For months it didn’t rain at all. The earth cracked, trees drooped, desiccated plants collapsed on the hot ground. Day after day the remorseless sun beat down, bleaching every molecule of moisture from the parched garden. We milked each passing cloud with prayers for rain, tried to read impending precipitation into the behaviour of the birds in the ravine and the old lady from the neighbourhood warung.When the rain finally began, the earth literally exploded with relief as legions of flying termites, frogs and large mysterious insects woke from hibernation. Huge rhinoceros beetles crashed drunkenly into the walls, spiders danced in the shower. My hand phone buzzed with text messages welcoming the end of the drought. The dogs and I stood in the downpour, tasting it, watching it wash the dust of long hot months from the leaves. Rain!Then the reality of the rain set in. "There’s only one thing you have to remember about drainage," said Nick, my engineer friend, helpfully. "Water always runs downhill." Indeed it does. Water cascaded down my shallow garden steps like a well-designed waterfall, excavating interesting new channels across what is going to be the lawn some day.
The two big tanks I put in to catch the rainwater soon ran over, reminding me that that I had forgotten to attach the overflow pipes and direct them to the drainage ditch that wasn’t finished yet. Heavy ropes of rain overflowed the gutters to drill deep into the soil beside the house. Puddles appeared on the floor under leaks in the roof while the dogs industriously tracked mud across every flat surface.
In the absence of the more technically competent Nyoman, Wayan and I sloshed around the muddy garden barefoot, screaming with laughter as we tried to break the fall of the water from the roof with buckets, block the overflow of the water tank with tea towels and dig drainage channels in a thundering downpour. In a day or two we figured out how to plug the holes, but Ibu Nature had another surprise. The rains also brought every housefly in Bali to torment us. Wayan figured that a combination of the rains and the ripe durians and mangoes had brought the infestation. Horrified, we watched as flies by the score landed on the terracotta floor, which they seemed to find particularly attractive. What was an environmentally responsible householder to do? A trip to the supermarket indicated that the least polluting option was good old-fashioned flypaper. I thought this low-tech solution had disappeared with my grandmother’s farmhouse. The local product’s label claimed to catch everything from flies to elephants, so I bought 10 packets.Lem Lalat is a sheet of brown paper, liberally smeared on one side with rubber cement and folded in half; there is a trick to pulling it apart without becoming stuck yourself. But once we started laying them around the house the results were immediately gratifying. One fly would land, stick and begin to buzz furiously. Then his friends would arrive, hover around and land to see what the fuss was about. By the end of the first day I estimated that we had caught several hundred of the pests. But the sticky paper was catching more than flies.
The first casualty was Microduck, a minute duckling I’d brought from my other house. A stiff breeze blew the flypaper into her pen, where she wandered a little too close to the buzzing payload. A string of high-pitched quacks brought us all running to the pen, where Microduck was becoming more intimately adhered to the flypaper with every flap. It took some time to extricate her, during which operation she lost most of the feathers from one side. "Bird hair gone," noted Wayan.Luckier was the cicak who was similarly lured by what must have seemed like an easy meal. The little creature was found glued flat to the paper from the tip of its nose to its tail. That’s when I discovered that cooking oil helps loosen the demon grip of industrial strength rubber cement. It took me some time to free the little creature with a Q tip and puddle of oil, but it eventually escaped undamaged though gleaming greasily. I wondered whether it would be able to walk on walls after its misadventure; perhaps it would slip off onto the head of an unsuspecting dinner guest.Wayan was the next victim. Passing the kitchen counter, her long hair touched an open flypaper which attached itself firmly to her tresses. It was a long and messy business but we managed to eventually free her without resorting to scissors. She started wearing her hair up after that.
Kalypso is an elegant Kintamani dog with a silky black coat and a tail like a fox brush. When that magnificent tail swept up a sheet of flypaper from the terrace floor one day, it was her dignity that suffered. Quite a lot of cooking oil and a bath, which she hates, restored her poise. She took a long detour around flypaper after that but Resi, the visiting dachshund, sits on a piece of it at least once a week.A few nights ago I came home to find a large, snarling tokay that had managed to wrap itself in flypaper, then tried to escape across the counter before the whole perambulating mess became stuck. He was an interesting bright blue colour with little red spots and roared balefully at me the whole time I was unsticking him.Besides flies, the rains bring other interesting creatures to the house. For about a week the flying termites arrived punctually just at dinner time. I soon learned to turn off all the lights except one in the eaves, and sit in the dark as the insect wings spun moving veils in the beam. Then one evening I got caught up in my email and forgot that I’d left my bed net open and my reading light on. When I finally remembered, I found 896,582 flying termites in my bed, with more arriving every second.More disturbing was the rat in the loo. I’m not usually a screamer, but I may have raised my voice a little on catching sight of a large rodent in the toilet bowl. It executed a neat turn at the sight of me and disappeared down the pipe, its ropy tail the last to vanish. Wayan was as puzzled as I was as to how it had gotten there. She insisted it must be dead. I was pretty sure it wasn’t. When I returned that evening there was a note on the counter ‘Tikus sudah keluar’.
OK, but where? How? Dead or alive?Another night a young civet cat braved the light to feast on flying termites, and Kalypso broke its neck on the terrace steps. It died in my hands, a rare and beautiful little animal with the face of a clever dog and the tail of a monkey. I buried it under a rosebush, sad that the rains had lured it into danger.There’s a pause in the rains now, and a return to hot dry days. The dogs lie panting on the patio, every centimeter of belly pressed to the cool tiles. The earth of the garden is splitting again and the plants are wilting. I don’t know whether to ask for rain, or not.
