By Amy Chavez
For The Bali Times
I learned long ago from the Indonesians to always inspect my face in the mirror. The mirror of a motorbike, that is. No place and no time is inappropriate for a little personal grooming, and with so many motorbikes at rest in parking lots and along streets, there is always a mirror available should you be, God forbid, out for a walk when the urge hits you for a facial inspection. Furthermore, a motorbike provides a seat, just in case you need to bring out your eyebrow tweezers to do some immediate plucking.
It was during one of these motorbike mirror sessions that I realized I had somehow gone from having crow’s feet to having centipede feet. It was time to find out what Bali’s beauty treatments were all about.
I rocked into one of my favorite spas, where I had been many times for other things but never a facial. A facial takes an hour, during which time the eyes must be kept closed. Since you can’t see anything, you have no idea what they are really doing to your skin. Unfortunately, this leaves much to the imagination.
The facial started out with a light face massage. As the spa lady’s fingers danced across my face, I felt the way a guitar must as the musician nimbly strums it. Alas, no music was produced and I rather became worried that she might bring out the plectrum and start picking my nose.
Soon to follow was a strange tickling sensation. I’m pretty sure the spa lady had just released a nest of ants on my face and was letting them crawl all over, zigzagging and meandering about, while their little feet massaged my face. Keep in mind that these are Indonesian ants, so small and cunning they can even get into sealed packages. These are ants that instantly invade an empty soda can and lap up the liquid along the rim.
Just when my face started feeling uncomfortably crawly and itchy, I felt suction on my face. This must have been the frog hired to eat up the ants. I could even hear him smack his lips after each suck. Then I remembered the English menu had read, “Take black spot out by vacuum.” Of course, it wasn’t a frog but a Hoover sucking up the ants. Nothing like a good face vacuuming. I hoped she wouldn’t leave any vacuum strokes in the nap.
Next, she said she’d take out the whiteheads. I didn’t know I had any but she assured me I did — they were just hidden. Her trained eye could see them! Whiteheads of what, I’m not sure, but perhaps from the ants that had been decapitated during the vacuuming. These she dug out with tiny very sharp shovels. “No pain no game,” she assured me in her best English.
When I heard the gentle rolling noise of a cement mixer, I knew it was time for the mask. After she applied this “active mud,” within moments my face became unmovable, like stone. So this is where Rodin statues come from.
After the mask was removed, accompanied by a loud sucking noise that could be heard all the way to Sumatra, I could finally see again. My tender face was definitely ready for the next step, “refresh face with cucumber.” I never thought I’d be so happy to have cold vegetables sitting on my face.
Next was “acne care with herb.”
“But I don’t have acne,” I said. But her trained eye could probably see it anyway.
When I thought we must be finished, she said, “Don’t you want to get rid of your mustache?”
“My what?”
“That mustache on your upper lip.” I had never really considered the silky blonde hairs on my upper lip, but now that her trained eye had noticed them, they seemed embarrassingly hideous.
“Away with the mustache!” I declared.
This required waxing, a euphemism for ripping out hairs with adhesive. She painted on the wax, which looks like molasses, and within seconds pulled it off. “No pain, no game,” she reminded me. I looked at the strip of wax with my hairs adhered to it and thought - molasses looks good with a mustache.
I knew it was time to get out of there when her trained eye noticed my eyebrows needed to be shaped. I passed on the eyelid and lip tattoos also.
I was on my motorbike in Denpasar the other day waiting for the traffic lights to turn green - a perfect opportunity for a facial inspection. In a moment, I had brought out my tweezers and deftly removed one blackhead and two stray eyebrow hairs. How embarrassing that I hadn’t noticed those earlier in the day! Just as I was admiring my newly naked upper lip, I noticed something odd. What was that hideous-looking thing on my chin?
By God, I’ve started growing a beard.
When the lights turned green, I turned my motorbike around and headed straight for the spa.
Showing posts with label life in bali. Show all posts
Showing posts with label life in bali. Show all posts
5.3.08
Lost and Found in Bali
By Mark Ulyseas
For The Bali Times
al•ter e•go n
1. a second side to an individual’s personality, different from the one that most people know
2. a very close and trusted friend
(Encarta World English Dictionary)
Morning blues color the face when one peers in the mirror and the image that stares back is unrecognizable after the debauchery of the night before. We look away for fear of confronting our alter ego – the sprite that resides in all of us: mischievous, cunning, loving, hateful and the shadow that stalks us through life.
