Video Night in Kathmandu

by Pico Iyer

  Yet even as their unfamiliarity with money situated them inescapably within one of the poorest nations in Asia, my self-appointed guides to Indonesia also displayed a familiarity with things Western that could put many a Westerner to shame, in more ways than one. Their special subjects of expertise, like those of any bar-hound in New York, were sex, sports and show biz. One day in Jogja, a young bravo called Agus delivered a detailed and authoritative disquisition on the mating habits of Americans that started with his own beliefs—“Sexual intercourse before marriage, no good!”—and culminated with the startling conclusion: “In America, it’s a case of ‘no money, no honey.’ Right?” That same day, in a garden restaurant nearby, I saw a local girl accost a sunburned Swiss student. What’s your name, she probed gently. “Erik.” She giggled. “Erik Estrada?” The Swiss man looked dazed. “CHiPs,” she explained admonishingly, but that was no help at all.

  On my very first night in Java, as I tried to catch a good night’s sleep on a bench in a railway station, I suddenly felt a hand on my body. I rolled off my suitcase pillow and looked at the sky. Dark. I checked my watch—4:10 a.m. Not quite myself, I took stock of the scene. I now, so it seemed, had not only a roommate, but also a bench mate. Eyes flashing, my slim-hipped new friend asked me where I came from. New York. His ardor noticeably dimmed. “AIDS!” he pronounced, and moved back a little. Firmly believing that this might not be the ideal time for a tête-à-tête, I nodded vigorously. But my potential companion was not so easily deterred. Did I like men? In certain contexts. And women? Sometimes. Ah, he said, snatching up his own word as if it were a prompt, there are two kinds of woman, the soft and the hard. And so, in the darkened, empty hallways of a large railway terminal on a tropical island, at 4:30 in the morning, I was treated to a most persuasive treatise on the two kinds of woman, the soft and the hard, as epitomized—so my versatile lecturer told me—by Olivia Hussey and Grace Jones.

  Of all America’s ambassadors to the archipelago, however, the most popular seemed to be its athletes. When first I arrived in Kuta, I found the proprietress of my losmen and her husband staring intensely at a TV screen. I looked closer and found that the object of their attention was a college basketball game between Lamar and Villanova. In the same Balinese village, I heard, for the first time ever, a rap song celebrating the skills of Julius Erving. Two teenage Indonesian friends hotly debated the strengths and weaknesses of American soccer. (“Look at the mighty Cosmos,” said one. “But recall,” parried the other, “that all their stars were imported.”) And the household god of the entire nation while I was there was an eighteen-year-old super flyweight whose admiration for “Marvelous” Marvin Hagler ran so deep that he had actually shaven his head and changed his name to Yoni Hagler.

  Foreign names, in fact, seemed the most precious currency of exchange in Indonesia, magical coins to be traded with every emissary from abroad. Often, my initial conversation with young Indonesians consisted merely of a recitation of familiar names—Michael Jackson, Rambo, Larry Holmes, Madonna—delivered in much the same spirit in which two people, newly introduced, might fish for an acquaintance in common. Once, as I sat drinking tea and watching the sun come up over the rice paddies of Ubud, a local boy strolled up to me, smiled and sat down at my feet, as for a weekly tutorial.

  “Michael Jackson,” he began tentatively. “He African?”

  “No. He’s a Negro, an American black.”

  Nioman took this in. A few moments passed.

  “Same with Lionel Richie?”

  “Yup.”

  “Him Negro?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  This, too, was digested in time.

  “And Marvin Hagler Negro?”

  “Yes.”

  “And Michael Spinks?”

  “Yes.”

  By now we were gaining momentum. Nioman looked thrilled with his new discovery.

  “And Muhammad Ali Negro?”

  “Right.”

  “And Larry Holmes?”

  “Yes.”

  “And Ronald Reagan?”

  I paused for a moment, and Nioman looked alarmed. I tried to explain that though many a star of stage and song and sports arena was black, the President of the Union was white. Nioman looked incredulous at first, then crestfallen. I began to wish I had voted for Jesse Jackson.

