Free Video Night in Kathmandu by Pico Iyer Page A

the unknown and the unseen—the possibility of surprise—could awaken true faith or devotion.
    At least, so I thought, the trekkers in Nepal had to hike and to suffer for their uplifting highs; even the tourist in Burma or Tibet had to tilt against the crazily spinning windmills of a socialist bureaucracy before he could collect his epiphanies. But the visitor to Bali was handed a gift-wrapped parcel of paradise the minute he arrived. After that, he had only to lie back and let the idyll present itself to him, demanding nothing in return. It was not just tropical fruits that were brought to tourists on a plate by slim, smiling dryads, it was the whole Bali package: massages, temple dances, the heart-stopping radiance of the local children. Every room came equipped with sunlight andbirdsong. Every lane brought smiles. Extraordinary sunsets were shown every night on Kuta Beach, and free of charge.
    I knew, of course, that for the locals, life here could be as troubling as anywhere else in the developing world. I had read all about the two most famous events in the island’s recent history: the massacre of 3,500 locals in 1906, when the entire royal court of Denpasar had dressed up in all its ceremonial finery and walked, as if in a dream, into the gunfire of the invading Dutch, preferring mass suicide to surrender; and the maddened bloodletting that had swept across the island in 1965 during the convulsions that attended the end of Sukarno’s rule by rough magic, when villagers, entranced, cut throats and smashed heads until as many as 100,000 people lay dead. Even in the most peaceful of times, medical care remained in the uncertain hands of witch doctors, and the press of vendors on Kuta Beach attested to the fact that, though the Balinese were not desperately poor, neither were they rich.
    The story I heard from Wayan, an engaging, ever-smiling twenty-three-year-old boy who worked in my guesthouse, sounded typical. He had grown up, he told me one sunny morning, in a tiny village in the west. At seventeen he had got married, and soon after, he had been blessed with a son. But soon after that, his wife had forsaken him for another man. Wayan was left in a one-room house, with his mother, his father, his brother, his sister and his baby to support. There was no work in his village, so he had come to Kuta.
    Did he think of remarrying?
    No, he said, he was afraid of girls now. He lived only for his baby. But even that was not easy. He could make only $22 a month at the
losmen
, and he had to spend $5 a month just to take a
bemo
home to visit his baby. If he wanted to take home some cake for his child, that would cost more. As it was, his son, now three and a half, still wore the clothes he had been given when two. And Wayan himself owned only two T-shirts, two pairs of trousers and a pair of shorts.
    Last year, to make things still harder, he had smashed his leg in a motorbike accident. The doctors, as usual, wanted to amputate; Wayan refused. But the treatment needed to save the leg had cost $250, and there was no way he could ever get that kind of money. He was frightened, he told me, always frightened thatthe people from the hospital would come and get him. What could he do?
    A cynic might say that Wayan had rehearsed his hard-luck tale for the benefit of credulous tourists. Maybe so. But that made the fact of his telling it no less sad or importunate. And still, every morning, when he saw me, Wayan flashed me an ebullient smile. “Bali, paradise!” he exulted.
    THERE WAS ALSO , as the trance-killings revealed, a more disquieting side to this island famous for its witches, its exorcisms, the nighttime howling of its unfed dogs (believed to be agents of the demons). Before I came to Bali, I had never met a girl with the passional rawness—the wild and windswept intensity—of a Brontëan heroine. But I found her, with a vengeance, in another Wayan, a twenty-year-old girl of Kuta (in Bali, the name is given to the eldest