Not just a terrible tragedy, but a ‘monkey dance’ ruined by too many flashbulbs

SINGAPORE – Emerging from Indonesia, especially from Bali – truly a unique, still enchanting "island of the gods" (marred, but surmounting the terrible "Bali Bombings" of October 12, 2002) and landing in Singapore is like having participated in a Wayang Kulit, the romantic, mystical shadow play based on the ancient Hindu epics, then suddenly, interrupted by the harsh light of day, the magical shadow puppets vanish, and you are right back in the real world, with all its grimness and grit.

The Hindu epics are, of course, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, the latter a retelling the continuing struggle and the triumph of good over evil.

Once Indonesia gave birth to the powerful Hindu Madjapahit empire – named after the bitter pahit tree which abounds near Surabaya. The "last stand" of one of the fabulous Hindu kingdoms was at Bali in April 1908, when the Hindu king, princes, princesses and their retainers, girded in their festival best, armed with their most treasured krises, flung themselves against the rifles of the Dutch "white barbarians" in what is known today as the puputan of Klungkun.

Men and women, and children, bared themselves to the bullets, even the young ones bearing kerises (swords), so they could "die with dignity".

Such is the stuff of which Bali is made. In contrast to Muslim Indonesia, they march to a different drum – worshipping the Hindu Trinity, Shiva who dances the dance of death and creation, Vishnu, the Preserver of Life, and Brahma whose benevolent eye sees to the proper ordering of the universe.

I first went to Bali as a young journalist, so long ago that you could buy those fantastic Ubud paintings for US$10 each – but in those days, remember, ten dollars for a reporter was a heavy sum. The sound of the gamelan, the 40,000 temples, the mysterious Kechak (the "Monkey Dance", so redolent of the enchantment of the forest), the graceful Legong, where young girls seem to float, their fingers fluttering, their hips swaying (they train for these impossible movements at the age of five and retire at 13). All these seduced me into agreeing with India’s late Jawaharlal Nehru that Bali was "the morning of the world".

It’s high noon in Bali now – and steamy hot, I must warn you – but for me, after more than half a dozen visits, Bali remains a magical isle. But a paradise in which the most painful serpent’s bite was the Bali bombings.

What has changed Bali’s character most, though, is tourism. It was inevitable. And now that the island’s economy is in tatters – having lost 70 percent of their Orang Bule ("white") tourists and many of their other Orang Asing (foreign) tourists in the wake of the bombing atrocity, the Balinese are desperately striving to attract the tourist hordes anew.

It’s helpful that, reportedly, 80 percent of the tourists now going there are locals – i.e., Indonesians from Java, Sumatra, Sulawesi and other parts of that sprawling archipelago of 13,000 islands. Indonesia, with its own 220 million population, is so vast that it contains three time zones.

And more Asian tourists are arriving. One of the "saviors" of Bali’s tourist industry – with the island’s magnificent hotels (in Nusa Dua, they are so luxurious and palatial and charming, it’s mind-boggling) standing two-thirds empty – are the Japanese.

But they go clicking everywhere with their never-resting cameras, even during the most intimate sequences of the dances. I wonder if many of the Japanese – they’re mostly young adventurers, men and women these days – actually see what they’re photographing. Or do they wait till they get safely home, so they can enjoy the photos with their relatives, friends and associates. I even saw girls taking snapshots with – you know – their cellphones!

Whenever I go to Bali, I never miss going to a Kechak (spelled Kecak, really) performance – which tells of the abduction and rescue of King Rama’s wife, the beautiful Sita, from the powerful, vicious demon-king Ravenna.

The chanting of an all-male choir, attired only in loin-cloth, often a hundred strong creates a mass hypnosis as they flutter their hands and sway like the wind moving through the treetops, jibbering like a tribe of monkeys – ketchak-chak-chak, until the audience, too, is mesmerized, and harkens to the godlike message of the Ramayana.

In the old days, under the towering trees, with a pale moon up in the sky, with the half-naked men dappled with shadows from a flickering lamp in the center, the Kecak was unbelievably entrancing.

