But we still felt embarrassed. We had to force the land certificates upon him. It was better than hocking them to someone else.

Before we knew it, not one of us was left with a land certificate. All of them had been given to Pak Jamah. That meant that the whole village was indebted to Pak Jamah. Most of the time that didn’t worry is because we could still go on working our rice paddies and Pak Jamah didn’t demand any of the produce. That made us feel embarrassed, too. So we often gave him whatever we could from our harvests.

"You don’t have to do that!" he would protest. "You need it more than I do. Take it home!"

But we still felt bad, and we half forced Pak Jamah to accept a small portion of the harvest from our rice paddies.

Our rice paddies? Could you say the land we worked was still ours? We didn’t want to know. If we were to count up the debt we owed plus interest, God only knows how much it would have come to. We were too ashamed to ask Pak Jamah. We believed he was a generous man, and we were grateful for his help that made it possible for us to conduct our religious ceremonies, to cremate our ancestors, and to send our children to school. If it weren’t for Pak Jamah, our beautiful, fertile rice paddies would have long been sold because we kept on needing more and more money.

*******

Two hundred hectares were needed to build the several hundred bungalows. They were going to be spread over a large area, and to walk from one bungalow to the next would mean traversing a little piece of rice paddy via a walking track. In the pieces of rice paddies in between the bungalows, we farmers were to continue working, sewing our seeds and reaping our harvests. But now, we weren’t working to achieve a good crop. We were working to given the tourists something to look at. We were working to make them happy. They photographed us plowing our fields. As we were harvesting, they approached us, shook hands with us, and asked us to pose with them while they took our photograph. Sometimes they would ask to borrow our sickles and our bamboo hats, and photograph each other wearing the hats and holding the sickles up above their heads. One by one they did this, leaving us no time to get our work done. But it didn’t matter if we didn’t finish our work, because Pak Jamah really didn’t need our harvests. What he needed was the money he got from renting out the bungalows.

*******

We never went to Mr Jamah’s house any more. Our relations with him began to change. We became to him as workers to a boss. Our dance troupe stopped performing in the hotels in Nusa Dua. Now they only performed in Pak Jamah’s bungalows, and Pak Jamah set the rate that our dancers were to be paid. The relationship between our village’s dance troupe and Pak Jamah was an employer-employee relationship.

The most powerful and most authoritative person in our village was no longer the village head. It was Pak Jamah. No longer did we sit around in the roadside stall chatting with him as we used to. When we passed him in the street, we would address him in a trembling voice and with great respect, our bodies bent over, nodding furiously.

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