“Yes.”
“You still meditate like your Guru in India teach you?”
“Yes.”
“You have bad dreams anymore?”
“No.”
“You happy now with God?”
“Very.”
“You love new boyfriend?”
“I think so. Yes.”
“Then you must spoil him. And he must spoil you.”
“OK,” I promised.
“You are good friend to me. Better than friend. You are like my daughter,” he said. (Not like Sharon . . .) “When I die, you will come back to Bali, come to my cremation. Balinese cremation ceremony very fun—you will like it.”
“OK,” I promised again, all choked up now.
“Let your conscience be your guide. If you have Western friends come to visit Bali, bring them to me for palm-reading. I am very empty in my bank since the bomb. You want to come with me to baby ceremony today?”
And this is how I ended up participating in the blessing of a baby who had reached the age of six months, and who was now ready to touch the earth for the first time. The Balinese don’t let their children touch the ground for the first six months of life, because newborn babies are considered to be gods sent straight from heaven, and you wouldn’t let a god crawl around on the floor with all the toenail clippings and cigarette butts. So Balinese babies are carried for those first six months, revered as minor deities. If a baby dies before it is six months old, it is given a special cremation ceremony and the ashes are not placed in a human cemetery because this being was never human: it was only ever a god. But if the baby lives to six months, then a big ceremony is held and the child’s feet are allowed to touch the earth at last and Junior is welcomed to the human race.
This ceremony today was held at the house of one of Ketut’s neighbors. The baby in question was a girl, already nicknamed Putu. Her parents were a beautiful teenage girl and an equally beautiful teenage boy, who is the grandson of a man who is Ketut’s cousin, or something like that. Ketut wore his finest clothes for the event—a white satin sarong (trimmed in gold) and a white, long-sleeved button-down jacket with gold buttons and a Nehru collar, which made him look rather like a railroad porter or a busboy at a fancy hotel. He had a white turban wrapped around his head. His hands, as he proudly showed me, were all pimped out with giant gold rings and magic stones. About seven rings in total. All of them with holy powers. He had his grandfather’s shining brass bell for summoning spirits, and he wanted me to take a lot of photographs of him.
We walked over to his neighbor’s compound together. It was a considerable distance and we had to walk on the busy main road for a while. I’d been in Bali almost four months, and had never seen Ketut leave his compound before. It was disconcerting watching him walk down the highway amid all the speeding cars and madcap motorcycles. He looked so tiny and vulnerable. He looked so wrong set against this modern backdrop of traffic and honking horns. It made me want to cry, for some reason, but I was feeling a little extra emotive today anyway.
About forty guests were there already at the neighbor’s house when we arrived, and the family altar was heaped with offerings—piles of woven palm baskets filled with rice, flowers, incense, roasted pigs, some dead geese and chickens, coconut and bits of currency that fluttered around in the breeze. Everyone was decked out in their most elegant silks and lace. I was underdressed, sweaty from my bike ride, self-conscious in my broken T-shirt amid all this beauty. But I was welcomed exactly the way you would want to be if you were the white girl who’d wandered in inappropriately attired and uninvited. Everyone smiled at me with warmth, and then ignored me and commenced to the part of the party where they all sat around admiring each other’s clothes.
The ceremony took hours, Ketut officiating. Only an anthropologist with a team of interpreters could tell you all that occurred, but some of the rituals I understood, from Ketut’s explanations and from books that I had read. The father held the baby during the first round of blessings and the mother held an effigy of the baby—a coconut swaddled to look like an infant. This coconut was blessed and doused with holy water just like the real baby, then placed on the ground right before the baby’s feet touch earth for the first time; this is to fool the demons, who will attack the dummy baby and leave the real baby alone.
