It Wasn’t Me Who Had the Epiphany

I kept bursting into tears! It was our first visit to Bali – me, Bill, and our two little boys. It was 1974, the tourist boom just beginning. We visitors would collectively alter that Paradise beyond retrieval … but we didn’t know so then. It was still unchanged. A naked family, showering under a roadside run-off, waved unembarrassed as our taxi passed.

the setting sun

falling slowly into

a wide flat sea

‘Island of the Gods’ the tourist books called it. We agreed. Enraptured as I was, why was I constantly bursting into sudden tears? 

We read the histories. Some postulated combined ancestry, Indian and Chinese. Later writers say those influences arose more from trade visitations. We could still find old Chinese coins, with holes in the middle, dropped in the street. I brought home three to use with my I Ching.

Suddenly Bill got it. ‘It’s the Indian in you!’ 

My maternal grandmother was mixed-race Anglo-Indian. (I have to add ‘mixed race.’ There are other definitions of the term, from the time of the Raj: one meaning completely English but living long in India, the other meaning completely Indian but thoroughly adopting British culture.)

He was right. It burst on me as revelation. It wasn’t the people but the artefacts. I was re-experiencing things I’d grown up with, lost along with my childhood. I was eating out of bowls I ate from in my grandparents’ home, I was surrounded by reminiscent ornaments, I was admiring familiar designs on cloth … 

There were connections with Chinese artefacts too. My mother’s family had put in there on the long boat trip from India to Tasmania, and bought some pieces. 

I’ll pass to descendants the carved Indian-silver containers and vases, the polished bamboo bowls with Chinese dragons painted around their outsides.

My Dutch-born husband wanted to visit Indonesia for the soul connection to an ancestor who had lived there and left diaries. I didn’t care. I hadn’t been out of Australia; I was happy to go anywhere. How odd that it was I who fell into connection with my Asian roots (who never got seventies Bali out of my blood for evermore). But …

I never returned 

to the isle of the gods –

vanished

Written for Haibun Monday: Epiphany at dVerse.