So what is it that makes us use, abuse and at times misplace our close and trusted friend in the mirror? And even those “friends” around us?
Memories and dreams are the culprits. They stand accused of keeping us in suspended animation, dulling reality. In the process, the link that holds one and a close friend together is broken and repaired many times over thus leaving it knobbly.
How can we rectify this situation? Is there any superglue that can fix the mirror images to prevent them falling apart and drifting downstream?
Maybe we need to discard old habits of looking in the mirror and try to rearrange or cover what we don’t like with the paintbrush of the ego. After this we probably should go out and make ourselves visible to the invisible sprites that dance before our eyes whenever we meet close friends. Reach out, touch them and attempt to make ethereal contact.
Easier said than done, some would say. But consider this – what if we didn’t have an alter ego - a trusted friend? Where would we be? Marooned in the world of un-belonging reality? One-dimensional beings?
Too many questions, too few answers. Well, let’s review our lives. Scroll back to the time we first made two close and trusted friends – one being the image in the mirror and the other a person. Those intense feelings of belonging to oneself and others invariably giving way to egotistical blunders, bordering on vanity and thereby cracking the mirror forever.
And as age moves on, the refracted image in the mirror distorts our lives permanently. We can retrieve memories but can never make them reality. For as one knows, virginity once lost can never be restored.
Here’s a classic example of a spat between two friends. Often the punch line sounds a bit like this: “You don’t know who I am. You will never know.” Of course, how will one know who the other person is when one doesn’t know one’s self?
The inscription at the oracle at Delphi – Know Thyself – is relevant today. If we begin to understand and know ourselves, then we will be in a position to view others in the correct perspective. Ever had a friend tell you, “Why did you do that? That’s not you! Is it?” And your answer in all likelihood would be, “Dunno” or “You don’t know me.”
Someone once told me that before we start loving others, we must first learn to love ourselves. To me this sounds a bit screwy. Are they suggesting perhaps that we become narcissists? Egocentrics? And then, with a bloated ego, we are expected to love other people? Whoever thought this one up was too long out on the tiles the night before and the blurred image in the mirror next morning tripped the reality fuse.
The truth for me was when I met Catherina at Warung Sobet in June this year, before she boarded a flight back to Paris. On seeing me, she cried about leaving Bali because she had made so many friends here and said she was returning post haste after selling her assets to purchase a house in Bali for a friend with whom she would live with happily ever after. This was evidently a decision she had made in the heat of the night, and as a well-wisher, I was determined to make her retract or at least review it. So the conversation went like this.
“Cathy, why do you want to return?”
“Mark, you remember meeting Wayan in Kuta? Well that’s the guy who’s going to stay with me. I adore him. I would do anything for him – anything.”
“Oh, but do you know why you came to Bali in the first place?”
“Yes, of course. My cat died and I was lonely. My job stinks. I needed to get out and find myself again.”
“Hold the thought. You said - to find yourself again?”
“Yes, I lost myself when my boyfriend of many years left me - for a guy! I couldn’t take the loss and humiliation. I felt I had lost a part of myself when he walked out of the door. You’re not a woman and you can never understand the trauma I went through. At least here there are no questions. One day at a time. I can live with that.”
“Darling, you missed the point. I asked if you have found yourself again.”
“I don’t know.”
“Then I suggest you first find yourself and then reach out to people around you.”
She never returned to Bali. I received an email a month later informing me she had a new cat and a new job but was still searching for herself. I wish her Godspeed.
Last I heard, Wayan was happily settled in Kuta with a charming girl from Spain. Maybe he had already found himself and simply needed a close friend to complete the equation.
Many a soul looks too far ahead. Some even attempt to peer over the horizon searching … when, in fact, it resides within us as our alter ego and around us in the form of trusted friends. All we need to do is to keep looking. Maybe the mirror trick every morning will finally bring results. Reaching out and touching friends with unselfish emotion could be the next best thing. Who knows?
I admit I have been searching for myself across continents these past few years but only realized in Bali that it was within me.
Now all I need to complete my equation is to find a trusted friend for the image in the mirror.
