They say water has a memory. In Bali, on the night of
September 9th, 2025, the Tukad Badung River remembered everything.
Chapter 1: The Night the River Went Mad
The thing about rivers—and this is something the old-timers
in Canebrulay would have understood, God rest their ornery souls—is that they’re
never really sleeping. They’re just waiting. Biding their time like a patient
cat outside a mousehole, dreaming of the day they can stretch their legs again,
flex those liquid muscles, and remind the world who was here first.
On Jalan Sulawesi in Denpasar, Made Sutrisna was closing up
his shop for the night when he heard it. Not the usual gentle murmur of the
Tukad Badung that had lulled him to sleep for forty-three years, but something
else entirely. Something that made the hair on his arms stand up like soldiers
at attention.
It was a growl. Low and wet and hungry.
Jesus, Made thought, though he was Hindu and probably
shouldn’t have been invoking the Christian savior. But sometimes, when the
darkness starts creeping in around the edges, a man reaches for whatever gods
he can find. What in the seven hells is that?
The growl grew louder. Became a roar. Then became something
that had no name in any language, living or dead—a sound like the earth itself
clearing its throat before it spoke some terrible truth.
By the time Made realized what was happening, the river had
already made up its mind about the conversation they were going to have.
The water came fast and mean, carrying everything it had
been storing up for decades in its muddy belly: tree branches twisted like
arthritic fingers, garbage that hadn’t seen daylight since the Suharto era, and
things that might have been debris but looked too much like grasping hands in
the darkness. It slammed into the riverbank with the force of a freight train
driven by a madman, and the bank said uncle without much of a fight.
Made’s shop—three generations of his family’s sweat and
dreams made manifest in brick and mortar—folded like a house of cards in a
hurricane. The iron security door he’d been so proud of, the one that had cost
him two months’ wages, crumpled like aluminum foil in the grip of some
invisible giant.
The water kept coming.
By morning, when the sun finally worked up the courage to
peek over the horizon and survey the damage, eighteen people were dead.
Eighteen souls who had gone to bed on September 9th thinking they’d wake up on
September 10th, never knowing they had an appointment with something older and
more patient than time itself.
The governor would call it unprecedented. The weather
service would blame atmospheric dynamics and equatorial Rossby waves—fancy
words for we don’t know why the sky fell, but here’s some science to make
you feel better. The BBC would label it the worst flood in a decade.
But they were all wrong, every last one of them.
This wasn’t unprecedented. This wasn’t new.
This was the river remembering.
Chapter 2: The Weight of Forgetting
You want to know the real horror of it? It’s not the
eighteen bodies floating face-down in water that used to be rice paddies. It’s
not the cars swallowed by the underpass at Dewa Ruci like metallic offerings to
some hungry god. It’s not even the bridges in Jembrana collapsing with the
weary sigh of old men finally giving up the ghost.
The real horror is that this had all happened before.
Wayan Suarta knew it. Sitting in his flooded living room,
watching his family’s photographs float by like prayer boats carrying memories
to the afterlife, he remembered his grandfather’s stories. Stories the young
folks didn’t want to hear anymore, stories that got in the way of progress and
development and all those shiny new words that meant the same thing: forget.
“Cucu,” his grandfather had said, using the old word for
grandson, “the water never forgets. Only we do.”
The old man had been talking about January 1932, when the
Dutch were still running the show and treating disasters like accounting
problems. Wayan’s grandfather had been just a boy then, but he remembered the
bodies in the Tabanan River—twelve of them, bloated and blue, like discarded
dolls from some giant’s playroom.
The colonial newspapers had been full of helpful information
about damaged bridges and disrupted telegraph lines, casualties measured in
guilders rather than grief. Several warehouses in Benoa collapsed, they’d
written, as if the warehouses were what mattered. As if the families who’d
lived near those warehouses weren’t worth mentioning by name.
That’s the thing about colonizers, Wayan thought,
watching a chicken coop drift past his window like a square wooden boat. They
turn everything into numbers. Everything becomes inventory.
But the numbers didn’t tell the whole story. Never did.
The lontar manuscripts knew better. Those ancient
palm-leaf books that the intellectuals liked to dismiss as mythology—they
remembered everything. They remembered the great Gejer Bali of 1815,
when the earth shook so hard it sent half a mountain sliding into the sea. They
remembered October 22, 1818, when the floods came for Buleleng like a liquid
army, drowning the royal palace and rewriting the political map of northern
Bali.
The manuscripts even had special words for different kinds
of water-death. Gentuh for mudslides. Nyanyad for volcanic debris
flows. The ancestors had known that not all floods were created equal, that
water could kill in a dozen different ways and each way deserved its own name.
But who read the lontar manuscripts anymore? Who
listened to the babad stories? The tourists wanted temples and monkey
dances and Instagram-worthy sunsets. The developers wanted empty rice fields
they could fill with concrete. The government wanted to forget anything that
might slow down the blessed march of progress.
