It was apparently a family business—and a bustling operation at this dinner hour, just past dusk, with six or seven motorbikes pulled up curbside, and a line of people waiting. The father took care of all packaging and payment, while the mother crouched beside hot coals, cooking. But it was the daughter who initially held my attention. She was sitting to one side, eating, when we first approached, but soon enough was forced to wolf down the remainder of her food as the customers continued to gather. Her task was the ever-popular bakso, or soup—lifting the lid off a pot of steaming broth, then tearing bite-sized lumps from a slab of pinkish meat, firming them up with quick fingers, plunking them into the boiling water. Wayan informed me it was ground fish, but its color and texture reminded me of brains. Idle in the gathering gloom, I indulged my imagination, and almost believed the little bits of brain to be still active in the soup, hissing and burbling in psychic conversation with one another. I spent a few minutes thus eavesdropping, until the daughter replaced the lid on the pot and proceeded to her next task, tossing handfuls of charcoal chips onto the cooking fire. Her mother, with one hand gripping an improvised utensil, spread the coals out evenly, while with the other she lifted six little sticks of satay at once, inserting them into the mouth of a small plastic bag which her husband was holding open. He then flipped the bag and its content over, somersaulting it into a tight little knot, and exchanging it for payment. How often, I wondered, would this precisely timed routine repeat itself tonight—and every other night. The mother must have had miracle haunches, squatting in front of that fire for two or three hours at a time. I was only crouched down for ten minutes or less, and when I rose to leave, I had to stretch out my paralyzed hamstrings for a moment or two before I could walk back to the motorbike with Wayan and his son—I with my previously purchased tamu stew, my tourist-friendly fried rice, and they with their plastic sacks of brain soup.
I recall a dinner many years earlier, on my first trip to Bali, with some friends of B—all of them ex-pat veterans of the island, students of traditional dance, itinerant tour-guides whose confidence far outweighed any more formal qualifications. One of them, soon after our arrival, ran out to fetch the evening’s repast, some satay from a favorite street vendor. This was long before the wave of tourist restaurants had washed over the streets of the still tiny town of Ubud, and so there were somewhat limited culinary choices. When he returned, before serving, he entertained us with his Tale Of The Half Mask—a found object he had recently ritualized before a group of wonder-starved tourists, assuring them that it was all that remained from a rare performance in which, as a finale, the mask worn by the main dancer is cleft in two. It had fetched a hefty price from someone on the bus. “And it paid for this,” he claimed, with dazzling insincerity, as he unknotted the plastic bags that held the ridiculously inexpensive satay, transferring them to a bamboo serving tray as if they were ingots of gold. “Beef,” he remarked casually—a fact which I was too callow a traveler to grasp the unlikelihood of. He waited, with consummate comic timing, until we were mid-chew on our second or third mouthful, before confessing that it might well be dog.