At a little past nine on a beautiful August morning, after our breakfast of fresh papaya and astringent lemon ginger tea, a man about ten feet in front of us took a dagger by the hilt with both hands and plunged it into his chest just above his heart.
Except the point didn't puncture his flesh. He tried and tried, worked it and worked it, while I sat squirming, I have to say, nearly writhing in my front-row seat in the small outdoor pavilion. A gamelan orchestra, all 16 players, made its otherworldly music, a skein of pongs and chongs they beat out with fancy hammers on their marimba-like instruments, with a few flutes accompanying and a master gong that set the major intervals with austere, reverberating bongs (which taken together sounded something like the Lionel Hampton Orchestra on LSD). The line of eight kris dancers kept trying to penetrate their chests-to no avail. These men, Hindu priests, bare-chested, barefoot, and wearing the ubiquitous sarong, were lost in a trance, an altered state induced by a series of prayers and offerings to the gods.
And so, in my own way, was I.
The dancers (who are named for their daggers, or kris knives) had emerged onto the stone stage in the village of Batubulan, a 15-minute drive from our hotel in the central Balinese town of Ubud, at the climax of the Barong dance, one of the several so-called trance dances that make up the core of the Balinese religious theatrical repertoire. For me, it seemed like the climax of a long and hypnotic journey across the island that had begun long before we'd actually set foot in the place.
Bali, Bali, Bail. The name had bonged and chimed in many a conversation between my wife and me. A choreographer, dancer, and massage therapist, she had once donned a sari while in college and immediately felt as though she should have been born in one. She had also read and read about Asian dance and seen it performed over the years by visiting companies. But she had never witnessed it in its native habitat. Bali, Bali, Bali, that was where she wanted to go. And so, in the year of our tenth wedding anniversary, she signed up for a small group tour of the island, a "healing arts tour" that was to include visits to local medicine men, temple ceremonies, dances, and also daily yoga practice-with me, token skeptic, tagging along.
Like most people, I had been to numerous religious ceremonies in my lifetime, and, like many others, had also seen my share of dance performances, both classical and modern. And I had traveled a bit around the world. But no amount of time as a child in a synagogue or as an adult on the occasions of weddings and funerals and holidays at various churches-Catholic, Protestant-and temples-Buddhist, Shinto-had prepared me for Bali. At first breath, I knew I had arrived in a special place.
The narcotic air outside our hotel porch steeped in frangipani blossoms and tuberoses; the old temple wall we walked along as soon as we arrived at the airport in the capital, Denpasar; the huge statue at the traffic rotary commemorating a battle from the great Hindu epic the Ramayana; the small temples within the family compounds that we passed on a drive from the beach up into the mountains of northern Bali; the skirts of checkered material-black and white for yin and yang, good and evil-and the offerings, the ubiquitous offerings of flowers and incense in every doorway, on every set of steps, in the ledges of the stone roadside shrines more numerous by hundreds than postboxes along an American street: The little altars everywhere proclaimed that people there, at worst, elevated what we Westerners normally take to be mere superstition to everyday reality and, at best, gave it a good name.
From our first hour onward, I went along with it, thinking that I was merely behaving politely, being a good trouper. When our party arrived on a misty afternoon in Munduk, a small mountain village amid clove and coffee and banana plantations and rice paddies, we immediately received a lesson in the construction of these offerings from the sandalwood-hued woman in white blouse and sarong who attended to them for the cottages on the property where we were staying. Our model was the small, ashtray-size palm-leaf box that holds another small leaf cut in the manner of origami and a number of tiny flowers, with a thumb-size pandan blossom at the heart of the arrangement, this presided over by a smoking stick of incense.
I threw myself into the work and, in my own clumsy way, put one of these together, as did my wife, and we offered them to the local gods on the balcony of our little cottage. And didn't it work! How else to explain what we saw before us when the mountain mist lifted, the incredible multitiered beauty, layer upon layer of light of varying intensity, rice paddies in the foreground, with the constant musical accompaniment of water running in irrigation ditches, leading our eyes across a series of palm-fringed ridges that descended all the way to the distant glistening plain of the Java Sea. Dozens of swifts dipped and swerved above the rice fields on the shimmering air of late afternoon, tallying up their daily fill of insects. Offstage, cocks crowed, and motorbikes, Bali's main mode of transportation, sputtered and growled like small dogs meeting at a crossroads.
Our days in the island's high elevations consisted of treks through the countryside, which, on first, and second, and even third look, resembled something like Eden's own horticulture. Multiple varieties of bananas and papaya growing everywhere, and other fruit both familiar and unfamiliar, and flowers and spices-jackfruit and mangosteen and avocado; monkey fruit; the infamous, foul-smelling (and delicious-tasting) durian; snake fruit; hibiscus flowers and wild poinsettia; taro and cassava and cacao and ginger, betel nut, lemongrass, lemon basil, and nutmeg. Rice paddies rose in terraced layers up every incline, like green wedding cakes waiting to be sliced. Along the narrow roads, spices lay splashed across long mats or on brushed earth, drying in the sun, and the air tasted everywhere of coffee and cloves.
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