After reading Eat, Pray, Love and being intrigued by the author’s relationships with Ketut and Wayan, I decided I should look them up when in Bali. It wasn’t meant as an Elizabeth Gilbert pilgrimage or anything. I was just curious. First of all, you know I love massages and along with the vitamin lunch, that’s one of Wayan’s specialties. And second, you know I love future-telling, which in addition to being a healer and artist, is also a skill of Ketut’s.
So on my final trip to Ubud with my friend from Singapore along for the ride, I first stopped off at Traditional Balinese Healing, Wayan’s shop conveniently located right in town. Unfortunately, Wayan was at temple and so no massages were being given that day. My friend and I discussed having the vitamin lunch, even though we had wanted the complete experience with Wayan. Just as we were about to sit, Gus, our driver who we’d told to pick us up in a couple of hours, drove by—so we were able to flag him down and instead have him take us to Pengosekan, a village just outside of Ubud to meet Ketut. Traditional Balinese Healing will just have to wait for the return visit to Bali, I guess.
Gus then drove us down the maze of dirt side streets looking for Ketut’s house. And when we finally came upon it, I was excited and a little nervous too. Here I was showing up at a stranger’s house, so far away from my own, unannounced, no appointment and for what? To say, “Hey, I read this book you were in!” At that point, I was especially grateful my friend was with me.
We walked into the courtyard of a pretty well-to-do (for Bali) sort of compound. I spotted Ketut immediately. He was sitting on a porch with a couple of women I took to be family. All of them were circled around a copy of Eat, Pray, Love. One of the women, however, turned out to be a curiosity-seeker just like us and before she even said another word, I knew she was going to say she was from San Francisco. And of course, she was. We laughed over the coincidence and then I went to sit down on what I thought was a chair, but turned out to be their table. Oops! I’m retarded.
Ketut was a very soft-spoken and gentle soul with probably a total of 1.2 teeth in his mouth. But his smile is wide and heartwarming just the same. We all talked for a bit and he told us the story of how he came to be a healer and then how he met Elizabeth. Then he gave us each about a five-minute reading which sounded eerily similar to one another. For instance, all three of us will live into our hundreds and we are all “very good girls.” Actually, once he found out I’d just gotten married, he exclaimed that I was a “very good WOMAN.” Woohoo, already the perks of married life! When he discovered that Travel Boyfriend had already flown back to the States alone though, he warned me not to cheat on him. Sage advice.
After our readings (for which we each gave him a donation of 100,000 rupiah—about $10) and autographs (I didn’t think to bring my own book, damn!), he tried to interest us in a few of his paintings. Now, I will say that Ketut has mad skills. And in addition to drawing and framing these masterpieces, he makes sure to create them on auspicious days and to pray over them so they are saturated with the right sort of energy. Think Thomas Kinkade goes through that much trouble? Hardly.
But in the end, I did leave feeling like I was experiencing the world’s most gracious shakedown. The paintings were priced well above anything else I’d come across in Bali. A couple hundred dollars apiece. And while I suppose that’s nothing when compared to U.S. prices (especially considering the karma-infusion), I couldn’t help feeling like he was using his notoriety from the book to overcharge in the local context. Of course, you could argue, why not? Would I do the same if I lived in a poor country and was suddenly being visited by book-club-loving, deep-pocketed Westerners? You bet I would! But I guess it just depends on which side of the overcharging you’re standing on. And in this case, I was standing on the side of righteous indignation.
