My name is Kadek Sudiana. I am a Balinese male. I am forty three years old. I learned English because my mother fell ill when I was thirteen, neither of us knew who my father was, and I needed to work as a taxi driver to make money from the visiting tourists. My mother’s mother put a shark tooth necklace around my neck. It was supposed to be a symbol of strength and protection. When I was fourteen, my sister died at the age of two with a fever and Typhoid. When I was fifteen, my older brother lost his left leg in the Vietnam war. I have never been married and I have never had sex. When I was sixteen, I received oral from my mother’s brother and he was found murdered the next year. They never found the murder weapon but concluded that his death was from what looked to be shark’s teeth. His body was found thirty kilometers away from the nearest body of water.
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My mother was the best part of my life. She worked all hours of the day and I never knew what she did exactly but there was always enough Lawar for my brother and I to go to sleep without a hungry stomach. Sometimes she wouldn’t put anything on her plate and tell us that she wasn’t hungry, that she had eaten at work, or that it was just a special treat for him and I. I remember thinking how my mom must’ve been Sri Asih herself, because she was able to work, cook, put us to sleep, and drive us to school everyday but I never saw her eat. I never saw any superheroes eat either.
“Kadek, you are so talented and smart. Wayan is in the war now and you have to help me okay?” My mom told me I could use her scooter from now on to give rides to people who needed to get from one place to another. She would walk from Mengwi to Sukawati every day so that I could bring a second income to our home with the scooter. I drove my first passenger on my thirteenth birthday and after four years we had enough to buy a car. I remember doing the math in my head and thinking how lucky I was to be able speak to new people everyday, to practice new words, to learn what my island looks like without walking.
When driving people from Ngurah Rai to Uluwatu I smiled when listening to stories of foreign happily ever afters on their way to consummate their marriage. I pushed my judgement aside when driving single I-am-here-on-business looking men to Sanur well past midnight, and nodded in agreement when giving my Christian friends rides to Belimbingsari. I felt excited when being told the plans of college graduates on their way to do their one-month-around-Bali that every I’ve-just-finished-Uni twenty two year old dreams of- that I have always dreamed of. Going to University.
My mother told to me “Kadek, make sure that if your dreams come true they will change the world, not just yours.” She found the time to think about everyone else in the world but rarely herself. I used to ask myself how someone so selfless could be attacked by something so selfish as cancer. I don’t agree much with how my world is. The first fifteen years of my life, I used to think that if I were the creator of the universe I would take away all of the bad and replace it with love and peace- that bad only forms from a lack of love. As I got older, I realized that bad will exist no matter how much love is in your heart, no matter how selfless you are. I started to learn that maybe that is how the selfish survive, selfless people attract them.
Bob and Marsha are my favorite couple that I have ever met while taxi’ing. I was fourteen when I drove Bob and Marsha from their hotel in Seminyak to catch their ferry at Serangang. They had both lost their first partners to cancer and met in the hospital when using the water fountain next to their rooms and bonded through the trauma of loss. After their significant others had passed on, the two came to the sudden realization that life is short and decided to get married and travel around Bali for their honeymoon. I remember hoping that my mom wouldn’t die, and that it wouldn’t take her death to prove to myself that I should cherish life.
Driving people around for money to take care of mother, I always thought about how for them, they were paying me the equivalent of their pocket change, a fallen quarter on their subway, a dollar they watch float by in their rain gutters. But for me- for me, it was everything. Every dropped coin helped us put enough food on the table; and included my uncle. I had never hated anything more than the sicknesses that cursed my mother or sister until I met my uncle. Have you ever wanted to kill something? It crossed your mind that your life would be easier without that thing alive. You imagine that maybe, just maybe, if they were gone, it would solve one or two problems. Maybe you never thought about how you would kill this person, or if you would be the person to do it. But I did. I thought about this.
“Thirteen point eight four kilometers that’s about eight point six miles, at fifty eight thirteen point nine five a mile, is fifty thousand Rupiah, but I take American dollars too if you have them. It’s three dollars and twenty three cents, if you happen to have two dimes I’ll take that no problem.”
