The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims (31 page)

85

Although the next day (protective brothers notwithstanding) I did get hit by a bus. It was sort of a smallish bus, but nevertheless it did knock me off my bicycle as I was cruising down the shoulderless road. I got tossed into a cement irrigation ditch. About thirty Balinese people on motorcycles stopped to help me, having witnessed the accident (the bus was long gone), and everyone invited me to their house for tea or offered to drive me to the hospital, they all felt so bad about the whole incident. It wasn’t that serious a wreck, though, considering what it might have been. My bicycle was fine, although the basket was bent and my helmet was cracked. (Better the helmet than the head in such cases.) The worst of the damage was a deep cut on my knee, full of bits of pebbles and dirt, that proceeded—over the next few days in the moist tropical air— to become nastily infected.

I didn’t want to worry him, but a few days later I finally rolled up my pants leg on Ketut Liyer’s porch, peeled off the yellowing bandage, and showed my wound to the old medicine man. He peered at it, concerned.

“Infect,” he diagnosed. “Painful.”

“Yes,” I said.

“You should go see doctor.”

This was a little surprising. Wasn’t
he
the doctor? But for some reason he didn’t volunteer to help and I didn’t push it. Maybe he doesn’t administer medication to Westerners. Or maybe Ketut just had a secret hidden master plan, because it was my banged-up knee that allowed me, in the end, to meet Wayan. And from that meeting, everything that was meant to happen . . . happened.

86

Wayan Nuriyasih is, like Ketut Liyer, a Balinese healer. There are some differences between them, though. He’s elderly and male; she’s a woman in her late thirties. He’s more of a priestly figure, somewhat more mystical, while Wayan is a hands-on doctor, mixing herbs and medications in her own shop and taking care of patients right there on the premises.

Wayan has a little storefront shop in the center of Ubud called “Traditional Balinese Healing Center.” I’d ridden my bike past it many times on my way down to Ketut’s, noticing it because of all the potted plants outside the place, and because of the blackboard with the curious handwritten advertisement for the “Multivitamin Lunch Special.” But I’d never gone into the place before my knee got messed up. After Ketut sent me to find a doctor, though, I remembered the shop and came by on my bicycle, hoping somebody there might be able to help me deal with the infection.

Wayan’s place is a very small medical clinic and home and restaurant all at the same time. Downstairs there’s a tiny kitchen and a modest public eating area with three tables and few chairs. Upstairs there’s a private area where Wayan gives massages and treatments. There’s one dark bedroom in the back.

I limped into the shop with my sore knee and introduced myself to Wayan the healer—a strikingly attractive Balinese woman with a wide smile and shiny black hair down to her waist. There were two shy young girls hiding behind her in the kitchen who smiled when I waved to them, then ducked away again. I showed Wayan my infected wound and asked if she could help. Soon Wayan had water and herbs boiling up on the stove, and was making me drink
jamu
— traditional Indonesian homemade medicinal concoctions. She placed hot green leaves on my knee and it started to feel better immediately.

We got to talking. Her English was excellent. Because she is Balinese, she immediately asked me the three standard introductory questions—
Where are you going today? Where are you coming from?
Are you married?

When I told her I wasn’t married (“Not yet!”) she looked taken aback.

“Never been married?” she asked.

“No,” I lied. I don’t like lying, but I generally have found it’s easier not to mention divorce to the Balinese because they get so upset about it.

“Really never been married?” she asked again, and she was looking at me with great curiosity now.

“Honestly,” I lied. “I’ve never been married.”

“You sure?” This was getting weird.

“I’m totally sure!”

“Not even once?” she asked.

OK, so she can see through me.

“Well,” I confessed, “there was that one time . . .”

And her face cleared like:
Yes, I thought as much.
She asked, “Divorced?”

“Yes,” I said, ashamed now. “Divorced.”

“I could tell you are divorced.”

“It’s not very common here, is it?”

“But me, too,” said Wayan, entirely to my surprise. “Me too, divorced.”

“You?”

“I did everything I could,” she said. “I try everything before I got a divorce, praying every day. But I had to go away from him.”

Her eyes filled up with tears, and next thing you knew, I was holding Wayan’s hand, having just met my first Balinese divorcée, and I was saying, “I’m sure you did the best you could, sweetie. I’m sure you tried everything.”

“Divorce is too sad,” she said.

I agreed.

