legitimate, property is valued in the same way as the Masai value cattle or as my five-year-old
niece values lip gloss: namely, that you cannot have enough of it, that once you have claimed
it you must never let it go, and that all of it in the world should rightfully belong to you.
Moreover—as I discover throughout the month of August, during my Narnia-like voyage
into the intricacies of Indonesian real estate—it’s almost impossible to find out when land is
actually for sale around here. Balinese who are selling land typically don’t like other people to
know that their land is up for sale. Now, you would think it might be advantageous to advertise
this fact, but the Balinese don’t see it that way. If you’re a Balinese farmer and you’re selling
your land, it means you are desperate for cash, and this is humiliating. Also, if your neighbors
and family find out that you actually sold some land, then they’ll assume you came into some
money, and everyone will be asking if they can borrow that money. So land becomes avail-
able for sale only by... rumor. And all these land deals are executed under strange veils of
secrecy and deception.
The Western expatriates around here—hearing that I’m trying to buy land for Way-
an—start gathering around me, offering cautionary tales based on their own nightmarish ex-
periences. They warn me that you can never really be certain what’s going on when it comes
to real estate around here. The land you are “buying” may not actually “belong” to the person
who is “selling” it. The guy who showed you the property might not even be the owner, but
only the disgruntled nephew of the owner, trying to get one over on his uncle because of
some old family dispute. Don’t expect that the boundaries of your property will ever be clear.
The land you buy for your dream house may later be declared “too close to a temple” to allow
a building permit (and it’s difficult, in this small country with an estimated 20,000 temples, to
find any land that is not too close to a temple).
Also you must take into consideration that you’re quite probably living on the slopes of a
volcano and you might be straddling a fault line, as well. And not just a geological fault line,
either. As idyllic as Bali seems, the wise keep in mind that this is, in fact, Indonesia—the
largest Islamic nation on earth, unstable at its core, corrupt from the highest ministers of
justice all the way down to the guy who pumps gas into your car (and who only pretends to fill
it all the way up). Some kind of revolution will always be possible here at any moment, and all
your assets may be reclaimed by the victors. Probably at gunpoint.
Negotiating all this dodgy business is not something I have any qualifications whatsoever
to be doing. I mean—I went through a divorce proceeding in New York State and everything,
but this is another page of Kafka altogether. Meanwhile, $18,000 of money donated by me,
my family and my dearest friends is sitting in Wayan’s bank account, converted into Indonesia
rupiah—a currency that has a history of crashing without notice and turning to vapor. And
Wayan is supposed to get evicted from her shop in September, which is around the time I
nora
(Nora)
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