Ke Bali

To Bali then. 

(day 3 in Bali and the Moon-man promptly equipped me with a few pages of Bahasa words. Close to the top was Ke,translated as 'to' - could Ke Bali then mean To Bali? Could this be the name of this blog? And why write a new blog at all?)

 

We have veered our entire life, great ship that we are, to Bali.

(Just picture: creaaaak and the galley turns and the slaves row and row… a bumpy sea and a storm or two, sweat and agony then a glittering shore - white, in all dreams, murky-multicolour in reality. We throw anchor...)

Rewind to January 2014, if you please; try telling me that we would soon be off to live in Bali. Watch. I roll my eyes. I gasp - something more like a high incredulous bray. I give you a playful cuff on a bicep, how silly can you get, you fool,  because really, Bali, really…. and words, for once, fail me.

Fast forward to April: a friend tells us about a school in Bali. We owe Kira a good school, after dragging her through silly narrow schools just because they happened to be where we happened to be. We are hooked and follow the line all the way to Green School in Bali. 

(I met our friend again today, and informed her that she changed our lives. Yeah, thanks Mandy. We laughed. She still has no idea.I still have no idea.)

June. We pack our bags, we leave Pakistan. Summer in Europe. We're moving to Bali. Ke Bali. 

September, just arrived in Bali: I still float around with an idiotic jetlagged grin, with surges of joy, with stabs of angst. I imagine a day when everything falls into slots of normality – which is why I need to write about today. Today when everything is up in the air, tumbling and shouting and fizzing and sliding, impossible to touch or tame or name or know. 

I don’t recognize anything – not the grass, not the sand, not the words, not the alien lizard that honks, hidden inside a lamp shade, at the night. Today – day 3 in Bali – is unique, impossible to repeat or replay, crawling with fears, twinkling with gifts and possibilities.

I don't want us to forget this day - and the next mad day and the more hectic next... When Bali becomes 'home' and 'business as usual', we might realise that we've paid for the flat line of normalcy with full oblivion of all this wonder.

And hence this journal: to capture and preserve our road to Bali. KeBali.