Although the next day (protective brothers notwithstanding) I did get hit by a bus. It was sort of a smallish bus, but nevertheless it did knock me off my bicycle as I was cruising down the shoulderless road. I got tossed into a cement irrigation ditch. About thirty Balinese people on motorcycles stopped to help me, having witnessed the accident (the bus was long gone), and everyone invited me to their house for tea or offered to drive me to the hospital, they all felt so bad about the whole incident. It wasn’t that serious a wreck, though, considering what it might have been. My bicycle was fine, although the basket was bent and my helmet was cracked. (Better the helmet than the head in such cases.) The worst of the damage was a deep cut on my knee, full of bits of pebbles and dirt, that proceeded—over the next few days in the moist tropical air—to become nastily infected.
I didn’t want to worry him, but a few days later I finally rolled up my pants leg on Ketut Liyer’s porch, peeled off the yellowing bandage, and showed my wound to the old medicine man. He peered at it, concerned.
“Infect,” he diagnosed. “Painful.” “Yes,” I said.
“You should go see doctor.”
This was a little surprising. Wasn’t he the doctor? But for some reason he didn’t volunteer to help and I didn’t push it. Maybe he doesn’t administer medication to Westerners. Or maybe Ketut just had a secret hidden master plan, because it was my banged-up knee that allowed me, in the end, to meet Wayan. And from that meeting, everything that was meant to happen . . . happened.
