Video Night in Kathmandu

by Pico Iyer

  Indeed, according to many Bali watchers, the tourist trade had actually quickened and revived Balinese culture, given wood carvers a living instead of a full-time hobby, provided dancers with a larger audience as well as an incentive to excel. The famous kecak dance had been imported to the island by foreigners, as had the art of oil painting. The locals, moreover, had displayed an impressive gift for adapting their ways to the times: these days, the leyak witches who traditionally took the forms of pigs or monkeys or treacherous maidens were said to turn themselves into runaway motorbikes, while the couples who eloped, as Balinese tradition dictates, did so not on foot but in brand-new Hondas. The Balinese, indeed, were wonderfully matter-of-fact about their magic. If you live in L.A., a Balinese dancer once told me in California, you need a car to get you where you want; if you live in Bali, you need an art to get you to the sacred.

  And across the street from Casablanca, where Tina Turner was shrieking out “What’s Love Got to Do with It?,” fifty Balinese men, in Kiwi Tour T-shirts, sat in a circle, practicing the chant of the kecak dance, the hissing, insistent curse that reminded me of nothing so much as the “Brekekoax-koax” chorus of Aristophanes’ Frogs. Bali’s frequent obliviousness to imported corruption seemed almost proof against it.

  SO I HAD decided in 1984. But when I returned to Bali just eighteen months later, my faith was shaken, and my seesawing convictions about whether paradise could survive took what seemed to be their final turn, downward.

  When I arrived in Kuta, the place was almost unrecognizable. Half its buildings were new, so it seemed, and the other half were under construction. In less than two years—no more than a blink in the eye of Siva—roadside stalls had been turned into flashy boutiques, tiny cafés into sleek Mexican watering holes. And as I walked down “Poppies’ Gang,” the dusty, narrow lane where I had stayed the year before in the Lasi Erawati, I could hardly orient myself for all the new additions. On one side of the field full of cows was a snazzy new singles bar, and on the other, a glassy café called Warung Transformer. Farther down the lane was a fresh two-story joint called Kempu’s Café (offering pizzas, tofuburgers, beef tacos and three kinds of guacamole), and down by the sea a newcomer called Chip’s that served hot dogs, hamburgers and piña coladas. More motorbikes than ever were racing down the unpaved road, throwing up water from puddles and forcing old women to back against bushes.

  For fun-loving tourists, of course, the boom was a boon. And for the locals, the development may well have been even more of a blessing. As I walked down the gang, taking in all the changes, a woman waved frantically to me from the kitchen of Kempu’s. I looked again and saw that it was the smiling proprietress of my former guesthouse, the Lasi Erawati. How did I like her latest business? she asked me with pride, gesturing with her head around the glittering café. She had also, she said, beaming, opened a whole new set of cottages farther down the lane. Everyone was flourishing. As she spoke, Madé and Madé, the two sweet-tempered young beauties who had served me tea every day the previous year, dazzled me with smiles from the Kempu kitchen. This was where they worked now, they said happily. And did I remember Wayan? I thought of the boy with the sad story, the faraway baby, only five articles of clothing, the $250 debt. He had struck it big, the girls chimed: he was now cooking burritos at brand-new T.J.’s.

  Inside the Lasi Erawati, the number of surfing decals on the walls had increased, and the mosquito coils that had been handed out free the previous year had now to be bought from a booth next to the kitchen. A new line of arty postcards was also on sale, costing four times more than the old standards. And as I walked into my room, I heard desperate whispers from the other side of the wall. An unemployed surfer from Byron Bay was pressing his claim on the girl who ran the restaurant now, so it appeared, a slender, golden-limbed nymph who seemed the spirit of sunlight incarnate. Finally, they emerged and walked hand in hand down to the beach.

  One feature of the guesthouse, however, seemed to be unchanged, and it was also one of the main reasons for my return: Reno, the fluffy dog who had sat serenely by my side every day the previous year as I wrote on my veranda. As soon as I saw him still lying quietly in the courtyard, I walked over and reached down to stroke him. Reno snarled, whipped round his head and snapped at my hand. Eighteen months was a decade in a dog’s life.