And I am sure there are many out there with the same predicament.
If only the twain could meet.
Om Shanti Shanti Shanti Om
For The Bali Times
al•ter e•go n
1. a second side to an individual’s personality, different from the one that most people know
2. a very close and trusted friend
(Encarta World English Dictionary)
Morning blues color the face when one peers in the mirror and the image that stares back is unrecognizable after the debauchery of the night before. We look away for fear of confronting our alter ego – the sprite that resides in all of us: mischievous, cunning, loving, hateful and the shadow that stalks us through life.
So what is it that makes us use, abuse and at times misplace our close and trusted friend in the mirror? And even those “friends” around us?
Memories and dreams are the culprits. They stand accused of keeping us in suspended animation, dulling reality. In the process, the link that holds one and a close friend together is broken and repaired many times over thus leaving it knobbly.
How can we rectify this situation? Is there any superglue that can fix the mirror images to prevent them falling apart and drifting downstream?
Maybe we need to discard old habits of looking in the mirror and try to rearrange or cover what we don’t like with the paintbrush of the ego. After this we probably should go out and make ourselves visible to the invisible sprites that dance before our eyes whenever we meet close friends. Reach out, touch them and attempt to make ethereal contact.
Easier said than done, some would say. But consider this – what if we didn’t have an alter ego - a trusted friend? Where would we be? Marooned in the world of un-belonging reality? One-dimensional beings?
Too many questions, too few answers. Well, let’s review our lives. Scroll back to the time we first made two close and trusted friends – one being the image in the mirror and the other a person. Those intense feelings of belonging to oneself and others invariably giving way to egotistical blunders, bordering on vanity and thereby cracking the mirror forever.
And as age moves on, the refracted image in the mirror distorts our lives permanently. We can retrieve memories but can never make them reality. For as one knows, virginity once lost can never be restored.
Here’s a classic example of a spat between two friends. Often the punch line sounds a bit like this: “You don’t know who I am. You will never know.” Of course, how will one know who the other person is when one doesn’t know one’s self?
The inscription at the oracle at Delphi – Know Thyself – is relevant today. If we begin to understand and know ourselves, then we will be in a position to view others in the correct perspective. Ever had a friend tell you, “Why did you do that? That’s not you! Is it?” And your answer in all likelihood would be, “Dunno” or “You don’t know me.”
Someone once told me that before we start loving others, we must first learn to love ourselves. To me this sounds a bit screwy. Are they suggesting perhaps that we become narcissists? Egocentrics? And then, with a bloated ego, we are expected to love other people? Whoever thought this one up was too long out on the tiles the night before and the blurred image in the mirror next morning tripped the reality fuse.
The truth for me was when I met Catherina at Warung Sobet in June this year, before she boarded a flight back to Paris. On seeing me, she cried about leaving Bali because she had made so many friends here and said she was returning post haste after selling her assets to purchase a house in Bali for a friend with whom she would live with happily ever after. This was evidently a decision she had made in the heat of the night, and as a well-wisher, I was determined to make her retract or at least review it. So the conversation went like this.
“Cathy, why do you want to return?”
“Mark, you remember meeting Wayan in Kuta? Well that’s the guy who’s going to stay with me. I adore him. I would do anything for him – anything.”
“Oh, but do you know why you came to Bali in the first place?”
“Yes, of course. My cat died and I was lonely. My job stinks. I needed to get out and find myself again.”
“Hold the thought. You said - to find yourself again?”
“Yes, I lost myself when my boyfriend of many years left me - for a guy! I couldn’t take the loss and humiliation. I felt I had lost a part of myself when he walked out of the door. You’re not a woman and you can never understand the trauma I went through. At least here there are no questions. One day at a time. I can live with that.”
“Darling, you missed the point. I asked if you have found yourself again.”
“I don’t know.”
“Then I suggest you first find yourself and then reach out to people around you.”
She never returned to Bali. I received an email a month later informing me she had a new cat and a new job but was still searching for herself. I wish her Godspeed.
Last I heard, Wayan was happily settled in Kuta with a charming girl from Spain. Maybe he had already found himself and simply needed a close friend to complete the equation.