I stayed there in Wayan’s shop for the next five hours, talking with my new best friend about her troubles. She cleaned up the infection in my knee as I listened to her story. Wayan’s Balinese husband, she told me, was a man who “drink all the time, always gamble, lose all our money, then beat me when I don’t give him more money for to gamble and to drink.” She said, “He beat me into the hospital many times.” She parted her hair, showed me scars on her head and said, “This is from when he hit me with motorcycle helmet. Always, he was hitting me with this motorcycle helmet when he is drinking, when I don’t make money. He hit me so much, I go unconscious, dizzy, can’t see. I think it is lucky I am healer, my family are healers, because I know how to heal myself after he beats me. I think if I was not healer, I would lose my ears, you know, not be able to hear things anymore. Or maybe lose my eye, not be able to see.” She left him, she told me, after he beat her so severely “that I lose my baby, my second child, the one in my belly.” After which incident their firstborn child, a bright little girl with the nickname of Tutti, said, “I think you should get a divorce, Mommy. Every time you go to the hospital you leave too much work around the house for Tutti.”

Tutti was four years old when she said this.

To exit a marriage in Bali leaves a person alone and unprotected in ways that are almost impossible for a Westerner to imagine. The Balinese family unit, enclosed within the walls of a family compound, is merely everything—four generations of siblings, cousins, parents, grandparents and children all living together in a series of small bungalows surrounding the family temple, taking care of each other from birth to death. The family compound is the source of strength, financial security, health care, day care, education and— most important to the Balinese—spiritual connection.

The family compound is so vital that the Balinese think of it as a single, living person. The population of a Balinese village is traditionally counted not by the number of individuals, but by the number of compounds. The compound is a self-sustaining universe. So you don’t leave it. (Unless, of course, you are a woman, in which case you move only once—out of your father’s family compound and into your husband’s.) When this system works—which it does in this healthy society almost all the time—it produces the most sane, protected, calm, happy and balanced human beings in the world. But when it doesn’t work? As with my new friend Wayan? The outcasts are lost in airless orbit. Her choice was either to stay in the family compound safety net with a husband who kept putting her in the hospital, or to save her own life and leave, which left her with nothing.

Well, not exactly
nothing
, actually. She did take with her an encyclopedic knowledge of healing, her goodness, her work ethic and her daughter Tutti—whom she had to fight hard to keep. Bali is a patriarchy to the end. In the rare case of a divorce, the children automatically belong to the father. To get Tutti back, Wayan had to hire a lawyer, whom she paid with every single thing she had. I mean—
everything.
She sold off not only her furniture and jewelry, but also her forks and spoons, her socks and shoes, her old washcloths and half-burned candles—everything went to pay that lawyer. But she did get her daughter back, in the end, after a two-year battle. Wayan is just lucky Tutti was a girl; if she’d been a boy, Wayan never would have seen the kid again. Boys are much more valuable.

For the last few years now, Wayan and Tutti have been living on their own—all alone, in the beehive of Bali!—moving from place to place every few months as money comes and goes, always sleepless with worry about where to go next. Which has been difficult because every time she moves, her patients (mostly Balinese, who are all on hard times themselves these days) have trouble finding her again. Also, with every move, little Tutti has to be pulled out of school. Tutti was always first in her class before, but has slipped since the last move down to twentieth out of fifty children.

In the middle of Wayan’s telling me this story, Tutti herself came charging into the shop, having arrived home from school. She’s eight years old now and a mighty exhibition of charisma and fireworks. This little cherry bomb of a girl (pigtailed and skinny and excited) asked me in lively English if I’d like to eat lunch, and Wayan said, “I forgot! You should have lunch!” and the mother and daughter rushed into their kitchen and—with the help of the two shy young girls hiding back there—produced sometime later the best food I’d tasted yet in Bali.

Little Tutti brought out each course of the meal with a bright-voiced explanation of what was on the plate, wearing a huge grin, generally just being so totally peppy she should’ve been spinning a baton.

“Turmeric juice, for keep clean the kidneys!” she announced.

“Seaweed, for calcium!”

“Tomato salad, for vitamin D!”

“Mixed herbs, for not get malaria!”

I finally said, “Tutti, where did you learn to speak such good English?”

“From a book!” she proclaimed.

“I think you are a very clever girl,” I informed her.

“Thank you!” she said, and did a spontaneous little happy dance. “You are a very clever girl, too!”

Balinese kids aren’t normally like this, by the way. They’re usually all quiet and polite, hiding behind their mother’s skirts. Not Tutti. She was all show-biz. She was all show
and
tell.

“I will see you my books!” Tutti sang, and hurtled up the stairs to get them.

“She wants to be an animal doctor,” Wayan told me. “What is the word in English?”

