Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia

They accept credit cards and speak English in Bali, making it easy to navigate. Liz changes money at the airport and asks her taxi driver to suggest a lovely hotel in Ubud. The hotel has a pool, a tropical garden, a complimenting Balinese staff, and a breakfast of piles of fresh tropical fruit. Liz’s room overlooks the treetops and costs less than ten dollars a day.

Liz seeks help in finding the medicine man. A man named Mario recognizes the name as a famous healer. He even took his cousin there the week before to cure her baby who cried all night. Once he took an American girl there, and Ketut Liyer drew a magic painting for her to help her be more beautiful. Liz tells Mario the medicine man drew a magic picture for her, too, a picture to help her find God. He says he can take Liz, not right then, but in five minutes.

Liz rides on the back of Mario’s motorbike to the family compound of the medicine man. He is in the courtyard, and they enter without knocking—there is no door anyway, just angry dogs. He wears the same sarong and golf shirt Liz remembers. He doesn’t recognize her and asks if it’s her first time in Bali and if she’s from California. He says he is less handsome now and shows her his mouth. He fell and knocked out his teeth, but he is too afraid of the dentist.

Liz says she thinks he doesn’t remember her and mentions the American yoga teacher who brought her. She describes the picture he drew and tells him he said she could help him learn English and he could teach her things he knows. No recognition. Then she says, getting desperate, “I’m the book writer, Ketut. I’m the book writer from New York” (244).

Then he remembers. He tells her she looks like a different person now, happy instead of sad, young instead of old. He remembers the bad divorce, her sadness, her worry. He tells her “Last time you ugly! Now you pretty!” (246). Ketut tells her they can start the English right away. He has letters he can’t read. After she reads the letters aloud to him, he tells her he has a wife. The last time she was there, his wife had just died. He points to a heavyset woman who has been glaring at Liz. He laments tourists have stopped coming to Bali since the terrorist bombing. He asks her to come to his house every day to teach him English. He thinks he can teach her Balinese meditation in three months, maybe four. He asks if she got married in Bali. When she says, “not yet,” he replies, “Maybe soon.” Liz gives him his first English lesson, the difference between “Nice to meet you” said the first time you meet someone and “Nice to see you” every time after that.

Bali is a Hindu island in the two-thousand-mile Muslim archipelago of Indonesia. The ancestors came from Java, fleeing a Muslim uprising in the 16th century, bringing only the high-caste Javanese, the royal families, craftsmen, and priests. Everyone in Bali descends from a king, a priest, or an artist. This accounts for their pride and brilliance. The Hindu caste system prevails with a methodical social and religious organization.

Religious ceremonies are so important that life is a constant cycle of offerings and rituals, with 13 major rites of passage. Lifelong appeasement ceremonies are conducted to protect the soul from the 108 vices that include violence, stealing, laziness, lying, and brutality. Beauty and order are revered. Citizens are named for when they were born in the family: First, Second, Third, and Fourth.

The Balinese are likely to ask three questions: Where are you going? Where are you coming from? Are you married? All three reflect position and orientation. The best answer about marriage is “not yet.” Liz’s wandering life as a single, divorced woman falls outside their grid. She calls it a “perilous dislocation.” Her definition of equilibrium, equal freedom, meaning “how things go,” terrifies the Balinese who “organize how things go, in order to keep things from falling apart” (251).

Liz buys a bike and rides it to Ketut’s village. Balinese parents have brought a crying, teething baby to him for help and placed about 25 cents in his basket. He prescribes rubbing the baby’s gums with red onion juice, a ritual for driving away demons, and an offering of a killed chicken and a small pig. The family will then eat its offering to the gods. Ketut chants a mantra over a bowl of water, blesses the baby with it, then sends the water home in a plastic sandwich bag.

Ketut receives about 10 visitors a day. As a medicine man, he can turn no one away, whether they pay or not. His profession, “healer,” is bestowed by the gods. If he fails to practice it, the gods will remove it. He gives Liz her first meditation lesson: to sit and smile. Yoga is too hard and too serious. The serious faces scare away good energy. He asks Liz to bring him Western friends for palm reading for his “empty bank.”

