Sam Cutler

Of course, just because one falls asleep in ‘paradise’ there is no automatic guarantee that one will awake in the same place, and so it was that on my first night in Bali I had some rather strange nocturnal experiences. The bed was hard and firm as an athletes muscles and draped in crisp white mosquito netting so that I felt as if I were in the tent of some desert potentate. I lay down and remember feeling ostentatiously luxurious before falling asleep with my head on a pillow softer than my lady’s breasts and without a care in the world.  I was awakened to the sound of a baby being strangled.

The most pitiable cries seemed to be coming from immediately outside my room. I woke instantaneously, charged and attentive, mind clear and focused, and ready to do battle with every monster that the world could summon to test me. It was two minutes past three in the morning and within less than five seconds of my re-entering consciousness I was standing at the door in my bare feet listening to the strange sounds. It was a noise like no noise I had ever heard before, a hideous noise, strangely moving and ineffably sad,a  noise that I couldn’t quite place, yet one which (though distant) seemed somehow familiar. It was the sound of a baby being strangled but that was plainly ridiculous I told myself, unless that is, I had gone to sleep in heaven and woken up in hell.

Armed with nothing more than an absurd sense of purpose I threw open the door to my room and stepped out onto the porch. The rain poured down in those monsoon sheets which one can only find in Asia. There was a soft and gentle rhythm as the rice shivered in appreciation beneath the downpour - in the distance across the fields a  lone light bulb pierced the gloom. I stepped to the edge of the porch and stood just behind a sheet of water which sprayed down from the edge of the roof and peered into the darkness. The baby sounds became intermittent, less insistent now, but I could see nothing and eventually they ceased all together. There was nothing but the steady sound of the rain, and I began to feel foolish standing naked on my porch and went back to the room.

Asleep again, I dreamed of when I was a child. I had been very ill and almost died from a condition known as Pyloric Stenosis. The pyloric valve sits at the lower end of the esophagus and regulates the flow of food from the tube which goes from the mouth to the stomach. If the baby suffers from this condition, the valve will not open, thus food cannot enter the stomach proper. The baby regurgitates its food with projectile force and without an operation will almost certainly not survive. BUT, some with the condition DO survive, and for those that make it through early childhood the ailment returns in their teens when it requires major surgery. I was one of these and was to spend almost a year of my life in hospital when I was seventeen. Anyway, I was asleep now in Bali, but it was a fitful sleep, disturbed and without restorative value. I would wake feeling as if I were choking and turn this way and that as I struggled for breathe, just like I must have done when I was a baby in my mother’s arms beneath the bombs that rained down on London in the Second World War. Finally I could stand it no more, and as the sky lightened I decided to get up and write.

As I stepped onto the floor, the terrible baby cries began again. I was shocked and listened attentively. The noises were coming from outside the room and this time I decided to get dressed before I investigated. Fully clothed and armed with an umbrella I stepped onto the porch and looked out at the fields as the dawn reformed the night sky. The noise was coming from just beyond the porch and I opened the umbrella and stepped out into the rain. A meter away from me in my peripheral vision I noticed something moving and the awful sounds were loud and insistent. There, almost at my feet, was a snake about a meter long doing its level best to swallow a massive frog. The green and red and black snake held the frog in its reticulated jaws, with the frogs eyes bulging manically and the most hideous cries coming from its throat. The snakes eyes were glazed and it would thrash its tail and with each spasm the frog would enter just a few millimeters more into the snake’s mouth. Two nasty fangs held the top of the frog’s head and there was no chance of its escaping. It was a hideous sight and one that made me want to wretch as I stumbled back in horror to the safety of the porch. I slumped into a chair and waited for the ghastly business to be over and finally the snake slithered into the rice paddy with its distended belly and its malevolent eyes and the sounds of death were no more.

The day had begun. The world had merely been going about its business with snakes eating frogs, and my memories of children dying, bombs falling, mothers abandoning their babies, rain falling, and my lover a million miles away. I felt horribly alone. At the end of the garden the Balinese had the house temple and I walked there in the rain. Beneath the benevolent eyes of the Gods I cried and mournfully realized that all was as it ever was. Rain and tears, rain and tears, same same baba, same same.  At night in the fields sometimes even the stones must cry.

©  sam cutler 2009