  Very much like Reno, the people of Kuta—especially the once demure girls—seemed to have suffered a sea change into something not so rich and strange. The shy teenagers who had looked after the boutiques now sported tight jeans and sunglasses; they had scarlet headbands above their mascaraed eyes, and they wore T-shirts that said “Proudly Australian” across their chests. They touched shirtless tourists on the arm, and giggled. Yet all the while, the real Balinese smiles seemed to be fading. Honey Villas. Eldorado. Rendezvous Inn. And what I was witnessing, I believed, was a kind of miracle in reverse: the most graceful people in the world, blessed with an unfailing dignity that beggared description, seemed, impossibly, to be turning hard, even ugly. Charisma. The Monte Carlo. The Pink Panther Club. With a shiver, I realized what it was that the names of the stores, like the girls at their counters, brought overwhelmingly to mind: the go-go bars of Bangkok and Manila.

  “Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows,” said Trinculo. And though I disliked the recitation of obligatory Bali laments, and though I could not help being pleased about Wayan’s good fortune, I, like every other tourist, struck up my own lament.

  ON MY FIRST night back in Kuta, I also came across the female Wayan whom I had met on the island eighteen months earlier. Now twenty-one, she had a smear of crimson on her lips, and her dancer’s hands were painted with a shopgirl’s nail polish. Around her waist was a gaudy white belt, and she had taken up jogging each morning to stay in shape. She too, I noted sadly, was beginning to look like a bar girl—and to sound like one. “My watch?” she said briskly. “Present from a friend in Darwin. My dress from friend in Sydney. My bag from my friend in Perth. You”—she flashed me a routinely lovely Bali Smile—“you send me straight-leg jeans from America.”

  A couple of nights later, when I accompanied her to a movie—to my horror and her delight, it turned out to be a Black Power kung fu flick in faded late-sixties Technicolor—she left at the end of the show holding hands with Terry, a happy-go-lucky electrician from Perth who had embarked, within four hours of arrival, upon fondling this fine piece of local talent.

  Why did she not like Indonesian boys, I asked Wayan when I met her the following day. To Western eyes they seemed the very picture of gentleness and beauty.

  Her smile faded. “I would rather”—she spat—“marry a dog.”

  WHEN I MADE my way up to Ubud, things seemed to have changed much less than in Kuta, though the place had certainly grown more crowded and had started to sprout losmens like mushrooms. And as I was meandering through the village, I came by chance upon exactly what I had hoped beyond hope to see: Madé Sri. She was walking along in a pretty rainbow skirt and a light blue top, her pile of sarongs still on her head. At ten, she had been radiant; at eleven, she had blossomed into one of the loveliest girls I had ever seen. As soon as she spotted me, she scampered over and blessed me with an angel’s smile. We exchanged all our news, and I gave her a copy of Time for her English and a piece of chocolate cake from the Lotus Café. Madé, I said finally, guess what. I have a picture of you up in my office in New York. Why didn’t you send me a copy? she demanded. I didn’t have your address, I said. And, I added, looking around the one-road village, I pretty well assumed that you didn’t have one.

  “Wait just a minute,” she chirped gaily, reaching into the bag in which she carried her temple scarves. She foraged swiftly through the bag, and then pulled out what she had been seeking: a stack of two-tone, heavily embossed business cards.

  Madé Sri Asih

  Handicrafts, sarongs, etc.

  On the bottom was an address

  “This is yours, Madé?” I asked, foolish with incredulity. />
  “Sure,” she sang out. “Why not?”

  AND THEN, JUST as I was beginning to suspect that Bali had finally become compromised beyond relief or belief, and that the vandals were about to knock Prospero unconscious and claim his paradise as their own, the fates were kind to me: a shadow crossed my path, and I fell ill. I was struck down, indeed, by a mysterious ailment that laid me low with a sledgehammer force I had never known before.

  For three days, I stayed in bed, too listless to eat or move or even think. And as I lay in my fairy-tale hut by the lotus pond, the tourist’s Bali I had seen blacked out and the silhouette of some darker spirit of the island began to take shape. That night I heard no propositions or Top 40 tunes. But I saw a tailless cat walk across the garden, heard a cock crowing in the dead of night. A plump gecko scuttled up the wall of my room, past a demon mask fringed with human hair. Mosquitoes buzzed about my head. The midnight air was rent with the yowls of copulating cats. All night long, I heard the shrieking and yelping of wild dog-demons. The jungle felt close.