  DEVELOPMENT, IN SHORT, had come to Bali as crookedly as it had to many another such place, and most of the boys I met, having dropped out of school because their parents could not afford the fees of $3 a month, were unable to read or write in their own language, yet were fluent in English. By now, therefore, it had become a commonplace to portray the Western presence in Bali as a snake in a tropical Eden. Even in my small-town California home, a local library carried a tome entitled Cultural Involution: Tourists, Balinese and the Process of Modernization in the Anthropological Perspective. And when I consulted Bima Wasata, a pamphlet put out by the village of Ubud to explain its culture to foreigners, I found Buta, or the force of evil, defined as follows: “Evil power can be many things. It might be too much money from tourism, or the imbalance number between locals and visitors, or the local people who think about moneymaking work.” All three kinds of evil, one could not help but notice, arose from tourism.

  And the image of the virgin violated was all the more tempting in Bali precisely because the great distinction of Bali lay precisely in its purity, its innocence of suggestiveness, at its best, the island had the springtime grace of a virgin who does not need to understand the beauty or the weight she carries. Indeed, it was innocence, above all else, that the Balinese (like Prospero) deemed holy: children were venerated on the island for the very Wordsworthian reason that they were recent arrivals from heaven, the closest thing on earth to messengers from the gods. Thus it was strictly forbidden for anyone to touch a child on his head, and until the age of three, every infant was carried on the shoulders of his elders so that he would not have to come in contact with the impure earth. Many of Bali’s most divine duties were entrusted only to virgins: a village that felt itself to be possessed would select two little girls, known as “heavenly nymphs,” to don white dresses and perform the sanghyang dance, casting out evil spirits as they moved together in a trance, swaying to the rhythm of an unheard music. These days, however, the signs outside the travel agencies in Kuta shouted: “Virgin Dance! Only $5 (U.S.)!”

  And though virgins might be the first victims to be sacrificed on the altar of tourism, others were sure to follow. Traditionally, the Balinese had always shunned the sea, believing it to be the hiding place of malefic spirits; today, however, the beach at Kuta was packed with local vendors and villagers in swimsuits who were more than willing to confront demons if it led to extra dollars. So too, one of the Gauguinesque beauties of Bali—celebrated by all its early visitors—had been the majestic unself-consciousness of the local women as they went about their daily tasks bare-breasted. But in turfing the natives out of Eden, the West had supplied them with a fig leaf. After a series of Western documentaries in the thirties had tried to sell the tropical garden as Toplessness Central, Balinese women had been forced to follow the example of prostitutes and cover themselves up. Yet even now, local vendors did a brisk business in portraits of natural maidens undressed. And these days, ironically, it was the Australian girls in Kuta who sought to get back to nature by shedding their tops (to the amusement of the young Balinese and the consternation of the old), while the local girls wrapped themselves up against the invasion of staring eyes. Decadence, perhaps, could be defined as nothing more than the artificial embrace of what once had been natural.

  YET STILL, NOW and then, Bali shone with a freshness newly minted. It had become a truism to call the island the “Morning of the World” but true the fact remained. For every morning, very early, while most of the foreign revelers were sleeping off the excesses of the night before, the island became herself once again. At daybreak, Bali took on the soft glow that bodies acquire in sleep, and the same sense of innocen
ce inviolate.

  Down by the long-sighing sea, Kuta Beach was empty, save for a lone fishermen or two casting their nets in the early light. Wind chimes sang outside the cafés. The lanes were drowsy with a gentle quiet. And one day when I walked at dawn to the beach, I saw a procession of villagers, dressed in their finest silks, carrying a flower-wreathed tower, amid a host of gilded parasols, down to the misty sea.

  By 5:30, the sleepy lanes were already bright and latticed with light. Wrinkled old women walked through the dust with a queenly erectness, silks piled high atop their heads; soft-faced little girls, in spotless white shirts and burgundy skirts, skipped their way to school; teenage boys, shirtless brown bodies radiant with good health, finished the day’s washing under the sun. In the mornings, Bali felt like a world reborn.

  THUS I WENT back and forth, unable to decide whether paradise had been lost, or was losing, or could ever be regained. And my greatest problem with Bali was, finally, that it seemed too free of problems. In many respects, it struck me as too lazy, and too easy. A real paradise, I felt, could not just be entered; it had to be earned. A real paradise must exact a price, resist admission as much as it invited it. And a real paradise, like a god or a lover, must have an element of mystery about it; only the presence of the unknown and the unseen—the possibility of surprise—could awaken true faith or devotion.

