Letters From An Island Son, Far From Home

Stefan Verbano graduated from the University of Oregon with a degree in Journalism in spring 2011. From February 2012 to May 2014, he served as a United States Peace Corps volunteer in the remote village of Mwanachama in Mansa District, Luapula Province, Zambia, Africa. For those two years he worked with local village leaders and farmer cooperatives, teaching about conservation agriculture and establishing poultry income-generating activities, all in order to create greater food security and rural livelihoods. Upon leaving Africa, Stefan has been heading east through Asia as a common traveler, working on Malaysian organic farms, climbing Himalayan mountains, contemplating eastern spirituality and exploring the culture, language, food, religion and landscape of a vast and beautiful continent. He is the son of Lawrence Verbano and Christine Damarjian. These are his letters home:


Sati's Inferno
Part I

The ability to perspicuously gauge someone’s intentions - to clearly perceive their soul’s yin-yang ratio of darkness and light, and to know which of the two drives them most strongly - will deliver you from many perils in a place like this. It is a practice I have had to hone over he past few years of casting my lot with strangers; of finding allies in the most unsuspecting places, while standing at the fringes of truck stops flagging down rides from Tanzanian and Botswanan long-distance semi drivers; while getting stranded at deserted highway junctions on the way to Malawi only to put my trust in a fellow hitchhiker who brings me to his hut on a moonless night and scoops his three sleeping children up off the living room floor so that I may take their place.
As the old saying goes, the path of the righteous is beset on all sides by the tyranny of evil men. And I have seen this path, not in some metaphorical, allegorical representation, but as a concrete, ethereal vision plain as day while sitting on a spongy blue mat in a Theravada Buddhist meditation center in Malaysia. It was a scene straight out of The Divine Comedy, except I did not have the great sage Virgil sounding out the steps ahead of me as I went. A protracted rocky ridge straight as a Manhattan sidewalk and narrow as a balance beam sprawled forward to meet the horizon, bent only by a handful of stone staircases set at intervals - some with only three or four toddler steps, and others downright daunting in their magnitude, like the approach to an Aztec temple built for 12-foot-tall adherents. This was “the straight path which never waivers”, and far, far below its gravel lane I saw the concentric circles of Dante’s daydream; giant chasms in the earth, each one smoking like the pit of perdition. I could see the heathens, the infidels, the sinners, the wicked; adulterers, false prophets, idolaters, gluttons, soothsayers, war profiteers, liars, deviants, murderers, cheats, and coveters in their respective circles, each being prescribed a form of poetic justice tantamount to their respective crimes. The throng was massive; thousands and thousands of tortured, wandering souls stretching across the craggy, barren landscape of fire and brimstone on either side of the ridge, meandering through clouds of smoke and dust all the way to the Styx’s jet black waters where, far off on the aqueous horizon, I could see the tiny speck of Charon at the tiller of his gondola, ferrying the souls of newly dead from the far shores of the Acheron across the river to the darker shades below.

And the words of the old rock and roll prophets rang true; if hell is a highway, then heaven is indeed a stairway. I could see a handful of radiant human forms in white robes walking the ridge of the righteous ahead of me, each one at different points along the path, and 1,000 feet below them the souls of the damned were trying to scrabble up the sheer cliff, clawing at the smooth rock, vainly grasping for footholds and handholds, all the while howling like primordial beasts as the rocks beneath their feet jostled themselves loose and Hades’ escapees fell back to earth in a pile of emaciated bones, bloated stomachs and tattered clothes. The separation was infallible, eternal, non-negotiable.

But this lucid division which so plainly polarizes the virtuous and the wicked in the afterlife - pure spirits tiptoeing precariously above, damned souls writhing in bloody dog piles below - is absent from the mortal world. Here, souls have not left their bodies yet, and so their cleanliness is not worn on their corporeal sleeves for the world to see. When you meet a stranger, the best judgment of their character comes in the form of a feeling, an intuition, a premonition. Years of wandering around strange lands full of strange people can help to develop this judgment; this radar - to make it more accurate, at least. This is out of sheer necessity; a life lived in a comfy bubble full of familiar faces and unflinching trust will never necessitate learning to read people based on the energy they emit; to be able to take a good, long look into an unfamiliar pair of eyes and recognize maliciousness in its many mutations. But a life lived on the road will develop this ability, simply because it is crucial to survival. It would be impossible to travel across certain reaches of this earth without trusting fellow human beings - without taking chances and putting life and limb in strangers’ hands. Taxi drivers hold more power than anyone gives them credit for, and in frontier towns in Indonesia where there is no personnel registry, no uniforms, no logos, no meters, no companies, no 1-800 hotline, no glowing dashboard GPS module and, most importantly, virtually no English comprehension, they hold all the chips.

