Hujan! (or Rain!)

Annie tells Oka to stop at the market, rows of fresh fruit and meat. At the check-stands, mediocre karaoke singers take turns serenading shoppers as they come and go in the dripping evening. I point to things like a five year old and ask for the name, I repeat it over and over, I forget and remember how to count to five or say good afternoon. I remember how to say “I forget” (saya lupa) only to forget. We laugh. My head swims with strange new sounds. My tongue trips over unfamiliar syllables. I have eager teachers. I make many, many, mannnny mistakes. But it's fun learning as I go. It’s a shopping experience like nothing else.

Oka pulls to the side of the road and points to a path: Villa Shivaloka. We grab bags and backpacks and head down the muddy path. My body’s floating with jetlag and I imagine the house just around every corner, but we keep walking. The plastic grocery bags grow heavy and rip into my hands. A gust of wind and the tolerable, dripping evening turns to a torrential downpour.

“Hujan! Hujan!” Soaked, tired, but happy, I shout the Indonesian word for rain. We all laugh and plod through mud and warm rain, past water pools, lotus flowers, and motor bikes. Annie points to a brown cow, standing under a banana leaf shelter, and looks at me. “Sapi!” I call back. Mud puddles turn to sturdy concrete squares, past a green pool with a single, pink lotus flower. The narrow jungle path suddenly opens to a lush, terraced, green valley, that stretches for miles. Herds of brown and black ducks (bebek), numbering in the thousands, mumble to each other as they route through freshly harvested rice fields (padi). With our approach, they scatter and run, then pool and reverse. Hundreds of heads flipping one way, then simultaneously turning the other way. It’s like watching feathered fish, school and play. Past the browning harvested fields, fresh green rice shoots go for miles.

(It’s said that once upon a time, a giant threatened to take the children of the village. The villagers pleaded with the giant to spare their children until the rice harvest. The giant agrees and the villagers staggered their rice harvest, constantly sowing, growing, reaping rice so that the harvest continued infinitely. So it is, rice grows continuously—in all stages--around the island, every 4 months or so the cycle starts again.)

In a sea fresh green, white, blue and yellow flags of all sizes wave from sticks, to keep the birds away. Then the villa.

Guilt. It’s huge.

I wanted a place to start, alone, where I’d feel secure and learn the ropes, then move on. But this is story-book amazing. Open air kitchen and dining room, two bedrooms, giant carved furniture, and a linen-netted bed. As I unpack, cicadas begin their electric hum, the sun sets and as the ducks bed down, frogs begin to grumble from the muddy fields. Thousands of frogs! One sounds like the drop of a mallet on tin. It’s hollow, and metallic, and perfectly timed. Another is high pitched and yelps. The majority sound like a herd of goats, hundreds of goats. I keep looking over the fence, surprised to see nothing but rice fields for miles.