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A DOG OF A DIFFERENT COLOUR

. This is another story about dogs - one dog at any rate - so, if you feel you9ve had your fill of Bali dogs, skip to the next chapter.
Who can blame you .

TAILPIECE

Happiness, as we all know, comes in different shapes and sizes. To a Balinese child, happiness is a Kite.

Let it be an ornate fantasy with streaming tail fluttering gaily in the breeze, or a scrap of grubby plastic stretched carefully across a few splinters of bamboo....

And how not
Imagine running barefoot around the sawah, your ears filled with the music of miniature waterfalls cascading through the rice terraces, your eyes on your kite as it soars and plunges - a mystic butterfly winging through a blue eternity.

The Balinese have a legend that there was once a boy who made a kite so beautiful that an angel flew out of Heaven to play with it. All day the kite and the angel danced together in the sky and when night came and the boy brought down his kite, he found a sleepy angel still clinging to its tail. From that day on, the children of Bali fly their kites, hoping to catch another angel.

Should I ever get to Heaven, who knows, perhaps 1, too, will find some small boy with a high-flying kite - to bring me back to Bali - the land of smoking duck and black rice pudding - my patchwork paradise.

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