I met a 26-year-old, smooth-faced Indonesian kid named Sati on the “slow” ferry from Padang Bay, Bali to Lembar - a port town on the island of Lombok, the next significant landmass east in the archipelago - who tested the efficiency of my virtue radar down to its nuts and bolts. Almost two entire weeks later, as I lay here sprawled out over a cushioned bench chugging along on this night train heading back to Jakarta’s international airport and a plane that will whisk me away from this strange and wondrous country, I still don’t know what to make of him. I still don’t know where in my divine meditative vision he would be deposited; whether up high on the rugged, unwavering moral mountain path, or down low in the alluvial plains of eternal damnation. He was an enigma; bereft of classification, beyond the dichotomy of morality which came to me in a meditative vision, and, because I ended up listening to my intuition and giving him the slip, I will never be able to tell which shade glows brightest in him - the darkness of the valley or the light of the ridge.

Part II

He was sitting on the passenger cabin bench right in front of me eating peanuts and bananas bought from the local women selling their home-grown fare out of plastic buckets perfectly balanced on their heads. My own was lolling to and fro with the rocking seas - as if the muscles in my neck had volunteered to fight the first skirmish of my physiological mutiny - and it was all I could do to keep my body in an upright position. I had dark blue circles under my eyes from lack of sleep, for the night before I had climbed Mt. Agung with our guide Keriani and the “Belgians”, and it was now 1 p.m. and I had not stopped moving since the day before. Christmas morning had dawned on the mountain, our trekking troupe had snapped the much-coveted million-dollar photo of sunrise over Bali from 9,000 feet, and without even a moment to sit down and rest our aching bones, we began the 5-hour descent back the way we came, this time in the cool air and golden light of morning.

The “Belgians’” personal driver met them at the bottom, and they mercifully offered to give me a ride to the minibus terminal in Klungkung, the next town on the main southeast Bali highway. We finally bid each other fatigued farewells conjuring up the strength to smile and exchange contact information, and then they were gone, and all of my luggage was lying in a pile on the filthy tarmac outside of the station, and I was barefoot because the driver demanded that we remove our cruddy shoes before cramming into his vacuumed-upholstery, vanilla-air-freshener Toyota sedan. I sat on the curb shaking the dirt out of my socks and shoes before lashing them once again to my feet, with about a dozen down-and-out looking locals gazing dumbfounded at the spectacle like it was the most interesting thing they had seen all week. I greeted them, as is the rule in this place, and their smiles bloomed - it sounds like hyperbole, but that is the only verb I can avail myself of that accurately describes the genuine Balinese grin. With luggage strapped all about me once again, I walked through the gate of the bus station and began the hour-long process - in broken Bahasa Indonesian and then broken English - of finding out which minibus was going to Padang Bay, and how much the fair price should be. Anyone who has ever tried to arrange transport in a minibus station in some boondocks town in an over-touristed “third-world” country will get the general idea; three dozen minibuses in various stages of decay, not another white person in sight, drunk locals with missing teeth trying to charge you three times the going rate for a seat in one of the buses, or better yet trying to convince you to “book” the entire bus for yourself for an even more outrageous price.

“No boss, please, I don’t want a ‘special booking’,” I would repeat over and over. “I just want a seat on the bus going to Padang Bay.”

“How much do you want to pay?” they would ask, letting out a different kind of smile; one that wilted instead of bloomed; the difference between a fake rose and a real one.

“I want to pay as much as it costs everyone else,” I would groan, this being the third or fourth iteration of this same conversation. “How much are your other passengers paying, boss?”

Then they would just laugh in my face at the ridiculousness of this request; at this “orang putih” with enough luggage for a lunar excursion asking to be treated equally - the same as everyone else in the station - regardless of the color of his skin. I flailed about in this manner for awhile, being led in circles by drivers who would ask me where I was going and, after hearing my response, would point with an outstretched hand in a vague direction of several broken-down-looking buses on the other side of the parking lot. “That one,” they would say, and walk off. Once or twice after they pointed to a promising looking ride, I approached the passenger window only to find the greasy driver snoring away loudly sprawled out on the front bench seat. Across the station the other drivers were still watching me, so I clasped my hands together and laid the side of my head against them at an angle, in the universal “sleeping” pantomime. This really cracked them up, and one of the more benevolent drivers walked over to try to help me, banging on the roof of the bus whose driver was inside sawing logs. He jolted awake from the commotion, looking very discombobulated for a few seconds like he didn’t know where he was, and then he saw me and instantly his minibus hustler instincts kicked in and the whole depressing dialogue would start up again.

