Eat, Pray, Love (32 page)

71

M
y flight leaves India at four in the morning, which is typical of how India works. I decide not to go to sleep at all that night, but to spend the whole evening in one of the meditation caves, in prayer. I’m not a late-night person by nature, but something in me wants to stay awake for these last hours at the Ashram. There are many things in my life I’ve stayed up all night to do—to make love, to argue with someone, to drive long distances, to dance, to cry, to worry (and sometimes all those things, in fact, in the course of one night)—but I’ve never sacrificed sleep for a night of exclusive prayer. Why not now?

I pack my bag and leave it by the temple gate, so I can be ready to grab it and go when the taxi arrives before dawn. And then I walk up the hill, I go into the meditation cave and I sit. I’m alone in there, but I sit where I can see the big photograph of Swamiji, my Guru’s master, the founder of this Ashram, the long-gone lion who is somehow still here. I close my eyes and let the mantra come. I climb down that ladder into my own hub of stillness. When I get there, I can feel the world halt, the way I always wanted it to halt when I was nine years old and panicking about the relentlessness of time. In my heart, the clock stops and the calendar pages quit flying off the wall. I sit in silent wonder at all I understand. I am not actively praying. I have
become
a prayer.

I can sit here all night.

In fact, I do.

I don’t know what alerts me when it’s time to go meet my taxi, but after several hours of stillness, something gives me a nudge, and when I look at my watch it’s exactly time to go. I have to fly to Indonesia now. How funny and strange. So I stand up and bow before the photograph of Swamiji—the bossy, the marvelous, the fiery. And then I slide a piece of paper under the carpet, right below his image. On the paper are the two poems I wrote during my four months in India. These are the first real poems I’ve ever written. A plumber from New Zealand encouraged me to try poetry for once—that’s why it happened. One of these poems I wrote after having been here only a month. The other, I just wrote this morning.

In the space between the two poems, I have found acres of grace.

72

T
wo Poems from an Ashram in India

First

All this talk of nectar and bliss is starting to piss me off.

I don’t know about you, my friend,
but my path to God ain’t no sweet waft of incense.

It’s a cat set loose in a pigeon pen,
and I’m the cat—
but also them who yell like hell when they get pinned.

My path to God is a worker’s uprising,
won’t be peace till they unionize.

Their picket is so fearsome
the National Guard won’t go near them.

My path was beaten unconscious before me,
by a small brown man I never got to see,
who chased God through India, shin-deep in mud,
barefoot and famined, malarial blood,
sleeping in doorways, under bridges—a hobo.

(Which is short for “homeward bound,” you know)
And he now chases me, saying: “Got it yet, Liz?

What HOMEWARD means? What BOUND really is?”
Second

However.

If they’d let me wear pants made out of the
fresh-mown grass from this place,
I’d do it.

If they’d let me make out
with every single Eucalyptus tree in Ganesh’s Grove,
I swear, I’d do it.

I’ve sweated out dew these days,
worked out the dregs,
rubbed my chin on tree bark,
mistaking it for my master’s leg.

I can’t get far enough in.

If they’d let me eat the soil of this place
served on a bed of birds’ nests,
I’d finish only half my plate,
Then sleep all night on the rest.

73

I
’ve never had less of a plan in my life than I do upon arrival in Bali. In all my history of careless travels, this is the most carelessly I’ve ever landed anyplace. I don’t know where I’m going to live, I don’t know what I’m going to do, I don’t know what the exchange rate is, I don’t know how to get a taxi at the airport—or even where to ask that taxi to take me. Nobody is expecting my arrival. I have no friends in Indonesia, or even friends-of-friends. And here’s the problem about traveling with an out-of-date guidebook, and then not reading it anyway: I didn’t realize that I’m actually not allowed to stay in Indonesia for four months, even if I want to. I find this out only upon entry into the country. Turns out I’m allowed only a one-month tourist visa. It hadn’t occurred to me that the Indonesian government would be anything less than delighted to host me in their country for just as long as I pleased to stay.

