Bali: The Sounds of Summer

I've had the driver let me off at the center of the village and am making my way toward the unmistakable gonging, ringing, clubfooted harmonies of a gamelan in full swing.

The music issues from a pavilion within the stone courtyard walls of a traditional Balinese family compound. With the exception of city dwellers, most Balinese live in these compounds, which typically house three or more generations: grandparents, parents, unmarried children, married sons and their wives and children, pets, goats, chickens, and motorbikes.

On the steps outside the pavilion is a scatter of plastic flip-flops, perhaps 30 in all, in lollipop colors. It's Dewa Putu Berata's gamelan class for the village schoolgirls - though gamelan is traditionally a boys' pursuit. The girls pound on their xylophonic tingklik as though they were Fisher-Price tool benches, producing a sound at once dissonant and lilting. (Imagine an Aaron Copland arrangement of "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.") Their eyes rarely leave Dewa, for two reasons. One: Gamelan has no musical scores; it's always been taught by demonstration and repetition. And two: Teacher is a dish.

Dewa calls a break and joins his fiancee, Emiko Susilo, on the steps for a tea break. His mother brings red rice tea on a tray, as she does every day at this time, arriving with the comforting regularity of an afternoon ice-cream truck. We talk, and at one point I ask Dewa whether he has to deal with groupies. He lights a clove cigarette and tilts his head back regally.

"Yes, girls come up to me and say, 'Oh, I want to come visit you.' At first I don't understand. I say, 'OK, any time. Come to my house. Everyone welcome, everyone important!'"

Emiko, so stunning she doesn't have to worry about the remark, rolls her eyes. Half-Indonesian, born in Honolulu and raised in Los Angeles, she met Dewa in Berkeley while he was teaching gamelan. Her presence in the family compound represents a loosening of traditional rules, as they're not yet wed.

"We wanted to get married in June, but the priests decreed it wasn't a good month for marriage," Emiko says, "go figure" implicit in her shrug.

The room the couple shares is small and spartan, as is typical of Balinese homes. The most picturesque (and, often, largest) part of the family compound is the family temple. All family temples have at least three shrines, one of them for the Balinese Hindu god's three main manifestations - Vishnu, Shiva, and Brahma.

Where we in the West might spend our savings on a remodeled kitchen, the Balinese household adds a fourth or fifth shrine. Rice paddies have shrines, as do schools, insurance offices, and hospitals. The shrine at the local gas station outsizes the fuel pump. ("No incense at this one," cautions the pump attendant. "Very dangerous.")

Religion dictates every facet of village life in Bali: when to plant rice, which side of the compound to build the kitchen on, how to hang a clothesline (low, lest the things you wear on the unclean half of your body drip onto your head). But Balinese Hinduism is a gentle dictator, and one with an eye for beauty. While we talk, Dewa's sister, Made, is sitting in a wash of morning sunlight, pulling petals from pale pink blossoms for one of her many canang, the daily offerings placed in shrines and at temple gates.

The petals are arranged inside small boxes, alongside grains of rice and snippets of palm leaf carved and cut like a child's paper snowflake. She makes the boxes too, from banana leaves folded and pinned together with quarter-inch lengths of stick. All told, Made makes about 40 canang a day. In Denpasar, Bali's big city, where urban office schedules leave little room for offering-making, an enterprising type has begun a canang delivery service.

I try my own hand at a canang, but let us say that the contents of my kitchen sink strainer would have made an equally pleasing and visually splendid gift for the gods. Dewa tells me that the appearance doesn't matter: "It's the work you are offering."

Indeed, a few hours after they have been made, canang are dried and faded. Another morning, at an outdoor cafe, I see a woman putting out an offering of mango and sweet rice. The contents, as she sets it down and turns away, is lapped up by her dog. She doesn't seem to care. It's the thought, as they say, that counts.

To most Balinese, Dewa tells me, making canang doesn't feel like work. "It's our meditation," he says. And this is how he feels about gamelan. Far from being simply a job, a way to pay for food, his music is a form of meditation and an offering. Like a farmer's rice or a dancer's dance, a gamelan performance at a Balinese ceremony is the player's offering to the gods.

Later today, for example, Dewa will play at the main palace temple in nearby Ubud. His payment: a performer's box lunch of mi goreng, decorated with the slogan Selamat minikmati: "Have a good enjoyment!"

There's no formal payment, but an informal system of debt credit exists: You play at my marriage; I provide rice for yours. While no one keeps a written record of who owes what to whom, everyone remembers. It was repayment of debt credits, says Dewa, that turned his grandfather's cremation into one of the biggest village events of the year.

Today's ceremony is an important one - a hundredth-year anniversary of the temple - and I must don a set of Emiko's pakaian adat, formal temple garb. For women, this means a yellow lace shirt and a sarong, a special ceremonial one that sheathes the legs like a cigar wrapper. It's like walking with an egg held between your knees. I don't mind, really. Once you accept that you're not going anywhere fast, you start to relax and focus on the beauty and lushness around you.

