Moby Jack & Other Tall Tales (29 page)

‘When Tunggal answers the questions, he opens his legs and the Prince Bima goes into his body through his phallus.
In heaven Bima finds the holy water in a gold casket on a five-tiered shrine. He takes this and goes home, to rejoice with his family. The lying priest is punished.’

He had obviously memorised this passage of English translation from a
guide book
of some kind, but before I could comment the electric light went out and a hushed atmosphere seized the spectators in this monochromatic drama.

The lamplight was even
more subtle
now, illuminating the screen with a deep yellow glow. It might have been the moon behind that cotton divider. The musicians in the small orchestra began playing on percussion instruments and the Tree of Life appeared in shadow form on the screen. Then characters began to enter, the epic unfolded, while the
dalang
recited the story at the same time as manipulating his puppets.

Very soon I was lost in the enthralling play on the screen before me. The puppets were handled with such rapidity, such skill and deftness, that after a while the rhythms of the shadows became a mesmerising sequence of dextrous movements before my eyes, hypnotising me. It did not matter that I did not fully understand the plot, or that many of the characters were anonymous to me, it was the vibrant shadows creating dramatic stimuli that held me spellbound, commanded absolutely my attention. I drowned in the performance.

Arrows flew across the screen, sword fights were enacted, and surely, surely, there were at least a dozen characters, a dozen voices, at any one time in the thick of great battles, while the
dalang
only had one mouth, one pair of hands? How were these wonders achieved, if not by mysticism and magic? This holy man behind the screen was himself a puppet of the gods, his mind wholly engaged by them, his hands assisted by theirs. There was a kind of wizardry in force, in which the priest was the master, and we the audience were his neophytes.

The music was insistent, adding to the mesmeric voice, the hypnotic movements. At times it was monotonous, dulling my senses to the point of utter receptivity; at other times it was sweet and beguiling, persuading me to open my perceptions; and lastly it could be almost cacophonic, loudly demanding my attention and my submission.

We were participants too, in the frenetic activity being played out on the screen, this battle involving men and gods, demons and monsters. Our hearts were black shadows awaiting the deadly dagger; our eyes perceived threats to our personal safety; our hands itched to wield weapons.

These were not simply dark images, icons flitting across a screen: they were immediately true.

We were drawn into new ways of comprehending reality, sitting in that room.

The battles on the screen became more frantic, more intense, until the villains were vanquished and the heroes victorious.

The two performances had taken almost five hours, during which many of the tourists had left quietly and gone home. I guessed that many of them had got bored, especially since they could not take flash photographs, the curse of the modern traveller.

I staggered outside the long hut to get some air, grateful for the perfume of the frangipani blossoms after the closeness of so many bodies with their unavoidable human smells. Then just as the bus was about to leave, I realised my watch had gone from my wrist. Using my torch I searched the immediate area, but couldn’t see it anywhere.

‘Hold the bus,’ I said to Ketut, and went back inside the hut to look around where I had been sitting.

I couldn’t find the light switch, so I used my torch to search the floor.

While I had my head down, there was a sudden
clack
from the platform above. It sounded as if someone was still there. When I looked I saw that the lamp was still on at the back of the booth. It was quiet and still in the hut now: a kind of hushed hallowed silence had descended upon the place in the absence of the
dalang
. Then the
clack
came again.

I switched the torch off and
tip-toed
up the steps to the platform and stared in the booth, the temple of this priest-wizard with the magic hands.

Surprisingly, it was empty except for the shadow puppets, still in their sockets ranged along both sides of the booth. Had one of them slipped and made the sound I had heard? Their strange
cut-out
heads and bodies looked sinister in the flickering yellow glow. There was fat Merdah, and Tualèn, and big-bellied Sangut, the great hero Kresna, and the kakayonan, the tree of life and sacred centre of the universe.

Their colours—the ochres, cobalt blues, blacks, Chinese yellows, whites,
pinks
—all glistened attractively in the lamplight. Their stillness made them appear strangely menacing after the frenetic activity they had shown during the performance. It was as if they were awaiting a signal to leap into violent action, like a cat that appears not to be paying attention to a bird, until the bird hops within reach of its instant spring.

I stared at the flat,
cut-out
puppets, fascinated by the elaborate filigree work upon their decorative forms. Narrowed eyes stared back at me, steadily, unmoving. It was difficult not to think of these pieces of leather as animate in the smoky atmosphere from the lamp. Which one of them had moved in its socket? They were all at a slight angle, none of them poker straight in their holders.

I could smell strong fragrance of the coconut oil burning, trapped inside the booth. There was also a residue stink of sweat and activity, and underlying smells of hardwood and buffalo hide. This heady mixture of scents made me feel a little giddy.

For some reason I felt impelled to enter the booth, and did so, my heart beating faster than usual. I gazed at the
lamp which
hung from the rafters. In the original palm-leaf manuscript of the myth
Sigwagama
, the lamp was played by Brahma himself, while Iswara was the
dalang
and Wisnu the musical instruments. That Brahma was light and could create shadows made him the most powerful of the three, even though the manipulator was Iswara and Wisnu played with the senses.

