Eat, Pray, Love

“Last time you have too much worry, too much sorrow. Last time, you look like sad old wo-
man. Now you look like young girl. Last time you ugly! Now you pretty!”
Mario bursts into ecstatic applause and pronounces victoriously: “See? Painting working!”
I say, “Do you still want me to help you with your English, Ketut?”
He tells me I can start helping him right now and hops up nimbly, gnome-like. He bounds
into his little house and comes back with a pile of letters he’s received from abroad over the
last few years (so he does have an address!). He asks me to read the letters aloud to him; he
can understand English well, but can’t read much. I’m his secretary already. I’m a medicine
man’s secretary. This is fabulous. The letters are from art collectors overseas, from people
who have somehow managed to acquire his famous magic drawings and magic paintings.
One letter is from a collector in Australia, praising Ketut for his painting skills, saying, “How
can you be so clever to paint with such detail?” Ketut answers to me, like giving dictation:
“Because I practice many, many years.”
When the letters are finished, he updates me on his life over the last few years. Some
changes have occurred. Now he has a wife, for instance. He points across the courtyard at a
heavyset woman who’s been standing in the shadow of her kitchen door, glaring at me like
she’s not sure if she should shoot me, or poison me first and then shoot me. Last time I was
here, Ketut had sadly shown me photographs of his wife who had recently died—a beautiful
old Balinese woman who seemed bright and childlike even at her advanced age. I wave
across the courtyard to the new wife, who backs away into her kitchen.
“Good woman,” Ketut proclaims toward the kitchen shadows. “Very good woman.”
He goes on to say that he’s been very busy with his Balinese patients, always a lot to do,
has to give much magic for new babies, ceremonies for dead people, healing for sick people,
ceremonies for marriage. Next time he goes to Balinese wedding, he says, “We can go to-
gether! I take you!” The only thing is, he doesn’t have very many Westerners visiting him any-
more. Nobody comes to visit Bali since the terrorist bombing. This makes him “feel very con-
fusing in my head.” This also makes him feel “very empty in my bank.” He says, “You come to
my house every day to practice English with me now?” I nod happily and he says, “I will teach
you Balinese meditation, OK?”
“OK,” I say.
“I think three months enough time to teach you Balinese meditation, find God for you this
way,” he says. “Maybe four months. You like Bali?”
“I love Bali.”
“You get married in Bali?”
“Not yet.”