KITE STRINGS OF THE
SOUTHERN CROSS

BY LAURIE GOUGH

TRAVELERS' TALES, INC.

380 PAGES

A wanderer enjoys the night sky with a new friend.

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By Laurie Gough

May 5, 1999 | The thing I love most about Bali is that everything is connected to the spirits. Every morning, Balinese women place sweet-smelling offerings at doorways to greet friendly spirits. Offerings are prepared with sprinkles of rice, burning incense, flower petals, and jasmine. Even nasty demons are treated with concoctions of blossoms and delicious things to eat. All villages, including those no larger than a crossroads, are adorned with elaborate shrines and temples. Above dangerous curves on the roads and at busy intersections sit sacred shrines to watch over passersby. In the countryside, stone-carved deities hide in the bushes to ward off evil demons. One is always protected by the spirits in Bali.

Almost every day of the year is celebrated with a ceremony or ritual. Once I was awakened in the middle of the night by a dreadful squealing noise. The next morning I discovered the neighbors had sacrificed a pig outside my window in some sort of pork chop offering to the gods ceremony. Not a day went by when I didn't see a procession of colorfully dressed women balancing pyramids of tropical fruit, cakes, and flowers on their heads as offerings to the fertility goddess, or whoever the deity of the day happened to be.

Not only are the Balinese intimately connected to the spirit world; they're in touch with the animal world too. One morning I walked out of the artists' village of Ubud, past the Monkey Forest Road and into the Monkey Forest. In front of me walked an older man, a European tourist carrying a camera. Without warning, a monkey swooped down out of a banyan tree, ran over to the man, made off with his camera, and clambered back up the tree. The man stopped and shook his fist at the animal, as if that would mean anything to the monkey. Just then an old woman came along, singing to herself. Dressed in the traditional batik sarong of her village, she was carrying an armload of bananas.

"Bananas, you want to buy? Feed the monkey," she said to the old man. She didn't offer to sell bananas to me.

"No, thank you. I want my camera back."

"Buy bananas. Feed monkey bananas. Monkey give you camera back."

She was right. When the man bought bananas from the woman and offered one to the monkey in the tree, the monkey jumped down, dropped the camera at the man's feet as it grabbed the banana, and tore back up the tree to eat it. Brilliant. I wondered how many people a day the old woman and monkey tricked in the same way.

Bali is a country of sweet swaying bodies on buses and exquisite women who spit. My flight arrived in Bali so late one night that I decided to sleep just outside the airport on a bench in a little wooden pavilion surrounded by tall grass. The next morning, I caught a bus for a mountain Village. The bus was hot, sticky, and crowded. Some of the people had to stand and I noticed how easily they melded with a roving bus that flew over curves, as if they were raised on rolling waves. Next to me on the bus sat a woman with such a serene smile and quietly delicate features, I thought she must have soaked herself in the juices of roses and must have been sung to all her life. She had the kind of gentle grace of a Gauguin Tahitian painting. I watched her gather her long black hair into a perfectly smooth collection of silk and then twist it into an ingenious knot on top of her head. I watched her, amazed, then tried the same maneuver with my hair. No matter how many times I tried, my hair refused to stay in place on my head. She had made it look easy. I was hot, and I wanted my hair out of the way. The woman turned to me, closed her eyes and bowed her head, and took my hair in her hands without speaking. She ran her fingers in a stream down my scalp to the very ends of my hair, then pulled it behind my ears. I felt her nimble hands whisk my hair around and around until it was secured tightly on top, just like hers.

The woman got off the bus when I did. I followed her, not meaning to follow her, but I found myself walking behind her along the dirt road of the village. I was looking for a guest house, but was in no particular hurry. The woman carried on her back a basket of vegetables with green shoots that stuck out of the top and rubbed against her neck. Around her waist hung a well-worn gold-and-red batik sarong that reached just below her calves. Her blouse was an unmatching floral design, and on her tiny feet were flip-flops. She took small steps. She waved and called out to another woman as she kept walking. I continued to walk behind her, vaguely watching for the guest house, or a place to eat, but really I wanted to know where the woman would go, to discover what her house, her family, might look like. She swayed her small hips back and forth, kicked little stones out of her way, and hummed to herself.

Then she spat. Right there on the road she spat without any grace whatsoever. She spat as if she had spat every day of her life, as if it was something that did not interrupt her stride, or even her thoughts, in the least. It shocked the hell out of me.

I continued to follow her. Not long after the spit, she strayed over to the side of the road and stopped at a voluptuous bush, a bush intoxicated with creamy yellow flowers. She bent down to breathe in the blossoms. I slowed down and watched. I heard the inhalation, the ecstatic cry of the flowers as their scent rushed down her lungs. With her head in the bush, she turned to look at me as if she knew I would be there. I walked over to where she stood bent over the blossoms. When I stood next to her, I noticed how small she was. I hadn't noticed before. Tiny bones, tiny hands, like a little girl. Yet her hands were lined and weathered as if she had used them for many years. She picked one of the flowers off the branch, made another bowing gesture towards me, and put the flower behind my ear. She picked another flower and put it behind her own ear. We stood facing each other like two comets colliding, reeling from flashes of light, falling into the flames of each other. Then her face, so serene and still, broke into a smile. She turned and walked away. I remained standing by the tree, with the blossom behind my ear and my hair still in a knot. I wanted to watch her walk away until she disappeared down the dirt road, until I couldn't see her anymore. I didn't follow her. I didn't want to see her spit again.

I can still tie my hair in a knot that special way, and whenever I do, I think of her.

Next page | Watching the moonrise on the beach with an artist named Bagus