I happened to glance behind me as I was crawling into the central space and saw my own shadow on the cotton sheet. I suddenly thought
,
what am I doing here? I might be guilty of desecrating some holy place
. If the
dalang
returned, or one of his assistants, I might be in serious trouble.

Yet I did not turn and go.
I was transfixed by my own dark shape on the sheet
, where so recently the myths had been re-enacted. My silhouette now stood frozen where gods had played, where heroes had run, where ogres had danced. There was a strange sensation of looking into another world, of standing alone on the threshold of a mythical kingdom. I was like some shambling giant, lurking at the gates, waiting to be told that I might enter and take my place amongst the lower shadow forms.

At that moment, while I stared at my foreshortened silhouette on the screen, the door opened at the back of the hut. One of the puppets moved in the breeze from the outside, dropped forward, with a
clack
, so that its shadow fell across my shadow. Staring, I saw that it was the puppet of Kala, Lord of the Demons, which had slipped in its holder. His frightening outline had closed with mine on the white screen.

A chill went through me.

‘Are you there, mister?’ said Ketut, softly.

I scrambled out from behind the booth, feeling shocked. Ketut’s eyes opened wide when he saw me. I tried to explain that I thought perhaps one of the musicians might have picked up my watch and left it there, but I don’t think he believed me for one moment. He looked at my hands, probably expecting to see I had stolen a puppet, but when he saw this was not so, he murmured that we should be catching the bus.

What he did see, however, and this surprised me as much as it did him, was that my watch was still on my wrist.

We were mostly quiet with one another on the way back. The bus was being jolted this way and that, by an uneven road full of potholes. I couldn’t understand why I thought my watch had been missing, when it had been on my wrist all the time. Had I been hypnotised in some way, during the performance? It was the only explanation I could give for such a mistake.

With the constant jarring I began to develop a pain in my shoulders, which began to make me feel ill.

I did manage to ask Ketut, ‘
What
is the main function of Kala? What does he do?’

Ketut replied, ‘He eats men.’

By the time we reached Ubud I was in agony. Ketut kept looking at me: sidelong
glances which
told me that my appearance was not good. When the bus stopped, he hurried off, thanking me over his shoulder for buying his ticket. I made my way to the rice terraces, where my path lay.

I didn’t need my torch. It was a full moon. The peaked houses, their rooftops sweeping upwards to horned points in the Indonesian manner, were casting shadows on the ground. Clustered together as the houses were, the shadows tended to be complex criss-crossings of shade. There were latticework fences too, which overlaid these designs on the ground. I tried to avoid their dark networks, since they reminded me of the shapes of puppets cast on a cotton screen.

I reached the forest in front of the rice terraces and again the shadows locked and interlocked: this time they were moving, as the treetops of the canopy were blown by the wind. They formed and reformed figures on the forest floor, and this time I
had
to walk through them, since I could reach the rice terraces no other way. As I hurried through them, they seemed to gather to one single giant shape, which stalked my own shadow.

I began to run. It was as if I were being pursued through the trees, by some predator, and my heart was banging against my ribs, though I didn’t dare look behind in case I saw something unreal. I was absolutely convinced now that I had been hypnotised and I was not going to allow the art of the hypnotist to fill my eyes as well as my head with fictitious horrors.

I emerged onto the terrace paths, feeling safer out in the open fields, with no trees to cast shadows.

How was I going to shake this fantasy that gripped my consciousness? Someone was having a very cruel joke at my expense. I was sure that once I was in my hut, with the artificial light on, I could break the mood and shed these terrible feelings.

As I hurried along I saw a man coming towards me, a duck herder, probably on his way home from a friend’s house.

Since the path was narrow, with room for only one person, I stopped so that we could step around one another carefully.

The man obviously did not notice me until the very last second, when he almost ran into me, and then his eyes went white around the edges. He stared at me for a second, as if peering into a dark hole, then muttered what sounded like a prayer or chant, before stepping into the paddy water and hurrying on. He looked back once, before he reached the drop to the next tier.

Watching him I had the terrible feeling that he had hardly been able to see me, yet it was extremely bright under that great moon. The deleterious pain in my shoulder began again.

I looked around me and saw that I was standing under a duck herder’s crook, left sticking in the mud. The rag on the top fluttered in the breeze, casting a changing shadow near my own dark shape. There, in the light of the full moon, I saw that the rag’s shadow had formed itself into the puppet shape of Kala, the devourer of men.

Kala’s form was eating my shadow
.

Already much of my shadow had been consumed, in the streets, in the forest, and now under the staff ’s rag. There were great chunks missing from around the shoulders and the back. My neck was now a gander’s neck, with a huge grotesque head perched on top, where the shadow had been eaten away.

I recoiled quickly in horror, only to see Kala’s black form dart forward and begin feasting again, as the wind increased in strength and bent the duck herder’s pole.

The pain was excruciating now.

I laughed out loud, hysterically, the sound echoing over the rice terraces. Surely, surely this was just some trick of the light? This was no Brahman lamp, this moon, and I was no
wayang kulit
, no shadow puppet.