crack crack

My father, the Balinese, has several nonsense rhymes that he learned from his childhood days which he has kept reciting forever. He would do one out of the blue:

Kaki, Kakiang,
Dadong, Dadongkang.

And he would do another one to follow his yawnings:

Ha, ha, hem
Meli tuak ji nenem
Men sing telah bang Dèlem
Kutang pedalem
Nuangin masem.

Both are sung with only two tones, one low and the other one higher, with a diatonic interval of a bit more than a major second, and more emphasis (tenuto-like) on the higher tone.

If I would try to notate them (with the rhythm and tone), the first one would be somewhat like this:

2/4

.1 | 2 12 | 1
.1 | 2 12 | 1 ||

And the second one:

4/4

2 2 1′1 11 | 2 22 1′1 11 |
2 22 1 .1 | 2 22 1 11
2 2 1 . ||

The first one is just simply a funny word game:

Kaki means Grandfather; Dadong means Grandmother. Kakiang is a general term for all old people; while Dadongkang doesn’t mean anything. Dongkang, however, is some kind of a frog that’s really big.

Ha, ha, hem in the second one is somewhat onomatopoeic. My father would yawn and already start the rhyme – so Ha, ha, hem would be the sound of his yawn and the rhyme would extend out from it.

Meli tuak ji nenem – bought coconut-wine of six (bottles)
Men sing telah bang Dèlem – if not (/can’t) finish (them just) give (to) Dèlem
Kutang pedalem – throwing (them is) a pity
Nuangin masem. – keeping (them only turns them) sour.

Dèlem is the fat, meek one of the two fools in a popular traditional form of puppet theatre. Dèlem’s skinny companion is Sangut who’s more opportunist. In the Javanese version of the same characters, Dèlem is Garèng, and Sangut is Petruk.

My father doesn’t know where exactly he learned these from. Just from around, he said, from the Balinese people.

Another one that he likes to recite out of the blue is:

34 | 5 32 1 34 | 55 32 1
Duni – a, duni a, duni – a ha, duni a

Dunia simply means the World(ly). He said he started reciting this only after he reached adulthood.

The bus was actually a truck with a wooden housing attached to its cargo area at the back. Its seatings were actually wooden benches, all different shapes and colours of them put together in rows. That’s how it got its name, I imagined, “Bis Kayu” – the Wooden Bus. I had to climb up the door at the back, there were no steps. The boy threw my other bag up to the top of the wooden roof.

I sat my butt on the hard wooden bench and immediately saw a peculiar little view: colourful plastic bags hanging from the ceiling of the bus. Lines and rows of them cute plastic bags, some with stripes, some just plain, transparent blue reddish black and white, some clipped to the ceiling, some tied. They looked like part of a festival decoration of some sort. For the Wooden Bus Insider’s Surprise Party, perhaps, or something resembling that.

I did wonder for a while, but refrained myself from asking why those plastic bags were there. I thought I should act local – perhaps that could help to avoid anything that could happen to a non-local in a foreign land (one with peculiar decorations hanging from the ceilings of their buses).

The bus went up, and down, and up, and down the bouncy hills and the turquoisish-rocky roads through the mountains. The plastic bags were blown – left, right, front, back, around, any other direction possible – by the wind coming from the unglassed windows, and following the jerky movement of the bus. I quickly adapted to the rhythm that the driver chose to put himself in.

Contrary to my initial imagination of how sore my butt would be pouncing on the wooden bench along the way, I was actually quite comfortably stably seated there. Perhaps it was because I was cuddling my other bag on my lap – helped to put a bit of gravity-lock, it seemed.

People came up and went down. Or rather, climbed up and jumped down. In further details: people climbed in, sat on the wooden bench, gave money to the boy, asked the bus to stop, and jumped out. I kept looking to the side of the road – to various little things that got spread on the local ground left to dry in the local sun. Enjoying the bewildering view – of the local trees, households, and chickens passing by – while still trying to act local, bored, and sleepy.

Alas, the boy asked me for money. I forgot how, I just understood his gesture I guess. I didn’t know how much the trip costed, having been too stupid to peek at how much the other passengers had given him – but thought I should just keep acting local, and that the other passengers had their lifts for shorter distances anyway. So I gave the boy a paper bill that I imagined would cover my whole journey.

“Bajawa,” I said.

He gave me change. Yep. Fantastic. Me yes local girl uh-huh I am. Despite the fact that I obviously looked non-local, of course.

That was when another passenger just in front of me started to look like he was suddenly inhaling a large amount of seawave into his lungs. Or perhaps into his abdomen. I looked at him in mild surprise and realized that he was just about to vomit whatever he inhaled just then. Another sudden inhale-like gesture. I tried not to look for the sake of courtesy.

But he suddenly reached up to the ceiling, and I suddenly felt the thrill of a discovery. My question was finally answered: what he did was grabbing one of those cute little flowing plastic bags hanging from the ceiling. He didn’t even have the time to choose a colour he liked before he eventually vomitted into it. When he was finished with his last drop, he tied the open end. On the count of one, he then threw it out his unglassed window.

I pat myself on my back invisibly for not bursting in a non-local delight.

Goodbye, decoration for the Insider’s Surprise Party! Welcome, sickness bags!