Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love

I blew out the candles of the birthday cake along with Little Ketut, the smallest orphan, whose birthday, I had decided a few weeks ago, would also be on July 18 from now on, shared with my own, since she'd never had a birthday or a birthday party before. After we blew out the candles, Felipe presented Little Ketut with a Barbie doll, which she unwrapped in stunned wonder and then regarded as though it were a ticket for a rocket ship to Jupiter-something she never, ever in seven billion light-years could've imagined receiving.

Everything about this party was kind of funny. It was an oddball international and intergenerational mix of a handful of my friends, Wayan's family and some of her Western clients and patients whom I'd never met before. My friend Yudhi brought me a six-pack of beer to wish me happy birthday, and also this cool young hipster screenwriter from L.A. named Adam came by. Felipe and I had met Adam in a bar the other night and had invited him. Adam and Yudhi passed their time at the party talking to a little boy named John, whose mother is a patient of Wayan's, a German clothing designer married to an American who lives in Bali. Little John-who is seven years old and who is kind of American, he says, because of his American dad (even though he himself has never been there), but who speaks German with his mother and speaks Indonesian with Wayan's children-was smitten with Adam because he'd found out that the guy was from California and could surf.

"What's your favorite animal, mister?" asked John, and Adam replied, "Pelicans."

"What's a pelican?" the little boy asked, and Yudhi jumped in and said, "Dude, you don't know what a pelican is? Dude, you gotta go home and ask your dad about that. Pelicans rock, dude."

Then John, the kind-of-American boy, turned to say something in Indonesian to little Tutti (probably to ask her what a pelican was) as Tutti sat in Felipe's lap trying to read my birthday cards, while Felipe was speaking beautiful French to a retired gentleman from Paris who comes to Wayan for kidney treatments. Meanwhile, Wayan had turned on the radio and Kenny Rogers was singing "Coward of the County," while three Japanese girls wandered randomly into the shop to see if they could get medicinal massages. As I tried to talk the Japanese girls into eating some of my birthday cake, the two orphans-Big Ketut and Little Ketut-were decorating my hair with the giant spangled barrettes they'd saved up all their money to buy me as a gift. Wayan's nieces and nephews, the child temple dancers, the children of rice farmers, sat very still, tentatively staring at the floor, dressed in gold like miniature deities; they imbued the room with a strange and otherworldly godliness. Outside, the roosters started crowing, even though it was not yet evening, not yet dusk. My traditional Balinese clothing was squeezing me like an ardent hug, and I was feeling like this was definitely the strangest-but maybe the happiest-birthday party I'd ever experienced in my whole life.

Still, Wayan needs to buy a house, and I'm getting worried that it's not happening. I don't understand why it's not happening, but it absolutely needs to happen. Felipe and I have stepped in now. We found a realtor who could take us around and show us properties, but Wayan hasn't liked anything we've shown her. I keep telling her, "Wayan, it's important that we buy something. I'm leaving here in September, and I need to let my friends know before I leave that their money actually went into a home for you. And you need to get a roof over your head before you get evicted."

"Not so simple to buy land in Bali," she keeps telling me. "Not like to walk into a bar and buy a beer. Can take long time."

"We don't have a long time, Wayan."

She just shrugs, and I remember again about the Balinese concept of "rubber time," meaning that time is a very relative and bouncy idea. "Four weeks" doesn't really mean to Wayan what it means to me. One day to Wayan isn't necessarily composed of twenty-four hours, either; sometimes it's longer, sometimes it's shorter, depending upon the spiritual and emotional nature of that day. As with my medicine man and his mysterious age, sometimes you count the days, sometimes you weigh them.

Meanwhile, it also turns out that I have completely underestimated how expensive it is to buy property in Bali. Because everything is so cheap here, you would assume that land is also undervalued, but that's a mistaken assumption. To buy land in Bali-especially in Ubud-can get almost as expensive as buying land in Westchester County, in Tokyo, or on Rodeo Drive. Which is completely illogical because once you own the property you can't make back your money on it in any traditionally logical way. You may pay approximately $25,000 for an aro of land (an aro is a land measurement roughly translating into English as: "Slightly bigger than the parking spot for an SUV"), and then you can build a little shop there where you will sell one batik sarong a day to one tourist a day for the rest of your life, for a profit of about seventy-five cents a hit. It's senseless.

But the Balinese value their land with a passion that extends beyond the reaches of economic sense. Since land ownership is traditionally the only wealth that Balinese recognize as legitimate, property is valued in the same way as the Masai value cattle or as my five-year-old niece values lip gloss: namely, that you cannot have enough of it, that once you have claimed it you must never let it go, and that all of it in the world should rightfully belong to you.

Moreover-as I discover throughout the month of August, during my Narnia-like voyage into the intricacies of Indonesian real estate-it's almost impossible to find out when land is actually for sale around here. Balinese who are selling land typically don't like other people to know that their land is up for sale. Now, you would think it might be advantageous to advertise this fact, but the Balinese don't see it that way. If you're a Balinese farmer and you're selling your land, it means you are desperate for cash, and this is humiliating. Also, if your neighbors and family find out that you actually sold some land, then they'll assume you came into some money, and everyone will be asking if they can borrow that money. So land becomes available for sale only by… rumor. And all these land deals are executed under strange veils of secrecy and deception.

The Western expatriates around here-hearing that I'm trying to buy land for Wayan-start gathering around me, offering cautionary tales based on their own nightmarish experiences. They warn me that you can never really be certain what's going on when it comes to real estate around here. The land you are "buying" may not actually "belong" to the person who is "selling" it. The guy who showed you the property might not even be the owner, but only the disgruntled nephew of the owner, trying to get one over on his uncle because of some old family dispute. Don't expect that the boundaries of your property will ever be clear. The land you buy for your dream house may later be declared "too close to a temple" to allow a building permit (and it's difficult, in this small country with an estimated 20,000 temples, to find any land that is not too close to a temple).

Also you must take into consideration that you're quite probably living on the slopes of a volcano and you might be straddling a fault line, as well. And not just a geological fault line, either. As idyllic as Bali seems, the wise keep in mind that this is, in fact, Indonesia-the largest Islamic nation on earth, unstable at its core, corrupt from the highest ministers of justice all the way down to the guy who pumps gas into your car (and who only pretends to fill it all the way up). Some kind of revolution will always be possible here at any moment, and all your assets may be reclaimed by the victors. Probably at gunpoint.