As the nice immigration official is stamping my passport with permission to stay in Bali for only and exactly thirty days, I ask him in my most friendly manner if I can please remain longer.

“No,” he says, in his most friendly manner. The Balinese are famously friendly.

“See, I’m supposed to stay here for three or four months,” I tell him.

I don’t mention that it’s a
prophecy—
that my staying here for three or four months was predicted two years ago by an elderly and quite possibly demented Balinese medicine man, during a ten-minute palm-reading. I’m not sure how to explain this.

But what
did
that medicine man tell me, now that I think of it? Did he actually say that I would come back to Bali and spend three or four months living with him? Did he really say “living with” him? Or did he just want me to drop by again sometime if I was in the neighborhood and give him another ten bucks for another palm-reading? Did he say I
would
come back, or that I
should
come back? Did he really say, “See you later, alligator”? Or was it, “In a while, crocodile”?

I haven’t had any communication with the medicine man since that one evening. I wouldn’t know how to contact him, anyway. What might his address be? “Medicine Man, On His Porch, Bali, Indonesia”? I don’t know whether he’s dead or alive. I remember that he seemed exceedingly old two years ago when we met; anything could have happened to him since then. All I have for sure is his name—Ketut Liyer—and the memory that he lives in a village just outside the town of Ubud. But I don’t remember the name of the village.

Maybe I should have thought all this through better.

74

B
ut Bali is a fairly simple place to navigate. It’s not like I’ve landed in the middle of the Sudan with no idea of what to do next. This is an island approximately the size of Delaware and it’s a popular tourist destination. The whole place has arranged itself to help you, the Westerner with the credit cards, get around with ease. English is spoken here widely and happily.(Which makes me feel guiltily relieved. My brain synapses are so overloaded by my efforts to learn modern Italian and ancient Sanskrit during these last few months that I just can’t take on the task of trying to learn Indonesian or, even more difficult, Balinese—a language more complex than Martian.) It’s really no trouble being here. You can change your money at the airport, find a taxi with a nice driver who will suggest to you a lovely hotel—none of this is hard to arrange. And since the tourism industry collapsed in the wake of the terrorist bombing here two years ago (which happened a few weeks after I’d left Bali the first time), it’s even easier to get around now; everyone is desperate to help you, desperate for work.

So I take a taxi to the town of Ubud, which seems like a good place to start my journey. I check into a small and pretty hotel there on the fabulously named Monkey Forest Road. The hotel has a sweet swimming pool and a garden crammed with tropical flowers with blossoms bigger than volleyballs (tended to by a highly organized team of hummingbirds and butter-flies). The staff is Balinese, which means they automatically start adoring you and complimenting you on your beauty as soon as you walk in. The room has a view of the tropical treetops and there’s a breakfast included every morning with piles of fresh tropical fruit. In short, it’s one of the nicest places I’ve ever stayed and it’s costing me less than ten dollars a day. It’s good to be back.

Ubud is in the center of Bali, located in the mountains, surrounded by terraced rice paddies and innumerable Hindu temples, with rivers that cut fast through deep canyons of jungle and volcanoes visible on the horizon. Ubud has long been considered the cultural hub of the island, the place where traditional Balinese painting, dance, carving, and religious ceremonies thrive. It isn’t near any beaches, so the tourists who come to Ubud are a self-selecting and rather classy crowd; they would prefer to see an ancient temple ceremony than to drink piña coladas in the surf. Regardless of what happens with my medicine man prophecy, this could be a lovely place to live for a while. The town is sort of like a small Pacific version of Santa Fe, only with monkeys walking around and Balinese families in traditional dress all over the place. There are good restaurants and nice little bookstores. I could feasibly spend my whole time here in Ubud doing what nice divorced American women have been doing with their time ever since the invention of the YWCA—signing up for one class after another: batik, drumming, jewelry-making, pottery, traditional Indonesian dance and cooking . . . Right across the road from my hotel there’s even something called “The Meditation Shop”—a small storefront with a sign advertising open meditation sessions every night from 6:00 to 7:00. May peace prevail on earth, reads the sign. I’m all for it.