There were hours of chants, though, before that real baby’s feet could touch ground. Ketut rang his bell and sang his mantras endlessly, and the young parents beamed with pleasure and pride. The guests came and went, milling about, gossiping, watching the ceremony for a while, offering their gifts and then taking off for another appointment. It was all strangely casual amid all the ancient ritualistic formality, sort of backyard-picnic-meets-high-church. The mantras Ketut chanted to the baby were so sweet, sounding like a combination of the sacred and the affectionate. While the mother held the infant, Ketut waved before the child samples of food, fruit, flowers, water, bells, a wing from the roast chicken, a bit of pork, a cracked coconut . . . With each new item he would sing something to her. The baby would laugh and clap her hands, and Ketut would laugh and keep singing.
I imagined my own translation of his words:
“Ohhhh . . . little baby, this is roast chicken for you to eat! Someday you will love roast chicken and we hope you have lots of it! Ohhhhhhh . . . little baby, this is a chunk of cooked rice, may you always have all the chunks of cooked rice you could ever desire, may you be showered with rice for always. Ohhhhh . . . little baby, this is a coconut, isn’t it funny how this coconut looks, someday you will eat lots of coconuts! Ohhhhhh . . . little baby, this is your family, do you not see how much your family adores you? Ohhhhh . . . little baby, you are precious to the whole universe! You are an A-plus student! You are our magnificent bunny! You are a yummy hunk of silly putty! Ooohhhhh little baby, you are the Sultan of Swing, you are our everything . . .”
Everyone was blessed again and again with flower petals dipped in holy water. The whole family took turns passing the baby around, cooing to her, while Ketut sang the ancient mantras. They even let me hold the baby for a while, even in my jeans, and I whispered my own blessings to her as everyone sang. “Good luck,” I told her. “Be brave.” It was boiling hot, even in the shade. The young mother, dressed in a sexy bustier under her sheer lace shirt, was sweating. The young father, who didn’t seem to know any facial expression other than a massively proud grin, was also sweating. The various grandmothers fanned themselves, got weary, sat down, stood up, fussed with the roasted sacrificial pigs, chased away dogs. Everyone was alternately interested, not interested, tired, laughing, earnest. But Ketut and the baby seemed to be locked in their own experience together, riveted to each other’s attention. The baby didn’t take her eyes off the old medicine man all day. Who ever heard of a six-month-old baby not crying or fussing or sleeping for four straight hours in the hot sun, but just watching someone with curiosity?
Ketut did his job well, and the baby did her job well, too. She was fully present for her transformation ceremony from god-status to human-status. She was handling the responsibilities marvelously, like a good Balinese girl already—steeped in ritual, confident of her beliefs, obedient to the requirements of her culture.
At the end of all the chanting, the baby was wrapped in a long, clean white sheet that hung far below her little legs, making her look tall and regal—a veritable debutante. Ketut made a drawing on the bottom of a pottery bowl of the four directions of the universe, filled the bowl with holy water and set it on the ground. This hand-drawn compass marked the holy spot on earth where the baby’s feet would first touch.
Then the whole family gathered by the baby, everyone seeming to hold her at the same time, and—oop! there goes!—they lightly dipped the baby’s feet in this pottery bowl full of holy water, right above the magic drawing which encompassed the whole universe, and then they touched her soles to the earth for the first time. When they lifted her back up into the air, tiny damp footprints remained on the ground
below her, orienting this child at last onto the great Balinese grid, establishing who she was by establishing where she was. Everyone clapped their hands, delighted. The little girl was one of us now. A human being—with all the risks and thrills which that perplexing incarnation entails.
The baby looked up, looked around, smiled. She wasn’t a god anymore. She didn’t seem to mind. She wasn’t fearful at all. She seemed thoroughly satisfied with every decision she had ever made.
106
The deal fell through with Wayan. That property Felipe had found for her somehow didn’t happen. When I ask Wayan what went wrong, I get some fuzzy reply about a lost deed; I don’t think I was ever told the real story. What matters is only that it’s a dead deal. I’m starting to get kind of panicked about this whole Wayan house situation. I try to explain my urgency to her, saying, “Wayan—I have to leave Bali in less than two weeks and go back to America. I can’t face my friends who gave me all this money and tell them that you still don’t have a home.”