Nowadays, it’s performed on a stage, with Japanese and other tourists clicking away with their flashing little digital cameras, spoiling the magic and the mood entirely. Ketchak-chak-chak, click-click-click.

No magical moon. No flickering shadows. Even the kecak men have grown sloppy. They no longer raise their guttural voices in trancelike unison. Some of them playfully wink at each other. They wear long trousers under their checkered loin-cloths, the hibiscus (gumamela) on the right ear seems to have been replaced by a curled up red plastic flower. Ersatz and punctuated by Japanese cameras! The isle of the gods defiled, and now just by the mad bombers of fanatical Islam, the Jemaah Islamiyah!

Yet, my love for Bali lingers still. When the breeze from the ocean blows, when you hear the fifes and the rhythmic grandeur of the gamelan, the chanting, step by mistake on offerings of rice and flowers strewn everywhere – you know the gods remain lording it over the mountaintops, and volcanoes, the demons and spirits are held in check – the legend will come out right in the end.

Despite the noise and hucksterism that now surrounds the site of the terrible carnage in which 202 innocent holidaymakers were murdered by the JI terrorists’ bombs, you can still see the empty lot in which the "SARI CLUB" once stood, and across it, on Legian street, the emptiness where "PADDY’S CAFE" once happily flourished.

There has been erected a small iron fence on which hang poignant messages. Friends and family members of the victims who died there, cruelly plucked from gaiety and joy and inflicted with agonizing death, have visited and revisited the site, leaving their loving and pathetic testimonies – most of which have, long since, been packed away.

On the wall we came upon a photograph of three beautiful girls, in their late teens or early twenties. They smiled, in a group (obviously inseparable – either sisters or barkada), into the camera – a shot taken, naturally, just before the tragedy.

Beneath it was a note which was so sad and touching that I couldn’t miss scribbling it down: "To Dear Franny, Renée and Simone: We miss you three gorgeous girls very much. Not a day goes by when we don’t think of your smiling faces."

There’s much more. The girls must have been dearly beloved. The note ends – with love from your Friends in the Shire."

Another with the picture of "Jodie Cearns", a very very pretty girl, is dedicated: "Much loved daughter, sister, step-sister and friend . . . As an angel she will live forever in our hearts and souls."

There are many others.

The ghouls who fashioned that outrage in the name of their unholy cause must be cast by Allah into the deepest of hells – but, alas, many of them are alive to kill and bomb again.

I left Bali reluctantly on the early morning flight to Singapore. If you want to know, even the Den Pasar airport is bigger, more beautiful, more efficient, more neat and attractive than our decrepit NAIA Terminal 1 and even our NAIA Centennial 2.

As we boarded our aircraft, the ground staff and officers of the Singapore Airlines International stationed in Den Pasar lined up by the airplane door and sang us a farewell song – "Don’t ever leave us!" they chorused in such a heartfelt way, that it brought a tingle to our hearts.

No, gentle, terrific people of Bali – we will never leave you. You will always be in our hearts!

There is, however, another darker side. The Balinese smile, so sunny and so sincere, hides behind it a constant anxiety.

As Christine Jordis once put it in her luminous book, Bali, Java, in My Dreams: "There is not an hour of the day, not a moment in human life, not a date in the calendar that does not have its prescriptive right to prayers and libations. The air is so abuzz with demons and spirits hell-bent on fighting each other that human beings have their work cut out to contain all these restless presences."

Those flowers and offerings are to appease gods and demons. Those dances are part of the daily ritual of worship or appeasement. The harmony of life can be upset, negative forces unleashed at the drop of a hat, so the Balinese must "protect" themselves while striving to restore the magic harmony, "obtained by virtue of gifts".

In the end, do they become mixed-up? Or do they thrive on this open-ended striving?

On our last night, one of the swarm of motorbikes that zoom around everywhere (mostly Hondas, Suzukis, etc. called "motor"), a teenager whizzed past our car on his bike.

On the back of his T-shirt was the message: Fuck It All!

The kid was wrong, of course. Or was it just the T-shirt maker – and the young man didn’t understand what he was wearing?