  Cast out from the sunlit paradise that had seemed so compliant, I was borne back, so it seemed, into the night world of Bali, island of shadow plays and cockfights, sacred daggers and full moon rites. This was the Bali where artists wait to be visited in dreams before they cover their canvases with swirling druggy patterns; where villagers place dead cocks on their doorsteps to placate evil spirits; where a menstruating woman is shunned even by her husband as a thing possessed. In Bali, when witches come out from the dark, gold-toothed monkeys are seen on deserted roads at night, and headless giants. In Bali—twilight zone of the unrational—I had seen a holy cave full of bats, and a temple in the sea guarded by a snake.

  In Bali, I had strange dreams each night. And gradually, through my fever, I began to catch the steady, keening undertone of this island of spirits (the aural equivalent, perhaps, to the undertow that carries several surfers to their deaths each year). I heard the jangled syncopation of the clangorous gamelan, weird, unearthly, psychic, resolving itself into no pattern that a Western ear could follow, but hammering away, with a dissonant and insistent tinkle, all through the narrow lanes of Kuta in the dark

  Strange, magical currents pulse through the whole of Indonesia, a hardheaded editor at Time had told me before I left. There was a beach in Java, an American girl had said, which washed away every body dressed in green: she had not believed it either, she said, until she visited the place and felt her toe stubbing against something, and looked down to see a corpse, in green. There is a strange and poisonous plant in Indonesia (I read on the front page, no less, of the Jakarta Post) that blooms when the moon is full, and wards off black magicians, then vanishes again as soon as the moon grows small. “The unseen is all around us in Java,” the enigmatic dwarf Billy Kwan had told the arriving Australian journalist in The Year of Living Dangerously.

  And as I lay alone in the dark, I began to think about the secrecy of this whole mysterious land, a secrecy so deep that it seemed like sorcery. Indonesia is the fifth-largest country in the world, exceeded in population only by the three superpowers and India, home to more people than South Korea, the Philippines, Thailand, Hong Kong and Nepal combined. But how often was it heard from? And what did we know of it? There are more than 13,000 islands in the country, stretched across an area that could reach from Oregon to Bermuda. But what were they famous for producing? And how many Indonesians had I met in the West? Indonesia was far and away the largest Islamic nation in the world, with twice as many Muslims as Iran, Iraq, Syria and Saudi Arabia combined. Yet even in Muslim Java there seemed to be few mosques, the mythology was Hindu and its most famous monument (Borobudur) was Buddhist. What was driving this place and why did it shy away from the headlines? Where were the remnants of its longtime Dutch rule? Indonesia was the only country I knew of whose national airline gave no indication of its homeland and was named after a mythological god-bird. What was going on here? And what were these beautiful people weaving behind the screens of their eerie shadow plays?

  And in a village courtyard, a huge moon hanging in the branches of the trees beyond, I watched as an old man patiently lit candles in the silence. A gang of bare-chested men burst out, in a trance, chak-a-chakking rhythmically, waving their arms about, sitting down in concentric circles and raising their hands to the heavens and shaking their heads wildly in the dust and all the time chuck-a-chucking furiously. As the chant mounted, the village mongrels let out a low growl, and backed away slowly. Limber, light-footed spirits in monkeys’ masks jumped out from the darkness and leaped this way and that. Then two little girls, perhaps eight years old, slithered out of the darkness in a trance, dressed all in white, bodies swaying, eyes shut tight, twisting their tiny wrists together in a witchery of motion, fluttering their hands like snakes. And as the fairies rocked back and forth in a spellbound dance of exorcism, the gamelan continued its relentless ungodly wailing, the voices of its caged dark spirits clanging and jangling through the night.

  I was delighted. Caliban was back, and the spirits were active, and both had survived even their shipwrecked visitors from abroad.

  TIBET

  The Underground Overland Invasion

  ONE MORNING in Tibet, I awoke before dawn and walked out from my tiny room onto a narrow, whitewashed terrace. The mountains before me were shadowed and huge. Feeling my way down a steep wooden ladder, I fumbled across a darkened courtyard and splashed my face with icy water from a pump. Then, while the world was still dreaming, I walked out into the inky streets, and traveled by bus, far, far out of town, past phantoms clomping through the blue-black alleyways, past the sleeping yak-hair tents of nomads, lit by tiny candles, past silhouettes of prayer flags flapping above squat, mud-brick houses, far, far across the high plateaus to a lonely hilltop monastery. There, in the chill of first light, some monks and nomads invited me to join them where they sat. Our breath condensed in the early air, as we shared rough bread and tea made of rancid yak butter and salt. Then, as the sun began to burn away the mist, a monk got up without a word and opened a door, letting me wander through the darkened chambers of the lamasery. Every one of them was heavy with the artichokey smell of butter lamps. Ancient scrolls were stacked inside glass cases thick with dust. Rows of flickering candles encircled placid Buddhas. Dog-eared snapshots of the Dalai Lama stood about their altars. In some rooms, in the darkness, small windows were thrown open to the bright, sharp air, framing the distant snowcaps against a brilliant blue. In others, the sun came down in shafts upon the chanting monks, flooding the room with light.