By the time I unpack my bags it’s still early afternoon, so I decide to take myself for a walk, get reoriented to this town I haven’t seen in two years. And then I’ll try to figure out how to start finding my medicine man. I imagine this will be a difficult task, might take days or even weeks. I’m not sure where to start with my search, so I stop at the front desk on my way out and ask Mario if he can help me.

Mario is one of the guys who work at this hotel. I already made friends with him when I checked in, largely on account of his name. Not too long ago I was traveling in a country where many men were named Mario, but not one of them was a small, muscular, energetic Balinese fellow wearing a silk sarong and a flower behind his ear. So I had to ask, “Is your name really Mario? That doesn’t sound very Indonesian.”

“Not my real name,” he said. “My real name is Nyoman.”

Ah—I should have known. I should have known that I would have a 25 percent chance of guessing Mario’s real name. In Bali, if I may digress, there are only four names that the majority of the population give to their children, regardless of whether the baby is a boy or a girl. The names are Wayan (pronounced “Why-Ann”), Made (“mah-DAY”), Nyoman and Ketut. Translated, these names mean simply First, Second, Third and Fourth, and they connote birth order. If you have a fifth child, you start the name cycle all over again, so that the fifth child is really known as something like: “Wayan to the Second Power.” And so forth. If you have twins, you name them in the order they came out. Because there are basically only four names in Bali (higher-caste elites have their own selection of names) it’s totally possible (indeed, quite common) that two Wayans would marry each other. And then their firstborn would be named, of course: Wayan.

This gives a slight indication of how important family is in Bali, and how important your placement in that family is. You would think this system could become complicated, but somehow the Balinese work it out. Understandably and necessarily, nicknaming is popular. For instance, one of the most successful businesswomen in Ubud is a lady named Wayan who has a busy restaurant called Café Wayan, and so she is known as “Wayan Café”—meaning, “The Wayan who owns Café Wayan.” Somebody else might be known as “Fat Made,” or “Nyoman-Rental-Car” or “Stupid-Ketut-Who-Burned-Down-His-Uncle’s-House.” My new Balinese friend Mario got around the problem by simply naming himself Mario.

“Why Mario?”

“Because I love everything Italian,” he said.

When I told him that I’d recently spent four months in Italy, he found this fact so stupendously amazing that he came out from behind his desk and said, “Come, sit, talk.” I came, I sat, we talked. And that’s how we became friends.

So this afternoon I decide to start my search for my medicine man by asking my new friend Mario if by any chance he knows a man by the name of Ketut Liyer.

Mario frowns, thinking.

I wait for him to say something like, “Ah, yes! Ketut Liyer! Old medicine man who died just last week—so sad when venerable old medicine man passes away . . .”

Mario asks me to repeat the name, and this time I write it down, assuming I’m pronouncing something wrong. Sure enough, Mario brightens in recognition. “Ketut Liyer!”

Now I wait for him to say something like, “Ah, yes! Ketut Liyer! Insane person! Arrested last week for being a crazy man . . .”

But he says instead, “Ketut Liyer is famous healer.”

“Yes! That’s him!”

“I know him. I go in his house. Last week I take my cousin, she needs cure for her baby crying all night. Ketut Liyer fixes it. One time I took American girl like you to Ketut Liyer’s house. Girl wanted magic to make her more beautiful to men. Ketut Liyer draw magic painting, for help her be more beautiful. I tease her after that. Every day I tell her, ‘Painting working! Look how beautiful you are! Painting working!’ ”

Remembering the image Ketut Liyer had drawn for me a few years ago, I tell Mario that I’d gotten a magic picture myself from the medicine man once.

Mario laughs. “Painting working for you, too!”

“My picture was to help me find God,” I explain.

“You don’t want to be more beautiful to men?” he asks, understandably confused.

I say, “Hey, Mario—do you think you could take me to visit Ketut Liyer someday? If you’re not too busy?”

“Not now,” he says.

Just as I’m starting to feel disappointed, he adds, “But maybe in five minutes?”