  At least, so I thought, the trekkers in Nepal had to hike and to suffer for their uplifting highs; even the tourist in Burma or Tibet had to tilt against the crazily spinning windmills of a socialist bureaucracy before he could collect his epiphanies. But the visitor to Bali was handed a gift-wrapped parcel of paradise the minute he arrived. After that, he had only to lie back and let the idyll present itself to him, demanding nothing in return. It was not just tropical fruits that were brought to tourists on a plate by slim, smiling dryads, it was the whole Bali package: massages, temple dances, the heart-stopping radiance of the local children. Every room came equipped with sunlight and birdsong. Every lane brought smiles. Extraordinary sunsets were shown every night on Kuta Beach, and free of charge.

  I knew, of course, that for the locals, life here could be as troubling as anywhere else in the developing world. I had read all about the two most famous events in the island’s recent history: the massacre of 3,500 locals in 1906, when the entire royal court of Denpasar had dressed up in all its ceremonial finery and walked, as if in a dream, into the gunfire of the invading Dutch, preferring mass suicide to surrender; and the maddened bloodletting that had swept across the island in 1965 during the convulsions that attended the end of Sukarno’s rule by rough magic, when villagers, entranced, cut throats and smashed heads until as many as 100,000 people lay dead. Even in the most peaceful of times, medical care remained in the uncertain hands of witch doctors, and the press of vendors on Kuta Beach attested to the fact that, though the Balinese were not desperately poor, neither were they rich.

  The story I heard from Wayan, an engaging, ever-smiling twenty-three-year-old boy who worked in my guesthouse, sounded typical. He had grown up, he told me one sunny morning, in a tiny village in the west. At seventeen he had got married, and soon after, he had been blessed with a son. But soon after that, his wife had forsaken him for another man. Wayan was left in a one-room house, with his mother, his father, his brother, his sister and his baby to support. There was no work in his village, so he had come to Kuta.

  Did he think of remarrying?

  No, he said, he was afraid of girls now. He lived only for his baby. But even that was not easy. He could make only $22 a month at the losmen, and he had to spend $5 a month just to take a bemo home to visit his baby. If he wanted to take home some cake for his child, that would cost more. As it was, his son, now three and a half, still wore the clothes he had been given when two. And Wayan himself owned only two T-shirts, two pairs of trousers and a pair of shorts.

  Last year, to make things still harder, he had smashed his leg in a motorbike accident. The doctors, as usual, wanted to amputate; Wayan refused. But the treatment needed to save the leg had cost $250, and there was no way he could ever get that kind of money. He was frightened, he told me, always frightened that the people from the hospital would come and get him. What could he do?

  A cynic might say that Wayan had rehearsed his hard-luck tale for the benefit of credulous tourists. Maybe so. But that made the fact of his telling it no less sad or importunate. And still, every morning, when he saw me, Wayan flashed me an ebullient smile. “Bali, paradise!” he exulted.

  THERE WAS ALSO, as the trance-killings revealed, a more disquieting side to this island famous for its witches, its exorcisms, the nighttime howling of its unfed dogs (believed to be agents of the demons). Before I came to Bali, I had never met a girl with the passional rawness—the wild and windswept intensity—of a Brontëan heroine. But I found her, with a vengeance, in another Wayan, a twenty-year-old girl of Kuta (in Bali, the name is given to the eldest child in nearly every family, whether male or female). Often when she spoke, it seemed that she was clutching on to life with such urgency, such frantic desperation, that life itself would wish to escape from her furious grip.

  One lazy evening, as we walked beside the sea under an enormous full moon, Wayan told me her story. At fourteen, she said, she had fallen in love, but when she refused to sleep with her boyfriend, he had gone off and found another girl. In response, said Wayan calmly, she had swallowed every pill she could find. She spent a month in the hospital, longing to die. At twenty, she continued steadily, she had found her first lover, a nice boy from Amsterdam; one month after he left, she had received a letter from his father informing her of the boy’s death in an industrial accident.

