Although I’ve lived in Asia for many years, I never had the chance to study rural plumbing until coming to live in Ubud. Opportunities are numerous now, as so much ablution is public.
In rural Bali, where many people don’t have bathrooms, it’s a popular custom to use the rivers and irrigation ditches to bathe and wash clothes. Public nudity is unacceptable, but everyone maintains the polite fiction that people are technically invisible when bathing in the open. In villages where the ditch doubles as the bath house, men will sometimes bathe on one side of the road and women on the other. Usually young women will keep their underwear on, but often the old ladies will strip right down. It’s not uncommon to be driving along a country lane as a naked person casually emerges from a ditch or under a bridge, wrapping on a sarong.
I was coming home from a friend’s house the other evening, just after dark. Using my torch, I picked my way carefully along the concrete path beside a big ditch that irrigated the rice fields nearby. I was just a few feet from my car when I realized that two naked men were sitting in the ditch right beside the door on the driver’s side, chatting and smoking.
This was a dilemma. Not knowing the protocol for closely approaching two naked men in a ditch, I opted for discretion. "Ma’af, Pak!" I politely alerted them to my presence, switched off my torch and averted my eyes while fumbling to unlock the door in the dark, balanced precariously on the bank. They sat very still, busily being invisible. I got into the car and drove a short distance with the lights out to preserve their privacy. In my rear view mirror I saw their shadows climb slowly out onto the grass and reach for their clothes.
Two days later I was visiting a friend up in another neighbourhood. There was a row of residences between the road and the rice fields, with an irrigation ditch running between them. As I turned the corner, there sat a naked man in the ditch. It was high noon, and he sat there soaping himself with great dignity as people passed, stepping around his shampoo bottle on the sidewalk. No one looked at him and he looked at no one.
I mentioned this to Annette who lived nearby. "I’ve seen all kinds of things in that ditch," she told me. "When they slaughter a pig, they wash the intestines there. People bathe in it, wash their plates and toss their litter." Talk about multi-tasking.It was also a favourite haunt of an old lady who was, to be polite, losing the plot. She roamed the neighbourhood filching bags of rubbish that people had left out for collection, then she’d head for the ditch, remove all her clothing and climb in with her treasures. Annette told me she would spend the morning sorting through the rubbish, washing and organizing it meticulously according to category. All the chicken bones went into one pile, the empty noodle packets in another… then she would carefully put everything into plastic bags and take it all home.
Pak Mangku, from whom I contracted the land for my house, had no bathroom. His modest compound had a loo of sorts, but the only running water came from a standpipe in the courtyard. Because the town pumped water only a few times a week and he had no storage tank, his household often had no water at all. During the months I was building my house, he’d stroll down the lane past the construction site each evening with his soap and toothbrush in a little plastic pot, on his way to the river to bathe.
I built a water tower at the border of our properties, with a large tank and a network of pipes and valves to ensure that both our residences would have plenty of water. I looked forward to the day that Pak Mangku didn’t have to walk all the way to the river for his daily bath. He wasn’t getting any younger, and the steps down the riverbank were very steep. Having handed him a fairly large whack of cash for a 20 year land contract, I expected that he’d take advantage of his new free, constant water supply to construct a bathroom.
But it didn’t happen. Eventually a very small cistern appeared in the middle of the courtyard, but that was all. Pak Mangku still walked cheerfully to the river every evening with his soap and toothbrush. I asked Wayan why this was, and she looked surprised. "His friends are there; it’s more fun to mandi with other people," she explained. I’d missed the point.
In warm climates and cultures that are deeply social, the public water supply has been a traditional meeting place. The pragmatic Balinese take this a step further by taking off their clothes and jumping in. I thought about the congenial groups of women I’d watched bathing and washing their clothes in roadside ditches, splashing the children and screaming with laughter over a bawdy joke. Bathing together is a chance to meet, to hang out and gossip. Yet Balinese girls consider the bikini top and tiny pair of shorts that some western women wear around Ubud unacceptably immodest.
The chilly climate of northern Europe, where our own culture evolved, discouraged roadside ablutions. So did the early Christian disapproval of nudity. As a result, we still close ourselves into a small room to bathe alone. Ironically, the northern Europeans are now more comfortable with nudity than North Americans, who can be quite prim. While enjoying a massage at a local spa, I’ve sometimes heard a male voice in the next cubicle raised in some distress when requested to remove his knickers. Yet this same man will wander shirtless through the shops and into restaurants, which the Balinese find rather improper.
