cock's legs touched the earth it would spring up again as if on a reflex. Next came the tail. The tail had to be bent this way and that way, twitched, fluffed out, blown into. Lastly, if a friend or neighbour were willing, two cocks might be permitted to spar with each other for a few seconds, without using spurs, for practice. Every day this took place; and there was much more to it concerning the hours a cock must be sunned, what it must be fed and when, quite apart from judging the auspicious days on which it might fight. Young boys learned about fighting cocks almost as soon as they could walk: for everything to do with these birds was only man's business.

  In a bale to the North there was a Djoged orchestra. Each night they would rehearse. The gaily painted instruments had all their keys made from bamboo, and each evening we would hear the madly syncopated clopping of these staccato Djoged melodies. It was strange to hear how melodious a sound bamboo could give out. This club had only just started; how long it would last nobody knew. The Djoged, we were told, was a highly amusing flirtation dance, where any man of the village had a chance to match his skill with the girl Djoged.

  The night noises of Kaliungu were various. First, then, the dogs, mournfully, evilly howling, according to the villagers able to see leyaks which the human eye could not detect. Then came the usual tropical cicadas, that myriad yet unseen accompaniment to all Balinese nights. Then, the clopping of the Djoged orchestra, stray voices from the nearby warongs, and, when the wind was in the right direction, we could just hear the gamelan orchestra of the Belaluan club as they rehearsed near the main road leading into Denpasar.

  One evening a car stopped in the lane outside and a boy handed us an invitation to dine at the puri, or palace, of the Raja of Gianjar in four days'time, when a performance of a famous Djanger would be put on for us. The invitation came from the very able elder son of the Raja of Gianjar himself, the Anak Agung Gde Agung, whom Luce and I had known in Djakarta, and who had claimed that the best dancers came from his part of Bali. The Anak Agung was now on a short holiday in Bali before taking up an appointment abroad.

  Four nights later, then, we were seated with him and his family watching this celebrated Djanger which he himself had helped create. To our surprise, the leader of the small orchestra was the same fat and jovial headman, or perbekel, who had helped us in our search for Rantun.

  Though we sat out of doors in a large village bate, hemmed in on all sides by thousands of Balinese, we found the dance dull. The twelve pretty girls and twelve young men seated in a square on the floor before us, chanting raucously and making vague gestures with their arms and the upper halves of their bodies, we found monotonous and dreary to watch for more than five minutes. Djanger dances which we had heard from the north of Bali were far more virile and exciting. But this Pliatan group had deliberately softened their Djanger to make it finer, and they had thus devitalized it; also, it had become pretentious, for the dancers first appeared boxed in on a tiny "stage" behind a singularly dirty orange-coloured curtain. This, we feared, was offered as proof of their modernity. We were deeply embarrassed vis-a-vis our host, but to the smiling perbekel I gave what I hoped sounded like sincere thanks.

  And it became increasingly embarrassing to us because we continued to meet the Anak Agung, who kept talking of his Djanger with the greatest enthusiasm. When he heard that we were hoping to open a guest-house, he very kindly carried us off to a neighbouring village where he showed us a large house which, he told us, we could rent for very little, and would make a wonderful guest-house. It had now been empty a long time, and we would need only to have it rethatched. But it was too far away and too much of a responsibility, so we declined, though we had been sorely tempted on seeing exquisitely carved stands for a gamelan orchestra in the long room upstairs.

  Then a series of strange things began to disturb us. One day we asked the Anak Agung to lunch in an attempt to repay some of his generous hospitality, but as he sat down to eat, I chanced to see that in the dispatch case which he kept always close to his side, there lay a revolver. He caught my surprised eye as I noticed this, and he said, "Yes, I'm sorry Mr. Coast; but you see, if anybody tries to shoot me, I have every intention of shooting him first."

  This incident left us uneasy. Who, we wondered, would be wanting to shoot the Anak Agung?

  Then a few days after the Anak Agung had lunched with us I received a truly astounding post-card through the ordinary mail. At first I thought it was meant for me, but then I saw that it was addressed to some Balinese, whose name I failed to recognize. I called young Kusti, who told me at once that this was the name of the next intended husband of our very valued Rantun: and here in my hands I held a sort of schoolboy-language card threatening his life.

  "Traitor to your race,” it read. "You, at the time when you were chauffeur to the Anak Agung Gde Agung, were cruel and oppressive in your conduct against your own people, who were then struggling for their independence. Beware now for your life! Signed: With Pistol and Sword Unsheathed."