“Where do you want to go, my friend?”

“Padang Bay, boss. Are you going there?”

“Yes, yes, no worries! So how much do you want to pay?”

After an hour of this ridiculousness, a well-dressed and presumably well-educated Indonesian waiting for a bus of his own took me under his wing; the one man in that station who didn’t view me as a walking, talking, clueless white cash cow.

“This bus will take you for 20,000, my friend,” he told me, offering to take the guitar case from my hand and throw it on the luggage pile. His smile was genuine.

The bus was full of old village women who started giving me the stink eye as soon as I stepped over the running board, and kept it up periodically for the next hour. Even after - at one of the bus’s numerous stops - I helped one of the women offload onto the street a giant woven bamboo basket of fruit tied up with string and ribbon, their expressions did not change. Winning them over was a hopeless cause, it seemed. Tourism has warped Bali beyond repair.

I arrived at Padang Bay in the early afternoon, bought my 45,000-rupiah ($3.50) foot passenger ticket for the 5-hour “slow boat” trip to Lombok, and asked half a dozen dock workers which ferry in the bay I should keep an eye on so I’m not late for passenger boarding, all before I figured the system out. The ferry itself was nothing to write home about (no pun intended); the bottom deck crammed with motorcycles, cars, and busses, and up above the urine-soaked bathrooms with overflowing squat toilets, overpriced concessions, hordes of people in want of a place to sit. But there was a certain charm about the rust bucket as well. In the front of the cabin, volunteer musicians strummed guitars and banged on hand drums, belting away sing-a-longs in Bahasa, and were rarely given more than two pairs of hands clapping for applause, which - in true Indonesian spirit - didn’t seem to phase the performers at all. Part of the cabin looked like a hookah lounge; sleeping mats and pillows flung all over the place with fully-dressed passengers conked out in the middle of the day using their jackets for pillows as their still-conscious compatriots tripped and maneuvered between them, rousing none. Everyone, everywhere was smoking clove cigarettes - even a few with their smoldering heads resting against signs stating “Dilirang Merokok” (“No Smoking”). Before departure, throngs of snack peddlers swept through the aisles selling the usual refreshments; biscuits, fruit slices, cup of noodles, coffee, ice cream, candy, cassava chips, triangular packets of sticky rice and chicken wrapped up in banana leaves. One guy, who I will admit seemed out of place, was hawking hunting knives with compasses inlaid in their hilts.

Sati asked me if I wanted some peanuts. This simple request was the genesis of our strange and short-lived friendship; he is an acquaintance I have made during many months of traveling which will continue to perplex me for weeks to come as to the true nature of his soul. He was Balinese Hindu, went to school to be an air traffic control technician and had worked at airports in Taiwan and Singapore in the past before getting laid off and returning to Bali. Now he was working behind the reception desk of some chic tourist hotel monstrosity in the city of Denpasar, Bali’s capital. He was coming home to celebrate Kuningan - the last day of an annual Balinese Hindu celebration called “Galungan”.

Galungan is the first day of a 10-day festival celebrating the creation of the universe, when spirits of deceased relatives who have been cremated return to earth and visit their former homes. These ten days are rife with activity in Bali’s “kampungs” (“villages”), since the current inhabitants feel a responsibility in being hospitable to the spirits of their visiting ancestors through prayers, ceremonies and offerings. Kuningan is the finale, when the spirits bid farewell to the realm of the living and return to heaven. I arrived in Bali on the first day of the festival - December 17 - and as soon as I hopped off the ferry from Java and onto the local bus going to Denpasar, I knew some special occasion was in the works by the sheer number of ornately decorated, curved bamboo stalks lining the islands’s roads. These poles are called “penjor”, and have offerings to the visiting spirits suspended at the ends, like dangling grass lanterns.

