Oct. 12 refuses to be quantified, measured, reckoned, even estimated. We may be able to count the lives lost and shattered, compute the cost in dollars and cents, but
we will never be able to add up the psychic and emotional toll of what happened that night. For Australians it has already emerged as their Day of Infamy. For Asians, it was the day terror came home. You may label it, but you can't fix a price to the loss of innocence.
In so many minds, Bali represented that Edenic state. The island had managed to transcend the anti-Chinese massacres of the '60s and Suharto-era violence to emerge, once again, as the purest manifestation of paradise that any of us had ever seen. Before Oct. 12, Bali connoted palm trees, white sand beaches, bungalow resorts—a brochure of tourist clichés come to life. You could get lost there, and thousands of foreigners did, one-week vacations extending into decades-long sojourns. For the predominantly Hindu locals, those tourists and expatriates provided a comfortable income, transforming the island into a financial shelter from Southeast Asia's economic storms. Even the ancient form of Hinduism practiced in Bali is a more forgiving doctrine than that pursued today in India, with a less rigorously delineated caste system and fewer dietary restrictions. (There are no sacred cows in Bali.)
The Hindu epic Mahabharata recounts a loss of paradise similar to that of the Old Testament's: man tempting fate, tasting the forbidden fruit and being cast out of Eden. For the tragedy that befell Bali to conform to those legends, there should have been a similar overreaching by humanity. That, at least, would have had a certain narrative logic. Instead, the bombings were random, brutal, a destruction of heaven itself. The Australians, British, Indonesians and others who died hadn't embarked on any mythical tempting of the fates; they were simply on vacation or doing a day's work.
The analogy for Americans would be if Hawaii were attacked again; for Europeans, perhaps Ibiza or St. Tropez. Bali was a symbol for most of us: of better times, of a future where we might lie in the sun for a few days or weeks, of a blissful state that has now vanished. We lost not only a resort and nearly 200 lives and our sense of safety amid a world at war against terror. Also gone is our belief that somewhere, out there, was a place that was free of all this violence and hatred. Paradise wasn't lost. It was bombed out of existence.
INDIA/PAKISTAN
Back from the Brink
On both sides, forces pull pack from the India-Pakistan border. How long can this thaw last?
MOVIES
A Sigh for Old Saigon
The made-in-Vietnam film of Graham Greene's The Quiet American looks at love and war, and the strange bedfellows they make
NORTH KOREA
Look Who's Got the Bomb
Confronted by the U.S., North Korea brazenly admits it's building nukes. Now what does President Bush do?
TRAVEL
Homestay on the Range
In the former Soviet Republic of Kyrgyzstan, My Yurt is Your Yurt
