June/July, 1998
No. 035/VI/98
cover story
After The Boom
What future is there for
Bali's modern theatre
scene?
Warung Society
Bali has its own history of
communal philosophising
and coffee-drinking
Renaissance
Twenty years of Bali's
Festival of the Arts
beyond
bali
Sumbawa's
Secrets
Photographs from
Kuang Amo
regular
features
Orchestrating a
cremation in Ubud
Home Grown
A preview of
the Quicksilver Pro
Adventure
Getting over a fear
of diving
Health and Beauty
Foreign aid for
optic
health
Books
The Painted Alphabet
reviewed
Food
Two boutique hotels,
two top chefs
Fiction
'Our Moon'
by Mas Ruscitadewi
advertising index for
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There was a ceremony to give life to the naga banda, a fantastic dragon statue
that was painstakingly made, to accompany the soul to heaven. It will be burned with the
body. Today, the naga looks strangely different, fiercer. I take out yesterday’s
pictures from my bag to check that it is the same dragon. Now the people are taking it out
of the gate to the outer courtyard. They have trouble getting the naga past the aling
aling, a traditional barrier wall just inside Balinese gates. The naga was built to
measure, so it could negotiate the two right-angle turns required by the presence of the
aling aling. Perhaps too precisely; there is no margin for error. I consider that aling
aling are designed to prevent evil beings from entering Balinese gates. It is said that
sinister entities have trouble with right angle turns. So does this naga, although it was
intentionally built in two sections that have been taken apart so it can effect an exit. A
long, white cord connects the naga head to its tail; like an extensible spinal cord, so it
remains one being throughout.
As the men jostle with
the naga like drivers of a tightly parked car, a sense of silent panic grips us all. This
is the kind of mishap that can ruin a ceremony and damage its delicate, elaborate
structure on the invisible level. A gamelan is playing, and a sacred baris gede warrior
dance solemnly prepares the way for the procession. The bull in which the body will burn,
is already outside in the street, on its own platform and ready to go. The cremation tower
is standing nearby with a dizzyingly steep bamboo ramp leading upwards to the invisible
interior.
"When the body goes out of the palace gate, that is the dangerous time. That is when people can do bad. There are people who are against adat (tradition). Who are against the palace. Who want change."
I know there are guardians again. Prince Rai, the mystic, comes through the gate, his face showing weariness and concentration. He carries a very vicious and strange-looking weapon, like a battle-axe with a serrated knife blade on the top. As a kind of stage-manager of the drama on the unseen level, he is instrumental throughout. The body is borne through the gate in a box covered with white cloth. It is a difficult passage, and tension crystallises the assembled palace community. There is an unbearable putrid odour, and everyone winces. Someone points to the whole piglet run through on a big pole, which is part of the procession, and someone else hurries to bind a plastic shopping bag over it. I guess it doesn’t matter if it looks like a rotting piglet or just a nondescript bundle.
Rai is stationed on the ramp to the tower; a thin figure all in black. So thin, I
think only half of him is in this world, and the other half already elsewhere. On the
ramp, he is the gatekeeper and escort to the domain of the dead. There are guardians. The
body goes up into the tower. Outside, the pedanda (high priest) is ready to sacrifice the
naga. He brought it to life, and now it is fulfilling its role as the soul’s guide.
"The pedanda shoots five arrows. He shoots the naga, then shoots to the four cardinal points. When the priest shoots the naga with an arrow, that is also a dangerous time."
The whole street is packed for more than a kilometre, as the procession to the cremation ground begins. The procession is huge, the whole street is a canyon of people, with a river of life flowing down the middle; noise and music. A dead body at the very centre.
"I feel that I do not want to be alone at a time like this. Nobody does. That is why the crowd is so important. We don’t want to be sociable either. That is why the noise is so useful."
The tower is careening here and there. Men are holding the white cord that leads it, being sprayed by a fire hose. Laughing. The whole group is veering left and right. People are shouting. The pedanda is calm amidst it, riding high on the platform. Some people try to make small talk, and it drops like rotten fruit falling from a tree.
People are smiling and laughing. Some are serious, some philosophical, some tense. The mixture of emotions is indecipherable. All the emotions of life are here. It all passes by, leaving an empty road littered with lost shoes and sandals; mute and banal.
The procession is gone and I am numb. I sit down, overwhelmed, never sure what to do. There is a plan, but it is not from planning, and no one knows quite what it looks like. Nothing can be planned precisely; like a man’s life and death. I will go now to the cremation ground. Other foreigners keep asking me what is going to happen, “what time does it start?” and other logical questions. I can’t tell them, no one can. It started before the dead prince was born. No one needs to know the plan. This is manifest in the way the family always seems to group in particular places. The feeling groups them, not a plan. What happens is evident, and your feeling leads you to be in the right place at the right time; at your place in the structure of things.
Text and photos by K. Susilawati.
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