T’was the night before Nyepi, and ghosts were walking the land.
I was driving down from Kalusa about 9 o’clock, driven by a strong but irrational desire to be home well before the midnight curfew. It was not a night to be abroad. The darkness was electric with unseen energy. As I left the village, a row of young pacalang with blazing torches marched by the roadside, the flames lighting the apprehensive faces of the boys. They stuck close together and looked startled as I drove past.
The deep, fern-lined gorges that had seemed romantic only hours before now appeared sinister in the moonless night. My seatbelt, which had always been perfectly reliable, kept coming undone. Then the headlights dimmed for no reason, brightened, dimmed again. I crept along in low gear, barely able to see the road and feeling very edgy. Since leaving the torchbearers behind, mine were the only lights on the road.
Then I turned a corner and suddenly there was a motorbike a few metres in front of me. Relieved, I fell in behind it and let it lead me down the steep, twisting road, across the dim bridges and up the other side of the final gorge. In first gear, I negotiated the precipitous S-bends behind that reassuring red tail light. The bike seemed uncannily silent on that steep hill, but I was concentrating too hard to think about it. Then we were on a flat, straight stretch — and the red tail light in front of me disappeared into thin air. I was close behind it; there was no place it could possibly have turned off.
I had been guided through the gorge.
I could feel the hair on my arms stand straight up and drove as fast as I dared toward the Payongan road. This, too, was deserted except for isolated clumps of people, glancing around uneasily as they hurried along in the darkness. Then I came upon a procession, banging cymbals and blocking the road. A pacalang directed me up a dark little lane. I tried to think of this as a grand adventure as I crept along the deserted gang. Imagination can be very helpful when writing advertising copy or designing baubles, but is not exactly an asset on a dark night haunted by demons and dreams and red tail lights that weren’t. There seemed to be an unusual number of dogs about. Sometimes I thought I saw little wildfires off in the distance, but when I turned my head to focus on them, they flickered out. Or were never there.
I’m a pragmatic person as a rule, but I badly wanted to be home. By the time I drove into Ubud I was on the edge of the driver’s seat and cursing every innocent who had inadvertently gotten between me and my house. I parked, leapt out of the car and barred the garden gate behind me as if the hounds of hell were on my heels. My shadowy garden felt quiet and safe. I took my first deep breath for half an hour, then marched around the house banging an old pot to put any stray goblins in their place.
The darkness of Nyepi is extraordinarily dense, moonless, nearly starless. Every night creature on the undercliff was out that night, chattering and crashing around. I had to restrain Daisy from checking it all out. A dachshund is bred to chase and kill things, and the principals of peaceful coexistence are slow to penetrate her silky head. But on Nyepi I kept her in. As the gods looked down, they mustn’t glimpse a small dog with a pearl collar nosing through the undergrowth. Too tempting by half. Kalypso is a real Bali dog. At the first sign of Nyepi darkness she curled up beside my bed and dug in for the night.
It’s very good to be home on Nyepi — the first long night, the uncannily quiet day and then the night again. It’s a time to renew a pledge of stewardship and harmony with the house and land and all the creatures, seen and unseen, that share it with me. A day of retreat.
All the senses become more acute, stripped back, overly sensitive. The sounds of Nyepi are subtle and all the more mysterious because they are the unheard warp and weft of our daily life, suddenly brought into sharp aural focus. I’m always astonished at the number and types of birds I hear on waking, especially the small-voiced ones whose calls are usually lost in ambient noise. A chicken clucks softly in the next banjar. A small child calls out across the river, quickly hushed. When it gets hot the crickets fire up, a background curtain of noise I never hear as a rule but today has the volume of a bulldozer. There was a small sighing sound every few minutes like a sad old man… I finally tracked it to the automatic pump. It had probably been making this little noise for months, but I hadn’t heard it until the rest of the world went quiet.
I’d just returned to Bali from a trip, and Wayan had taken advantage of my absence to wash all the Persian carpets. They hadn’t had a chance to dry completely and the house smelled like a bus full of damp Englishmen. So I festooned the lawn with carpets and slowly followed the sun around the garden all day, watching them dry. I had a couple of lengthy, unneccessary naps. I tried to teach Papaya, the parrot, to say her name and she tried to humour me. I ate the smoked chicken that Wayan had thoughtfully laid in. It was all very restful. There was so much nothing to do that there wasn’t enough time to do it all.
Monday dawned to what seemed a cacophony of noise. Reluctantly, I unbarred the garden gate as if it had been shut for 3 years instead of 36 hours. The lane teemed with motorcycles, school children and women on their way to market. The ghosts had gone home and the world was ours once again.
