The SMS Queen of Bali

At the end of May, my sister Anja emails from Bali to tell me some 'fantastic news' - she's getting married in a week's time to Nyoman, a 'beautiful Balinese man'. It's her fourth marriage. He's thirty. She's fifty. Ten years older than me and, in many ways, more like a second mother than a sister. I've always been in awe of her energy and charisma, her adventurous life. But this sounds a little too crazy, even for her. They've only known each other a few weeks, introduced through a match-making local priest. When I tell my husband John about Anja's wedding, he snorts and shakes his head in an exasperated way: 'She's become totally irrational!' Although I felt much the same that morning, I'm annoyed with him: 'Who are we to say how she should behave? Men marry younger women all the time!' I storm off to my room to write angry thoughts about the rules of society in my journal and how it makes for a very boring world indeed. That's one thing about Anja - she's never boring. She's always been the wild card of our family.