The Trouble With Onions, And How Carolyn Webb’s Terrible Touts Saved The Day

Finally, I reach the end of the long check-out queue at Bintang Supermarket. My purchases are scanned, and only about one-third of them need manual input because of the inevitable crumpled bar-code labels – apparently a specialty of this place.  Then I’m only delayed for a further five minutes while the cashier looks at me with silent censure and sends an assistant to wander off to weigh my pre-packed bag of onions. I’m looking at my pre-packed, bar-coded bag of potatoes and thinking, “Why should onions be different?” but I hold my tongue.

After four minutes of waiting, I’m ready to tell the cashier to forget the onions, but just then I spy the assistant slowly ambling back and bite my tongue again. The bar-code won’t scan properly, of course, so there’s more pecking of cash register keys until the display grudgingly admits that I have bought onions and not tomatoes as it insists at first. I should have recognised that all this nonsense was a sign from above that I should have just left the onions, paid and gone home.

Eschewing the dreaded plastic bags, I load up my two venerable recyclable bags with a ridiculously heavy load, stuffing all of my shopping into one shoulder bag and one smaller bag. The cashier looks at my shoulder bag with a practised eye, says “too heavy!” and offers me a plastic bag. I piously refuse. As I stagger to my bike, listing well to the right to counterbalance the load, I’m thinking that maybe the cashier was right. But, you know, it would be unmanly to go back and ask for another bag now, so I persevere. Besides, once I’m on the bike, I can just rest the weight of the bag on the pillion and everything should be fine. I’m such an optimist.

So there I am, negotiating the left-hand turn from Jl. Legian into Jl. Nakula, grinning a greeting at the local touts outside the MiniMart.  I skilfully manoeuvre through the deep pothole on the corner – the one that has been cleverly patched with concrete and immediately opened to traffic before it has set. It is a maze of trenches, ridges and wheel ruts which jolt my bike and rattle my teeth. Obviously I’m not skilful enough through this obstacle, because I feel a little warning snap of releasing stitches at my shoulder. But before I have time to react, the strap breaks completely and my precious bag falls off the pillion and into the middle of the road with a great thump.

Oh no! I hear the Bali traffic bearing relentlessly down on it while I try to park the bike at the side of the busy road. My coffee jar! My chilli sauce! Visions of exploding Rinso packets mixing with all the gooey stuff as fat tyres crush my shopping fill my mind. There is another thump as my other bag slips off its bike hook and bounces to the kerb. I stare at it, see that it’s not going to fall any further, spin around to see what has become of the first bag – and stop dead.

One of Carolyn Webb’s much-maligned touts has stopped traffic for me. Drivers are grinning and waiting patiently as I run back to retrieve my goodies, helped by another of the tout’s allegedly terrible cronies. An ojek driver – obviously taking time out from ferrying prostitutes, if you are to believe Ms. Webb – stops his bike and pushes mine to a safer place on to the footpath. He retrieves dropped bag number two and puts it back on the hook. It takes less than a minute to clear the road and have me on my way. I thank the guys profusely, but they wave it off with a grin and a “no problem!” They think that the whole debacle is funny – they’re big on physical humour here.

I like the so-called touts in Bali. After nearly three years here, many of them recognise me, wave hello and then leave me alone, seeking more bountiful prospects elsewhere amongst the visiting hordes. But even when I first arrived, I didn’t have a problem with them. I would tell them “No thanks, I can’t”. When pressed for an explanation, I would tell them, with a completely straight face, that I am incredibly stingy, but I wish them well and hope they find a Japanese tourist soon. We get along fine, and I like talking to them. They are human beings doing an incredibly difficult job to feed their families, and I have a great deal of respect for them. I don’t mind in the least when they greet me cheerfully as Pak Pelit – it’s almost a compliment to be called Mr. Stingy.

You’ve got to love Bali. Where else would you have people jumping unselfishly to help you when you get yourself into trouble? Because of them, my shopping, luckily undamaged in its plunge from the bike, remained uncrushed by traffic.

