The fragrance of crispy shallots and coconut oil cut through humid air alive with the chirps of crickets and geckos. Their calls transported me back 24 years to the last time I was in Bali. In those days I was a sulky teenager, and my only lasting memory from that trip was my obsession with Balinese onion-fried rice and tangy snake fruits. Now, finally, I was back here, on a visit that felt long overdue. Distance, both physical and emotional, had kept me away, as had a lack of connection with this side of my heritage. So too had the perception of an island ruined by travellers, even though, in so many ways, I owe my very existence to tourism.
My German mother discovered Bali in the 1980s during a break from her job as a newsreader in London. She was seduced by the lush, unspoilt island, and also fell in love with my father, Santana. The match was an unusual one. She was a Western intellectual and free spirit, he was a painter born into a family of basket weavers in a village outside Ubud. Yet their romance blossomed, and my mother frequently returned to Bali, fitting into my father’s simple life, where there was no electricity and villagers bathed in the rivers. Several visits and many letters later, my parents decided to live together in central London. The idea was that she would keep the job she loved while my father carved out a career as an artist – though it didn’t quite go to plan. He was banned from my mother’s rented Notting Hill flat for being “too black”, and his basic English and small-town upbringing made him unsuited to city life. But then my mother fell pregnant. Since her career was taking off, she continued working at the BBC while my father attempted to sell his artwork to her colleagues. But a sense of isolation and separation from his family threw him into a deep depression, and he stopped painting. When the culture clash eventually proved too much, he returned to the comfort of his village, away from noise, pollution and modern technology.
Five months later, back in Britain, I was born, a mixed-race child of the ’80s. In the early years my mother repeatedly took me to see my father’s family, who treated us like royalty. My first memory is of being washed, aged one, with a bucket in the yard by a relative whose teeth were stained with betel nut juice. The next time I went there I was a toddler; then an eight-year-old; and then, on the last visit, a culturally uninterested teen who was outraged at my father for asking me what my name was. In between these trips there was never any contact between him and me.
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