Unfortunately, we're riding Emiko's motorbike to the temple, and so I have had to unrelax and focus on careening trucks and potholes the size of Crock-Pots. I sit side-saddle, a teetering column of silk and adrenaline.

Dewa is playing for a gambuh, the oldest genre of Balinese dance. The movements are slow and angular, a sort of pointy tai chi. Like Western opera, Balinese dance is a hybrid of theater, music, and dance. Also like Western opera, it has me scratching my head. Who is the woman with the mustache? What is the man in the baggy pants so upset about? I'm lost, but sometimes it's better that way. To the clueless visitor, everything seems magical. Security guards look like princes. A sound check is an incantation.

At present I'm captivated by a man in a yellow Nehru jacket. He holds a piglet swathed in matching yellow cloth, leading me to believe that he's brought his livestock to be blessed. A man with a duckling, similarly attired, stands behind him. How nice, I whisper to Emiko, that even farm animals are accorded respect. What a wise and gentle religion.

"Actually, it isn't so much a blessing as..." Her words are interrupted by a hideous squeal that cuts across the gamelan music. "...an offering." She means a sacrifice.

A crowd gathers. A video camera swings its gaze from the dancers to the sacrifice area. One of Emiko's friends puts a hand on my arm. "I'm sure it'll have a good reincarnation," she says.

Meanwhile, men have joined the women dancers. The men are stout and thickly padded, so as to appear menacing - or, anyway, hard to knock over. They roll their eyes and move their jaws wildly up and down, like Nutcracker soldiers drunk on leave. Their fingers keep up a frenetic tremolo, as though dispatching urgent messages in Morse code.

In the street outside, a woman strolls past with a basket balanced on her head. This has long been the manner in which Balinese women carry their wares to market. The difference is that nowadays the cash crop in the basket is as likely to be woodcarvings as rice or bananas.

The basket is the size of a wicker laundry hamper, but the woman wears it like a party hat. Emiko surmises that all their practice with baskets, shifting the head this way and that to balance the load while moving through the marketplace, is what makes the women able to execute the anatomy-defying head movements of Balinese dance. Emiko should know: She's studied traditional dance and taught it to schoolgirls at Dewa's family compound.

Though it's a weekday, the palace temple is packed. I ask Emiko if everyone has the day off from work.

"The ceremony runs for 21 days," she says. "As far as I can tell, people are taking the whole month off!"

Morning in Bali sounds like a gamelan concert. Roosters strike the opening notes, followed by cicadas, a bass line of lowing cattle, and a duck's percussive quacks. Each on its own is jarring, yet together they're music. Do not try to explain this to a gamelan professional. When I try, Dewa squints through cigarette smoke and asks: "I play like ducks?"

Dewa is showing me around the village temple. We are standing in a courtyard where cremations take place. Depending on your wealth and connections, a cremation can be as elaborate and showy as a marriage or a tooth filing. (At puberty, Balinese children have their canine teeth filed flat, a symbolic taming of any savage tendencies.) In a corner, a man tends a small, smoky fire. I remark that it must have been a poor, humble person who died. Dewa looks at me.

"That is garbage," he says. "He is burning garbage."

Inside the temple itself, preparations are under way for a tumpek, a holy day, this one devoted to the gamelan. A trio of priests, all former musicians, is arriving at nightfall to bless the players and their instruments.

In Bali, it seems, everything is blessed. Books have a tumpek, as do barnyard animals, rice, and trees. (Banyan trees, the elders of the tree kingdom, are accorded special respect. People honk as they go by, a way of asking the tree's permission to pass. "To Balinese people, honk is not angry," explains Dewa. "More like: 'Hi!'")

Tumpek are open to broad interpretation. The tumpek for knives, for example, is generalized by some to be a holy day for sharp objects; others apply it to metal things. The latter interpretation explains - sort of - why once a year you'll see flowers sticking out of the grilles of trucks.

One of Dewa's troupe tends a cooking fire made from coconut hulls. Beside him, a young man fashions a length of bamboo into an impromptu satay cooker, the wood skewers aligned like xylophone keys. Someone else is pounding jackfruit on a tree stump. A man wearing a pink polo shirt with his temple sarong introduces himself and invites me to the ceremony tonight. He leans in close and flashes his eyebrows: "We have cycling pig!"

I smile and nod. In a land that blesses carrot peelers, anything seems reasonable. "You're not going to kill it, are you?" I ask.

The eyebrows drop. He motions behind him: Under a banyan tree, a suckling pig rotates slowly on a hand-cranked spit. Clearly not going cycling anytime soon.

Around noon we amble back across the street to Dewa's compound for lunch. His mother runs a small take-out place from the family kitchen, the closest thing to a restaurant in Pengosekan. The remainder of the afternoon glides by like a barge on the horizon. The men practice their music and nap, the women chat and cook and finish their canang. Though Dewa's family is hosting the tumpek and there must be a hundred details to attend to, no one seems stressed or short-tempered. In the three days I've been here I have yet to see a child cry.