“But Liz, if a place has no good taksu . . .”
Everybody has a different sense of urgency in this life.
But a few days later Wayan calls over at Felipe’s house, giddy. She’s found a different piece of land, and this one she really loves. An emerald expanse of rice field on a quiet road, close to town. It has good taksu written all over it. Wayan tells us that the land belongs to a farmer, a friend of her father’s, who is desperate for cash. He has seven aro total to sell, but (needing fast money) would be willing to give her only the two aro she can afford. She loves this land. I love this land. Felipe loves this land. Tutti—spinning across the grass in circles, arms extended, a little Balinese Julie Andrews—loves it, too.
“Buy it,” I tell Wayan.
But a few days pass, and she keeps stalling. “Do you want to live there or not?” I keep asking.
She stalls some more, then changes her story again. This morning, she says, the farmer called to tell her he isn’t certain anymore whether he can sell only the two-aro parcel to her; instead, he might want to sell the whole seven-aro lot intact . . . it’s his wife that’s the problem . . . The farmer needs to talk to his wife, see if it’s OK with her to break up the land . . .
Wayan says, “Maybe if I had more money . . .”
Dear God, she wants me to come up with the cash to buy the whole chunk of land. Even as I’m trying to figure out how to raise a staggering 22,000 extra American dollars, I’m telling her, “Wayan, I can’t do it, I don’t have the money. Can’t you make a deal with the farmer?”
Then Wayan, whose eyes are not exactly meeting mine anymore, crochets a complicated story. She tells me that she visited a mystic the other day and the mystic went into a trance and said that Wayan absolutely needs to buy this entire seven-aro package in order to make a good healing center . . . that this is destiny . . . and, anyway, the mystic also said that if Wayan could have the entire package of land, then maybe she could someday build a nice fancy hotel there . . .
A nice fancy hotel?
Ah.
That’s when suddenly I go deaf and the birds stop singing and I can see Wayan’s mouth moving but I’m not listening to her anymore because a thought has just come, scrawled blatantly across my mind: SHE’S FUCKING WITH YOU, GROCERIES.
I stand up, say good-bye to Wayan, walk home slowly and ask Felipe point-blank for his opinion: “Is she fucking with me?”
He has not ever commented upon my business with Wayan, not once.
“Darling,” he says kindly. “Of course she’s fucking with you.”
My heart drops into my guts with a splat.
“But not intentionally,” he adds quickly. “You need to understand the thinking in Bali. It’s a way of life here for people to try to get the most money they can out of visitors. It’s how everyone survives. So she’s making up some stories now about the farmer. Darling, since when does a Balinese man need to talk to his wife before he can make a business deal? Listen—the guy is desperate to sell her a small parcel; he already said he would. But she wants the whole thing now. And she wants you to buy it for her.”
I cringe at this for two reasons. First of all, I hate to think this could be true of Wayan. Second, I hate the cultural implications under his speech, the whiff of colonial White Man’s Burden stuff, the patronizing “this-is-what-all-these-people-are-like” argument.
But Felipe isn’t a colonialist; he’s a Brazilian. He explains, “Listen, I grew up poor in South America. You think I don’t understand the culture of this kind of poverty? You’ve given Wayan more money than she’s ever seen in her life and now she’s thinking crazy. As far as she’s concerned, you’re her miracle benefactor and this might be her last chance to ever get a break. So she wants to get all she can before you go. For God’s sake—four months ago the poor woman didn’t have enough money to buy lunch for her child and now she wants a hotel?”
“What should I do?”
“Don’t get angry about it, whatever happens. If you get angry, you’ll lose her, and that would be a pity because she’s a marvelous person and she loves you. This is her survival tactic, just accept that. You must not think that she’s not a good person, or that she and the kids don’t honestly need your help. But you cannot let her take advantage of you. Darling, I’ve seen it repeated so many times. What happens with Westerners who live here for a long time is that they usually end up falling into one of two camps. Half of them keep playing the tourist, saying, ‘Oh, those lovely Balinese, so sweet, so gracious . . . ,” and getting ripped off like crazy. The other half get so frustrated with being ripped off all the time, they start to hate the Balinese. And that’s a shame, because then you’ve lost all these wonderful friends.”
