Video Night in Kathmandu by Pico Iyer Read Free Book Online

the gods, disarm Antonio, worldly and usurping Duke of Milan, before it was too late?
    Like Prospero’s isle too, Bali offered all the amenities of Eden. Its regally graceful people dwelt in a lush Rousseauesque garden of snakes and tropical flowers. Young girls, careless of their loveliness, bathed in running streams, wore scarlet hibiscus in their hair and silken sarongs around their supple bodies; the soft-eyed local men seemed likewise gods of good health, dazzling smiles offsetting the flowers they tucked behind their ears. In Bali, even old women were slender creatures who moved with a dancer’s easy grace. There was no friction in this land of song and dance, and nothing unlovely: children, taken to be angels of purity descended from the heavens, were never scolded or spanked, crime was unknown and even cremations were opulent festivals of joy. Nature had been charmed by Art. Everything was at peace.
    In Bali, indeed, life itself, and everything in it, was taken to besacrament and dance. The Balinese traditionally had no particular conception of “art,” since every villager wove or danced or painted as a matter of course; every house, moreover, had its own shrine, and every village had three temples, open to the heavens and wrapped in white and golden sashes. Every day, as I arose, bare-shouldered women in sumptuous silks were sashaying through the early morning sunlight, stately and unhurried, piles of fruit on their heads to be placed as offerings before the gods. And every night, in village courtyards, radiant little girls, in gorgeous gold brocades, white blossoms garlanding the hair that fell to their waists, swayed together out of the darkness, their eyes rolling, twisting their hands like sorcerers, moving as one to the gongs and cymbals of the spellbinding gamelan. Like Prospero’s isle, Bali was “full of noises, sounds and sweet airs… a thousand twangling instruments.”
    And the beauty, and the curse, of Bali was that a piece of this paradise was available to everyone who entered. For $2 a night, I was given my own thatched hut in a tropical courtyard scented with flowers and fruit. Each sunny morning, as I sat on my veranda, a smiling young girl brought me bowls of mangoes and tea, and placed scarlet bougainvillaeas on the gargoyle above my lintel. Two minutes away was the palm-fringed beach of my fantasies; an hour’s drive, and I was climbing active volcanoes set among verdant terraces of rice. Along the sleepy village lanes, garden restaurants served tropical drinks and magic mushrooms, while a hundred stores offered giddy T-shirts, sixties paintings and cassettes galore. And all around were dances, silken ceremonies and, in a place scarcely bigger than Delaware, as many as 30,000 temples.
    Thus the paradox remained: Bali was heaven, and hell was other people. Tourism had become the island’s principal detraction. And the specter of commercialism shadowed every visitor from his first step to his last: one might debate the issue or demean it, but one could not ignore it. Sightseers were inclined not to say that Bali was beautiful or terrible, only that it had been raped or was still intact. “ ‘Isn’t Bali spoiled?’ is invariably the question that greets the returned traveler… meaning, is the island overrun by tourists?” wrote Miguel Covarrubias. He had written that in 1937. “This nation of artists is faced with a Western invasion, and I cannot stand idly by and watch itsdestruction,” wrote André Roosevelt, in his introduction to a book on Bali, entitled (what else?)
The Last Paradise.
He had written that in 1930.
    And after fifty years of such anxieties, Bali had, inevitably, become a paradise traduced by many tourists, the place that sophisticates hated to love: many of my British friends would rather have vacationed in Calais or Hull than submit to what they regarded as the traveler’s ultimate cliché. Even those who adored the island found it more and more trying. For if it