Many a soul looks too far ahead. Some even attempt to peer over the horizon searching … when, in fact, it resides within us as our alter ego and around us in the form of trusted friends. All we need to do is to keep looking. Maybe the mirror trick every morning will finally bring results. Reaching out and touching friends with unselfish emotion could be the next best thing. Who knows?
I admit I have been searching for myself across continents these past few years but only realized in Bali that it was within me.
Now all I need to complete my equation is to find a trusted friend for the image in the mirror.
And I am sure there are many out there with the same predicament.
If only the twain could meet.
Om Shanti Shanti Shanti Om
20.5.06
Part I: Dayu Siti's last stand
Features - May 14, 2006
I grew up in Bali terrified of witches and goblins (leyak).
One dark night in 1976, motorcycling home to Sidakarya from the Denpasar Dance Academy where I worked -- as Bali's first one-man, all-male legong -- an invisible "monkey" hopped onto my bike and the back wheel started to shimmy and shammy. I was completely freaked out for two kilometers.
I have never really recovered.
In those days -- the early 1970s -- many a night was whiled away in our neighborhood warung, listening to octogenarian Nini Tap‚'s stories about demon battles in the coconut groves of Mertasari, near Sanur, where I now live, and of the white witch of Intaran (Sanur) Dayu Siti and her legendary powers.
***
Twenty-five years later, I met Dayu Siti for the first time, in a back courtyard of our neighborhood palace: 85 years old, she was ensconced there as the step-grandmother of my work colleague, Gung Nik. We talked a bit, but I never got to know her.
Two weeks ago, Dayu Siti passed away, quietly. On the day she died, my family was having a huge tooth-filing ceremony -- a karya ayu, or beatific event -- and 30 of Dayu Siti's family were present. They didn't tell us of her death, as they didn't want to visit sebel (gloom) on the occasion.
I found out only after observing one old grandmother weeping, unusually and suddenly in the middle of a sea of otherwise jolly celebrants -- the news had spread quickly down the village lane and across the courtyard, and had finally hit her, like a night-bus. She was heart-broken -- she had been Dayu Siti's maid for 80 years.
***
I went to Jero Dalem Tanjung, Kepaon palace that night to pay my respects. The house was packed with nobles -- in batik, floral and black Majapahit funeral wear -- playing cards, singing hymns and gossiping.
I sat down next to the family patriarch and a mourning relative from Pemecutan Palace, the Kepaon family's ancestral home.
"When are you getting married?" they demanded seconds after I sat down.
"No time for love," I replied (it's my standard answer these days).
"But you're so handsome these days (translation: I've put on 30 kilos), I bet those Indian girls with the big tits are all over you."
There was no talk of the deceased.
I gazed around the courtyard of mourners -- the 300 or so relatives' I have grown up with -- and I thought, Really, for the Balinese, things done between ceremonies are just fill. Cremations are everything: between cremations and temple events the Balinese just idle, in neutral.
Everyone was having such a great time over cakes and coffee -- bonding, gambling, smoking -- and it would be like this for the next week at least; by which time someone else in the vast Pemecutan family diaspora will have passed on and it will all start again.
Over the evening, the life of Dayu Siti was discussed only in terms of her complicated and tenuous connection to this family: in fact, she was a brahmani lass from the mighty Brahmin stronghold of Intaran, in Sanur, who had married the old prince's brother. The family mostly talked of how pleased they were that emissaries from Intaran family had started to arrive.
***
The next day, I was double-booked for body-washings: for Dayu Siti, the white witch of Intaran, and the late high-priest, and for Ida Bagawan Putra Kemenuh, the patron saint of my clan of ksatria (princely) Dewa garden commandos. And both at 4 p.m.
Identical ceremonies, back to back: one princely, one priestly.
I did the Kepaon family first.
The courtyard was much as the night before -- macho men, robust palace ladies strapped into lacy black bustiers, lots of slouching and smoking and loose talk -- except that the temple section of the palace was alive with activity. An angklung orchestra was parked inside the temple gate.
I had missed the body-washing but was in time for the ngajum ceremony, during which family members put sewing needles into the joints of the astral body effigy -- kajang pengawak -- set up on a bed in a pavilion in the family temple. I caught the prince genuflecting gently to the astral body effigy as he backed out of the pavilion and returned to his post.
The atmosphere was noisy and heavy, but reverent -- black reverent.