And so the island forgot.
Until the river decided it was time to remember.
Chapter 3: The Sponge That Became Stone
There’s a word in Balinese—subak—that sounds peaceful
when you say it. Rolls off the tongue like water over smooth stones. It means
something beautiful: harmony. Balance. The idea that humans and water and rice
and spirits can all live together in the same neighborhood without trying to
kill each other.
For a thousand years, it worked.
The subak system was like something out of a fairy
tale, if fairy tales were written by hydraulic engineers with advanced degrees
in sustainable development. Terraced rice fields that caught rainwater and held
it like cupped hands. Canals that shared water the way a good mother shares
love—fairly, wisely, with enough for everyone.
It was a giant sponge made of earth and wisdom and
community, designed to absorb the kind of liquid punishment that September 9th
had delivered. When the rains came hard, the subak said thank you
and soaked it up. When the dry season stretched long, the subak said we’ve
got this and released what it had saved.
UNESCO called it a World Heritage Site. Experts from around
the world came to study it, to marvel at it, to take photographs and write
papers about indigenous ecological knowledge and sustainable water management.
And while they were busy admiring it, Bali was busy
destroying it.
Villa by villa. Hotel by hotel. Shopping mall by shopping
mall.
Every rice field that disappeared was a sponge cell dying.
Every canal that got paved over was a valve being shut. The system that had
protected the island for a millennium was being dissected with surgical
precision, sold off piece by piece to the highest bidder.
Ananta Wijaya had watched it happen. He was an artist, which
meant he saw things other people missed—or chose not to see. He remembered when
you could drive from Denpasar to Gianyar and actually see where one city ended
and the next began. Green spaces like breathing rooms between the concrete. Now
it was all one long urban smear, like someone had taken a gray crayon and
colored over paradise.
“Even Ubud has traffic jams,” he’d said, and there was
something in his voice like mourning. Because Ubud was supposed to be the
spiritual heart of Bali, the place where people went to find themselves. If
Ubud had traffic jams, what hope was there for anywhere else?
The old farmers knew. They’d been trying to tell anyone who’d
listen that you can’t concrete over a sponge and expect it to keep working.
That you can’t kill a thousand-year-old system of flood control and replace it
with storm drains and hope for the best.
But nobody listened to old farmers anymore. Old farmers were
obstacles to development. Old farmers didn’t understand economics.
The water understood, though.
The water understood perfectly.
Chapter 4: The Choice
Now here’s the thing about choices—and this is something
every horror story worth its salt eventually gets around to—most of the time,
you don’t know you’re making them until it’s too late to take them back.
Bali had been making a choice for decades without realizing
it. Every rice field sacrificed to tourism. Every traditional irrigation canal
filled with concrete. Every subak community dissolved for the greater
good of progress. They’d been choosing forgetting over remembering, convenient
lies over inconvenient wisdom.
The floods of September 2025 were the bill coming due.
Sitting in his damaged shop, Made Sutrisna looked around at
what was left of his life’s work and felt something shift inside his chest.
Something that might have been understanding. His grandfather’s old books were
ruined—the lontar manuscripts that had been passed down through five
generations, reduced to pulp by the very element they’d been written to
explain.
But maybe that was fitting. Maybe that was the point.
The river hadn’t been angry, Made realized. Rivers don’t get
angry. Rivers just are. The river had been doing what rivers do: flowing from
high places to low places, carrying what needed to be carried, going where it
needed to go. The fact that humans had built their lives in the way—well, that
was a human problem.
The choice now was simple, even if it wasn’t easy.
Bali could keep pretending this was unprecedented. Keep
building higher walls and deeper storm drains and stronger bridges. Keep
treating the symptoms while the disease ate away at the island’s ancient immune
system.
Or it could remember.
Remember that water has rights too. Remember that some
things are more important than quarterly profit margins. Remember that the
ancestors weren’t stupid, and their solutions weren’t primitive—they were
tested by time in a way that modern engineering never could be.
Remember that an island is a finite thing, surrounded by
infinite ocean, and in that equation, humility isn’t just wise—it’s survival.
The next flood was already forming somewhere in the
mountains, in the convergence of atmospheric pressure and ancient grievance.
The only question was whether the island would be ready for it, or whether it
would still be trying to forget its way to safety when the water came calling
again.
Made looked at his ruined shop, at the water stains on the
walls that marked how high the river had reached, and made his choice.
He was going to remember.
Even if it killed him.
Especially if it killed him.
Because some things—like water, like memory, like the weight
of a thousand years of wisdom—are more important than any one man’s life.
The river had spoken.
Now it was time for the island to listen.
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In Bali, they say water has memory. On September 9th,
2025, the island learned that sometimes, memory has teeth.
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