This is the second in a four part series of encounters with women in Amed. I call these wonderful women – birds of paradise – for they don the plummage of paradise in the hope that they will become exotic in a land they assume is utopia.
Sometime ago when I was sitting in a Warung in Bunutan (Amed) listening to Jimmy Nail and sipping an Arak Attack a young woman walked up from behind and said cheerfully “Hiya, am Alison, you’re playing my song – Crocodile Shoes”.
I turned around and stared into the face of an American girl who looked like Ali McGraw.
“What are you doing here? Don’t tell me you’re alone and checking out the countryside”, I said and laughed loudly.
She told me that she had been working with an NGO in Java as part of her thesis for her Masters from an American University and as the deadline drew near she had come to Bali to stretch her legs and complete the pending work. Kuta was her first choice but the throbbing streets at night punctuated by pulsating music were a distraction. Now she was in Amed looking for a cheap clean room to lay her head down for a few days.
I called my friend Made over to my table and introduced him to Alison and requested him to give her one of the best rooms at his small hotel, where I happened to be staying. So off she went on his bike. I returned to the small hotel at sunset to see Alison in a red checked bikini lying on a sun bed beside the swimming pool. The room boys were hanging around like flies on a luscious tropical fruit.
Late that Saturday evening, I saw her in a café in an animated discussion with Kadek, a friend of Made’s. When the live band began to play, she was soon lost in the plumes of cigarette smoke and sweaty gyrating bodies on the dance floor.
Next morning at breakfast Alison confided in me that she had been indiscreet for the first time and was contemplating telling her boyfriend. I advised her against it for the night could never be relived. Then Alison mentioned she had fallen out of love with her boyfriend. That he was a boring artist too immersed in his work who didn’t see her as a woman. She needed the warm touch and strong arms of a man to make her feel woman all over.
Alison spoke of the emptiness in her life even though she was travelling the world. There was an element of her that was missing, like a lost piece of a jigsaw puzzle. One night in Amed had apparently changed her perspective of life.
I thought for a moment about what she had told me and then uttered words like passion, lust and momentary lapse of concentration – All these had factors warped her sense of proportion when she met Kadek. Alison replied by spilling her mixed fruit juice on me. It was a deliberate act by someone in the throes of Bali. It had seduced her with its voluptuous lifestyle that made her drunk on lasciviousness the likes of which she had probably never encountered before.
That day was spent with her lying on adjacent sun beds on the seashore and gazing at the sky. Images that danced through my mind were like flipping through the pages of Lolita.
“What is your sign,” I asked her.
“Aquarian”, she replied. Then she reached out and patted my stomach telling me I had a paunch just like her dad. This is when all thoughts of Lolita were unceremoniously dispensed with and reality kicked in like a shot in the solar plexus.
“Yes, I know, too many whiskeys and cigars”, I said blithely.
Just then a fisherman ambled up and asked if we would like to go out with the fishing boats the following morning. Alison requested me to accompany her on the boat. I hesitantly agreed on the condition she wore her bikini so that in case I fell into the water she could dive in and safe me. I was embarrassed to tell her I couldn’t swim.
The next day at 5 a.m. we headed out in a craft no bigger than a large dugout canoe. The wind was up and the boat was pushed out to sea. The spray wet our lips and made them salty. Alison shivered as she was in a bikini with only a hand towel with which she vainly tried to cover her head and wipe her body.
I reached out to her and held her hand.
“Alison, are you okay, shall we turn back?” I asked.
“No, not now, lets wait for the sunrise”, she said in a shaking voice.
A short while later the sun rose over the horizon like a poached free-range egg all glowing with wholesome energy. The fisherman turned the boat towards shore.
The shoreline was bathed in a strange light with Mount Agung luminous orange as it penetrated the skyline.
“This is it! I wish Henry were here. Wow, what a fantastic sight,” exclaimed Alison.
“Who is Henry?” I shouted above the roar of the wind.
“My boyfriend in the States silly. This is where he should be not in a studio on the twentieth floor of a building,” she replied.
“So you want him to be with you in Bali?” I asked.
“Yes, no…maybe, I don’t know. It’s just that when I see something beautiful I want to share it with him”, she said.
“So what about Kadek?” I asked.
“Well they can both share me. One for my body and the other for my mind,” she laughed mischievously.
We landed on shore drenched and Alison none the less wiser.
Over breakfast she got a call on her cell phone. She spoke into it in monosyllables and after a few minutes banged the phone down on the table.
“You know what, Henry just called to tell me he has another girlfriend. It’s good I spent a night with Kadek. Maybe it was the spirits telling me to let go. They were preparing me for this moment”, she said quietly, as tears swelled in her eyes.
I didn’t see her for the rest of the day. She had locked herself in the room and refused to meet even Kadek.
In the evening, Alison emerged from her room with swollen eyes and asked me to call Kadek, who miraculously appeared as we were talking. She sat on his bike and went home with him.
A day later she returned to the hotel on Made’s bike. I asked her to tell me what had happened. She avoided my questions and began to pack.
I entered her room and said, “What happened, are you okay, do you need to see a doctor?”
“What am I doing here…you tell me? I have wasted a week sleeping around, going on trips and lying on the stupid shore when I should be finishing my thesis. My work is my life. Why can’t the men in my life understand this? Do you know what Kadek wanted me to do? Get married, have children and live in a village vegetating! Henry was no different. All he wanted me to do was mother him. I got up this morning next to Kadek and realised that it was MY LIFE…it does not belong to anyone else,” she said with finality.
Abruptly, I walked out of the room. She followed me and apologised. Then Alison sat down beside me, held my hand and told me she was pregnant.
“That’s impossible to know after one night,” I said.
“No silly, I mean with Henry’s child”, she replied.
Alison knew that it was time to depart for home, as she had to complete the thesis and nurture the life growing within her. Terminating the pregnancy did cross her mind but this was quickly despatched by what she had learnt from the Balinese – that all life was sacred.
In the end, Paradise had mended the broken wing of a bird of paradise so that she could fly home to nest.
Om Shanti Shanti Shanti Om
