“It’s beautiful and amazing, but I’m not so overwhelmed. Is that wrong? I think if we had come straight from home, I would see this and have my jaw dropped,” Emily said.
“But we see amazing things everyday. We’re in this place and it’s amazing, then the next week we’re in this other place and it’s amazing…. This is amazing. But it’s another amazing thing. Is that wrong?”
It’s both wonderful and disconcerting at the same time. We do see amazing things everyday. Our lives have become this constant tour of the amazingness of the world. Even the rough parts are still…amazing. It’s a charmed and phenomenal existence.
At the same time, when Bali doesn’t knock you down, it makes you question.
Still, Emily wants to quit work and go shopping and walking around all day – and for the next two months. So, there has been an impact. She wasn’t that way in Bangkok, or Delhi or Udaipur. She took those in doses. Bali – well, no one needs to do anything in Bali except be part of it. On that front she, and we haven’t lost our awe for it all.
Of course, I’m not shocked or awestruck. I lived here – in the same compound, with the same housekeeper. There’s very little that has changed. It’s like walking back into another life I lead. Only now I’m sharing it with someone I deeply love. So, it’s a blissful merging of intimacies. It recolors my world and makes all of it more special and beautiful.
Chad said to me, “It’s obvious, there’s no barrier between you – no boundary at all. You guys are like one.”
In Bali, I feel at one with the island. Bali is seductive. She welcomes everyone with her warmth, her fragrance, her gentleness. She implicitly asks you to slow down and join her beautiful ways.
Here I am – at one with my wife, at one with my environment. I am living a dream. Not so coincidentally, last night Emily and I both slept sounder and more comfortably than we have in some time.
Like everyone in Bali except lightening-storm tourists, we didn’t do much today. Emily and I worked a little in the morning and went into town. Emily bought a dress along the way while I picked up our now blessed motorbike. We went to Casa Luna, one of my favorite restaurants – which now has WiFi – for lunch. Then we stopped in at the spectacular Lotus Temple amphitheater across the road before doing a little grocery shopping and heading home to finish all the work we somehow didn’t get done.
Bali sucked our afternoon away in what felt like no more than an hour. It happens sometimes.
Luckily, we have nowhere we have to be. We don’t even have to make dinner. Nengah, my old housekeeper was waiting at the house to prepare dinner. So, while we work, our homemade Balinese dinner is being prepared.
Nengah is – and always has been – one of the strangest parts of the Bali experience. Most houses of this kind come with staff. Nengah’s entire family has been employed by the Pradnyana family for years.
The owners of the compound are wealthy Balinese who own several properties around Bali. This one has three houses now and extensive grounds. Each house has a housekeeper and there are also grounds staff. This exists in each property – including the Pradnyana’s primary home in Denpasar.
When I first moved here in late 2004, Nengah who is my age, was assigned to my house and his younger cousin, Ketut was the groundskeeper. Nengah had a severe motorcycle accident a couple of years before I met him. Because medicine on Bali isn’t what it should be, the accident left him with a dent in his forehead which impinges a little on his left eye.
He also has a moderate level of traumatic brain injury. He has trouble learning new things and tends to forget frequently. Top that off with the fact that Nengah spoke no English when I met him. It was an interesting experience to have a male, Balinese housekeeper my age with a dent in his head and traumatic brain injury.
It took some getting used to – and some working with to come to arrangements where communication worked and he had a basic, daily routine.
Nengah went to the local market for me to buy produce as needed. He made breakfast daily, dinner most days and cleaned the house every morning. When I needed laundry, he took the clothes to the laundry down the street and collected them when they were ready a day or two later. He probably spent about three hours of his average day working.
Given that I never liked having someone walking in and out of my house or waiting for orders as house staff usually get when they serve Balinese and Indonesians – the idea of a daily routine suited us both perfectly.
Nengah took two weeks to learn to make an avocado-cheese omelette and toast. After that, Chad and I tried to teach him French toast. Two days into it, we decided we could live with omelets. Nengah knew how to make most Indonesian foods for dinner – and when he didn’t, he ran and got help from one of his cousins who tended the house across the compound. Learning comes slowly to Nengah. Patience – especially at that time – didn’t come easily to me. Basic seemed best.
The Pradnyanas sent Nengah back to me – knowing we did well together. It’s an odd reunion. In the almost five years since I lived here, he’s learned a little English since I left – which is a pleasant surprise and helpful to Emily. He’s better at his work than he used to be. Nengah has become far more capable and able to think for himself.
He’s taken up a little more space in my brain than I was expecting. His English isn’t that good and I’ve forgotten a lot of the Indonesian I knew. It’s back to the dictionary. After all this time, the routine needs to be reestablished – plus Emily is here with her needs as well as mine.
It’s also been very nice. Nengah has advanced quite a bit. We used to communicate primarily in writing as it allowed me to to look things up and ensure communication was clear. We’re back to that and the old routine slightly revised along with it.
This morning, Nengah made the avocado-cheese omelet and toast as he used to. It was great. Only he gave us two spoons, one knife and one fork. I let Emily have the fork. He made Emily coffee as soon as she got up.
We bought both Bali coffee, which he knows how to make and ground coffee for the French press on the shelf. He didn’t understand the difference (although he’s seen it before and the packages are in Indonesian) and poured the grounds into Emily’s cup and added water. Emily – not knowing this – took a sip of thick sludge and spit it out on contact.
I reviewed the two kinds of coffee and told him to only use the Bali coffee – which you mix with water because the fine powder grounds fall to the bottom of the cup or pot like silt – similar to Turkish coffee. He knows how to make it and that’s great. I told him to leave the grounds for Emily for when she wants to make her own coffee. He could handle that.
When we left the house, we noticed Nengah had left his set of keys in the front door of our house. We wanted to lock up. He had taken off for the afternoon, so I gave them to one of the other staff to give him when he returned. When we got back, the keys were back in the door, with the bolt left locked. It sort of defeated the purpose of locking the door – but I’m not sure the idea itself made sense to him.
That’s Nengah.
Nonetheless, it’s fun to have him around again – if not odd at times. Emily is still getting used to it. Although, she likes the meals being made and the house being cleaned aspects….Just as I did when I moved here in 2004.
Nengah is in a strange sense, an old friend. While I had not expected to see him – it’s almost fitting that he would be here. He is a unique and colorful part of my past and present meeting, and me looking at things in a new light.
Sent from my iPad