***
In Ketewel, 20 kilometers away, the priestly ngajum ceremony was a "white" affair. I had changed, in the parking lot, like Clark Kent, into white and checkered garb. The mood inside the geria palace was incredibly refined and still.
In the extensive ceremonial courtyard, hundreds of devotees of the much-loved begawan priest were all sitting quietly along the bases of the various pavilions.
Six high priests and their wives sat in the biggest, northernmost pavilion, chatting about bell-ringing protocol and such. Next to them, two high priests were incanting Vedic chants in front of a truck-load of offerings, high on a white-and-yellow festooned platform.
The deceased's widows were busy doing a full range of complicated and beautiful ceremonies. Three gamelans played from various courtyards. Fifty choristers in white traditional kebaya blouses were seated in the family temple, from where the soft harmonies of an ancient gambang orchestra drifted through the gaps in the courtyard activity.
The effect of all this ambrosia of the gods and the temple-garden beauty was dizzying.
I sat at the feet of Pedanda Kemenuh, the nabi (guru) of the deceased priest and a former sergeant major in the army. I was served coffee and cakes by Desak, my saintly and long-suffering maid from my years living in Sanur in the 1980s.
"Why did all the ladies unfurl their hair and rub the feet of the corpse?" I enquired politely, as I sipped my coffee.
"Oh them," the pedanda replied, "they were the deceased's daughters and his students, performing a final act of filial piety."
It had been a profound defining moment in the body-washing ritual, you can imagine, but the high priest just dismissed it, as a bit of minor theatrics. They're often glib like that.
***
The difference in the all-black ksatria ceremony and the all-white brahmana (priestly) version of the same ngajum couldn't have been more pronounced. As Miguel Covarrubias famously wrote in his book Island of Bali (1936): "What is a rule in one village, is an exception in the next."
***
The next day I was double-booked again.
I chose the Ketewel cremation, selfishly, because it promised to be more theatrical and gorgeous and I knew the deceased.
***
Later that day, returning home from the incredible Ketewel cremation -- more of that next issue! -- I got news of a miracle at Dayu Siti's cremation.
Her hair hadn't burned on the funeral pyre!
The unburned hair had been taken back to the palace where it is to be enshrined as a pratima (votive object) in the royal chapel this week.
Will holy miracles never cease?
Stay tuned next issue for part two of "Dayu Siti's Last Stand"!
-- [signature - Made Wijaya]
I grew up in Bali terrified of witches and goblins (leyak).
One dark night in 1976, motorcycling home to Sidakarya from the Denpasar Dance Academy where I worked -- as Bali's first one-man, all-male legong -- an invisible "monkey" hopped onto my bike and the back wheel started to shimmy and shammy. I was completely freaked out for two kilometers.
I have never really recovered.
In those days -- the early 1970s -- many a night was whiled away in our neighborhood warung, listening to octogenarian Nini Tap‚'s stories about demon battles in the coconut groves of Mertasari, near Sanur, where I now live, and of the white witch of Intaran (Sanur) Dayu Siti and her legendary powers.
***
Twenty-five years later, I met Dayu Siti for the first time, in a back courtyard of our neighborhood palace: 85 years old, she was ensconced there as the step-grandmother of my work colleague, Gung Nik. We talked a bit, but I never got to know her.
Two weeks ago, Dayu Siti passed away, quietly. On the day she died, my family was having a huge tooth-filing ceremony -- a karya ayu, or beatific event -- and 30 of Dayu Siti's family were present. They didn't tell us of her death, as they didn't want to visit sebel (gloom) on the occasion.
I found out only after observing one old grandmother weeping, unusually and suddenly in the middle of a sea of otherwise jolly celebrants -- the news had spread quickly down the village lane and across the courtyard, and had finally hit her, like a night-bus. She was heart-broken -- she had been Dayu Siti's maid for 80 years.
***
I went to Jero Dalem Tanjung, Kepaon palace that night to pay my respects. The house was packed with nobles -- in batik, floral and black Majapahit funeral wear -- playing cards, singing hymns and gossiping.
I sat down next to the family patriarch and a mourning relative from Pemecutan Palace, the Kepaon family's ancestral home.
"When are you getting married?" they demanded seconds after I sat down.
