Eat, Pray, Love

down to twentieth out of fifty children.
In the middle of Wayan’s telling me this story, Tutti herself came charging into the shop,
having arrived home from school. She’s eight years old now and a mighty exhibition of cha-
risma and fireworks. This little cherry bomb of a girl (pigtailed and skinny and excited) asked
me in lively English if I’d like to eat lunch, and Wayan said, “I forgot! You should have lunch!”
and the mother and daughter rushed into their kitchen and—with the help of the two shy
young girls hiding back there—produced sometime later the best food I’d tasted yet in Bali.
Little Tutti brought out each course of the meal with a bright-voiced explanation of what
was on the plate, wearing a huge grin, generally just being so totally peppy she should’ve
been spinning a baton.
“Turmeric juice, for keep clean the kidneys!” she announced.
“Seaweed, for calcium!”
“Tomato salad, for vitamin D!”
“Mixed herbs, for not get malaria!”
I finally said, “Tutti, where did you learn to speak such good English?”
“From a book!” she proclaimed.
“I think you are a very clever girl,” I informed her.
“Thank you!” she said, and did a spontaneous little happy dance. “You are a very clever
girl, too!”
Balinese kids aren’t normally like this, by the way. They’re usually all quiet and polite, hid-
ing behind their mother’s skirts. Not Tutti. She was all show-biz. She was all show and tell.
“I will see you my books!” Tutti sang, and hurtled up the stairs to get them.
“She wants to be an animal doctor,” Wayan told me. “What is the word in English?”
“Veterinarian?”
“Yes. Veterinarian. But she has many questions about animals, I don’t know how to an-
swer. She says, ‘Mommy, if somebody brings me a sick tiger, do I bandage its teeth first, so it
doesn’t bite me? If a snake gets sick and needs medicine, where is the opening?’ I don’t know
where she gets these ideas. I hope she can go to university.”
Tutti careened down the stairs, arms full of books, and zinged herself into her mother’s
lap. Wayan laughed and kissed her daughter, all the sadness about the divorce suddenly
gone from her face. I watched them, thinking that little girls who make their mothers live grow
up to be such powerful women. Already, in the space of one afternoon, I was so in love with
this kid. I sent up a spontaneous prayer to God: May Tutti Nuriyasih someday bandage the
teeth of a thousand white tigers!
I loved Tutti’s mother, too. But I’d been in their shop now for hours and felt I should leave.
Some other tourists had wandered into the place, and were hoping to be served lunch. One of