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with whips’ (TB, 151). She goes on with her own intensely passionate and irrelevant
impressions, showing how the ludicrous gravity is really a question of perspective:
The girl said, ‘I couldn’t stand the young guys. They’re so bloody beautiful.
Their bodies are so smooth and lean after all the fasting. Did you see? When
their eyes roll up, showing only whites, and they start dancing they don’t have
any expression at all. No joy, no excitement, no fear. Just nothing. When the
priests put those big spears through their cheeks they don’t register anything.
They aren’t there, they’re out with the cosmos somewhere.’ The girl picked
distractedly at a patch of bleached skin on her arm - she said she’d caught a
skin fungus in Bali. ‘I wonder if they fuck like that?’
Judith snorted.
‘No, I’m serious,’ the girl said. ‘Those guys really let go. They let go
of the whole world, they look like they’re coming. I kept thinking, Jesus I’d
like to fuck with a guy who looked like that. And then I’d think, but Jesus, it’s
scary. You’d be alone.’ (TB, 150)
This egocentric, Orientalist reaction might well be shared by many Western tourists enthralled
with the exoticism of Asian ritual, and though Judith’s snort pretends to reject it out of hand,
we know that she shares a fascination for the festival’s macabre ritual, and that she has been
having sex very much ‘alone’ during her unhappy married life, and also find her immediately
after the festival back in the passionate throes of sex with her own Indian lover.
This is, after all, just how Judith reacts to such intense experiences, and is the whole
point of the scene as well as of the early one of the horror of the 1969 street riots in Kuala
Lumpur, when she and a male colleague witness the decapitation of an Indian and, thanks to a
feat of extraordinary strength on Judith’s part, save another Indian from a similar fate. Judith
and her just-met colleague then rush back to his hotel room and have repeated cathartic sex,
and this just days after marrying to her long-time sweetheart, engendering the child which is to
destroy her storybook marriage. Westerners, like Judith, might show shock and disgust at the
extremes of asceticism of such Asian practices, but tend to confuse the passions themselves
and how interrelated they all are. Bruce Bennett notes how d’Alpuget was impressed by the
‘smell of sex in the air’ during her visit to Jakarta when she was 22. She found the ‘fear and
loathing’ of sex in the Judeo-Christian cultures was replaced by an openness, amongst her
female acquaintances at least, in the Hindu-Buddhist milieu. This seemed to have fit in with
the other apparent socio-political contradictions she encountered in Indonesia, and made
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