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Ibu
Rani (right) with Mbok Made (left)
and Kadek Astri Angraeni (centre)
weaving a jejaitan from palm leaves
in their Ubud family compound.
The jejaitan is the base mat upon
which temple offerings are placed.
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Mangku
Gerjar, an elderly priest from the village of Ubud in central Bali,
lives with his extended family in a typical compound. The com- pound
houses a total of thirteen people: he and his wife, lbu Kawi, their
three married sons, and their wives and children. Mangku Gerjar's
youngest son, Nyoman Bahula, and his wife, Rani, are modern Balinese,
having only two children, Rudi and Lies.
In the
morning, once the children have gone to school, lbu Rani sets off
to market, (lbu, a polite Indonesian term of address
for a married woman, is not actually used among the Balinese, who
have a very complex system of names.) By 7 am the market is already
crowded. Rani bypasses mounds of brilliant flowers and coconut-leaf
offering trays to select a kilo of purple-skinned sweet potatoes.
From piles of vivid leafy green vegetables, she picks out a couple
of bundles of water convolvulus or kangkung. Next
into the shopping basket goes a paper twist of raw peanuts and a
leaf-wrapped slab of fermented soybean cake (tempe).
Rani pauses
by some enamel basins full of fish in brine, changes her mind and
settles for a bag of tiny, frantically wriggling eels caught in
the rice fields, then goes to the meat stall and buys a piece of
pork and a small plastic bag of fresh pig's blood.
The basics
of today's meals already purchased, lbu Rani heads for the spice
stalls. Mounds of purplish shallots, pearl-white garlic and chillies
ranging from long red tabia lombok to the popular
short, chunky red and yellow tabia Bali, fiery little
red and green bird's eye chillies compete with piles of innocuous-looking
roots hiding their rich fragrances. There's familiar ginger; its
relative, laos or greater galangal; camphor scented
kencur (known to the Balinese as cekuh), with
its white, crunchy and flavoursome flesh, and finally vivid yellow
turmeric, the most pungent of all.
Fragrant
screwpine or pandan leaf, the faintly flavoured salam
leaf, the small but headily scented kaffir lime and its double leaf,
spears of lemon grass and sprigs of lemon-scented basil, all promise
magic in the kitchen. Like the emphatic tones of a large gong, the
odour of dried shrimp paste from nearby stall assails the senses.
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