“Veterinarian?”

“Yes. Veterinarian. But she has many questions about animals, I don’t know how to answer. She says, ‘Mommy, if somebody brings me a sick tiger, do I bandage its teeth first, so it doesn’t bite me? If a snake gets sick and needs medicine, where is the opening?’ I don’t know where she gets these ideas. I hope she can go to university.”

Tutti careened down the stairs, arms full of books, and zinged herself into her mother’s lap. Wayan laughed and kissed her daughter, all the sadness about the divorce suddenly gone from her face. I watched them, thinking that little girls who make their mothers live grow up to be such powerful women. Already, in the space of one afternoon, I was so in love with this kid. I sent up a spontaneous prayer to God:
May Tutti Nuriyasih someday bandage the teeth of a
thousand white tigers!

I loved Tutti’s mother, too. But I’d been in their shop now for hours and felt I should leave. Some other tourists had wandered into the place, and were hoping to be served lunch. One of the tourists, a brassy older broad from Australia, was loudly asking if Wayan could please help cure her “god-awful constipation.” I was thinking,
Sing it a little louder, honey, and we can all dance to it . . .

“I will come back tomorrow,” I promised Wayan, “and I’ll order the multivitamin lunch special again.”

“Your knee is better now,” Wayan said. “Quickly better. No infection anymore.”

She wiped the last of the green herbal goo off my leg, then sort of jiggled my kneecap around a bit, feeling for something. Then she felt the other knee, closing her eyes. She opened her eyes, grinned and said, “I can tell by your knees that you don’t have much sex lately.”

I said, “Why? Because they’re so close together?”

She laughed. “No—it’s the cartilage. Very dry. Hormones from sex lubricate the joints. How long since sex for you?”

“About a year and a half.”

“You need a good man. I will find one for you. I will pray at the temple for a good man for you, because now you are my sister. Also, if you come back tomorrow, I will clean your kidneys for you.”

“A good man and clean kidneys, too? That sounds like a great deal.”

“I never tell anybody these things before about my divorce,” she told me. “But my life is heavy, too much sad, too much hard. I don’t understand why life is so hard.”

Then I did a strange thing. I took both the healer’s hands in mine and I said with the most powerful conviction, “The hardest part of your life is behind you now, Wayan.”

I left the shop, then, trembling unaccountably, all jammed up with some potent intuition or impulse that I could not yet identify or release.

87

Now my days are divided into natural thirds. I spend my mornings with Wayan at her shop, laughing and eating. I spend my afternoons with Ketut the medicine man, talking and drinking coffee. I spend my evenings in my lovely garden, either hanging out by myself and reading a book, or sometimes talking with Yudhi, who comes over to play his guitar. Every morning, I meditate while the sun comes up over the rice fields, and before bedtime I speak to my four spirit brothers and ask them to watch over me while I sleep.

I’ve been here only a few weeks and I feel a rather mission-accomplished sensation already. The task in Indonesia was to search for balance, but I don’t feel like I’m searching for
anything
anymore because the balance has somehow naturally come into place. It’s not that I’m becoming Balinese (no more than I ever became Italian or Indian) but only this—I can feel my own peace, and I love the swing of my days between easeful devotional practices and the pleasures of beautiful landscape, dear friends and good food. I’ve been praying a lot lately, comfortably and frequently. Most of the time, I find that I want to pray when I’m on my bicycle, riding home from Ketut’s house through the monkey forest and the rice terraces in the dusky late afternoons. I pray, of course, not to be hit by another bus, or jumped by a monkey or bit by a dog, but that’s just superfluous; most of my prayers are expressions of sheer gratitude for the fullness of my contentment. I have never felt less burdened by myself or by the world.

I keep remembering one of my Guru’s teachings about happiness. She says that people universally tend to think that happiness is a stroke of luck, something that will maybe descend upon you like fine weather if you’re fortunate enough. But that’s not how happiness works. Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it, you must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it. If you don’t, you will leak away your innate contentment. It’s easy enough to pray when you’re in distress but continuing to pray even when your crisis has passed is like a sealing process, helping your soul hold tight to its good attainments.

