An old flame in Bali

I saw an old flame this week. I hesitated to stay in that section of Lovina, because I didn’t know if I wanted to run into him. But as I was moving to a different bungalow (one where the water actually worked) at the small family-run establishment where I usually stay. I heard him call to me, lounging on the porch of the bungalow next door, hidden by the lush foliage.

“Do I know you?” I said. Often people know who I am in Bali, though I don’t know them. Not that I’m that interesting – it’s just people in the village generally know everything going on.

“I don’t know, do you?” he said.

Smart ass answer. Could only be one person. Was he on that porch by chance? No, he would have heard I was here. I called his name as a question as I stepped away from the greenery in order to see him. He had cut his hair.

“I knew your voice,” he said.

I thought running into him would be awkward, but instead it was good to see an old friend. “I heard you got married.” I said.

“Who told you that?” he asked.

“Oh, we know everything in America,” I joked. He knew the lines of communication, who had told me.

“Any children?”

“A boy, two and a half,” he said.

I was glad for him. He had been having a lot of bitter family issues in the compound where his volatile older brother dominated. So when he married, he moved to a rented house with his new wife. He had met her at the Kalukbukbuk Hotel where she started working. I remember I used to call him there, and his friend would run down the beach to find him to take my call, years ago.

“How long has it been?” I asked.

“Four years. A long time,” he said.

Yes, he was right. It was three years since I had been to Bali, but four since I saw him. It was about six years ago I met him, about the same time I met ‘Tut. It could have gone either way, but due to a miscommunication, a misunderstanding, a chance of fate, I left him in Padang Bai, the eastern beach town where ferries leave for Lombok. He returned to Lovina. And I returned to ‘Tut. As I face him in the bright sun, it all washes over me. Fleetingly I wonder if I had made the wrong choice. But it is only wistfulness at the creak of a door swinging shut.

“Can I still talk to you?” he asks.

“Of course,” I smile. “I want to meet your son.”

Grown up in Bali

It had been four years since I’d seen Putuh. Then, even after recently having her second baby, vestiges of girlishness remained. I’d known her a few years before that when she visited her Balinese brother and Irish sister-in-law in San Francisco for a year, helping them after their first child was born. Now I look at her face, and see small worried lines around her mouth. She is a woman now, not the girl I first met. She talks about the same thing she discussed when I last saw her, four years before. They have trouble with their mechanics shop in northern Bali because they don’t have the money to buy proper inventory for a full-service operation. I hand her the envelope and the baby clothes sent by her sister-in-law in America as she rocks her third baby, who has begun to fuss.

Bali changes

It was so beautiful when I first started coming to Bali… the long-haired boys in their sarongs, casually slipping flowers behind their ears, smiles flashing. Now, it seems most of the guys in Bali have cut their hair and traded their flowers for Harley t-shirts.

As I drive my motorbike through the villages after a few years away, I suddenly notice almost no one is wearing a sarong. In Denpasar or Singaraja or even Ubud, of course, younger people had never walked down the streets in sarongs except for ceremonies in the years I have been going to Bali. But back in the villages, I used to see a mix, some wearing Western clothing, but certainly a lot of people comfortable wearing beautiful batik sarongs as they went about their days. Women carrying water on their heads as they swayed down the street, men working in the fields, and grandmothers cooing to babies. Today only the very old women seem to wear sarongs outside of ceremonies; everyone else has adopted ugly synthetic K-Mart clothing.

It is so changed.