Eat, Pray, Love

About forty guests were there already at the neighbor’s house when we arrived, and the
family altar was heaped with offerings—piles of woven palm baskets filled with rice, flowers,
incense, roasted pigs, some dead geese and chickens, coconut and bits of currency that
fluttered around in the breeze. Everyone was decked out in their most elegant silks and lace. I
was underdressed, sweaty from my bike ride, self-conscious in my broken T-shirt amid all this
beauty. But I was welcomed exactly the way you would want to be if you were the white girl
who’d wandered in inappropriately attired and uninvited. Everyone smiled at me with warmth,
and then ignored me and commenced to the part of the party where they all sat around admir-
ing each other’s clothes.
The ceremony took hours, Ketut officiating. Only an anthropologist with a team of inter-
preters could tell you all that occurred, but some of the rituals I understood, from Ketut’s ex-
planations and from books that I had read. The father held the baby during the first round of
blessings and the mother held an effigy of the baby—a coconut swaddled to look like an in-
fant. This coconut was blessed and doused with holy water just like the real baby, then placed
on the ground right before the baby’s feet touch earth for the first time; this is to fool the
demons, who will attack the dummy baby and leave the real baby alone.
There were hours of chants, though, before that real baby’s feet could touch ground. Ketut
rang his bell and sang his mantras endlessly, and the young parents beamed with pleasure
and pride. The guests came and went, milling about, gossiping, watching the ceremony for a
while, offering their gifts and then taking off for another appointment. It was all strangely casu-
al amid all the ancient ritualistic formality, sort of backyard-picnic-meets-high-church. The
mantras Ketut chanted to the baby were so sweet, sounding like a combination of the sacred
and the affectionate. While the mother held the infant, Ketut waved before the child samples
of food, fruit, flowers, water, bells, a wing from the roast chicken, a bit of pork, a cracked
coconut... With each new item he would sing something to her. The baby would laugh and
clap her hands, and Ketut would laugh and keep singing.
I imagined my own translation of his words:
“Ohhhh... little baby, this is roast chicken for you to eat! Someday you will love roast
chicken and we hope you have lots of it! Ohhhhhhh... little baby, this is a chunk of cooked
rice, may you always have all the chunks of cooked rice you could ever desire, may you be
showered with rice for always. Ohhhhh... little baby, this is a coconut, isn’t it funny how this
coconut looks, someday you will eat lots of coconuts! Ohhhhhh... little baby, this is your
family, do you not see how much your family adores you? Ohhhhh... little baby, you are pre-
cious to the whole universe! You are an A-plus student! You are our magnificent bunny! You
are a yummy hunk of silly putty! Ooohhhhh little baby, you are the Sultan of Swing, you are
our everything.. .”