"No time for love," I replied (it's my standard answer these days).
"But you're so handsome these days (translation: I've put on 30 kilos), I bet those Indian girls with the big tits are all over you."
There was no talk of the deceased.
I gazed around the courtyard of mourners -- the 300 or so relatives' I have grown up with -- and I thought, Really, for the Balinese, things done between ceremonies are just fill. Cremations are everything: between cremations and temple events the Balinese just idle, in neutral.
Everyone was having such a great time over cakes and coffee -- bonding, gambling, smoking -- and it would be like this for the next week at least; by which time someone else in the vast Pemecutan family diaspora will have passed on and it will all start again.
Over the evening, the life of Dayu Siti was discussed only in terms of her complicated and tenuous connection to this family: in fact, she was a brahmani lass from the mighty Brahmin stronghold of Intaran, in Sanur, who had married the old prince's brother. The family mostly talked of how pleased they were that emissaries from Intaran family had started to arrive.
***
The next day, I was double-booked for body-washings: for Dayu Siti, the white witch of Intaran, and the late high-priest, and for Ida Bagawan Putra Kemenuh, the patron saint of my clan of ksatria (princely) Dewa garden commandos. And both at 4 p.m.
Identical ceremonies, back to back: one princely, one priestly.
I did the Kepaon family first.
The courtyard was much as the night before -- macho men, robust palace ladies strapped into lacy black bustiers, lots of slouching and smoking and loose talk -- except that the temple section of the palace was alive with activity. An angklung orchestra was parked inside the temple gate.
I had missed the body-washing but was in time for the ngajum ceremony, during which family members put sewing needles into the joints of the astral body effigy -- kajang pengawak -- set up on a bed in a pavilion in the family temple. I caught the prince genuflecting gently to the astral body effigy as he backed out of the pavilion and returned to his post.
The atmosphere was noisy and heavy, but reverent -- black reverent.
***
In Ketewel, 20 kilometers away, the priestly ngajum ceremony was a "white" affair. I had changed, in the parking lot, like Clark Kent, into white and checkered garb. The mood inside the geria palace was incredibly refined and still.
In the extensive ceremonial courtyard, hundreds of devotees of the much-loved begawan priest were all sitting quietly along the bases of the various pavilions.
Six high priests and their wives sat in the biggest, northernmost pavilion, chatting about bell-ringing protocol and such. Next to them, two high priests were incanting Vedic chants in front of a truck-load of offerings, high on a white-and-yellow festooned platform.
The deceased's widows were busy doing a full range of complicated and beautiful ceremonies. Three gamelans played from various courtyards. Fifty choristers in white traditional kebaya blouses were seated in the family temple, from where the soft harmonies of an ancient gambang orchestra drifted through the gaps in the courtyard activity.
The effect of all this ambrosia of the gods and the temple-garden beauty was dizzying.
I sat at the feet of Pedanda Kemenuh, the nabi (guru) of the deceased priest and a former sergeant major in the army. I was served coffee and cakes by Desak, my saintly and long-suffering maid from my years living in Sanur in the 1980s.
"Why did all the ladies unfurl their hair and rub the feet of the corpse?" I enquired politely, as I sipped my coffee.
"Oh them," the pedanda replied, "they were the deceased's daughters and his students, performing a final act of filial piety."
It had been a profound defining moment in the body-washing ritual, you can imagine, but the high priest just dismissed it, as a bit of minor theatrics. They're often glib like that.
***
The difference in the all-black ksatria ceremony and the all-white brahmana (priestly) version of the same ngajum couldn't have been more pronounced. As Miguel Covarrubias famously wrote in his book Island of Bali (1936): "What is a rule in one village, is an exception in the next."
***
The next day I was double-booked again.
I chose the Ketewel cremation, selfishly, because it promised to be more theatrical and gorgeous and I knew the deceased.
***
Later that day, returning home from the incredible Ketewel cremation -- more of that next issue! -- I got news of a miracle at Dayu Siti's cremation.
Her hair hadn't burned on the funeral pyre!
The unburned hair had been taken back to the palace where it is to be enshrined as a pratima (votive object) in the royal chapel this week.
Will holy miracles never cease?
Stay tuned next issue for part two of "Dayu Siti's Last Stand"!
-- [signature - Made Wijaya]
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)