  As the day grew warmer, I scrambled up a flight of stone stairs to the open rooftop, where the building’s golden turrets stood out against the cloudless blue. And there I sat, through the sun-washed morning, writing and thinking and looking out on the barren plains below. No movement could be felt but the fluttering of prayer flags. No sound at all but the low-voiced murmurs of the monks, the sometime tolling of a prayer bell.

  Later, after many noiseless hours in the sun, I scrambled down the hill again and caught a bus back to Lhasa. By then, the clean-edged light was starting to turn the “City of Sun” to gold, sharpening the orange of its flower boxes, the bright yellow of its temple walls, the clean white of its balconies, and gilding all the strange faces that moved through its central sunlit square—fierce-eyed Khampa bandits, skins almost black and strips of red cloth woven through their jet-black hair; leather-skinned Golok women in green bowler hats and yak-hide boots, prayer wheels spinning as they hobbled down dusty lanes; rough men from the mountains in broad-brimmed gaucho hats, the heads of bulls or carcasses of dogs slung over their sturdy shoulders; huge-eyed, hairless babies clinging to the backs of mothers whose 108 ritual braids, smeared in yak butter, streamed below their waists; traders and monks and mendicants, and purple-cheeked young girls with turquoise in their pigtails and brilliant smiles.

  Then, as the shadows lengthened, I wandered back to my guesthouse terrace to watch the light leave the mounta
ins. And then, once night had fallen, I descended the narrow ladder again to a cavernous kitchen bubbling with pots and tureens. In one dark corner, three pretty girls were chopping meat while their hardy sisters busily peeled potatoes; in the center of the room, an old man with shaggy white hair took the vegetables I gave him, emptied them into a large black frying pan, scattered spices all about and then, squinting through the flying grease, handed me back my bowl. Dinner in one hand and glass of milky tea in the other, I went back up to the terrace and watched the heavens fill with stars.

  TIBET HAD ALWAYS been one of the world’s secret places. For more than twenty centuries, its people had turned their backs on the world at large and resolved to live alone, hidden behind the highest peaks on earth, disengaged from the march of time. Four decades ago, Heinrich Harrer had wandered by chance across the seemingly impassable mountains and stumbled into the heart of secrecy; during his seven years of living in Tibet, he later reported, only five other foreigners were sighted there. Indeed, in all of history until 1979, less than two thousand Westerners had ever set eyes on the Forbidden Land—most of them members of the Younghusband expedition, and the rest mostly madmen or wild adventurers disguised as Chinese nomads. “Isolation,” the Dalai Lama once wrote, “was in our blood.”

  In time, of course, such solitude had become not only self-sufficient but self-sustaining; gradually, Tibet had vanished further and still further behind the veils of myth. By now, indeed, the country seemed mostly to exist in the imagination, a lofty, otherworldly kingdom on the rooftop of the world, curtained by clouds, encircled by snow: Tibet was the home of the Abominable Snowman and the half-mythical Snow Leopard; Tibet was the mystical place known as Shambala or Shangri-La; Tibet was the magical zone that summoned Tintin in a vision and waylaid Sherlock Holmes during the three years of his “death.” Even the historical details of the area’s recent past seemed torn from some fabulous romance—the discovery of the Dalai Lama at the age of two, in a distant peasant’s home, through omens and an oracle’s dream; his rescue from an evil warlord, who demanded almost $400,000 before agreeing to release his divine subject; his ceremonial installation, amid regents and seers and rainmakers, on Lhasa’s Lion Throne; his sudden assumption of political leadership at the age of fifteen, as China’s occupation of his homeland threw him up against Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai; and finally, most poignantly, the God-King’s sad flight through snowbound passes, disguised and on a pony, into exile.