Aunt Boomie

Ali, a 20-year-old Balinese driver, slowed down his [insert name of a nice looking but slightly off brand boxy faux 4-wheel drive vehicle], to point out the funeral procession hogging one lane of traffic on the road connecting us from the party bowels of Kuta Beach to the surfer’s paradise of Uluwatuu and Padang Padang beaches.

“Where’s the body?” asked Mary, my co-worker and inquisitive travel companion.

“Oh, it’s on top,” Ali replied.

At which point I shrieked, in that unfiltered Boomie way of mine, “Oh my God! That’s the dead man riding on the throne?!?!”

Ali’s cheeks reddened and he brushed back his long surfer bangs, eyes hidden behind [insert name of knock off cool sunglasses]. “No, no,” he half-stammered, half nervously giggled. “The body is burned. The ashes are inside.”

Without me asking any further, he explained, “Maybe that’s his son riding on top. Yes, that is the dead man’s oldest son.”

At the time of the incident, I had to laugh at myself, heartily, for momentarily thinking that a culture, even one as obsessively ritualistic and ceremonial as certain groups of people in Bali, would strap a deceased body onto a throne and parade him through the streets.

Oh, the moments of black humor (and whatnot) that remind us of our own backlog of ways of understanding the world, and our gaping desire to discover and encounter how other people, around the world, approach this whole thing called being alive–or the entrance and exit in and out of this world.