Max Lane Indonesia Southeast Asia and International Affairs

I have heard them referred to as "Hindu eyes" presumably a reference to some distant Indian originating Aryan genes. His eyelids were bigger than most peoples, kind of half shutting down over the eyeball. But they didn't droop at all, it was just how they were. Steady half shut but big and focused eyes looking at you, or staring at you. There may well have been Indian blood somewhere in his ancestry. After all he was Balinese and Bali was the last Hindu enclave in Indonesia. And way back seven or eight or nine hundred years ago the rulers of the day, all through Sumatra as well as Java and Bali had invited Indian Brahmin to their courts to teach religion and writing and reading. But I haven't been to India, so I can't vouch that those strange eyes are indeed Indian.

They added to his force of presence. He was taller and heavier than most Balinese but it was personality and his actions that were the real basis of that presence.

How did I meet him?

It was a less than ordinary building on an ordinary road, an unattractive street despite the trees that lined it. Yes, it was an unattractive avenue adourned with buildings constructed on the cheap and for function only. Cables and wires of all kinds were strung from pole to pole, and building to building, a tangled mess, making even looking up at the sky unattractive. Around the trees was asphalt and concrete and that stretched out across six lanes, along which racket making and black smoke spewing vehicles traveled. There were not even jeepneys on this road, which at least would have added splashes of colour and trashy pictures to the narrow panorama of asphalt and cement and cables and grey, square buildings.