During Galungan in Ubud - a hilly town in central Bali pronounced “Ooh-Bood” - ranks of children dressed up in Balinese Hindu garb paraded down the streets banging gongs and cymbals and drums, while a select two made up the front and hind legs of what looked like a cow costume, and the whole procession would stop at certain intervals and perform Ngelawang - the “Dance of the Barong”. Balinese Hindus believe the Barong is a divine protector in the form of a mythical beast, and his dance is meant to restore the balance of good and evil in households. After the dance, a cardboard donation box would go around the mass of spectators; mostly camera-clad, slightly confused westerners like myself.

Sati’s father had passed away when he was young, but his mother and much of his nuclear and extended families lived on the island of Lombok, which has a predominantly Muslim population. Since Bali is almost entirely Hindu, I had not seen a “masjid” (“mosque”) in almost two weeks, but as soon as I got off the ferry in Lembar, one of Lombok’s main port towns, the curved domes and free-standing minarets abounded once again, just like on Indonesian islands closer to continental Asia. If one was to travel west to east in Indonesia from Sumatra to Lombok, Bali would be just a small hiccup of Hinduism in an almost omnipresence of mosques, hijabs, white robes, calls to prayer and a supreme lack of affordable alcohol and most pork products.

We started with small talk: where we were from, what we planned to do on Lombok; the usual stranger formalities. He was a local, returning to the family homestead to celebrate an ancient, holy Hindu festival, and I was a tourist, traveling to an island I had only heard about by chance during a drunken late-night ramble by a fellow American on the island of Penang in Malaysia. He was going to pay respects to the visiting spirits of his dead ancestors, I was going surfing. Go figure.

His friendliness was contagious. He loved to talk - to ask questions about my life - and my descriptions of living in Africa (a continent, not a country) seemed to really put the zap on his head. After some cursory back-and-forth about eastern spirituality revolving around my puny understanding of Hinduism picked up while traipsing through Nepal for four months, I politely asked him to excuse me. I explained the story of Agung; how I had not slept the night before, and how, as much as it intrigued me to ruminate on topics of faith with people who have a completely different theological take on the world as I do, what I really needed was to lay out on the outside deck and take a nap. He didn’t seem to be phased by this, and I figured that was that. Hours later, when the ferry was starting its approach into Lembar Harbor, Sati found me prostrate on the deck, half-asleep, sunning myself and trying to ease the mounting soreness in my body’s lower half. We struck up a conversation again, and, without imposing, I mentioned how I was coming to Lombok a day earlier than I had planned, and that I neither had travel plans for the evening nor a place to stay that night. All at once I saw where the conversation was going, and before I could think twice he was inviting me to his family home to stay with him.

This was one of those critical moments when the ability to read someone  correctly - to gauge their intentions, to plainly see their subterfuge - will deliver you from many perils and pitfalls while traveling in the favor and company of strangers. Sati seemed to come on strong, but I deduced that this was just his way; that he really didn’t have a sinister bone in his body, and he was just being overtly friendly because, on most days, the only interactions he has with tourists probably involves them asking him for extra towels and directions to “decent” restaurants; to call them taxis and to send the maintenance guy upstairs to unclog their toilets.

So I agreed to come with him on the back of his motorbike, and he handed me a spare helmet. We separated from the throng queuing up to exit the ferry once it had docked and wove through the parkade of bikes until we found his, mounted up, and zoomed off the loading ramp into the rainy dusk, winding through back roads until the commercial buildings and mosques fell away, replaced by the squat cement black-iron roofed houses and rice paddies of the “kampungs”. We pulled through a makeshift bamboo gate left ajar and into the garbage-strewn yard of a family compound bordered on all sides by a 5-foot-high cement wall. I could hear voices in every direction chattering excitedly in Bahasa. The main rectangular building was the sleeping quarters, with several smaller outbuildings scattered across the yard: kitchen, toilet/shower, an obviously Hindu shrine. Per his instructions, I got off the bike in the yard so he could go park it on the other side of the house. Rounding the corner of the house toward its entrance, I kept to the shadows, waiting for Sati to materialize in front and introduce me so that no one would get spooked or confused as to how this overburdened white man managed to suddenly show up in the lamplight of their front yard in the middle of Nowhere, Lombok in the early evening. After half a minute or so, I saw my newfound friend walk up to the porch beaming, and embrace his relatives with bear hugs and cries of joy. As if that was my cue, I cocked out a leg to take the first step toward the exuberant huddle; into the light to make my introductions and attempt to shake two dozen hands at the same time.

