Haddock In Flight
‘You, ay...no, THAT!’ Those few hastily spoken to-do’s in Balinese creole I could barely gather in my confusion, and anyway they’d come too late. An elemental force tugged at my reluctant body—rudely, without warning—and there was nothing to be done now. I was off my feet and whooshing through the salty air, like a zeppelin on a last mission. Plucked out of that little atoll on which I could now see my wife and daughter, reduced to a bonsai size. And next to them, the two attendants—of tawny bodies, Batik minimalia and indistinct beachbum English. Their last words, I was sure, amounted to some desperate imprecation to me to tie my seat buckle. I tried gingerly to lower myself into my seat...nothing! Damn.
Ah, the oddity of it. A wide-angle view from 500 feet above the bay, wouldn’t a medieval European mapmaker have given a limb and a half for it? And here I was, a kite in high winds, tied to the whims of a distant speedboat, my veto wrested away, quite sure my arms would give, kundalini assailed by a terminal tumult. And outside—a picture of preternatural calm. The whole bay, just there, a flawless postcard, lazy ships coiled up in the sun, the water oh-so blue, all oblivious to my panic. “Sunil Menon,” I muttered to myself, “this is it.” It took me many agonising minutes (of waiting breathlessly for life’s flashback to start rolling) to admit my harness was in order, and I wasn’t falling into the Indian Ocean.
Months later, looking down from my towered tenement eyrie at the unmoving New Year fog, which smothers my comet’s tail corner of the Aravalis like a white sea, I muse on my eye-in-the-sky moment. That cascading hormonal panic, recollected in tranquillity, was still giving me the shivers. Or was it just Gurgaon’s desert chill?
Barong’s Land
The rest of the trip went swimmingly well. Bali is not a tourism cliche for nothing. Nature’s bequest is married with an inner artistic drive that seems to order the Balinese lifeworld in such a happy union that the two can scarcely be separated. The old aesthetics hasn’t been sullied by the strain of commercialisation even while pandering to it. The architecture has all the rich, ordered complexity of gamelan rhythms, with its hint of abyssal terror. The strangest gargoyle faces stare you down from stonewalls, gates, walkways. Entrances are honoured with a flower-and-incense-stick ensemble that you have to take care not to step onto. Sanur’s seaside shrine to the Matsya avatar—flowing, legato lines on stone in a quiet, dappled village grove—was but a sampler. Later, brochure destinations flowed by in a gentle blur: the highlands of Ubud, the Kintamani vista (best washed down with chilled Bintang), cosy bargaining at coffee plantations, spotless beaches ensconced at the troughs of undulating drives.
Those who do Bali seriously do Ubud, a world apart from the holidayers on the coast. Its palaces, bistros and bazaars bear the imprint of a deep cultural phenotype. You get the sense of a place that won’t yield its secrets easily. People find excellent excuses to rent a villa on the cheap for a season—or even better, to settle down, like marrying locally and opening a Michelin-starred restaurant. What rhymes with Ubud? Why, Bubur, the delectable rice congee! After we discovered it on the breakfast buffet, we never even looked back at the cold cuts.
The kecak dance in Uluwatu is a Bali cliche, but what magnificence! An 11th century temple on a promontory silhouetted against an equatorial evening sky, the sea so far below that it’s stilled to the eye, the rat-a-tat of monkey-chant vocalisations...I’d put it on any self-respecting list of 50 tourism things to do before WW-III. As they made the obligatory rainbow secularism noises, though, you could feel a slight tautness in the evening air.
Kopi Luwak For Two
Bali is a Hindu island, fragile and nervous in Islamic Indonesia, stricken by a sense of loss of control over its affairs, of advancing serfdom. Its Hinduism is a phantasmic confection of local flavours, but Indians produce an odd resonance. “How far, how far to the sacred river?” asks a concierge, with sad, wistful eyes, as I mention Delhi. I feel like plucking him out of his seaside sannidhya to the fishgod, and getting onto a zeppelin bound straight for high-vaulted Badri, with a hip-flask full of Kopi Luwak for the ride.
Conversations
Bali is a repeat destination. Proof comes at an al-fresco bar—a canopied affair with carousel chairs. A grizzled, old Dutch gent stirs from his arthritic stupor on spotting a Balinese bartender his age. They guffaw, chat about the weather, about pension, about life. A mark of the po-co logic of modern tourism that a Dutchman and a Balinese soda jerk are old pals, I thought, as I motioned to my man for one more round of the local hooch. “You’ll get good sleep tonight,” he said, winking.
Last week...
I sent my knees by parcel to hell, trying out the 7-minute NYT high-intensty workout routine. Cheap ortho specialists can apply to the e-mail below.
Sunil Menon, ordinarily resident at Outlook, occasionally falls off the map; E-mail your diarist: menon AT outlookindia.com
