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In the morning, Mario helps me buy a bicycle. Like a proper almost-Italian, he says, “I know
a guy,” and he takes me to his cousin’s shop, where I get a nice mountain bike, a helmet, a
lock and a basket for slightly less than fifty American dollars. Now I’m mobile in my new town
of Ubud, or at least as mobile as I can safely feel on these roads, which are narrow and wind-
ing and badly maintained and crowded with motorcycles, trucks and tourist buses.
In the afternoon, I ride my bike down into Ketut’s village, to hang out with my medicine
man for our first day of... whatever it is we’re going to be doing together. I’m not sure, to be
honest. English lessons? Meditation lessons? Good old-fashioned porch-sitting? I don’t know
what Ketut has in mind for me, but I’m just happy to be invited into his life.
He’s got guests when I arrive. It’s a small family of rural Balinese who have brought their
one-year-old daughter to Ketut for help. The poor little baby is teething and has been crying
for several nights. Dad is a handsome young man in a sarong; he has the muscular calves of
a Soviet war hero’s statue. Mom is pretty and shy, looking at me from way below her timidly
lowered eyelids. They have brought a tiny offering to Ketut for his services—2,000 rupiah,
which is about 25 cents, placed in a handmade basket of palm fronds, slightly bigger than a
hotel bar’s ashtray. There is one flower blossom in the basket, along with the money and a
few grains of rice. (Their poverty puts them in stark opposition to the richer family from the
capital city of Denpesar who will come to see Ketut later in the afternoon, the mother balan-
cing on her head a three-tiered basket filled with fruit and flowers and a roasted duck—a
headgear so magnificent and impressive that Carmen Miranda would have bowed down in
humility before it.)
Ketut is relaxed and gracious with his company. He listens to the parents explain their
baby’s troubles. Then he digs through a small trunk on his porch and pulls out an ancient
ledger filled with tiny writing in Balinese Sanskrit. He consults this book like a scholar, looking
for some combination of words that will suit him, talking and laughing with the parents the
whole time. Then he takes a blank page from a notebook with a picture of Kermit the Frog on
it, and writes what he tells me is “a prescription” for the little girl. The child is being tormented
by a minor demon, he diagnoses, in addition to the physical discomforts of teething. For the