On a plateau at two thousand metres, shaving one child's head

The highland dawn is cold, the mist not yet lifted, the air so thin a few steps leave one panting. A child topped with a head of tangled curls is led by an adult to the temple front, a little drowsy, a little nervous. Some children in Dieng are born with hair like this, and the locals believe they are different. Today, his head is to be shaved — not an ordinary haircut, but a solemn rite.

Scattered across the Dieng plateau stand Java's oldest Hindu stone temples, half-hidden in the cloud and mist. The locals believe these children born with matted curls are descendants of ancient guardians, their hair carrying a kind of blessing, and also a little of something that needs "untangling." The shaving rite is called ruwatan, lifting this weight from the child. But there is a rule: before the shaving, the child may make one wish, however wilful, and the family must do its utmost to grant it — for legend says that if his wish is not met and the head is shaved by force, the hair will grow back and the child will fall ill.

A few travellers, strangers who had followed the gongs and drums here together, stood watching at the temple front. A mother crouched before the child, brushing the curls at his forehead aside, her movements gentle, as if she knew that what was being cut was not only hair. The elder began to chant, the child was lifted onto a chair, and with one snip of the scissors, that mass of hair that had been with him for years fell into the cloth his mother held.

We heard only later that this child's wish was for a bicycle, which the family had prepared for him well in advance. With his head shaved, he was swept up by relatives and walked once round the village, gongs and drums leading, the freshly cut short hair revealing a somewhat shy nape. The highland wind is cold, blowing over stone temples a thousand years old, and over this child who has just "begun again."

On the open ground before the temple, a stall selling hot ginger tea gives off white steam, a few travellers cupping their glasses for warmth, none knowing one another, yet naturally crowding under the same eaves to shelter from the mist. Gongs, chanting, the child's laughter, all wrapped in that thick highland mist, sound somewhat softened.

The shaved hair is in the end sent to the water, drifting away downstream, and the child, become an ordinary child again, runs off skipping. A few of us stood in the cold mist watching all this, the stone temples silent behind for a thousand years — and I think you too will suddenly feel, as we did, that what we call tradition is sometimes nothing more than a group of people willing to treat with gravity a thing that, elsewhere, would seem very small.