What happened next I will never forget for the rest of my life; the feeling of real, pure, unadulterated, crystalline fear. Everything seemed to move in slow motion. A brick was sent sailing through a plate glass window; first the heavy racket of glass slabs falling on concrete, then hundreds of delicate tinkles as the smaller, lighter pieces went skipping across the ground. Women were screaming, young girls were weeping, enraged men were shouting louder and louder over one another, all in Bahasa, and the mob of people in the yard exploded into a rugby scrum. At first the violence seemed to be directionless - just a throbbing mass grabbing at collars and shaking each other senseless - but then I began to notice how all of the hostilities were being directed at one man, the brick-thrower, I assumed. They began to push him around the yard, pushing, throwing punches and wagging pointed fingers like daggers in this face. Bodies were running all over the yard, into the fray, away to safety.

I took one step backward, back into the shadows. I wanted to run but my legs were Jell-O. I could do nothing but stand there and watch the terror unfold. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I caught Sati sprinting across the yard. I could recognize him by his smooth, handsome face and cropped haircut. I almost called out to him, just to let him know I was there; that I was scared and wanted him to validate my presence there. I would have given anything, anything, to see one of his beautiful, disarming smiles radiate across the yard in my direction at that very second. But I didn’t call out, and he didn’t smile. His face was blank, absent of emotion as he grabbed a four-foot wooden pole leaning against the side of the house and wielded it out in front of his chest with both hands like a katana. He let out a scream and bolted back across the yard toward the culprit. The first few swings missed his mark. Drunk or crazy or both, the vandal certainly had some keen reflexes about him. But then Sati stopped swinging wildly, carelessly out of unchained rage, and started aiming, focusing now on bashing his enemy’s brains in. After seeing how the odds were stacking up against him, the crazy man went on the defensive, finding a piece of sheet metal roofing lying out in the yard and using it as a shield against the peasant weapons and missiles of the melee. He would lift the metal over his head to deflect one or two blows, and then lower it again as he recoiled, taunting his assailants in an incoherent, fanatic babble until they worked up the strength to swing again.

I will never forget the sound of wood smashing against metal, interspersed with swearing and screaming, as leaves on the banana trees beside the house swayed in the evening breeze. I will never forget how fear clouds the eyes; causes tunnel vision; makes the world appear lopsided and swirling. I was drunk with fear; stoned on terror, and every iota of inner rationality was telling me to start running and not stop and not look back until I was surrounded by street lights and convenience stores and policemen again. But I didn’t move at all. I didn’t even blink. The train was crashing and I was its spectator, so there I remained, guitar case in one hand, hiking backpack straps digging into my shoulders, standing in a darkened yard along a potholed dirt road in an Indonesian village on an island I had never heard of watching what would surely be slapped on page A1 of tomorrow’s newspaper; a story about how a seething mob had beaten a man to death with bricks and wooden poles while the relatives of their dead ancestors and one lost, scared, pitiful white American kid sat in attendance and did nothing to stop it.

He wasn’t beaten to death. Rather, he was pummeled a half-dozen times and then pushed out onto the road, where Sati and the rest of the crowd chased after him along lightless muddy village paths. Once the madman had fled the scene, an eerie silence crept back in. I could hear labored breathing; I could see men nursing wounds and bruises, and women breaking out grass brooms to begin sweeping up the broken glass. Cigarettes were sparked to life. And then, slowly but steadily, now that the most pressing and obvious peculiarity - the man with the sheet-metal buckler - had split the scene, the villagers milling about the yard, one by one, began to notice the other elephant in the room. One pair of eyes peering out at me through the foggy night turned into two, which turned into four. And then soon all of the people remaining from the enraged mob were staring across the yard at me, no smiles, no curiosity this time, just one intimidating collective expression which said in no uncertain terms: “what the hell are you doing here, white man?”

A young, broad shouldered village kid was the first to ask me that question, in a slightly less menacing parlance.

“Siapa anda?” he asked me in Bahasa. (“Who are you?”)

“Saya kawan… saya kawan dari Sati,” I mumbled. I could feel myself shaking uncontrollably. (“I am… a friend of Sati.”)

“Who is Sati?” he replied, squinting his eyes at me, this time asking in English.

