Hold the Enlightenment by Tim Cahill

Author:Tim Cahill
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781588360854
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-09-07T10:00:00+00:00

I heard news of Nyoman periodically, because I recommended his services as driver and guide to any number of Bali-bound friends. The reports were always favorable. People liked Nyoman.

A business trip to the Far East gave me an excuse to hop a short flight to Bali. People said the island had changed, and that it was now a place about tourism. The tourist dollars had bled all authenticity out of the culture, or so it was said.

My first day, I hired a car and drove from my beachfront hotel up into the mountains, where Nyoman lived, in Ubud.

Muka, my Balinese driver for the day, pointed out what was new: the double highway through Sanur, the luxury hotels, the shops where there had only been rice paddies before. Behind the shops, Muka said, there were still rice paddies. You just couldn’t see them from the road.

The road to Ubud, a winding two-lane blacktop, was similarly full of shops, mostly those of family entrepreneurs who carved, say, giant kangaroos out of wood. There were silver shops, and crafts stores, and places that sold replicas of sacred and secular masks. All new.

The people in general looked healthier than I recalled.

“It is true,” Muka said. Health care had improved remarkably in the past thirty years or so. Children were inoculated. Life expectancy in Indonesia as a whole has risen from 45.7 in the 1960s to 62.7. Even with the current economic problems, the country was a good deal more prosperous than it had been when I had last visited. Almost all the mountain villages now had electricity and running water, for instance.

We arrived on the outskirts of Ubud, always Bali’s cultural soul. The main street was choked with shops and services, with new restaurants and upscale hotels. Traffic was constant and unrelenting. Muka and I walked up to Nyoman’s family homestay, where I’d lived eleven years ago. There was a line of motorbikes parked out front, and heavy traffic was at a standstill. The sign—“Homestay Adur”—was still there, but a huge pile of rocks blocked the entrance. I climbed over, and walked up the stairs.

Balinese homes are generally walled compounds consisting of several houses. There had been three or four at Homestay Adur, but when I stepped over the threshold, I saw that all but one of the small wooden houses had been torn down. There was a huge hole in the center of what had been a graceful courtyard, and busy workmen were digging in the earth, setting the foundation for a new, central building. In the single house left standing, a dozen or more people sat at sewing machines, sweating in the heat, and making T-shirts. Nyoman, I was told, wasn’t in at present. He had gone down to his T-shirt shop on the tourist beach, at Kuta. He wouldn’t be back until tomorrow. I could, however, give him a call on his cell phone.

This, I reflected, was not the Nyoman who lived in memory.

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