It has been 24 years since my last trip to Bali. The scent of shallots and coconut oil fills the humid air as the song of crickets and geckos carries me back to another time, to my moody teenage days. The only thing I remember from that journey is my obsession with Balinese onion-fried rice and the tart-sweet taste of snake fruit. Now, at last, I am back, feeling that I should have come much sooner. The disconnect with this side of my family, a distance both physical and emotional, had kept me from returning, just as my perception of this island, worn down by tourism, had done. Yet, in many respects, my own existence is the result of one of those trips.
My mother, German, discovered Bali during her holidays in the 1980s, when she was working as a news presenter in London. She fell in love with the green and lush landscapes and also with my father, Santana. It was a rather unusual encounter: she was a European intellectual with a free spirit; he, a painter born into a family of basket makers from a village near Ubud. But their love story thrived, and she kept returning to Bali again and again to enjoy the simple village life, where there was no electricity or running water and where people bathed in the river. After many trips and letters, they decided to move together to central London. The plan was for my mother to continue with her work, which she loved, while my father carved out an artistic career in the city. It did not go as they had hoped. My father was barred from entering the Notting Hill apartment where my mother rented, for being “too black,” and he found it very hard to adapt to life in the city with his limited English. But then, my mother became pregnant. As her professional career was thriving, she continued working at the BBC while my father kept trying to sell paintings. But his sense of loneliness and isolation from his family plunged him into a deep depression and he eventually stopped painting. When the cultural shock became unbearable and he could bear the noise and pollution no longer, he returned to his village.
