It would not be an understatement to declare that the Balinese have a different sense of time than Westerners.
Those who have come straight to Bali from the frenetic West often feel they have been drop-kicked into a different dimension. They have. There’s never been a sense of urgency in everyday life here, and the Balinese decline to adopt one. They open their shops and warungs at a certain time each day –- ceremonies permitting – but it seems more a matter of habit than adherence to a schedule. A watch is a fashion statement, not an essential tool for living. The rhythm of the Bali day is dictated by much more than the remorseless march of the clock.
Modern thinking enjoins us to live in the moment, a skill we try desperately to achieve for the sake of our mental health. It’s not easy to shed decades of multi-tasking and deadlines. The Baliense live richly and effortlessly in the moment. When there’s too much to do or problems with money, the claim ‘ada stress’. There was no word for this condition before we came along.
I lost my watch a few months after moving here and never bothered to replace it. Last year I was given one while out of the country, and it ran perfectly until I arrived back in Bali. A few days later it stopped and could not be persuaded to run again. For months it sat on the bathroom counter staring at me with its blank face and baleful unmoving hands. Then I planned another trip and began to pack my bags. The watch came to life suddenly and started to keep perfect time.
When I pointed out to Wayan that it had begun running again, she was unsurprised.
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It wasn’t necessary here. Now you need it again,” This seemed perfectly logical to her.
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Will it run while I’m away?”
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Probably”
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And when I come back?”
She shrugged expressively. “Maybe.”
She and Nyoman arrive promptly at 10 each morning, although they rarely wear the watches I gave them. They are somewhat less punctual about leaving at 3, their designated departure time. Sometimes they don’t go home til 4, which makes me late for my nap.
At first I kept a much closer eye on the clock than they did, concerned that they were working overtime. I tried to balance their work schedule; when I needed them a few hours longer one day I would give them time off later. They gently resisted this by appearing as usual on days I had declared holidays and turning up with plants for the garden on Sunday, their day off. It took them a long time to train me, but finally I succumbed to their concept of ‘when’. It’s not about what the clock says, it’s about what we do in the day and how much tme that takes. There are no sharp edges.
They appear to enjoy coming to work. I suspect they find me more entertaining than television. Occasionally they take a day off for a ceremony or I need to be picked up at the airport at night. Their philosophy seems to be that it will balance out if we are all reasonable. We are and it does. Nobody looks at their watches during these unspoken negotiations, because no one is ever wearing one.
In Indonesian Class I learned that besok doesn’t necessarily mean tomorrow, it just means ‘not today’. Lusa, the word for the day after tomorrow, can be loosely interpreted as sometime in the more or less immediate future. Two weeks is approximately equal to infinity. I learned a long time ago that most Balinese don’t think two weeks ahead, and there’s just no sense getting cross about it.
My Indonesian teacher reminded us that invitations to weddings and tooth filing ceremonies arrive only a day or two before the event, because the Balinese might forget if the interval was longer. I used to panic about these abrupt summonses, translating them with the aid of a dictionary while Wayan dressed me in my pakaian adat and actually arriving promptly at the stated time. Invariably I was either the first person there or it was all over by the time I got there and people were lounging around dreamily eating smoked duck. It all bears a bit of thinking about in terms of cross-cultural expectations.
Another interesting wrinkle in time is the tendency, not just in Indonesibut elsewhere in Asia, to agree to make a certain item in two weeks. The unsuspecting tamu turns up fourteen days later to collect it, at which point the vendor actually begins the work. Why do they wait until they see the whites of our eyes before they start the project, I wonder. Are we so unreliable? Didn’t they believe us? Was two weeks just too long?
After 13 years of living in Southeast Asia, I’ve developed a philosophy which has been very helpful – sooner or later, something will happen, one way or the other. What time does the bus leave? In the west, four o’clock means just that, give or take ten minutes. In much of Asia it can mean six o’clock, midnight, when the bus is full, or “What bus?” The bottom lne is that if you get attached to what you think should happen at a certain time, you may be disappointed. Despair is futile.
I seem to have struck a happy balance between the two worlds of Bali time and western time. I can turn up at exactly 9 o’clock for an appointment if that is required. But if an upacara suddenly blocks my path, I turn off the car engine and slip across into that other dimension. The cymbals clash, the women sway gracefully under their towers of fruit and the pretty children run to catch up. In Jakarta, it’s demonstrations that make people late, in the US it’s gridlock. Here it is ritual and music, which is not so very hard to take. The rest of the day will unroll itself a few minutes later, that’s all.
I recently returned from a trip to Singapore, wearing my new watch. I checked it when the plane landed and it was still working when Nyoman drove me up the mountain in the dark. Gradually the traffic thinned, the air cooled, the road began to climb steeply. The dogs greeted me ecstatically as Nyoman unloaded the bags and departed. I pottered around contentedly, unpacking and making a cup of tea. By the time I took off the watch, it had stopped. I smiled as I put it away; I wouldn’t be needing it for a while.
