sun.
The koki was already at home. She sat on the kitchen floor, fanning the fires of three small braziers and stirring the contents of the pans on top. Around her were bowls of grated coconut, fried onions and ingredients I could not identify. On the mat beside her lay little mounds of red peppers, garlic and nuts. There was a litter of bananas, duck eggs and crabs, some Australian butter in a large tin, and a stupefied chicken, tied by the leg to a nail in the wall. Her cigarettes and betel were within easy reach. An emaciated dog had already adopted the place and sniffed in the corners of the room.
In the air was a powerful, complex smell, acrid and pungent, of burnt feathers, fish and frying coconut oil. I was to find this a daily smell, punctual and inevitable as the morning smell of coffee at home. It came chiefly from sra, a paste of shrimps that had once been ground, dried, mixed with sea-water, then buried for months to ferment. It was used in almost everything, fried first to develop the aroma. It was unbelievably putrid. An amount the size of a pea was more than enough to flavour a dish. It gave a racy, briny tang to the food, and I soon found myself craving it as an animal craves salt.
Each night I gave the koki a guilder, at that time about forty cents, which she converted into Chinese coins when she went to the market at dawn. She bought a pair of chickens or a beautiful fish, vegetables, fruit, eggs, rice, beancurd, a handful of dried fish for herself and the boy, and had something left over to treat herself to cigarettes and betel.
Each morning she appeared around seven with a large washbasin balanced on her head. It had become a fantastic hat trimmed with pineapples, leeks, cabbages and bananas, from out of which peered a numb-looking chicken or duck.
Tabé tuan.
Tabé koki. How goes it?
Yes, tuan.
She was too remote, too indifferent to fill in the correct reply. She trudged silently to the back of the house. But it would not be long before her voice took on another tone. She was a woman with a little, shrewish temper, and she refused to get along with the houseboy. She was a Madurese and a Mohammedan, while he was a heathen Balinese, and a pork-eater into the bargain. Her scolding would burst forth in a sharp chatter that rose to a squeak and disappeared in the higher overtones of final exasperation.
For lunch she cooked Javanese style, which meant rice, accompanied by a dozen different dishes that were enough for six people. The table was crowded with bowls in which fish and fowl swam in sauces of green, yellow or scarlet. Some dishes tasted somewhat like curry, though infinitely fresher in flavour; some were so hot with spice they brought tears to the eyes and sweat to the forehead.
The preparation of these dishes was involved, and took hours of patient labour. The idea, it seemed, was variety to please a gourmet’s palate, for a chicken was never cooked in one way only, but divided into parts, to be fried, broiled, stewed, shredded, and seasoned with great care for contrast. A fish she cooked in the same way. This, however, was not enough, for there were endless little side-dishes of strange delicacies—stewed acacia blossoms, preserved duck eggs, tiny octopus fried crisp and looking like a dish of spiders.
Her sweets were even stranger. For lunch would end perhaps with corn and grated coconut mixed with a syrup of palm sugar, soggy little balls of rice paste treacherously filled with more syrup, or a sliced pineapple to be eaten with salt, red pepper and garlic.
But at night the koki “cooked Dutch.” Then she would send in a meat loaf, or duck in a black and curious sauce. Pancakes and blancmange alternated for dessert.
The houseboy was strangely limp and colourless. He had said, Call me Gusti (prince) though it seemed he had no right to the title. He a gusti? exclaimed the koki to me privately. She laughed derisively. In the early morning Gusti brought me luke-warm coffee while he was still half asleep. He dragged the mattress into the sun, moved chairs and dusted as though it took his last ounce of strength. He managed to wash a shirt or two each morning, and spent the afternoon in a delicious dream-world of cigarette smoke and slow, thoughtful ironing. First he did my shirts, then a pair of trousers. After this he rested. Then he pressed his own shirt and jacket, or spent an hour ironing fancy pleats into his sarong. This he wore when not in the mood for trousers, wrapped neatly around his waist and falling down the front in folds, which lay in flat accordion pleats that opened out when he walked, reminding you of Egyptian reliefs.
Soon the house was running of its own accord. I grew deaf to the koki’s voice; as I learnt to understand what she was saying it became clear that she scolded much of the time simply to keep in practice; these outbursts were her daily vocal exercises, necessary to keep her voice flexible in the long complaint of woman against man.
The village was laid out square as a chessboard. Like all villages on the island, it was a network of roads and lanes that ran north and south, east and west. It gave the impression of lying in the heart of a lovely forest; the houses were hidden behind walls in a jungle of breadfruit-trees and palms, whose long fronds drooped like plumes and reflected the morning sunlight at a thousand angles.
The house lay just off the main road at one end of the village. Across the way stood the Temple of Origins. You walked down the road past the Temple of the Village Elders to the market and the men’s clubhouse. Then you came to the Temple of the Earth’s Axis. Out in the fields stood the little temple for Sri, the rice goddess. Still farther away you could see from the house a group of shrines for Saraswati, goddess of learning. Beyond the graveyard at the south edge of the village stood the Temple of the Dead. Silent, deserted, each temple waited for its feast day, when the courts would fill with people and the walls echo with music.
At the market-place in the centre of the village all was life and movement from dawn till late at night. Here people came to meet and gossip, and buy a handful of dried fish or a measure of rice. Once in three days, on market-day, you could buy pigs and ducks, mats, Japanese textiles, hardware from China and Java. Here too, in the shade of the great banyan that covered the entire market, men gathered each day to talk idly, or sit and think about nothing at all. They brought their fighting cocks, and sat for hours absent-mindedly massaging the firm, tense legs, or running the long silky necks through their fingers.
At -night the men’s clubhouse became the social centre. It was a long hut of bamboo and palm-thatch, with a raised floor of earth that had dried hard as a rock. Here the gamelan that belonged to the music club of the younger men in the village was kept. In the daytime you seldom passed without hearing from within a soft chime of gongs or metal keys as some child, sitting in the cool darkness of the empty hut, improvised and learnt for himself how to play. But after dark the hut was a luminous centre surrounded by a blaze of little, lamps. Outside the saleswomen had set down their tables of sweets and betel, while the members of the club gathered inside to practise. Now was the time to go through the music they already knew, for the sheer pleasure of it, or work over the difficult parts of some new composition they were just learning. They used no notes (indeed there were none, it seemed); each phrase of the melody, each intricate detail of accompaniment they had learned by ear, listening carefully and with infinite patience to the teacher who had, perhaps, been called from some other village. Late into the night they played. From the house I could hear them going over phrase after phrase, correcting, improving, until the music began to flow of its own accord. I fell asleep with the sounds ringing in my ears, and. as I slept I still heard them, saw them rather, for now they seemed transformed into a shining rain of silver.
NYOMAN KALÉR
A BALINESE VILLAGE IS divided into wards or banjars. Each has its headman, its priest, its separate community life. Sometimes the village is a peaceful one, with a harmonious relationship between all banjars, but often (I was to find out) there is bitterness and rivalry between adjacent wards, especially among the youths and younger men. One evening shortly after I had come to the village I received a call from the head of my own banjar.