  And then at night we started to hear gun shots, and we noticed that by nine o'clock at night Denpasar had become as deserted as a city of the dead. When we went out on our nightly excursions, hoping to run into music and dance festivals, we now found that villagers would flee in haste at the mere sound of a jeep's engine, and our headlights would pick them out running as if hordes of leyaks were at their heels.

  We noticed this particularly near a small town called Blahbatuh, on the road to Saba. And then suddenly we heard that a disaster had hit Pliatan. A girl in the Djanger had been kidnapped by the Military Co
mmander of Bali, who was shortly returning to Java. It might not have been so serious had he not been an Ambonese, and therefore a Christian, and if he hadn't chosen for his bride the prettiest girl of all who was, in fact, the Djanger's fifteen-year-old leader. The Rajas of Gianjar and Denpasar had witnessed the wedding, we were told, so that there was no chance of an appeal.

  Very soon after this a new Military Commander arrived, this time a young Sumatran, Islam Salim, and fortunately for us, he was an old acquaintance. From him I learned what I was already beginning to fear: that I had fled from the politics of Djakarta to find that Bali was just about to experience a phase of her national revolution that Java had experienced several years ago. Anything might now happen. People were all at once being killed in a spate of murders of revenge. I began to sleep with a loaded automatic by the side of my pillow. In October the whole island was placed under military law.

  ____________________

  1See Railroad of Death, 1946.

  2House in Bali (Gollancz)

  2

  Our Work Begins

  *

  Though Bali was the last place on earth where one would have expected to be caught in a “revolution”, it was nevertheless some such upheaval which now erupted and which very rapidly entered into the life of every Balinese. But we determined, if it should be possible, to leave their revolution to the Balinese, and, not without trepidation, endeavoured to carry on just as before.

  Anyhow, for the time being I was completely wrapped up in my design for the guest’s bathroom. It was to be a little gem of modern plumbing, ornamentally encased in the smaller hut taken from Kuta; already it was thatched and connected by another small passageway to the side of the guest house. From a Chinese I had bought serrated green tiles to drain the floor, and green and shining white ones for the bath itself. This bath was not only to be six feet long, but I intended that our guests should have the luxury of hot water. Normally, our baths were filled by Agung with buckets from the well, but for our guests I wanted to heat smooth stones and drop them sizzling into the water to warm it. There was even a real toilet standing in the garden, waiting to be installed.

  As it turned out, the Saba workmen should have been sent home as soon as the outside walls and roof were fixed; but their leader, one Gusti Made, was a garrulous fellow who had married his village's prettiest Legong dancer in days long ago, and he was, it may thus be imagined, a plausible talker. He was perfectly happy to stay in Denpasar and eat in Kaliungu.

  "You do understand about tiles, Gusti?” I asked him.

  "What is there to understand, Tuan?” he replied—and with such a confident smile that I trusted him utterly.

  But this was, in fact, the Gusti's last, too subtle, attempt to draw information from me without losing face. Neither he nor any of the men had handled a tile in their lives.

  "How do you fix them, Gusti?” I went on, for I knew nothing of such work. "Do you stick cement on the back of the tile and then lay it against the wall, or do you plaster the wall first and just set the tiles into the plaster?"

  The Gusti swallowed-at last he had received a hint as to procedure—and at great speed he answered, "One prepares the wall first, generally. It will all be ready in two days, I reckon."

  And for two days they worked like beavers, plastering the walls and themselves with the greatest industry; but I could not help observing that the Gusti's estimate had been a little optimistic. However, on the evening of the second day I went out to inspect. The bath they had not yet begun, and above the edges of the walls they had finished, the cement line was rough and ragged. Very softly, tentatively, I felt one of the top tiles to make sure it held strongly. With no protest at all it fell out into my hand.

  There was a very awkward silence. Even Gusti Made was temporarily checked.

  "What's wrong, Gusti?" I asked wearily, as I calculated in my head the cost of redoing the work and feeding those rotund Saba bellies for several more days.

  "Wrong, Tuan?" The Gusti sounded hurt. "Why we did it in the very way Tuan ordered!"

  I did not recollect ordering anything.

  "Well, suppose you begin all over again. Maybe you have friends in Denpasar who can give you a little advice."

  By the next evening there was one wall already finished by some new method, and on an inspiration the Gusti had laid the floor tiles-so as not to waste time. Resignedly I observed that the serrated edges ran crossways, thus guaranteeing that no water would flow away. The Gusti greeted me with a wide grin as I nodded, hypnotized, at the floor and he smiled easily as I very gingerly prodded the wall put up that day, and when one or two tiles just sighed and tumbled with a squelch into my hand, I silently turned and left them.

