Wayan, my pembantu, is a unique window into Balinese culture for me. Sometimes when we’re companionably chopping vegetables together in the outdoor kitchen, she’ll bring me up to date on community buzz that I’d never otherwise be aware of. These occasions push my Indonesian language skills to the limit, but somehow I seem to get the gist of the story even when I don’t understand half the words.
There seem to have been a lot of sudden deaths lately. Granted that the night temperature can plummet to an arctic 18C at this time of year, but even in Bali that’s not quite life-threatening. Wayan reports that there have been three deaths in as many weeks in her village alone. What did they all die of, I wondered. “They weren’t old. They weren’t sick. They just come home from work, sit down and die,” says she.
Pak Mangku next door concurs that there seems to be a lot of it going around, whatever it is. He’s told her of three recent deaths he’s heard about where the people have not been sick at all. One was a man of 60 who sat down at a warung on our very street, bought glass of coffee and promptly fell down dead. There was no suggestion that the quality of the beverage was at fault.
Wayan approves of these rapid departures. “That’s good, they’re happy now,” she nods, chopping garlic briskly. “It’s good to be dead. Being alive has a lot of problems.”
Her insights into the local fauna and flora can be illuminating. Several times I offered her the seeds from a particularly succulent papaya that grew in my garden, and she always refused them politely. Finally, she felt she knew me well enough to confide the reason, which was rather startling. “We can’t have papaya trees in our compound, or ghosts will hang around them,” she stated. I glanced around my yard at the seven or eight trees heavy with fruit. “There are no ghosts hanging around MY papaya trees,” I declared indignantly. She agreed that I ran a tight ship in that department, but she would get them for sure. “It’s a problem.”
A few weeks ago her husband flushed a huge black scorpion from the garden near my unglazed bedroom window, the second we’ve found (only then did Wayan tell me that she sometimes finds their children under my bed and in the bathroom). He put it in my best Tupperware container and took it back to their village that night to try and sell. Could there really be a market for big black scorpions? Yes, indeed; he had seen a man on a motorcycle with a container of them crawling around. The man was taking them to the market in Denpasar where they would sell for Rp 20,000 each. The buyers, using some technology that was beyond my language skills, brewed the scorpion venom with coconut oil and sold it as a remedy for rheumatism.
This was big money. We discussed the possibility of breeding scorpions as a business initiative, but agreed that it might have a negative effect on our social lives. Besides, how did you tell a male scorpion from a female scorpion? What did they eat? How often did they breed? As so often in Bali, the production issues were daunting. Nevertheless, when he drove me into Denpasar the next day Nyoman brought along our new acquisition. While I ran my errands in Jalan Sulawesi, he visited the pasar to do some market research. Alas, there were no takers. We drove back up the mountain with a large scorpion noisily scrambling around its container in the back of the car. On Pak Mangku’s recommendation, the stinger was removed and it was released back into the jungle, at what I hoped way beyond walking distance to my yard.
I told my staff a scorpion story I’d recently heard from India. Roadside stalls in Gujarat feature aluminum pots full of just this kind of big black scorpion. Wealthy clients pay US$7 to allow a scorpion to sting them on the palm of the hand. Apparently the initial pain quickly subsides, leaving a feeling of euphoria that lasts several hours. Wayan and Nyoman scoffed at this nonsense (“Crazy people!”), and had to agree I didn’t think it would catch on.
Then there were the walking catfish. “Sometimes I’ll be standing in a dry sawah talking to a friend, and I’ll see some lele walking to the river,” Wayan confided as she swept around my office chair.
“ Walking?”
“
Truly.” In fact, I had heard elsewhere that catfish can make their way overland between waterways in the dry season. “But when I looked again, they’d disappeared. They are really the children of the river people, so we’re afraid to eat them or we’ll have a lot of problems.”
Wayan stopped buying red apples for my morning juice. “Poison,” she intoned darkly. After a big upacara a few weeks ago, rumours started to fly that the red apples from China were poisoning people. “After people brought the offerings back from the temple, they would eat the fruit. When they ate the red apples, their mouths swelled up and they would die.” How many people had actually died? After some discussion, my staff agreed that at least four people had expired in this unpleasant fashion. A fairly serious public relations issue for the Chinese apple marketing board. I now use the sour little green ones from Java.
I hadn’t been in Bali very long before I realized that this part of the island was prone to gentle earthquakes. “It’s the rain,” Wayan told me. I wasted quite a lot of breath trying to explain the relationship between live volcanoes and earth tremors, and she listened with patient attention. “Maybe that happens in other places,” she conceded when I finished. “But in Bali the rain causes earthquakes.”
Determined that Western logic should prevail just this once, I tried to keep track of the tremors. Annoyingly, they did seem to occur in the rainy season. Finally, early yesterday morning, I was woken by the gentle rocking of my antique Madura bed. Although overcast, it hadn’t rained for weeks.
“
There was an earthquake this morning, and it wasn’t raining,” I informed Wayan when she arrived from the market. She tipped a bag of chicken heads into the pot to boil up for the dogs. “But Ibu, it must have been raining somewhere, or there wouldn’t have been an earthquake.”
Later that morning a neighbour’s pembantu arrived to borrow our ladder. There was a rapid exchange in Balinese. As the dogs escorted the visitor to the gate Wayan turned to me with a triumphant smile. “It rained last night,” she announced, “in Teges.”
I’ve decided not to be a warrior for logic any more. I’m living in a world of walking catfish, haunted papaya trees and rain-induced earth tremors –- the world according to Wayan.