But I can’t help feeling that if I had only left the damned onions in the supermarket, the extra weight wouldn’t have snapped my bag strap. But then again, I wouldn’t have had the chance to show that Carolyn Webb’s perception of Bali was deeply flawed either.

Shopping, Memory Loss and Mice

It’s official – Bali is changing me. Slowly, insidiously, I am adopting a lifestyle which involves succumbing to impulse and forgetting about planning, follow-through and … you know, other stuff. See, I’m even forgetting the words for whatever it was that used to be important in my pre-Bali life. Living in Bali, especially in an area which seems to be reserved for the terminally bewildered, can do that to you.

The other day, I set out to get some shopping done. Still labouring under some crazy delusion that I can remember things, I didn’t bother to write a shopping list. I mean – lists are only for forgetful people, right? And I probably would have remembered to buy most of the things I needed, except I forgot to go shopping. You see, while riding past one of my favourite massage salons, I was seized with an irresistable impulse to be pampered, so in I went. After a delicious hour of sensual, albeit comatose pleasure, I wandered off to find my bike and get on with the day. That took a while, because I had forgotten where I parked it.

Still in that lovely post-massage torpor, I decided that a coffee would be nice, so another pleasant 40 minutes were spent reading, daydreaming and re-caffeinating before I rode home. Then I remembered that I had forgotten to shop. Right, back on the bike for the five-minute trip to the supermarket, where I wandered around wondering what it was I needed. Maybe it was memory pills? So I asked myself : “What would have been on my list if I had made a list?” Lo and behold, it jogged my failing memory enough to spend 400,000 rupiah on a trolley full of stuff.

As it turned out, it was obviously a false memory, because after getting home, not one of the things I had originally planned to buy were actually in my shopping bags. Back in the old days, this scenario would have worried me senseless. I would have thought that there was something seriously wrong with me, and rushed off to schedule an immediate brain scan. Not anymore. I just accept this fugue state as a natural part of Bali life, and if I have a pantry full of stuff that I don’t need, well, so be it. There’s always tomorrow.

Minutes later, I caught a furtive movement out of the corner of my eye. If I hadn’t actually seen it, my pembantu’s shriek would have told me what it was anyway. A mouse! It was marching purposefully from the garden towards the pantry, on a trajectory that was about to intersect my right foot. Being a man of decisive action, I stamped my foot directly in front of the beast to scare it away. Petulant, I know, but for most mice of my acquaintance, this alpha male type of aggression causes immediate, squeaking flight in the opposite direction.

Not so with the mouse of steel. The thing stopped, glared at me and just kept coming. My pembantu, always one to recognise a fearless predator,  immediately fled up the stairs. Without my wingman, it was left to me to confront this animal, one which was obviously unaware of its place in the grand scheme of things. With a dexterous sweep of my foot, I tumbled it back towards the garden, It still didn’t run. In fact, it stood up, glared at me, bared its tiny teeth and growled.

Now, mice don’t growl. They use ultrasonic communication, audible squeaks and occasionally emit rapid clicks. Maybe it was bruxing - but I swear this thing actually growled at me. Yes, it was faint and somewhat pathetic, but it was clearly a growl. It took quite a few deft soccer passes to get the thing back to the garden – growling all the way – until it reluctantly went off, looking over its shoulder at me all the way. I didn’t even know mice had shoulders.

Well, what with the massage, the coffee, the shopping and the mouse that thought it was a Bali tiger, it just about filled out my daylight hours. But I did need to go shopping again. This time, I did make a list containing all the items I had forgotten the first time, including – you guessed it - mousetraps. That mouse was obviously sent by a higher force.

You see, that’s how Bali works – apparently unrelated events can conspire to bring one’s life back into balance, correct mistakes and iron out the effects of temporary amnesia. That’s one of the reasons I like it here.

Except that on the way to the supermarket, I saw this really nice-looking massage salon …