Beyond The Upright World

20 April, 2004—Petulu, Bali—

I take a three hour walk with Wayan this morning, to celebrate his last day of freedom before a month or so of all-day jewelry-making begins—days and days of sitting at home, dawn to dusk, bending tiny wires with a tiny pair of pliers. He leads me on a route I’ve never traveled before, along the access path to the natural spring that furnishes water for both holy and household village activities. The spring is in a deep gorge, one echoing with voices—and the footworn steps of descent, cool with jungle shadows, are inscribed with ritual designs that layers of moss and lichen have, over time, absorbed into the landscape. Even to an outsider, such as myself, this is clearly a rambunctious social scene, sequestered from the village proper, a place of bathing, of gossip, of flirtation—but also of an underlying reverence, a reverence for water itself perhaps. We cross the adjacent river on steppingstones, then proceed up the other side of the gorge on earth-cut steps, up, up, up into suddenly silent and sunny rice fields. I’m out of breath when we crest, and of the two paved roads that pass through Jungjungan into busy Ubud, we choose the quieter one.

Around one bend we see an old man squatting over something in the middle of the pavement. “Orang gila,” Wayan comments. “Crazy person.” For he recognizes him as a local beggar whose utter self-absorption is one of the universal symptoms of the socially ostracized insane. As we amble along, chatting in two half-languages, we come to an agreement that the disturbed nature of such outsiders might run only skin deep, that they might indeed be only external misfits while internally calm and healthy-hearted. The status of pariah might, we agree, be but a shadow cast by the repressed maladjustments of their tidier neighbors. I try to translate for him the expression, ‘there but for fortune go I’, but I am not sure he fully understands.

Full understanding is left to the speechlessness of the horizon, and to the green and golden waves of paddy waving against it, to herds of ducks waddling by in single-file, to burning hot sun interspersed with cloud-cast pools of cool shifting shadow. Periodically, for the next half-a-kilometer, we chance upon a series of little deposits in the middle of the road, tiny heaps of paper and leaf and string, left like demented origami pagodas by our much-discussed orang gila who’s apparently passed this way earlier like a visionary pioneer preparing our way. And it is then that we pass by the boy, crouched down, fixing a splintered bamboo fence. We are almost on the outskirts of Ubud, where the road will grow broader, with deeper gutters and sidewalks and long flights of steps leading up to the wealthier housing compounds of those who’ve scored big by catering early to the increasing influx of tourists. He is almost a gatekeeper then, this boy, a barefoot sentry between realms, between changeless rice fields and a burgeoning township—and when we pass by, instead of straitening up and turning round to greet us, he bends further, almost folding himself in half, and then grins at us, upside-down, from between his parted knees—laughing as we make topsy-turvy eye contact and then pass on into the upright world.