In one of the houses, discreetly curtained off with gay hangings, the young girl for whom the ceremony was being held was being adorned for the main event of the day: the ritual of filing down her canine teeth. The reason for this operation was cheerfully given us by Rai: “So she not be like animal.”
When all was ready the maiden—a pretty, frightened-looking girl of seventeen—was borne out on the shoulders of two men, for on this day her feet must never touch the ground. She was clothed in a sarong of green and gold lamé, with a gold scarf bound around her breasts and wearing a tall crown of beaten gold, heavy with ornaments.
In the center of the courtyard was the most gaily decorated pavilion of all and here she was deposited on a raised couch in full view of all the family and guests. Women attendants removed her headdress and helped her to lie down. A priest then took over, intoning prayers and throwing petals of flowers around and over her with a ceremonial gesture. Having induced at least semihypnosis, he began the task of filing down her teeth. Throughout the proceedings, the chants of a dozen handmaidens provided a moaning background, in which the girl herself joined at times as if in fear or pain. Several times she sat up long enough to rinse her mouth and spit into a yellow coconut shell. The business had just enough of a suggestion of the dentist’s chair to lend it a slightly incongruous note.
When all was over, she was again lifted to the shoulders of her bearers and carried, wan and red-eyed, back to the privacy of the dressing room.
“Soon,” Rai promised Jessica, who was visibly upset, “she be more happy, you see. This afternoon, many food—everything play.”
For us, too, there was “many food”: trays heaped high with molded rice, both plain and highly seasoned; a wide variety of curries and condiments; succulent roast pork; sate—bits of spicy meat on thin skewers; bananas, mandarin oranges, and various other dishes that I preferred to eat without identifying.
In the afternoon, as Rai had promised, the girl—now a marriageable young lady—was again carried among us, glowingly triumphant. Dances and a Balinese puppet play were presented for the assembled guests.
Also thanks to Rai—and because it was an auspicious time on the Balinese lunar calendar for ceremonial occasions of any kind—we had the opportunity of viewing a cremation. The remains of a number of deceased persons had been “saved up” for months, waiting until the bereaved families could prepare, and afford, a properly grand celebration. I use the term “celebration” advisedly, for a cremation in Bali, coming many months after the sorrow of death has faded, is not a time of mourning but a joyous release: release of the soul of the departed and, one presumes, release of the family from a heavy burden of obligation.
The procession accompanying the crematory tower itself was long and colorful. It included groups of musicians who played on the melodious Balinese drums, gongs, cymbals, and flutes; men who carried bundles of rice straw and others with cords of firewood; and a lengthy file of women with offerings of all kinds which they bore upon their heads. Everyone, it seemed, contributed food or goods, according to his means or ambition, and everything was to be consumed—by fire.
The main attraction, naturally, was the tall and elaborately decorated cremation tower, which carried the mortal remains of the dozen or so individuals who were being honored. This was borne upon the shoulders of some eighteen or twenty men, who plunged it from one side of the road to the other, splashed it with water from the drainage ditches along the way, or spun it about in erratic, zigzag patterns. This, we were told, was to confuse the spirits of the dead so they could not find their way back to haunt the living.