“Jesus kid, don’t you got a brain on ya!” Bob laughed while flicking through a stack of Rupiah and counting out what I had just told him. It was then that I realized I am really good with numbers. The more I taxied, the more people were astounded by my gift with math and always telling me “Did you go to college here? You should you know!” But even if I had saved enough to go, all of the money my brother and I made had to go toward our mother, our house, our food, and our uncle.
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It was 6:28, twenty two minutes after the sun fell below the horizon. Even though you can’t see it anymore, you know it is still there, and will rise again tomorrow. The same goes for the pain and disgust I felt. There was still a little light left in the sky, and there would be for twenty two minutes more. I knew my uncle would be home for supper, he usually is. He chooses to sit at the head of the table as if our acting father and eats a plate’s worth of food that could be better proportioned to give to my ailing mother, or provide more sustenance to two growing boys in the household. Because he so heavily enjoyed acting as our father, I played Jesus and allowed him a last supper.
I felt different that day. I remember feeling like I was finally better than him because I knew something he didn’t. I was in control now, I had the power. And it felt even better that he didn’t know this versus if he had. Knowing I was about to take him out of our lives forever, his draining energy away from my mother, one less plate on the dining room table. My pain felt-quiet.
A year can be a short time and a year can be a long time. If you have graduated university like the kids I used to drive around the island, a year feels like just one fourth of their studious journey. If you’ve been married for thirty, one year is just a single wave in the Bali Sea. But if one of those years is spent accompanying your husband to the hospital for Chemo and watching him cough red and breath like he has just surfed that single wave and barely made it to the surface, then one year is a long time.
My sixteenth year was my longest. There was not one day of that year that my uncle didn’t eat dinner with us. “Why me?” I would asked myself every night before forcing myself to sleep. I didn’t want it to happen to anyone else, but why me? He could have joined the businessmen I dropped off in Sanur late at night. And been with someone who chose this way of work to pay for their Lawar. I never chose it. I never even got the choice to.
One year, two hundred and ten days. There was not ever a dinner I didn’t drive my uncle home, but there were some days that I also had to pick him up. Three hundred and fifteen. I have never been married nor have I ever had sex but when I was sixteen I learned that I do not have control over my body. I hated myself because what I hated most, my body didn’t. Shame and guilt was sewn into my brain as if my uncle was the only one in Indonesia who knew how to sew. I have never been curious about what it would feel like with a woman since. Before my uncle started eating dinner with us, it was all I thought of. But now, I know if it were to happen, it would be the same feeling I experienced three hundred and fifteen times twenty seven years ago, and that is something I never want to feel again.
It was 6:28, twenty two minutes after the sun fell below the horizon. My uncle was on the back of my scooter and I drove him to his house after dinner. We headed North to Ubud like we usually did. When we reached his hut in Tegallalang I wasted no hesitation on waiting for the perfect moment. There is no perfect moment to kill someone. I took off my helmet and the necklace my grandmother gave to me when I was four. Why didn’t it work? I always wore it, like she told me. I prayed with it every night and I kept it beneath my shirt always. Why did it not protect me? Why did it not save my mother? Why did my sister die?
As I watched him remove his helmet and place it on the right handlebar for safekeeping, I wound the braid of the necklace around my four fingers and placed the shark tooth in between my ring and middle finger. When my uncle turned around I stabbed him until he wasn’t standing anymore. And after that, I stabbed him until he wasn’t yelling anymore. And after that, I stabbed him until he wasn’t breathing anymore. The shark tooth necklace may not have protected me, but it gave me strength.
They found his body thirty kilometers from Sanur Harbour. The autopsy showed fifty three fatal shark teeth wounds in his Carotid artery. Since 1990 there have been four shark attacks in Bali, none of which were fatal. My uncle was the first person to die of a shark attack since 1990.
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My name is Kadek Sudiana. I am a Balinese male. I am forty three years old. I learned English because my mother fell ill when I was thirteen and I needed to work as a taxi driver to make money from the visiting tourists. I made many friends over these years that helped me without knowing they were doing so. Terima kaseh Bob and Marsha for reminding me to cherish life even when there is pain. My name is Kadek Sudiana, this is my life, and I am strong enough to live it.