'No. With you.'
She looks like she's going to faint.
'Wayan,' I say. 'My friends in America are very angry with you.'
'With me? Why, honey?'
'Because four months ago, they gave you a lot of money to buy a home, and you did not buy a home yet. Every day, they send me e-mails, asking me, 'Where is Wayan's house? Where is my money?' Now they think you are stealing their money, using it for something else.'
'I'm not stealing!'
'Wayan,' I say. 'My friends in America think you are… a bullshit.'
She gasps as if she's been punched in the windpipe. She looks so wounded, I waver for a moment and almost grab her in a reassuring hug and say, 'No, no, it's not true! I'm making this up!' But, no, I have to finish this. But, Lord, she is clearly staggered now. Bullshit is a word that has been more emotionally incorporated into Balinese than almost any other in the English language. It's one of the very worst things you can call someone in Bali-'a bullshit.' In this culture, where people bullshit each other a dozen times before breakfast, where bullshitting is a sport, an art, a habit, and a desperate survival tactic, to actually call someone out on their bullshit is an appalling statement. It's something that would have, in old Europe, guaranteed you a duel.
'Honey,' she said, eyes tearing. 'I am not a bullshit!'
'I know that, Wayan. This is why I'm so upset. I try to tell my friends in America that Wayan is not a bullshit, but they don't believe me.'
She lays her hand on mine. 'I'm sorry to put you in a pickle, honey.'
'Wayan, this is a very big pickle. My friends are angry. They say that you must buy some land before I come back to America. They told me that if you don't buy some land in the next week, then I must… take the money back.'
Now she doesn't look like she's going to faint; she looks like she's going to die. I feel like one-half of the biggest prick in history, spinning this tale to this poor woman, who-among other things-obviously doesn't realize that I no more have the power to take that money out of her bank account than I have to revoke her Indonesian citizenship. But how could she know that? I made the money magically appear in her bankbook, didn't I? Couldn't I just as easily take it away?
'Honey,' she says, 'believe me, I find land now, don't worry, very fast I find land. Please don't worry… maybe in next three days this is finish, I promise.'
'You must, Wayan,' I say, with a gravity that is not entirely acting. The fact is, she must. Her kids need a home. She's about to get evicted. This is no time to be a bullshit.
I say, 'I'm going back to Felipe's house now. Call me when you've bought something.'
Then I walk away from my friend, aware that she is watching me but refusing to turn around and look back at her. All the way home, I'm offering up to God the weirdest prayer: 'Please, let it be true that she's been bullshitting me.' Because if she wasn't bullshitting, if she's genuinely incapable of finding herself a place to live despite an $18,000 cash infusion, then we're in really big trouble here and I don't know how this woman is ever going to pull herself out of poverty. But if she was bullshitting me, then in a way it's a ray of hope. It shows she's got some wiles, and she might be OK in this shifty world, after all.
I go home to Felipe, feeling awful. I say, 'If only Wayan knew how deviously I was plotting behind her back…'
'… plotting for her happiness and success,' he finishes the sentence for me.
Four hours later-four measly hours!-the phone rings in Felipe's house. It's Wayan. She's breathless. She wants me to know the job is finished. She has just purchased the two aro from the farmer (whose 'wife' suddenly didn't seem to mind breaking up the property). There was no need, as it turns out, for any magic dreams or priestly interventions or taksu radiation-level tests. Wayan even has the certificate of ownership already, in her very hands! And it's notarized! Also, she assures me, she has already ordered construction materials for her house and workers will start building early next week-before I leave. So I can see the project under way. She hopes that I am not angry with her. She wants me to know that she loves me more than she loves her own body, more than she loves her own life, more than she loves this whole world.
I tell her that I love her, too. And that I can't wait to be a guest someday in her beautiful new home. And that I would like a photocopy of that certificate of ownership.
When I get off the phone, Felipe says, 'Good girl.'
I don't know whether he's referring to her or me. But he opens a bottle of wine and we raise a toast to our dear friend Wayan the Balinese landowner.
Then Felipe says, 'Can we go on vacation now, please?'
107
The place we end up going on vacation is a tiny island called Gili Meno, located off the coast of Lombok, which is the next stop east of Bali in the great, sprawling Indonesian archipelago. I'd been to Gili Meno before, and I wanted to show it to Felipe, who had never been there.
The island of Gili Meno is one of the most important places in the world to me. I came here by myself two years ago when I was in Bali for the first time. I was on that magazine assignment, writing about Yoga vacations, and I'd just finished two weeks of mightily restorative Yoga classes. But I had decided to extend my stay in Indonesia after the assignment was up, since I was already all the way over here in Asia. What I wanted to do, actually, was to find someplace very remote and give myself a ten-day retreat of absolute solitude and absolute silence.
When I look back at the four years that elapsed between my marriage starting to fall apart and the day I was finally divorced and free, I see a detailed chronicle of total pain. And the moment when I came to this tiny island all by myself was the very worst of that entire dark journey. The bottom of the pain and the middle of it. My unhappy mind was a battlefield of conflicted demons. As I made my decision to spend ten days alone and in silence in the middle of exactly nowhere, I told all my warring and confused parts the same thing: 'We're all here together now, guys, all alone. And we're going to have to work out some kind of deal for how to get along, or else everybody is going to die together, sooner or later.'
Which may sound firm and confident, but I must admit this, as well-that sailing over to that quiet island all alone, I was never more terrified in my life. I hadn't even brought any books to read, nothing to distract me. Just me and my mind, about to face each other on an empty field. I remember that my legs were visibly shaking with fear. Then I quoted to myself one of my favorite lines ever from my Guru: 'Fear-who cares?' and I disembarked alone.
I rented myself a little cabin on the beach for a few dollars a day and I shut my mouth and vowed not to open it again until something inside me had changed. Gili Meno Island was my ultimate truth and reconciliation hearing. I had chosen the right place to do this-that much was clear. The island itself is tiny, pristine, sandy, blue water, palm trees. It's a perfect circle with a single path that goes around it, and you can walk the whole circumference in about an hour. It's located almost exactly on the equator, and so there's a changelessness about its daily cycles. The sun comes up on one side of the island at about 6:30 in the morning and goes down on the other side at around 6:30 PM, every day of the year. The place is inhabited by a small handful of Muslim fishermen and their families. There is no spot on this island from which you cannot hear the ocean. There are no motorized vehicles here. Electricity comes from a generator, and for only a few hours in the evenings. It's the quietest place I've ever been.
Every morning I walked the circumference of the island at sunrise, and walked it again at sunset. The rest of the time, I just sat and watched. Watched my thoughts, watched my emotions, watched the fishermen. The Yogic sages say that all the pain of a human life is caused by words, as is all the joy. We create words to define our experience and those words bring attendant emotions that jerk us around like dogs on a leash. We get seduced by our own mantras (I'm a failure… I'm lonely… I'm a failure… I'm lonely…) and we become monuments to them. To
