Chapter One - Richard Lewis

Chapter 17
Nol's sister Wayan was wealthy enough to have a fancy lawyer's office, but in
order not to alert the tax man, she worked out of a decrepit building lodged in Denpasar's
small intestines.
Nol found a parking spot by a meatball soup vendor, who had place his food-cart
in the shade of weary, grime-smudged tree. In his sister's law office, three assistants
communed with their computers and one fellow pecked away at a manual typewriter.
Wayan was in her inner office, partitioned off by glass windows. She was reading a legal
document to a young, well-dressed couple.
A few minutes later, the couple left, and Nol took one of the hard plastic chairs,
still warm from its previous occupant.
"And what were they here for?" he asked as he fished a mint out of the bowl on
her desk. Files and folders crammed the inner office from floor to ceiling, blocking light
from the window. Nol could practically hear the worms munching through the paper.
"A pre-nuptial agreement. She's rich and he's not."
"Same caste?"
"Same as us. Sudras. How's Putu?"
"He has this American girlfriend. Suti says we should invite her to the tooth
filing."
"Of course you should."
"You don't even know her. She's got teeth like a monkey's," Nol said, although
truth to tell, he'd never seen teeth so white and even. "We send Putu to America and he
comes back a surfer with an American girlfriend."
"What's wrong with that?"
"His skin's all dark. Like he's a peasant. We're dragging him to his homecoming
blessing at the Temple of the Crater Lake. He didn't want to go. Said the surf was going
to be good and he didn't want to miss it." Nol shook his head in disbelief, as if such a
pilgrimage could be postponed at a whim. He popped another candy into his mouth. "I've
been developing this idea. A new sales approach. See, I open a website and sell rice and
noodles and basic nonperishable market food. Everybody orders online, and everything's
delivered to their doors by a sales team. It's going to be big. A small startup investment
could earn you serious money."
Wayan's expression flattened. She leaned back and yelled through a slot in the
window, "Is that document ready?"
One of her staff handed her a folder. She put on her reading glasses.
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