The type A personality doesn't seem to exist in the Balinese village. Schedules are loose. Appointments are optional. Mothers, who in the States would simply drop their children off at music classes, stick around for the entire two-hour lesson. They listen and talk among themselves while younger children on bikes raise dust in the compound yard.

This is not laziness. It's having priorities in order. The Balinese work only as hard as is needed to keep the children and elders fed, the gods pleased, the village clean. The rest of the time, they savor life. Any extra money they amass, they spend, usually on a ceremony.

"Ceremonies," Dewa points out, "are a bigger expense than food."

What's nice is that the money stays in the community. "If we need bamboo," says Dewa, "we buy bamboo from my friend. If we need rice, we pay the farmer in town. I spend a lot of money," he smiles. "But my friends get it."

Dewa smiles almost constantly while he talks, not in the forced manner of a salesman but with obvious sincerity. His smile is a feature of his face, like his nose or his eyebrows. I find myself becoming conscious of the deadpan drear of my face at rest and have begun to interject random grins in an attempt to keep up my end of the bargain. There's a good chance I look ridiculous, baring my teeth like a nervous temple monkey.

At seven o'clock the village kulkul sounds, summoning the players to the tumpek ceremony. A kulkul is a carved wooden cylinder the size of paper towel roll, which issues a hollow tok when struck - a cross between a woodpecker and a chuck-wagon triangle. No one at Dewa's house pays it any attention.

An hour later I ask Dewa if that was indeed the kulkul we'd heard. He confirms that it was. I ask him how he knows he's not missing the ceremony. "Because they won't start without the leader of the group, and I am the leader."

Around 8:30 we leave for the village balai banjar, an open-air pavilion for ceremonies and meetings. Some 40 gamelan performers are chatting on the stage, waiting for the priests to arrive. The gongs, benches, and metallophones of the gamelan have been pushed to one side, looking less like instruments than workout equipment at the back of someone's garage. Women saunter in, portaging heaped-up offerings of fruits and rice and flowers on their heads, Carmen Miranda-style. One family offers an entire chicken - split and roasted, its wings and legs akimbo like a Balinese dancer. You long to see someone lose their footing, not out of spite but to witness the spectacle of all that food cascading to the floor.

The priests have arrived. They slip off their shoes and pad barefoot to the stage. Balinese religious ceremonies are a far cry from the gleaming, sanitized rituals of my Catholic youth. One priest's robes are smudged around his midsection, giving him the look of a small-town butcher, the sort of affable, easygoing fellow who sets aside your favorite cut and knows the names of all your kids. Another carries a Chanel knock-off quilted handbag. Whether this means he is higher-ranked or merely more fashionable is hard to say. He pulls a set of bells from the bag. These he rings, as he chants blessings in a seductive monotone.

The third priest, meanwhile, takes a Bic lighter from his pocket and lights the incense sticks that protrude, antennae-like, from the offerings. The rest of the congregation follow suit, lighting incense they've brought. A little boy perhaps four years old waves his incense like a sparkler.

At some point the gamelan players have begun praying along with the priests. The words are melodious, half-sung, half-spoken. With each incantation, a fresh blossom is pressed between the fingertips. Everyone's hands are then raised above the head in prayer, and eyelids are lowered. Unfortunately, with eyes closed, it's difficult to know the proper moment to lower one's hands, and Dewa has to nudge me several times. Each time I open my eyes and find that I alone have my hands above my head.

One of the priests stops chanting to speak, whereupon the whole group breaks out laughing. Dewa insists it's not me they're laughing at but the suckling pig. The priest has remarked that it looks as if someone snuck in and took a few bites out of it when no one was looking. This is the second or third time the priests have interrupted the prayer cycle to share an amusing observation. The Balinese are a people who clearly love to laugh. (Bali's most popular TV program, I'm told, is World's Funniest Home Videos.)

The priest has set down his bells and is moving through the crowd with a bowl of holy water. I raise my palms as I've seen everyone else do and direct a panicked look at Dewa.

"Drink it," he whispers.

A terrible, uptight American thought presents itself: Are the priests using bottled water? Before I can figure out a tactful way to ask if the holy water is safe to drink, it's in my palms, and I'm slurping it down.

Dewa elbows me.

"Fourth, fifth, and sixth times," he says, "splash on head."

 Hinduism has the most refreshing religious ceremonies on earth. And the messiest. Flowers and rice litter the floor; my mascara is running. The third priest is making the rounds with a bowl of rice grains, letting a handful sift into each person's palm. The rice is pressed to one's forehead and temples, where it sticks until it falls off.

The service has ended, but no one seems in a hurry to leave. This is partly because no one is ever in a hurry and partly because the congregation has got wind that the suckling pig is about to be served, along with some offerings.

Around 10:30 the group, including all three priests and the last of the pig, moves over to Dewa's compound, where they talk and laugh and play music until all the lights in the village are out and the stars demand attention. Geckos speak from the rafters and night-blooming jasmine sweetens the breeze. It's nearly one o'clock, but I don't blame anyone for not wanting to go home.