The Wind

 The wind continues in south Bali. Four days now, howling up and down streets, overturning garbage cans (for which the neighborhood dogs are thankful), scattering the contents like tumbling tufts of sagebrush, plucking flowers from the bushes and limbs from the trees, chasing the neighborhood dogs who are more accustomed to giving chase. They all show up at my door. For God's sake, let us in!

First it's sunny, then rainy, then sunny again. I rush out to get a coffee during one of these intervals of sun and meet the rain halfway to my destination. I slog in, dripping, but people understand. It happens, dude. 

In the early evening, the sky clears, an azureous blue, with clouds standing afar off like exhausted foes, and I rush down to the beach for an evening coffee and a stroll, buffeted all the way by the fists of the driving wind. Arriving there, I find the place unusually crowded. Perhaps it's accidental. These people may have come not so much by intention but as victims of the southerly wind. In any case, they seem happy--breezy, one might say--walking in pairs and trios and quadruplets, or riding those popular little electric bikes, against which a pedestrian must always be on guard. 

At my table, I begin to read, but put my book down, light a cigarette and watch the passing crowd instead. It is composed of every person of every type in every color speaking every language--a regular Babel, but laid flat to the sandy ground like a tattoo. Two elderly women are sitting at a table just one from mine, smoking as well, and when a young woman in a two-piece, backless, bare ass bathing suit strolls by with her boyfriend, I see the two women fix their gaze on the female member of the couple. She passes through their line of vision, and the old women do not deviate their gaze nor adjust their line of sight with a turn of the head. Their gray faces are as plain and unopinionated as stone, their facial features perfectly inscrutable. They take in the young woman as she passes through their field of vision like some kind of electric scanning device. The woman nearest me, once a blond I think, takes a long drag on her cigarette and blows out a long stream of blue smoke, which comes back in her face and swirls around her head at the whim of the wind. 

And then it started to rain.