Around the World in 80 Dinners - Bill Jamison [13]
Cheryl races after the scoundrel, full of the ferocity of a lioness defending her cub but less commanding—all observers would agree—in the requisite speed and dexterity. In the ensuing scuffle, she rescues only one each of Stanley’s arms and legs. Staring horrified at the sundered limbs, she breaks into tears while Bill says, a little too harshly, “How could you be so careless?”
“And how can you be so uncaring?”
After calming down a bit, we panic together about what to do. “Should we explain the truth to Bronwyn,” Cheryl asks, “that Stanley experienced a life-defining spiritual conversion and went to live in a religious sanctuary?”
Bill considers the possibility but says, “No, we can’t admit he’s gone and leave her without a Stanley show.”
“Then how, pray tell, do we put our Humpty Dumpty back together again?”
“Let’s look for a copy of the storybook with the same cutout doll that Bronwyn used. Maybe we can find it here or next week in Australia.” Local bookstores, it turns out, carry plenty of Western fairy tales—a young Balinese girl sits in the aisle of one shop avidly reading Cinderella—but no Stanley stories. Panic deepens.
After his third beer that evening, Bill gets another idea. “Everyone in Bali is reincarnated after death. Why not Stanley?”
Unlike most of the predominantly Muslim nation of Indonesia, the island of Bali is historically Hindu and devout in its practice of the faith. According to carefully prescribed rites, the family of the deceased, with the help of almost everyone in the village, cremates the body in a lively public ceremony. This is the only way to free the soul to return to earth in another form. Neither of us knows much more than that, but we’re planning to attend a cremation in a few days. “That’s a perfect opportunity for us,” Bill says, “to see how it’s done. Then we can reenact the whole thing for Stanley and bring him back to life in a new form.”
“And since he was so young,” Cheryl proposes without consulting any spiritual authorities other than her own bottle of brew, “he should look much the same—enough to fool Bronwyn if we dare—even though the body must be different. We can redraw him on another kind of paper, freeing us from the need of a book, and add color with crayons from Bali. The rescued arm and leg give us the right dimensions for everything.” As an art major in college, as well as a suspected accomplice in the homicide, Cheryl takes on the responsibility of giving birth to Stanley the Second. She actually delivers triplets, so we’ve got the Third and Fourth on hand for future insurance purposes.
Elaborate ceremonies accompany every stage of a person’s life in Bali, we soon learn, but the last of these, cremation, is the biggest and most important, requiring considerable preparation. Members of the community bring food to the family of the deceased, who in turn feed people participating in the rite and entertain them with gamelan music performed by a drum, xylophone, and gong orchestra. The family asks a Hindu priest to identify an auspicious day for the event, which he does by consulting the tika, a complex 210-day-per-year calendar that governs rituals. They build a funeral tower and lay out the body in a special house to be blessed with holy water, bathed, and wrapped in cloth.
Guests must prepare for the day as well. The tourism office, in booking the transportation for our six-hour excursion to the nearby village holding the cremation, tells us to bring our own water and food, which for us consists of cashews, dried fruit, and Double Stuf Oreos. Most critical, the agent says, we must wear sarongs and sashes, widely available in the Ubud central market for around four dollars per outfit. At 10:00 in the morning of the appointed day, we leave the tourism office with a small group of other visitors in a minibus long past its expiration date, air-conditioned only by