“No,” I lied. I don’t like lying, but I generally have found it’s easier not to mention divorce to
the Balinese because they get so upset about it.
“Really never been married?” she asked again, and she was looking at me with great curi-
osity now.
“Honestly,” I lied. “I’ve never been married.”
“You sure?” This was getting weird.
“I’m totally sure!”
“Not even once?” she asked.
OK, so she can see through me.
“Well,” I confessed, “there was that one time.. .”
And her face cleared like: Yes, I thought as much. She asked, “Divorced?”
“Yes,” I said, ashamed now. “Divorced.”
“I could tell you are divorced.”
“It’s not very common here, is it?”
“But me, too,” said Wayan, entirely to my surprise. “Me too, divorced.”
“You?”
“I did everything I could,” she said. “I try everything before I got a divorce, praying every
day. But I had to go away from him.”
Her eyes filled up with tears, and next thing you knew, I was holding Wayan’s hand, hav-
ing just met my first Balinese divorcée, and I was saying, “I’m sure you did the best you could,
sweetie. I’m sure you tried everything.”
“Divorce is too sad,” she said.
I agreed.
I stayed there in Wayan’s shop for the next five hours, talking with my new best friend
about her troubles. She cleaned up the infection in my knee as I listened to her story. Way-
an’s Balinese husband, she told me, was a man who “drink all the time, always gamble, lose
all our money, then beat me when I don’t give him more money for to gamble and to drink.”
She said, “He beat me into the hospital many times.” She parted her hair, showed me scars
on her head and said, “This is from when he hit me with motorcycle helmet. Always, he was
hitting me with this motorcycle helmet when he is drinking, when I don’t make money. He hit
me so much, I go unconscious, dizzy, can’t see. I think it is lucky I am healer, my family are
healers, because I know how to heal myself after he beats me. I think if I was not healer, I
would lose my ears, you know, not be able to hear things anymore. Or maybe lose my eye,
not be able to see.” She left him, she told me, after he beat her so severely “that I lose my