The other side of paradise

Oct. 6, 2012, 3 a.m.

Nyoman Rencini sits on the floor of her kitchen, waiting for the night.

The single adornment on the wall is a picture of Rencini's daughters, aged 21, 16 and 13. They are beautiful in the Balinese way, smiling shyly. Life and a bomb, however, have vaporised any shadow of Rencini's own youth, replacing it with a weary anxiety.

We reach her tiny home by dodging traffic on a road clogged with motorcycles, trucks, cars and petrol fumes in the Sanur area of Bali's sprawling capital, Denpasar. We squeeze between makeshift eating houses and trail down a lane far from postcard Bali, dust and stray dogs ghosting at our heels. Babies squeal, bare-foot children drift by.

Rencini's kitchen is also her dining room and sitting room. There is no table; no chair. At night it is the bedroom of Rencini and her daughters. They drag a mattress out of the only other room because the roof trusses have sagged, the tiles have shifted and tropical rain sluices in. Rencini is fearful the roof will fall so she won't allow her girls to sleep beneath it. She is wise. Two days later, part of the roof collapses. She has no idea how to pay for repairs.

Here is the other side of paradise.

In a parallel Bali, surfers carve the waves at Kuta and tourists enjoy massages among the beach boys kicking footballs across the crowded sand, waiting for a tangerine sunset when the ocean glows gold. In the villas of Seminyak Westerners loll cloistered

each other and sold their own people as slaves. The keris - the wickedly serpentine traditional knife, handy for beheading and stabbing the heart - has a leading role in Bali's history.

The island is also home to a significant Muslim population. Muslims came centuries ago as mercenaries to Balinese kings, their lives and those of their descendants interweaving with the animist, Hindu and Buddhist Balinese culture; in recent decades, Muslims, attracted by the tourist-based economy, have moved in from other areas of Indonesia. About 14 per cent of Bali's population is now Muslim.

George Quinn, former head of the south-east Asia centre at the Australian National University, points out the majority of tourists to Bali are Muslims from other areas of Indonesia - about 4 million a year.

Many of them are on a pilgrimage to what are said to be seven graves of ancient Muslim saints ''discovered'' after a Javanese Muslim living in Bali received a supernatural revelation of their existence in 1992.

The Muslim travellers far outstrip the number of tourists from the rest of the world. About 2.8 million non-Indonesian visitors are expected to visit Bali this year, some 900,000 of them from Australia.

The terrorists responsible for the bombs were, of course, Islamic militants hoping to start a holy war. This time, however, the Balinese did not reach for the keris.

''The Balinese chose not to become vigilantes waging war on Muslims, but I can tell you it was in their hearts at the start,'' says Rucini Ballinger, an American skilled in Balinese dance who has been married to a Balinese man for 26 years and is deeply involved in charity work on the island. Rucina is a director of YKIP, an Indonesian acronym for the Humanitarian Foundation for Mother Earth, which helps educate the children of bombing victims, including Rencini's and the sewing widows' daughters. She is also ambassador for the Inspirasia Foundation, established by a British businessman, Mark Weingard, in memory of his fiancee, Annika Linden, who was killed in the 2002 bombings. The foundation is about to open an impressive new centre in East Denpasar designed as a ''one-stop shop'' for the non-government organisations offering health, prosthetic and educational help for the disadvantaged.

But how did Bali's better heart find equilibrium in the face of flames and blood?

There was, for a start, the figure of Haji Agus Bambang Priyanto, a Muslim who was a civil servant in charge of parking in central Kuta when the bombs shattered the night. He was, he says, at home reading and felt the concussion and saw the ball of fire rising above rooftops.

He leapt on a bicycle and pedalled to the Sari Club. Cars were on fire, their fuel tanks exploding. People were running from the club, their hair and clothes aflame, screaming for help. Bambang remembers the horror of their skin melting in his hands. He held a woman, a shard of glass protruding from her chest, knowing that it must have pierced her heart.

He spent three hours helping evacuate the living and another eight hours helping remove the dead. And when there was no more lifesaving to be done, he came back every day for a month to ensure not a shred of any body was left on the site.

The pictures and stories spun across the world. The terrorists may have been Muslim, but here was a devout Balinese Muslim who had made the pilgrimage to Mecca four times refusing to leave a victim, alive or dead, unattended. A man with a gift for communication, he became the lightning rod that took much of the charge from the superheated air.

The terrorists, he told everyone he met, were members of a criminal group, and did not represent Islam. Bambang became the symbol of the message, and travelled around villages speaking peace. He would, eventually, be honoured by the United Nations and was invited to New York as the guest of the UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-Moon.

He remains astounded when strangers tell him he saved the reputation of Islam.

''What I did was very simple,'' he says. ''When we see someone in front of us needing help and we can help, why won't we help?'' He adds that the death penalty carried out on three of the bombers was ''fair - some thing deserving; just imagine, 202 died, 325 [were] injured''.

Within a month of the bombing, Bali's Hindu temple priests called on the entire population to undertake cleansing rituals to restore balance and appease the gods.

In homes and temples incense burned and offerings were made, and thousands attended a ceremony at Kuta.

Rucina Ballinger, who took a traditional puppeteer into villages to try to de-mystify the bombings and bring relief to those suffering post-traumatic stress disorder, says that after the ceremonies, ''there seemed a collective relief, as if the air had gone out'' of the built-up tension.

Ten years on, Rencini sits on her floor, waiting for night, reliant on the kindness of strangers and the pittance she earns at the docks.

How does she feel about the way her life has turned out?

''I never had much, anyway,'' she says.