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I can’t remember the last time I got dressed up, but this evening I dug out my one fancy
spaghetti-strap dress from the bottom of my backpack and slithered it on. I even wore lipstick.
I can’t remember the last time I wore lipstick, but I know it wasn’t anywhere near India. I
stopped at Armenia’s house on the way over to the party, and she draped me in some of her
fancy jewelry, let me borrow her fancy perfume, let me store my bicycle in her backyard so I
could arrive at the party in her fancy car, like a proper adult woman.
The dinner with the expatriates was great fun, and I felt myself revisiting all these long-
dormant aspects of my personality. I even got a little bit drunk, which was notable after all the
purity of my last few months of praying at the Ashram and sipping tea in my Balinese flower
garden. And I was flirting! I hadn’t flirted in ages. I’d only been hanging around with monks
and medicine men lately, but suddenly I was dusting off the old sexuality again. Though I
couldn’t really tell who I was flirting with. I was kind of spreading it around everywhere. Was I
attracted to the witty Australian former journalist sitting next to me? (“We’re all drunks here,”
he quipped. “We write references for other drunks.”) Or was it the quiet intellectual German
down the table? (He promised to lend me novels from his personal library.) Or was it the
handsome older Brazilian man who had cooked this giant feast for all of us in the first place?
(I liked his kind brown eyes and his accent. And his cooking, of course. I said something very
provocative to him, out of nowhere. He was making a joke at his own expense, saying, “I’m a
full catastrophe of a Brazilian man—I can’t dance, I can’t play soccer and I can’t play any mu-
sical instruments.” For some reason I replied, “Maybe so. But I have a feeling you could play
a very good Casanova.” Time stopped solid for a long, long moment, then, as we looked at
each other frankly, like, That was an interesting idea to lay on this table. The boldness of my
statement hovered in the air around us like a fragrance. He didn’t deny it. I looked away first,
feeling myself blush.)
His feijoada was amazing, anyway. Decadent, spicy and rich—everything you can’t nor-
mally get in Balinese food. I ate plate after plate of the pork and decided that it was official: I
can never be a vegetarian, not with food like this in the world. And then we went out dancing
at this local nightclub, if you can call it a nightclub. It was more like a groovy beach shack,