Young lovers survive the test of the blast

I Wayan Juniartha, The Jakarta Post, Denpasar, Bali

Upon hearing the news that a blast had ripped through several nightclubs in Kuta last Saturday night, Nyoman Sudirka decided there and then that he had to get to the Sari Club.

He could not sit around and wait to find out what happened to Ayu Sila Prihanadewi, the girl he had been dating for the past two years and who had worked for seven months as a cashier at the club popular among foreign tourists.

Ayu was on a night shift on that fateful night when a bomb claimed the lives of over 180 people, injured some 300, and flattened the club and other buildings along the road in the Legian area.

Sudirka was in Denpasar when his aunt called and told him that his house was probably on fire. He raced to Legian on motorbike immediately, but found his house intact.

What made his heart sink was the billowing thick smoke that he knew was coming from the Sari Club, which was engulfed in fire.

"I couldn't get Ayu's face out of my mind," Sudirka, a resident of Banjar Pengabetan in Legian, said on the night of chaos.

His house was located just 200 meters from the Sari Club, where the powerful bomb exploded and tore the whole area apart.

With tears streaming down his face, Sudirka ran to the scene, finding his way among the twisted vehicles, charred bodies on the sidewalk, and dozens of panicky, injured foreigners, who were frantically looking for safety.

Upon seeing that the Sari Club had been leveled and fire surrounded the place, Sudirka started sobbing quietly.

"I thought I would never see her again and that thought devastated me. I had just had our photo enlarged," he said, recounting the miraculous moments in his girlfriend's life.

Expecting the worst, he jumped into one of the evacuation team's pick-up trucks and closely inspected each corpse in the hope that he might find Ayu's body. Failing to find her, he joined the evacuation workers who were collecting bodies from the scene. "I was so desperate that I made a sesangi (a promise to the gods) that if I could find my girlfriend I would make a special offering of one suckling pig to them. I would accept whatever happened to her as long as I could find her," Sudirka said.

If he had only known that by the time he had reached the scene that his girlfriend had been taken to the nearby hospital. She had miraculously survived the inferno.

"The club was packed that night, mostly with young westerners. Naturally, I, and my colleagues (bartender Arnold, and two waiters Suwarto and Ajib), were much busier than usual. The music was also so loud that I could not hear anything else," Ayu said.

Sari Club has three bars: at the front, the back and the side. Each bar had four employees serving customers; one cashier, one bartender, and two waiters. Ayu was working at the side bar, at the southern end of the club.

"Everything seemed all right, the guests were very much enjoying themselves until a sudden deafening blast ripped through the club," she said.

The explosion threw 21-year-old Ayu several meters onto a huge pile of ice, apparently from a knocked-over ice container that had been blown off the bar's table.

When she regained consciousness, all she saw was ubiquitous thick smoke and menacing fire.

Led by her fellow worker Arnold, Ayu ran hastily to the east, through an opening in the club's collapsed wall, across the street and into a small alley.

The alley goes for some 20 meters and then ends in a T- junction of smaller alleys in front of the Panin Bank building. Ayu turned left and ran for several minutes before finding out it was a dead end.

"I had no choice but to run back to the T-junction, jump over the bank's wall toward the Sri Dewi hotel, race through the hotel's back door to get to the Troppozone area, and finally to Mataram street, where a motorist picked me up and took me to Graha Asih Hospital," Ayu said.

It was in this hospital that the two lovers were joyfully reunited. Sudirka later moved Ayu to Surya Husada Hospital, where she was treated for several days for minor burns.

"I lost a very good friend that night, Widayati, a mother of three children, who was serving customers at the front bar," she said.

Under the constant companionship of Sudirka, her aunt Sari Jani -- a former Sari Club employee -- and her relatives, Ayu has been recovering from trauma. She is regaining her cheerfulness, and has started to smile and laugh again.

"I am very glad that none of my colleagues from the side bar were killed. Those working at the front and back bars were unlucky though," Ayu said.

On Thursday morning, Sudirka kept his promise to the gods. Along with their relatives, Sudirka accompanied his girlfriend to the bomb site, where they later arranged a beautiful offering of a suckling pig and prayed together to express their gratitude to the gods that saved their love.

"I want to marry her in the near future, in November perhaps," he said.