Chapter One - Richard Lewis

"Maybe a bit more and the demon from Penida Island will come over and gobble
you up," Wulandri replied evenly.
The two girls laughed, and Zoe sat down at Wulandri's table.
Dharma had noticed as well, and was frowning.
"The calm before the storm," Tina said. "Putu is a handsome boy."
"And a commoner. Wulandri is a royal. Her family won't be happy. And neither
will his."
"The lure of the forbidden." Tina leaned forward. "You were saying about Reed's
photos?"
"At this charity," Dharma said, "they also showed a movie taken in the 1930s of
village women husking rice with their husking poles. Have you seen this?"
In fact, Tina had seen such movies, and as with much of daily life in Bali, the
simple act of husking was infused with grace and poetry and music, the bare-breasted
women raising their long poles and pounding them down into the wooden pestle,
alternating their hands from right to left and right again, a rhythm of motion and sound.
"The people at the party, the foreigners and the Jakarta socialites and even the
young Balinese were amazed. There was much sighing about how beautiful life was back
then. But I tell you, Tina, that rice husking was hard work in a day full of hard work.
Those women were young and looked healthy but in ten, twenty years time they would be
old women, worn down and broken.
"In those years after Independence, the majority of Balinese lived on the knife
edge of poverty and disaster. A simple illness or accident could spell tragedy for a family.
And that was how life on Bali had always been, except that the fervor of Revolution and
Merdeka had given us hope. It was an atmosphere ripe for politicization of the masses.
People took their cues from feudal lineages and from family elders and from
revolutionary leaders. By 1960, there were really only two parties, the Partai Komunis
Indonesia and the Partai Nasionalis Indonesia.
"The PKI and their associates the Peasants League and Gerwani were big on land
reform. The League and Gerwani made inroads into Batu Gede. As for Gerwani, such
clever seductresses they were. They set up day care centers and health clinics, not for the
children but to indoctrinate their mothers. They wanted women to have power. It became
a joke in the neighboring villages. Oh, you're from Batu Gede? Did your wife allow you
to travel today?"
"God forbid that women have that kind authority," Tina said.
"Nah, early in 1963, a week before Mount Agung exploded, Mantera summoned
me to the palace. The whole village was busy with preparations of the big Eka Dasa
Rudra, the one hundred year ceremony at the holy mother temple on Mount Agung.
Mantera sat upon a chair in his court and I squatted upon the ground before him. I was
older than he was, big and full of muscles. He was a slender man in expensive brocade,
his cheeks red and smooth as ripe papaya. He said to me that the previous day members
of the PKI and the Peasants League had paid him a visit and told him the palace owned
too much land and ordered him to give up fields according to the land reform law.
Mantera asked me what I thought about this. He was testing my loyalty. Would I be a
friend of the palace, or an enemy? I do not wish to brag, but my choice was important. I
had good revolutionary credentials. I did not crow like a cock at every sunrise, but when I
did speak, men listened to what I had to say.
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