“But what should I do?”
“You need to get back some control of the situation. Play some kind of game with her, like the games she’s playing with you. Threaten her with something that motivates her to act. You’ll be doing her a favor; she needs a home.”
“I don’t want to play games, Felipe.”
He kisses my head. “Then you can’t live in Bali, darling.”
The next morning, I hatch my plan. I can’t believe it—here I am, after a year of studying virtues and struggling to find an honest life for myself, about to spin a big fat lie. I’m about to lie to my favorite person in Bali, to someone who is like a sister to me, someone who has cleaned my kidneys. For heaven’s sake, I’m going to lie to Tutti’s mommy!
I walk into town, into Wayan’s shop. Wayan goes to hug me. I pull away, pretending to be upset.
“Wayan,” I say. “We need to talk. I have a serious problem.”
“With Felipe?”
“No. With you.”
She looks like she’s going to faint.
“Wayan,” I say. “My friends in America are very angry with you.”
“With me? Why, honey?”
“Because four months ago, they gave you a lot of money to buy a home, and you did not buy a home yet. Every day, they send me e-mails, asking me, ‘Where is Wayan’s house? Where is my money?’ Now they think you are stealing their money, using it for something else.”
“I’m not stealing!”
“Wayan,” I say. “My friends in America think you are . . . a bullshit.”
She gasps as if she’s been punched in the windpipe. She looks so wounded, I waver for a moment and almost grab her in a reassuring hug and say, “No, no, it’s not true! I’m making this up!” But, no, I have to finish this. But, Lord, she is clearly staggered now. Bullshit is a word that has been more emotionally incorporated into Balinese than almost any other in the English language. It’s one of the very worst things you can call someone in Bali—“a bullshit.” In this culture, where people bullshit each other a dozen times before breakfast, where bullshitting is a sport, an art, a habit, and a desperate survival tactic, to actually call someone out on their bullshit is an appalling statement. It’s something that would have, in old Europe, guaranteed you a duel.
“Honey,” she said, eyes tearing. “I am not a bullshit!”
“I know that, Wayan. This is why I’m so upset. I try to tell my friends in America that Wayan is not a bullshit, but they don’t believe me.”
She lays her hand on mine. “I’m sorry to put you in a pickle, honey.”
“Wayan, this is a very big pickle. My friends are angry. They say that you must buy some land before I come back to America. They told me that if you don’t buy some land in the next week, then I must . . . take the money back.”
Now she doesn’t look like she’s going to faint; she looks like she’s going to die. I feel like one-half of the biggest prick in history, spinning this tale to this poor woman, who—among other things—obviously doesn’t realize that I no more have the power to take that money out of her bank account than I have to revoke her Indonesian citizenship. But how could she know that? I made the money magically appear in her bankbook, didn’t I? Couldn’t I just as easily take it away?
“Honey,” she says, “believe me, I find land now, don’t worry, very fast I find land. Please don’t worry . . . maybe in next three days this is finish, I promise.”
“You must, Wayan,” I say, with a gravity that is not entirely acting. The fact is, she must. Her kids need a home. She’s about to get evicted. This is no time to be a bullshit.
I say, “I’m going back to Felipe’s house now. Call me when you’ve bought something.”
Then I walk away from my friend, aware that she is watching me but refusing to turn around and look back at her. All the way home, I’m offering up to God the weirdest prayer: “Please, let it be true that she’s been bullshitting me.” Because if she wasn’t bullshitting, if she’s genuinely incapable of finding herself a place to live despite an $18,000 cash infusion, then we’re in really big trouble here and I don’t know how this woman is ever going to pull herself out of poverty. But if she was bullshitting me, then in a way it’s a ray of hope. It shows she’s got some wiles, and she might be OK in this shifty world, after all.
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