be a lovely place to live for a while. The town is sort of like a small Pacific version of Santa
Fe, only with monkeys walking around and Balinese families in traditional dress all over the
place. There are good restaurants and nice little bookstores. I could feasibly spend my whole
time here in Ubud doing what nice divorced American women have been doing with their time
ever since the invention of the YWCA—signing up for one class after another: batik, drum-
ming, jewelry-making, pottery, traditional Indonesian dance and cooking... Right across the
road from my hotel there’s even something called “The Meditation Shop”—a small storefront
with a sign advertising open meditation sessions every night from 6:00 to 7:00. May peace
prevail on earth, reads the sign. I’m all for it.
By the time I unpack my bags it’s still early afternoon, so I decide to take myself for a walk,
get reoriented to this town I haven’t seen in two years. And then I’ll try to figure out how to
start finding my medicine man. I imagine this will be a difficult task, might take days or even
weeks. I’m not sure where to start with my search, so I stop at the front desk on my way out
and ask Mario if he can help me.
Mario is one of the guys who work at this hotel. I already made friends with him when I
checked in, largely on account of his name. Not too long ago I was traveling in a country
where many men were named Mario, but not one of them was a small, muscular, energetic
Balinese fellow wearing a silk sarong and a flower behind his ear. So I had to ask, “Is your
name really Mario? That doesn’t sound very Indonesian.”
“Not my real name,” he said. “My real name is Nyoman.”
Ah—I should have known. I should have known that I would have a 25 percent chance of
guessing Mario’s real name. In Bali, if I may digress, there are only four names that the major-
ity of the population give to their children, regardless of whether the baby is a boy or a girl.
The names are Wayan (pronounced “Why-Ann”), Made (“mah-DAY”), Nyoman and Ketut.
Translated, these names mean simply First, Second, Third and Fourth, and they connote birth
order. If you have a fifth child, you start the name cycle all over again, so that the fifth child is
really known as something like: “Wayan to the Second Power.” And so forth. If you have
twins, you name them in the order they came out. Because there are basically only four
names in Bali (higher-caste elites have their own selection of names) it’s totally possible
(indeed, quite common) that two Wayans would marry each other. And then their firstborn
would be named, of course: Wayan.
This gives a slight indication of how important family is in Bali, and how important your
placement in that family is. You would think this system could become complicated, but some-
how the Balinese work it out. Understandably and necessarily, nicknaming is popular. For in-
stance, one of the most successful businesswomen in Ubud is a lady named Wayan who has
a busy restaurant called Café Wayan, and so she is known as “Wayan Café”—meaning, “The
nora
(Nora)
#1