THE AFTERMATH

But surely the strangest and saddest of all experience, the icing on the cake, came on the way home after a day of celebrating, a day full of shocks and surprises. As the bemo rattled its way back towards Rantepao, the driver slammed on the anchors, swerved, L. and Cora gasping in the front passenger seat. A kitten had run out across the road, and as the bemo backed up I saw a little girl cradling a tiny tabby kitten, its paws limp and lifeless as its head lolled unnaturally to the side, its neck broken. In the West there would have been tears, a difficult time for the parents and a tearful ritual burial in an old shoebox. But in Tana Toraja death has less of a sting, and there was no reaction at all. Instead the bemo driver found a stick and started digging a shallow grave, right there on the roadside.

'If we don't bury the cat, then this bemo will have a crash sometime in the next two weeks,' explained one of the locals, jammed into the back of the bus alongside me. Apparently cats have a special meaning in Toraja, and as the driver finished off his work, everyone seemed to consider that that was the end of it: the child whose pet it was didn't bat an eyelid as we shot off, leaving rubber and black exhaust as the only sign that anything had happened. I'd read about Buddhist attitudes to death and I'd seen Christian funerals, but I'd never seen people react so calmly to loss of life before, and that wasn't just when it came to cats. It left me hugging my own haversack, burying my misery for these animals loses in a day just like this…