Fruit on their heads...

So there we sat, the other menstruation guests and I, on folding chairs in the home of the girl whose new maturity we were honoring. My place was among a covered portico between the heavy gate and the courtyard where the ceremony would take place.

The gamelan' played without respite, and sarong-clad women bearing elaborate towers of fruit and flowers on their heads filed past on the way to the main altar around the corner in the courtyard's largest section. Men brought in tubs of meat and poultry, as well as a chicken for a ritual slaughter.

The boys, also riding on men's shoulders, seemed bored. One was toothpick-thin and appeared to verge on restlessness. The other, pudgy and sullen, kept looking toward the kitchen, from which drifted aromas of the banquet that would follow.

The procession wound to the altar where the ceremony took place. Older men and women, seated separately, had the best places -- close, just before the altar. I could see them, but not the ceremony itself, and for a while I watched the old folks watching what was actually going on.

The Balinese do it better...

Eventually, I found myself drifting off into a dreamy state, furthered by the heat of an early Balinese afternoon and the sensory overload of the colors and sounds and smells. Through my haziness, an insight emerged, nothing cosmic, just one of those realizations of the obvious that nonetheless satisfies. A joyous celebration of a girl's very clear transition in life, shared by her male peers, no matter how reluctant or bored, seemed preferable to furtiveness, snickering, and the other traditional Western responses to coming of age--or many other of life's transitions. The Balinese do it better!