I had no response. I had no idea who Sati was, his last name, whether this was actually his family’s home or not. I just stood there, at a loss for words, and the mob never checked its penetrating gaze. I thought I was going to be next. I honestly thought the people outside that house would come to believe I had brought the energy there which drove the man to go crazy and smash their window; that - in-line with their superstitions - it was hardly a coincidence that as soon as the scruffy orang putih showed up lurking in the shadows, this evil spirit was brought down upon them, possessing one of their own. The seconds ticked by. My interrogator wanted an answer.

And then Sati appeared again, came back through the bamboo gate into the yard, shaken, but smiling once again. Everything was going to be okay.

“Him! Him!” I yelled, almost hysterical with tears welling up in my eyes, pointing out the man who had potentially just saved my skin. “He’s my friend!”

Two seconds later, the whole thing was diffused. The mob nodded, satisfied with my alibi, and went back to cleaning up the yard. The kid who had been questioning me broke into a smile as well, slapping Sati on the back and saying “Oh, that’s okay then!”
Sati was his nickname among his peers in Denpasar and he did not go by it around his family, he would later inform me once everyone had calmed down a bit. He kept apologizing for what would henceforth be euphemistically called “the accident,” and, more than anything else, he looked downright embarrassed, like he had wanted to show off his home and his family to me; to roll out the red carpet and dust off the fine China and play host to a western guest, and I could see in his eyes how ashamed he was that this was my first impression. I told him not to worry about it; that it “was his family and his family’s business”, and this seemed to cheer him up a little. But I was never really able to expunge the image out of my head of him picking up the pole and swinging it like a baseball bat at another human being. I understand that he did what he had to do; to protect his family, but that incident seemed to show a side of him which he had tried to keep hidden; it was in that blank expression on his face when he rushed over to grab the weapon. It scared me in that moment, and it continued to scare me.

The kampung settled back to normal life after a time. The women got dinner started, and Sati asked me if I wanted to bathe - something we had been talking about since the ferry ride to Lombok, being that I was still completely covered in dirt from Agung. I agreed, and grabbed soap and a change of clothes out of my pack. One of his uncles (the man with the biggest feet in the whole place, I’m sure) lent me a pair of flip-flops and I walked across the yard, past the pile of glass fragments that half an hour ago had been a window, and proceeded to take a bucket bath in the outdoor “shower” - basically a small, square concrete slab with a chest-high wall around it. And then there I was, naked, covered in soap, ladling sauce pot-fulls of water over my aching body as children and women milled around the yard and men sat cross-legged in a circle on the porch, smoking and deliberating about what was going to be done about “the accident”. I could only tell this was the subject because an English word or two would present themselves every few minutes, like “police” or “criminal” or “jail”.

After my bath, Sati and I moved my bags into one of the spare bedrooms and walked to the neighboring compound where Sati’s sister’s family lived, and we ate dinner with them: rice, cured pork, stewed vegetables, a spicy roasted peanut and shredded coconut dish, the name of which escapes me. I fell asleep that night on a thin, soiled mattress on the floor next to Sati, whom I engaged as such because I knew no one else in the village, and it would be a little too much for me - considering the scene that just unfolded at that house - to be awoken later that night in the pitch black by a commotion outside and not know where he was. Outside I could hear the older men still smoking, arguing and deliberating about the events of the evening and what was to be done.

“The crazy man was taken to jail,” Sati told me the next morning at breakfast. “The police came last night and arrested him.”

Well, I guess the system works, I thought. On the ferry, Sati had offered to host me for the five days I was going to spend on the island, but that was sort of out of the question now. And besides, I really just wanted to get a full night’s sleep in a guesthouse and give my legs a break until I could walk easily again. My heart hurt in a way since I would have to forfeit participating in the festivities of Kuningan, but my body was completely exhausted and I could feel the dry, scratchy throat of an approaching cold, caught while shivering sweat-soaked at the top of a mountain waiting for the sun to rise.

We arranged for a taxi to pick us up at noon, and he said he would escort me to Kuta Lombok, a beach town on the southern coast, about an hour’s drive from Lembar, where I had originally planned to visit before we met and the past 18-hours of craziness began. Prior to leaving, though, I was paraded around the village for a few hours, sitting on raised bamboo platforms topped with grass roofs in half a dozen neighbors’ yards, drinking instant coffee, eating mangoes and papayas, politely declining cigarettes and playing with their newborn children. This, I came to realize, was the formula for visitors in the kampungs: make them comfortable in the shade somewhere, offer some sort of food/beverage, no matter how humble or how many times it is turned down, and then bring out the newborns to let the orang putih play with them.

