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With his old eyes staring into the distance through an open door in front of him, Kajali lights a cigarette and inhales deeply from it. A bird in a cage, hanging less than a meter above his head, deposits droppings several times on the small wooden bed where he sits. The 60-year-old doesn’t appear bothered and keeps drawing on his cigarette and blowing thick smoke into the room.

Once in a while, he looks around the living room of the small, dark makeshift bamboo shack he calls home. Two of his children lie watching TV. A baby sleeps in a swing made from a piece of cloth hung from the ceiling, as Kajali’s daughter-in-law sits beside her.

It seems a sparse existence for an award-winning wayang [puppet] practitioner, but this puppeteer, who created his own form of the traditional art, has had few calls for performances of late.

“No one has asked me for a performance this month,” the father of 10, four of whom have already died, says. “I hope there will be bookings.”

The wind stirs a foul smell through the room, possibly coming from the bird cage and the two chickens that walk around leaving droppings on the dirt-floor kitchen next to the room where he sits.

“Look at the roof, there are holes everywhere,” Kajali says, pointing upward. “When it rains, the water gets in through the holes and wets everything in the house.”

Kajali invented his wayang garing style of puppetry many years ago in his small home village of Mendaya in the Serang district of Banten. In Sundanese, the word garing means dry, and the style came about out of sheer necessity. Six years after he began learning puppetry, Kajali started to perform on his own in 1964. His teacher gave him a collection of 125 leather puppets made of buffalo and cow hides.

“The provincial government granted me an award for my dedication to preserving local culture,” he says.

“It is garing because I am the only person in the performance and there is neither a set of musical instruments nor sinden [female singers]. I had the puppets but no instruments because I couldn’t afford to buy them.

“But it’s good there’s no sinden because there are a lot of clerics in the villages,” says Kajali, referring to the villages where he performs at weddings and circumcision celebrations. “My clients say they feel awkward about having a wayang performance with a sinden because they also invite clerics to their parties.”

The image of a sinden, Kajali says, is seen as irreverent by most people.

“They wear tight outfits that show their bodies and are usually flirtatious,” he explains.

When he performs, Kajali always brings his complete wayang collection and a box of other equipment, such as a large white cloth he uses as an onstage screen. The only thing that a client has to prepare for the performance is a banana tree trunk for standing the puppets in.

Doing a one-man show also means producing the sounds himself, he says. He has one makeshift instrument, which he calls a kecrekan — a simple bunch of thin metal plates, hung from his box, which he kicks during a performance while producing drum-like sounds from his mouth at the same time.

“My whole body works when I’m performing, so it’s not only my hands,” he says. He even avoids eating a certain variety of banana, believing that will keep his voice clear. “I thank God for always granting me good health so I can make money.”

When hired locally in his district, Kajali charges Rp 400,000 to Rp 600,000 ($40 to $60) for a four-hour show and at least Rp 1 million for performances outside the town. He usually gets a down payment when clients book his services, and the rest is paid when the show is over.

But Kajali says there have been at least three occasions when clients failed to pay. “There was this guy who avoided me and didn’t pay. He died not so long after that,” he recounts. “I think it was karma.”

Kajali will perform any time of the week, but never on Thursday evenings.

“It’s the time when Muslims usually sit together in a musholla [small mosque] and read the Koran and pray,” Kajali says. “If I perform, people will come to see me instead of praying.”

The stories he performs are mainly classic Hindu epics, which he delivers in the Banten-Sundanese language. When requested, Kajali makes up his own stories based on whatever situation the client wants him to tell the audience about.

Wayang garing enthusiasts, Kajali says, are mostly children and old people. The village kids love the humor that he inserts into his stories, while older audience members focus on the morals of the stories.

“Young people don’t like it because they think it’s boring,” he says. “They only like music and dancing.”

The best time of the year for him as a puppeteer is the harvest season.

“People celebrate harvest time and that’s when I receive a lot of bookings,” he says.

When there are no bookings, Kajali works in a rice field. The crop, he says, is divided between himself and the landowner.

Having been performing for about 45 years, Kajali feels tired sometimes. Although he has never thought about quitting, he wishes there were someone to continue performing wayang garing after him.

“But it’s not easy to keep this alive.”

The only person who performs wayang garing besides him is his first son, Pendi. However, Pendi will only perform in their home village.

“He said he doesn’t have the confidence to perform outside,” Kajali says. “My other son is just too shy to learn to be a puppeteer. He chose to be a construction worker instead.”

But it may be a good thing to have no competition.

“That’s how I earn money to feed my family,” he says. “It makes me sad to think about what we are going to eat when there are no bookings at all, like these days.”