It is with a sense of guarded elation that I take up my in-built mouse accompanied computer keyboard this week to tell you news of an altogether shocking change in my life - I have just had a telephone installed in my house.

Now I realise this might not sound much like news to city folk, but here in the boondocks of Bali a telephone is a rare and precious thing. The only other way of hearing the otherwise familiar ring of a handset round these parts is to tune in to the local radio phone-in programme.

The whole episode started a few weeks ago with the arrival of a uniformed engineer on my doorstep. Would we care to help pay for the installation of a telephone line to the village, he asked? It seems he needed at least 15 people in the vicinity to agree to cough up the readies before he could proceed, and I just so happened to be the fifteenth person. It sounded like a bad sales pitch for Reader’s Digest.

Well, to be honest, I was at first a little reluctant. I mean I came here to this rural, get-away-from-it-all island just so I could escape the telephone and its attendant leather-bound accessories, and now here I was about to hold another handset in my increasingly callus-ridden mitt.

Then again ... what if I was to refuse? Would they find another fifteenth man to fill the hole? Would I be held singly responsible for prolonging the Dark Ages among the dusty streets of my Balinese village?

I eventually agreed to pay the asking price and awaited the arrival of this electronic lifeline to the outside world. It came a week later after workmen erected telephone poles all the way up the driveway, a process which Pooty the mutt found particularly offensive because he inflicted a small but nonetheless significant wound to the leg of one of the men. Then he stole his packed lunch and sprinted for the river.

Other members of our household have been similarly affected by the advent of this technological breakthrough. Wayan - she-who-cooks-and-cleans round here - greeted its arrival by sprinkling holy water about the place and mumbling a few mantras into the wall socket, a new and very interesting way of communicating with the outside world, I pointed out.

She looked at me with the face of a frightened lamb and I realised for the first time that she had never actually used a telephone before, a fact for which I give her immense credit considering the way in which this planet we laughingly call a ‘global village’ daily sacrifices detail in the name of progress.

The crunch came later in the week of course when the phone actually started to ring. I picked it up only to hear someone talking at me in unintelligible Balinese, a tongue I have been hitherto unable to master because of its unreasonable complexity.

I tried to pass the handset to Wayan but to my amazement she refused to take it. I thrust it further towards her and she clutched it in her hand. Upside down. She held it at a good arm’s length before staring straight at it. And then she heard the voice on the end of the phone, and that really did it. She screamed in terror, hurled the thing against the wall and ran shrieking from the room, tearing at her clothes and hair in uncontrollable hysteria. Some things, I mused, are perhaps better left unchanged.

Illustration by Ketut Mulya.