“What do you think of the baby?” they would always ask me.

“Beautiful,” I would say with a smile. And they always were.

This, Sati later explained to me, was the standard. As a guest in the village, it is considered rude not to consume some morsel of whatever is being offered, so by the time I got out of there I had drunk three cups of coffee, and for someone who hates the stuff, this was a task in itself.

Before Sati and I left - before I used my limited Bahasa to thank his family profusely for the hospitality and the food; before we piled our bags into the trunk of a cab and took off for Kuta Beach - some of the middle-aged men in the village came around and asked me if I wanted to come watch a “sabung ayam”, a cockfight.

The competition was being held at a dusty, nondescript piece of cleared land on the side of the road next to a small metal-roofed, open-air structure. The spectators - all men, many of whom looked like they had spent the better part of the morning drinking “arak” (rice wine) - brought their prized roosters from all over the village, and would squat down in a circle holding their birds, trying to gauge which ones had it in for one another. Once the rivalry was determined, the circle would be cleared out, and the owners would fish around in their pockets and pull out what looked like leather shaving kits full of assorted straight razors bent at angles, which were lashed to the birds’ legs so that the razor edge would protrude off the back of the foot, arming them with weapons mother nature never intended them to have. With the blades tightly lashed down, the coaches would crouch down on opposite ends, restraining their fighters with both hands and aggravating them excessively by plucking at the plumes of their tail feathers and pinching the flap of skin next to their ear holes. I will not get into detail about what happened next, but I’m sure it’s not too hard to fathom. In the end, there was only one winner - the living chicken, obviously - and before the victory bell could be rung, and before the bookie could shell out the money to the lucky betters, the losing rooster would have been chopped up and on its way home to be made into lunch. It was hard to watch, I admit, but - much like the train wreck the previous night - it was hard to look away, too.

When our taxi arrived in Kuta, I paid the driver the fare, and assumed that Sati would stay with me in my room, at least for the night, since it was a somewhat long and expensive drive back to Lembar. But before ten minutes had elapsed, his phone rang and he said he had to get back to the family compound to help with some preparations for the festival. All of this didn’t raise any suspicion whatsoever until, right before he left to catch a minibus back across the island, he asked me if he could borrow 50,000 rupiah, assuring me that he would pay me back tomorrow when I came to the ceremony. Alarm bells started ringing once again. I told him I didn’t know if I would see him tomorrow or not; once I finally got a good night’s sleep, my legs were going to lock up from overexertion (something I learned the hard way on the Annapurna Circuit), and had my doubts about whether I could physically make it back to Lembar on public transport the following day or not. He said not to worry about it; that he would find me tomorrow somehow and pay me. There was a moment of awkwardness as I resisted, staring into his eyes, searching for deceit. But he wasn’t going to back down. I certainly owed him a token of appreciation for all that he had done for me, but something about it - something in the way he made the request - just didn’t sit right with me. I dug out my wallet and gave him the bill, nonetheless thanking him for everything he had done for me over the past 24 hours. He smiled, of course, saying it was the least he could do, and with that, he hopped off the porch in front of my room and rambled down the driveway towards the main road.

I couldn’t get him out of my head that night. I thought about the moment when he took up the pole; about that strange look he gave me when he stood, one foot out the door, with his outstretched hand aimed at me. And I made the decision to distance myself from him. To this day, I have no idea what real intentions lay in his heart; whether or not there was a dark pool of mischief lying still and quiet underneath his smiling, cheery veneer. But I listened to my intuition; the little voice in my head which had not stopped whispering out warnings since that night when the crazy man broke the window and he reacted so violently. I did not answer his phone calls. I did not respond to his text messages. Something about him - his energy - didn’t sit right with me, so, at the risk of being overtly and unforgivably rude to an otherwise beautiful and pure-hearted human being, I cut him out. I will never know if I made the right decision, but in places like this, over the course of ambiguous and unpredictable human interactions, sometimes you have to make decisions like that. Sometimes you have to protect yourself from the tyranny of evil men, and at times risk throwing the baby out with the bathwater; risk casting out someone who doesn’t deserve it. But this is not an exact science, and you must exercise caution and keep a level head about you in this world, for it is full of trickery. Forgive me, Virgil. I am new to the path, and the line between friend and foe - between good and evil - can become blurred out here in this jungle, where the better angels of our nature are not always triumphant.

Love,

-- Stef


All The Letters From An Island Son, Far From Home