  That night he came to explain. Luce and I were grimly drinking arak, mixed with but little of the sweet rice wine, and we were trying not to think about bathrooms. Cheerfully the Gusti entered and sat on the floor before us, pulling contentedly at the carnation-scented cigarette he had lighted.

  "I beg leave to speak, Tuan. Tuan, you must not touch the tiles until after two days. I have been asking a friend. He tells me—excuse me, Tuan—that it is very wrong to touch the tiles for at least two days and nights."

  "It seems always to be my fault, eh, Gusti?"

  He remained silently smoking, tactfully agreeing that this was so. But I went on quietly: "This is your last chance, Gusti. If in two more days and nights the whole bathroom is not ready, I drive you back to Saba."

  Very hurt, the Gusti left me. And at last, using my common sense, the next morning I went to confer in the town with a Chinese contractor.

  Unfortunately, the contractor's foreman, a Balinese, came around the following evening to see what the work would entail—for I had guessed that by then the Gusti would have bluffed for the last time. This foreman—his name, he told me, was Nyoman Regog, and he played a metallophone in the Orchestra of the God of Love in a village called Abianangka-walked back with us to witness the state of the bathroom.

  I must admit it was uncanny what those three men had achieved. The walls resembled nothing so much as a crossword puzzle, the blanks being the empty spaces from which tiles had already fallen. The long side of the bath had been tiled in what Gusti Made swore was a straight line, but in what Euclid had long denominated a curve, and ironically, the floor tiles, laid wrongly, were the only ones that had stuck fast.

  Luce and I, with Nyoman Regog, stood gazing at my pet experiment, avoiding the workmen's eyes, with Rantun trying to look solemn in the background but periodically unable to contain herself any longer, so that she would have to rush off to her room and explode into what she imagined was silent laughter. It was a depressing sight.

  “I ask pardon, Gusti,” I said in my politest tones. "Tomorrow I shall drive you home to Saba. It has been all my fault for giving you work that was not suitable."

  "May I speak, Tuan? We would have gone home tomorrow anyway, for in a few days there is a temple festival." Thus face was saved and the bathroom was completed by Nyoman Regog. Next morning we all drove off to Saba together. The men had bought new kains and Hawaiian shirts and the back of the jeep was piled high with their baskets. The Gusti seemed quite cheerful; doubtless he was reflecting on the stories he would soon be telling of his Denpasar adventures. We dropped them on the outskirts of the village, with many polite mutual regrets, and drove in to look for the head of the Legong club, Gusti Gde Raka. We saw him busy in his house temple, wearing the white kain of a priest, so we went to the water garden facing his rice-fields, and sat there to wait for him.

  As we rested, looking over the water-lily covered pond to the place opposite where the women came down with earthen jars on their heads to fetch water, we saw one of the Legong girls, a small pot on her head, too. We waved, hoping she and her friends would join us. And presently the three of them came, half running, half hold
ing one another back, soon persuaded by Luce to sit with us, alternately solemn and giggling helplessly, but smoking one of Luce's cigarettes between them.

  These were three high-caste children, aged about eight, nine and eleven. They spoke no word of Indonesian, were shy of us as birds, and their charm lay in their earthiness and in their virility of dancing. These three mites lived in a poor village that owned too few rice-fields, especially since the death of the old Gusti, who had pawned or sold so many fields to pay his cockfighting debts. These children, therefore, had to work in the rice-fields daily, and would come home trailing firewood for their mothers. They were burned a dark brown colour by the sun; they had few clothes, and what they did have they saved against the next temple festival or the New Year celebrations, appearing daily in wispy sarongs of great age. They were wild, free, happy, and the village was proud of them.

  After a while Raka came into the garden, wearing in his hair, exactly on the top of his head, a white jasmine blossom, a sign that he had made his devotions for the day. He was a stout, youngish fellow, long hair brushed back from his forehead, eyes rather too close together, full of energy and ambition.

  "What news?" we asked.

  "Oh, nothing. Just as usual."

  "Has the Legong played this week?" "No. It has been quiet."

  But Raka was not his robust self for once. His eyes were uneasy, furtive. He looked thinner, too. As he clearly did not wish to talk today, we rose soon to go, and without protest he went with Luce to the gateway, I behind, walking with a young cousin of the family.

  "What is the matter with Gusti Gde Raka?” I asked him, quietly.