Recalling these teachings as I ride my bike so freely in the sunset through Bali, I keep making prayers that are really vows, presenting my state of harmony to God and saying, “This is what I would like to hold on to. Please help me memorize this feeling of contentment and help me always support it.” I’m putting this happiness in a bank somewhere, not merely FDIC protected but guarded by my four spirit brothers, held there as insurance against future trials in life. This is a practice I’ve come to call “Diligent Joy.” As I focus on Diligent Joy, I also keep remembering a simple idea my friend Darcey told me once—that all the sorrow and trouble of this world is caused by unhappy people. Not only in the big global Hitler-’n’-Stalin picture, but also on the smallest personal level. Even in my own life, I can see exactly where my episodes of unhappiness have brought suffering or distress or (at the very least) inconvenience to those around me. The search for contentment is, therefore, not merely a self-preserving and self-benefiting act, but also a generous gift to the world. Clearing out all your misery
gets you out of the way.
You cease being an obstacle, not only to yourself but to anyone else. Only then are you free to serve and enjoy other people.

At the moment, the person I’m enjoying the most is Ketut. The old man—truly one of the happiest humans I’ve ever encountered— is giving me his full access, the freedom to ask any lingering questions about divinity, about human nature. I like the meditations he has taught me, the comic simplicity of “smile in your liver” and the reassuring presence of the four spirit brothers. The other day the medicine man told me that he knows sixteen different meditation techniques, and many mantras for all different purposes. Some of them are to bring peace or happiness, some of them are for health, but some of them are purely mystical—to transport him into other realms of consciousness. For instance, he said, he knows one meditation that takes him “to up.”

“To up?” I asked. “What is to up?”

“To seven levels up,” he said. “To heaven.”

Hearing the familiar idea of “seven levels,” I asked him if he meant that his meditation took him up through the seven sacred chakras of the body, which are discussed in Yoga.

“Not chakras,” he said. “Places. This meditation takes me seven places in universe. Up and up. Last place I go is heaven.”

I asked, “Have you been to heaven, Ketut?”

He smiled. Of course he had been there, he said. Easy to go to heaven.

“What is it like?”

“Beautiful. Everything beautiful is there. Every person beautiful is there. Everything beautiful to eat is there. Everything is love there. Heaven is love.”

Then Ketut said he knows another meditation. “To down.” This down meditation takes him seven levels below the world. This is a more dangerous meditation. Not for beginning people, only for a master.

I asked, “So if you go up to heaven in the first meditation, then, in the second meditation you must go down to . . . ?”

“Hell,” he finished the statement.

This was interesting. Heaven and hell aren’t ideas I’ve heard discussed very much in Hinduism. Hindus see the universe in terms of karma, a process of constant circulation, which is to say that you don’t really “end up” anywhere at the end of your life—not in heaven or hell—but just get recycled back to the earth again in another form, in order to resolve whatever relationships or mistakes you left uncompleted last time. When you finally achieve perfection, you graduate out of the cycle entirely and melt into The Void. The notion of karma implies that heaven and hell are only to be found here on earth, where we have the capacity to create them, manufacturing either goodness or evil depending on our destinies and our characters.

Karma is a notion I’ve always liked. Not so much literally. Not necessarily because I believe that I used to be Cleopatra’s bartender— but more metaphorically. The karmic philosophy appeals to me on a metaphorical level because even in one lifetime it’s obvious how often we must repeat our same mistakes, banging our heads against the same old addictions and compulsions, generating the same old miserable and often catastrophic consequences, until we can finally stop and fix it. This is the supreme lesson of karma (and also of Western psychology, by the way)—take care of the problems now, or else you’ll just have to suffer again later when you screw everything up the next time. And that repetition of suffering— that’s hell. Moving out of that endless repetition to a new level of understanding—there’s where you’ll find heaven.

But here Ketut was talking about heaven and hell in a different way, as if they are real places in the universe which he has actually visited. At least I think that’s what he meant.

Trying to get clear on this, I asked, “You have been to hell, Ketut?”

He smiled. Of course he’s been there.

“What’s it like in hell?”

“Same like heaven,” he said.

He saw my confusion and tried to explain. “Universe is a circle, Liss.”

I still wasn’t sure I understood.

He said. “To up, to down—all same, at end.”

I remembered an old Christian mystic notion:
As above, so below.
I asked. “Then how can you tell the difference between heaven and hell?”

“Because of how you go. Heaven, you go up, through seven happy places. Hell, you go down, through seven sad places. This is why it better for you to go up, Liss.” He laughed.

I asked, “You mean, you might as well spend your life going upward, through the happy places, since heaven and hell—the destinations— are the same thing anyway?”

“Same-same,” he said. “Same in end, so better to be happy on journey.”

I said, “So, if heaven is love, then hell is . . .”

“Love, too,” he said.

I sat with that one for a while, trying to make the math work.

Ketut laughed again, slapped my knee affectionately with his hand.

“Always so difficult for young person to understand this!”