  These shadows hung about Wayan like dark attendant spirits. And when it came time for me to leave Bali, she asked, with unusual vehemence, if she could come to the airport to see me off. The reason, I discovered, was that she wished to deliver a chilling valediction. “Last night,” she told me with haunted eyes, “I dreamed I died. I dress all in white and go away.” I told her gently not to be worried by such dark thoughts. “I ready to be dead,” she intoned. “I know. I have dream.” But she had much to be happy about, I reminded her. “I am happy”; she nodded, looking down. “But I am also a lot sad. You come to Bali again, you not see me, because I dead. Last night I dreamed I dead.”

  For all that, however, the Balinese firmly believed that such spirits generally did not bother with foreigners, and, mostly, they seemed to be right. For most tourists, no shadows at all obscured the Balinese sky. Sure, the island might have a few hustlers and hellhounds, but for the most part it was as soft and welcoming as Miranda. In that sense, I thought, Bali had not matured into complexity, but remained in a state of sweet vulnerability. A real paradise, I told myself, should be the natural equivalent of an artistic masterpiece: it should have challenge and chiaroscuro, the fascination of what’s difficult; it should yield new meanings on every inspection, awakening in its visitors something new and unexpected; it should bring a different meaning to everyone who saw it.

  But Bali, for all the variety of its charms, was relentless in its charm, and it meant the same to everyone who came here. It offered paradise, and provided it. It was pretty as a postcard, and just about as deep. Only a special kind of person can remain for long in Paradise, making his peace with tranquillity. Most people, I suspected, took taking it easy pretty hard. Humankind, to invert Eliot, cannot stand too little reality.

  IV

  And maybe it was the ease with which Bali yielded to its tourist traffic or maybe it was something else—its dawning freshness, perhaps—but when first I came to know the island, I was sure somehow that the local culture had a self-sufficiency to it, a tough self-possession, that could withstand even the grasping hands and outstretched dollars of foreign intruders. And even as I was unnerved by the rowdy desecration of Kuta, I was constantly surprised to see how the Balinese seemed almost impervious to the corruption around them. Innocence, I thought, could
be its own protection; seeing no evil was halfway toward feeling no evil. “There’s nothing ill can dwell in such a temple,” says Ferdinand. Later he tells Miranda, “’Tis fresh morning with me when you are by at night.”

  My hopefulness had been encouraged when I ran across a Javanese man on the banks of a stream in Ubud. Every Balinese family, he explained to me, was linked together by a desa in each village, and every desa was connected by a banjar. These units included every married man in the village and oversaw the welfare of the entire community: they financed local dancers and artists, distributed wealth to ensure that nobody in the area would be without food or clothes or shelter, and, most important, enclosed the locals within a magic circle of self-reliance. There was no police force on the island, the man went on; the people simply governed themselves with minatory memories of the gods. Nor, as I had seen, were there any bloated stomachs or tattered rags or broken huts in Bali—only fine silks, and houses laureled in flowers. Bali’s happy system of agrarian socialism, embroidered by its spiritual gaiety, seemed truly to have brought it close to that golden age envisaged by Gonzalo, where there is “no name of magistrate; letters should not be known; riches, poverty, and use of service, none.”

  I reminded myself too that all paradises are the subjects of as many elegies as eulogies, and all accounts of travel, as Lévi-Strauss observes, “create the illusion of something which no longer exists, but should exist.” For at least fifty years now, Bali had been the ultimate once-upon-a-time idyll, the traveler’s favorite requiem. As early as 1930, Hickman Powell, author of The Last Paradise (the first book in English on Bali), was writing of the “modern Juggernaut that would kill Bali,” and in 1937, Covarrubias had published his landmark study mostly, he wrote, as a monument to “a living culture that is doomed to disappear under the remorseless onslaught of modern commercialism.” By 1941, Philip Hanson Hiss, while repeatedly announcing: “The Balinese are the happiest people in the world!” was already cursing the hotels that packaged Balinese dances as sex-appeal shows “not very different from Broadway or Hollywood.” At the end of his paean, he had concluded, grimly: “The end seems inevitable.” Over the last fifty years, some of those fearful nightmares had come true. But still the dream remained.