One Year Later — page 3

When I was in Bali in early September, preparations were under way for the anniversary of the attack. I attended a ngeruwak ceremony, which sought the gods' permission to build a memorial on a wedge of land between the tidy rectangles of rubble where the Sari Club and Paddy's Irish Pub once peddled good times. The event was presided over by a white-robed priest who walked with a silver-dragon-headed cane. The leaders of the Kuta community were all there, Hindus wearing ceremonial silk sarongs and Muslims in their Friday best. The vice mayor climbed down a ladder into a deep hole in the ground to make an intimate offering intended to placate demons attracted to the site by the carnage of the bombings. After the ceremony concluded, an Australian lad sat apart and sobbed; an older compatriot, a reporter, spoke kindly to him and patted him on the back.

It was a depressing event, on an exceptionally hot morning, yet it gave me hope. Bali can be an industrious place when it puts its mind to it. Although the anniversary was scarcely a month away, the builders promised to have the memorial ready in time. A little row had been kicked up over the design, which calls for a Javanese-style Hindu temple at the entrance. Some neighborhood do-gooders objected to having a religious symbol there. It made everyone happy to have a controversy, and I was happy to see their old passion back, in a fine fracas. That offered a distraction from their troubles.

There are complex webs of old feuds in Bali, mostly squabbles among the banjars (the local unit of government, equivalent to precincts). But suspicion of off-islanders, especially the Javanese, has always pullulated under the serene Balinese mask. When I was living there, the banjar and the military in Kuta got into a power struggle over the right to control the immigrant Javanese beach vendors, which culminated in the burning of thousands of the vendors' pushcarts. Even among the island's élite, a nasty anti-Javanese bias persists.

However, as I talked to people all over the island, Muslims and Christians as well as the majority Hindus, I finally accepted their nearly universal insistence that religious divisions have not played a significant role this past year. In the days after the bombings, there were scary rumors flying around about rumbles between Hindus and Muslims, but they never amounted to anything. One of the principal entries in the year's suka column is that at the grassroots level, where it counts, Bali's social glue has stuck.

One of the most devastating effects of the massacre has been its psychological impact. The Balinese, loath to discuss their problems openly, have always turned to the performing arts, their culture's greatest glory, for solace and instruction. Many special performances of wayang kulit, Indonesian shadow-puppet drama, have been staged to help young people comprehend a world turned upside down. A dalang (puppeteer) named I Made Sidia has created, with the support of UNICEF and USAID, a spectacular drama that he performs on a wider screen than normal, for children throughout the island. It is a parable about animals in the forest after it has been burned by demons. At first the animals bicker among themselves, but in the end, as you might expect, they learn to get along and vanquish the demons. A psychiatrist also speaks to the audience and offers counsel to anyone seeking it. The title of the drama is The Ten Names of Peace, but everybody calls it "the skateboard wayang": in order to keep the wide-screen action going, the dalang whizzes back and forth on a skateboard.

Yet most Balinese have responded to the bombings as Agus Suardana did, with an intensified religious fervor. On the last day of my visit, Agus invited me to West Bali to meet his family and attend an odalan, a major festival at a famous old temple on the coast. Rambut Siwi is a mossy, crenellated pile on a rugged cape straight out of a Turner painting: a red-granite cliff, a glittering black beach and a pounding sea, with misty Java reclining on the horizon. Hundreds of people were promenading on the cliff above the temple, files of lace-bodiced women with offerings stacked upon their heads, men standing in groups wearing elegant sarongs and cream jackets, smoking and chatting. Muslim vendors hawked ritual goods, drinks and cheap, shiny toys. I bought a bottle of water from a boy, perhaps age 18, who said he has been unemployed since June, when the little shop where he worked went out of business.

Agus was waiting for me at the edge of the parking lot, barefoot. As we descended the steps carved into the granite, he explained that today he had ngayah duty—which meant that he must sprinkle holy water on the worshippers all night long as they entered the temple to pray. We joined the privileged ranks of the ngayah guys in a small pavilion by the sea, where Agus introduced me to his brother, his uncle, his great-uncle and his grandfather. I asked them how old the temple was, but none of them knew. Agus' grandfather, the oldest man there, said Rambut Siwi was always old.

I asked Agus what people pray for at a ceremony like this.

"People come here to pray for a good harvest, for good health. They pray for Bali."

"And you?" I asked.

"I pray for myself, for my family, but not only for us. I pray for everybody. Now there is war everywhere in the world. It is the duty of Balinese people to pray for balance in the whole universe, not just on our island."

The Balinese interpretation of the bombings, that it was divine retribution for impiety, sounds superstitious to Western ears, but it has its own truth. At Rambut Siwi I realized that Bali has survived the past year not because of the extraordinary way it has coped with the tragedy but because of the profound continuity that people like Agus Suardana feel with the civilization that existed centuries before the dream drew in drifters like me, the Bali that was always old, the morning of the world.

Agus' notion that the Balinese can save the world with their prayers may be naive, but it's as good a plan as any I've heard. If anybody has a shot at charming the gods to come back and save us from ourselves, it's the Balinese.

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