82
As for Ketut’s wife, it takes me a while to align myself with her. Nyomo, as he calls her, is
big and plump with a stiff-hip limp and teeth stained red by chewing on betel nut tobacco. Her
toes are painfully crooked from arthritis. She has a shrewd eye. She was scary to me from the
first sight. She’s got that fierce old lady vibe you see sometimes in Italian widows and right-
eous black churchgoing mamas. She looks like she’d whup your hide for the slightest of mis-
demeanors. She was blatantly suspicious of me at first—Who is this flamingo traipsing
through my house every day? She would stare at me from inside the sooty shadows of her
kitchen, unconvinced as to my right to exist. I would smile at her and she’d just keep staring,
deciding whether she should chase me out with a broomstick or not.
But then something changed. It was after the whole photocopy incident.
Ketut Liyer has all these piles of old, lined notebooks and ledgers, filled with tiny little
handwriting, of ancient Balinese-Sanskrit mysteries about healing. He copied these notes into
these notebooks way back in the 1940s or 1950s, sometime after his grandfather died, so he
would have all the medical information recorded. This stuff is beyond invaluable. There are
volumes of data about rare trees and leaves and plants and all their medicinal properties.
He’s got some sixty pages of diagrams about palm-reading, and more notebooks full of astro-
logical data, mantras, spells and cures. The only thing is, these notebooks had been through
decades of mildew and mice and they’re shredded almost to bits. Yellow and crumbling and
musty, they look like disintegrating piles of autumn leaves. Every time he turns a page, he rips
the page.
“Ketut,” I said to him last week, holding up one of his battered notebooks, “I’m not a doctor
like you are, but I think this book is dying.”
He laughed. “You think is dying?”
“Sir,” I said gravely, “here is my professional opinion—if this book does not get some help
soon, it will be dead within the next six months.”
Then I asked if I could take the notebook into town with me and photocopy it before it died.
I had to explain what photocopying was, and promise that I would only keep the notebook for
twenty-four hours and that I would do it no harm. Finally, he agreed to let me take it off the