We learn Ketut Liyer’s life story. He is from a nine-generation family of medicine men. As a child his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather want him to be a medicine man because they see the light, beauty, and intelligence in him. He wants to be a painter. An American man commissions him to make a painting. He works into the night by the light of an oil lamp. One night it explodes and burns his arm. The arm becomes infected and needs to be amputated. The three fathers appear to him in a dream and tell him to rub the arm with juice and then powder made from saffron and sandalwood. In ten days, his arm heals.

Then he has another dream in which the three fathers appear again. They tell him he must become a medicine man and give his soul to God. To prepare he must fast for six days, not even water. On the fifth day, he goes unconscious and sees gold everywhere, even inside himself. His great-grandfather gives him medical books written on palm leaves, lontars. He learns to heal the sick. He treats physical problems with herbs, disharmonious families with magic drawings, and love problems with a mantra and magic drawing.

He still paints as a hobby. He also delivers babies and performs funerals, weddings, and ceremonies for tooth-filling. He always tells the truth, even bad news. He is in the fourth caste in Bali but serves many people in the first caste less intelligent than he is. His grandfather gave him the name “Liyer,” meaning “bright light.”

Liz enjoys the freedom of Bali, so different from the discipline of the ashram in India and the decadent zooming around and eating in Italy. She follows her guru’s meditation technique for an hour in the morning and Ketut’s practice for an hour every evening. Mario and the staff at the hotel keep track of where she is going and where she has been. She bicycles into the hills in the evening and finds an “Artist’s House for Rent” at the top of one hill, a vine-covered cottage with a red kitchen, goldfish pond, marble terrace, and outdoor shower. She rents it and makes up names for the beautiful tropical flowers in her garden, which comes with a gardener, all for less than she paid for taxis in New York. She eats papayas and bananas off the trees, feeds the cat who comes with the property, enjoys the evening orchestra of the wildlife, and is awakened by all the roosters from miles around who holler in unison at sunrise. Surrounded by “pure beauty,” she “can’t imagine or remember discontent” (259).

Liz researches the history of Bali at the local library and discovers the peaceful island has a history of blood, violence, and oppression equal to anywhere else on Earth. The Javanese kings who migrated there in the 16th century established a feudal colony with a strict caste system and a lucrative slave trade. They fought ferociously against the Dutch invaders but collapsed when the rival kings betrayed each other. In the 1920s and 1930s elite Western travelers ignored the bloodiness of the past and discovered the island as “The Island of the Gods.” In the 1940s, the Japanese invaded. After the war, Indonesia struggled with its independence, and by 1960 it became a battlefield between Nationalists and Communists. Nationalist forces came to Bali and killed 100,000 people.

Liz doesn’t know how old Ketut is, and neither does he, estimated somewhere between 65 and 105. He gauges his age on how he feels each day, sometimes 60, sometimes 85. The day of the week when you are born is more important than the year in Bali. It determines, almost like astrology, the issues one might face. If one is born on a Saturday, there are elements of bad spirits—crow, owl, rooster, but also good spirits—rainbow and butterfly. Ketut believes in black magic when “evil spirits come out rivers and hurt people” (265).

Ketut reminds Liz to practice Balinese meditation every night until “you learn to smile even in your life” (265). It will make her beautiful, and she will have “pretty power.” Her Indian meditation is equally beneficial. He never argues about God, believing all religion is “same-same.” He eats only one meal a day, drinks one cup of coffee with sugar every day, and keeps his body strong “by meditating every night before sleep and by pulling the healthy energy of the universe into his core” (266). The human body, microcosm of the universe, is made up of the five elements of all creation—water, fire, wind, sky, and earth.

Patience always reigns in Ketut’s courtyard. Even the naughtiest children, judged by Liz’s American standard, are remarkably patient. The Balinese have a different standard for good behavior. Liz wonders about her function there. She isn’t his English or theology teacher, but she is his “company.” He likes to hear stories about India, Italy, and America. He has never left Bali. He has a dream about Liz riding her bicycle all over the world. He followed her in his dream, but he tells Liz he cannot visit her in America: “Don’t have enough teeth to travel on an airplane” (269).