Eat, Pray, Love

classic kung fu movies, a form of English you could call “Grasshopperese,” because you
could insert the endearment “Grasshopper” into the middle of any sentence and it sounds
very wise. “Ah—you have very lucky good fortune, Grasshopper.. .”
I wait for a pause in Ketut’s predictions, then interrupt to remind him that I had been here
to see him already, two years ago.
He looks puzzled. “Not first time in Bali?”
“No, sir.”
He thinks hard. “You girl from California?”
“No,” I say, my spirits tumbling deeper. “I’m the girl from New York.”
Ketut says to me (and I’m not sure what this has to do with anything), “I am not so hand-
some anymore, lost many teeth. Maybe I will go to dentist someday, get new teeth. But too
afraid of dentist.”
He opens his deforested mouth and shows me the damage. Indeed, he has lost most of
his teeth on the left side of his mouth and on the right side it’s all broken, hurtful-looking yel-
low stubs. He fell down, he tells me. That’s how his teeth got knocked out.
I tell him I’m sorry to hear it, then try again, speaking slowly. “I don’t think you remember
me, Ketut. I was here two years ago with an American Yoga teacher, a woman who lived in
Bali for many years.”
He smiles, elated. “I know Ann Barros!”
“That’s right. Ann Barros is the Yoga teacher’s name. But I’m Liz. I came here asking for
your help once because I wanted to get closer to God. You drew me a magic picture.”
He shrugs amiably, couldn’t be less concerned. “Don’t remember,” he says.
This is such bad news it’s almost funny. What am I going to do in Bali now? I don’t know
exactly what I’d imagined it would be like to meet Ketut again, but I did hope we’d have some
sort of super-karmic tearful reunion. And while it’s true I had feared he might be dead, it
hadn’t occurred to me that—if he were still alive—he wouldn’t remember me at all. Although
now it seems the height of dumbness to have ever imagined that our first meeting would have
been as memorable for him as it was for me. Maybe I should have planned this better, for
real.
So I describe the picture he had made for me, the figure with the four legs (“so grounded
on earth”) and the missing head (“not looking at the world through the intellect”) and the face
in the heart (“looking at the world through the heart”) and he listens to me politely, with mod-
est interest, like we’re discussing somebody else’s life entirely.
I hate to do this because I don’t want to put him on the spot, but it’s got to be said, so I just
lay it out there. I say, “You told me I should come back here to Bali. You told me to stay here
for three or four months. You said I could help you learn English and you would teach me the