Eat, Pray, Love

much forget about Tutti ever getting enough education to go someday to Animal Doctor Col-
lege.
Other factors have emerged over time. Those two shy girls I noticed on the first day, hid-
ing in the back of the kitchen? It turns out that these are a pair of orphans Wayan has adop-
ted. They are both named Ketut (just to further confuse this book) and we call them Big Ketut
and Little Ketut. Wayan found the Ketuts starving and begging in the marketplace a few
months ago. They were abandoned there by a Dickensian character of a woman—possibly a
relative—who acts as a sort of begging child pimp, depositing parentless children in various
marketplaces across Bali to beg for money, then picking the kids up every night in a van, col-
lecting their proceeds and giving them a shack somewhere in which to sleep. When Wayan
first found Big and Little Ketut, they hadn’t eaten for days, had lice and parasites, the works.
She thinks the younger one is maybe ten and the older one might be thirteen, but they don’t
know their own ages or even their last names. (Little Ketut knows only that she was born the
same year as “the big pig” in her village; this hasn’t helped the rest of us establish a timeline.)
Wayan has taken them in and cares for them as lovingly as she does her own Tutti. She and
the three children all sleep on the same mattress in the one bedroom behind the shop.
How a Balinese single mother facing eviction found it in her heart to take in two extra
homeless children is something that reaches far beyond any understanding I’ve ever had
about the meaning of compassion.
I want to help them.
That was it. This is what that trembling feeling was, which I’d experienced so profoundly
after meeting Wayan for the first time. I wanted to help this single mother with her daughter
and her extra orphans. I wanted to valet-park them into a better life. It’s just that I hadn’t been
able to figure out how to do it. But today as Wayan and Armenia and I were eating our lunch
and weaving our typical conversation of empathy and chopsbusting, I looked over at little Tutti
and noticed that she was doing something rather odd. She was walking around the shop with
a single, small square of pretty cobalt blue ceramic tile resting on the palms of her upturned
hands, singing in a chanting sort of way. I watched her for a while, just to see what she was
up to. Tutti played with that tile for a long time, tossing it in the air, whispering to it, singing to
it, then pushing it along the floor like it was a Matchbox car. Finally she sat upon it in a quiet
corner, eyes closed, singing to herself, buried in some mystical, invisible compartment of
space all her own.
I asked Wayan what this was all about. She said that Tutti had found the tile outside the
construction site of a fancy hotel project down the road and had pocketed it. Ever since Tutti
had found the tile, she kept saying to her mother, “Maybe if we have a house someday, it can
have a pretty blue floor, like this.” Now, according to Wayan, Tutti often likes to sit perched on