Observations from Overseas: Sri Lanka
[I spent six months of a sabbatical in Sri Lanka, from
October 2002 until
April 2003. While I was there, I wrote a series of
short essays recording
my observations about Sri Lanka and the life that my
family and I were
leading there. (Well, really, they weren't essays
exactly; they were
email messages that I mailed to friends to let them
know what I was up
to while I was overseas). Here are six of them.]
The Neighborhood Dogs
[Early December, 2002]
It's remarkable how quickly a person can adjust to the
rhythms of life in a new
place. Quincy and I now pretty much take for granted
those things that seemed
novel when we first got here: buffalo curd in the
fridge (Jasper and I both
gobble it down), parasites in the tap water (we boil
three big tubs of it per
day on the stove to make it drinkable), the smell of
smoke in the air (that's
where the garbage goes). I'm reminded of it all over
again as we watch Claudia-
who just arrived two weeks ago-adapt so quickly to Sri
Lankan life. She's
hopping buses to rural villages. She's whacking
coconuts in half with our big
rusty coconut knife. She's already made more
acquaintances than Quincy and I
put together. Hell, she hadn't even been here two full
days before Anil came
knocking at the door, looking for his new friend
Claudia.
Anil is this tiny little guy who lives down the road
with his great big wife.
He's a dapper dresser, and he knows everything and
everybody in the
neighborhood. It's his job: He's a connector. He
connects employers and
employee, he connects people with places to live, and
he gets a commission.
It's through Anil that we found our house, and it's
through Anil that we were
found by the woman who cooks for us twice a
week-although in both cases, it was
only much later that we discovered that Anil was
involved because we hadn't even
met him yet.
Anyway, it really doesn't take long to adapt to new
circumstances.
I've even adapted to the ants. Maybe it's because of
the constant presence of
all those happy monks with their ruby robes and black
umbrellas. Or maybe it's
the soothing view from our rooftop, out over the
morning mists rising from the
river and the flocks of parakeets that skim the canopy
of coconut palms and
jackfruit trees. Or maybe it's just a sort of
surrender. In any case, just as
I've come to reach a weird sort of serenity about the
lengthy trials and random
tribulations of trying to get our visas extended, so
too I've come to accept
ants as a normal and benign part of our household. The
never-ending highways of
little critters that grace our baseboards and run in
ragged lines up and down
the wall behind the sink used to sizzle my scheming
thoughts whenever I was in
the kitchen (which, of course, is almost always; I
love that buffalo curd) but
not anymore. Now I hardly even notice them. Sure, I'll
brush them aside when
they get into the garbage, or when I need the cutting
board on which they are so
keen to gather and swarm. But they don't bother me so
much. They were here in
this house before us, and they'll be here after we
leave, and we may succeed in
subtly re-routing them from time to time, but they're
not going anywhere; so I
might as well welcome them into our lives with a
shrugging sort of grace. And
so I have. I've decided that they're our pets.
And not just the ants. All the insect and arachnid
life that creeps in through
the hundreds of slits and cracks and drainholes in
this house: they're all our
pets. I mean, they're pretty benign. The ants don't
seem to sting. The
spiders don't seem to bite. Even the wasps seem
content just to buzz blindly
around the windowpanes without expressing any interest
in the rest of us. Okay,
so they're maybe not the most affectionate of pets. They
don't purr in our
arms, or drape adoring jowls across our thighs, or
nuzzle our crotches with
relentless enchantment. But, hey, what they lack in
companionable quality, they
more than make up for in quantity.
The neighborhood dogs, however, are another matter
entirely. Oh there's plenty
of dogs in this town, plenty of strays. It was one of
the first things I
noticed when we arrived: All these scrawny
dusty-looking mongrels on the
streets. At first it alarmed me a bit, since we spend
a lot of time walking on
those streets, and Jasper is such a curious wee
thing-always eager to stretch
out her tiny hand to meet the muzzle of a drooling
mutt. But then I realized
that the dogs around here don't have the energy for
giving chase or hassling us
in any way as we go about our day. They spend their
days lying languidly in the
dirt at the edge of the road, just barely outside the
range of the grinding
wheels of trucks and buses, barely even looking up. But
that's the daytime. As
soon as the sun sets, it seems, the dogs start
roaming-and barking. All of
them, and all at once, and they don't stop until the
roosters start crowing.
Our first few nights here I kept waking up to the
grating chorus of yips and
yowls rising from the hillside below-sometimes far off
but still penetrating,
and sometimes very close by. I got used to it though,
and it stopped bugging
me. But then Claudia arrived and the shrill barking of
the local strays has
become our new household obsession. Every morning we
assess the damage to
Claudia's sleep cycle, and throughout the day we plot
new methods trying to keep
those roving packs of boisterous mutts from climbing
our hill and yapping into
our windows.
At first we tried explosives. We know that folks fling
firecrackers at monkeys
to clear them off their roofs and out of their mango
trees, so we figured it
might work for dogs as well. So Claudia bought a
package of locally-
manufactured firecrackers. These aren't the skinny
little red things that
highschool boys fling laughingly out of car windows on
Halloween night. These
are some serious bombs. And crudely-made. Hell, they
look like something I
might've assembled myself, if all I had on hand was
string, newspaper,
gunpowder, and enough liquor to dull my better
judgment. We tested one, one
afternoon, while we were all hanging out in the yard. Me
and Claudia plotted
strategy on the driveway, while Quincy kept an eye on
Jasper who was flapping
her hands in a garden tub where we grow water lilies
and mosquito larvae. I lit
the fuse, tossed it toward the gate, and...
The explosion was deafening, echoing off the walls and
across the valley to the
hills beyond. (Jasper didn't seem to mind; while the rest of
us were still
peeling our shell-shocked expressions off of our
faces, she just glanced around
placidly and went back to her pet larvae.) And so,
every night for the last
week or so, the chorus of barks that starts up after
dark has been punctuated by
the sounds of mortar shells exploding in our yard.
But the dogs keep coming back, and so we keep
plotting. An attempt to call the
city didn't go far. There seems to be some sort of
animal control unit-we've
heard tales of municipal trucks working their way up
and down the roads, with
men jumping off to jab at strays with sharp sticks
dosed in strychnine, and
flinging the twitching poisoned bodies up into the
truck for disposal-but
they're always out to tea. Inevitably, and especially
at 2 in the morning, I've
considered various ways in which I myself might
violently convince those dogs to
stop their yapping forever. But, while I've clubbed a
couple of scorpions to
death (it turns out things with six-inch-long
poisonous tails don't quite
qualify as household pets), I'm less keen to try
taking such drastic measures
with a dog-especially if those measures involve me
sleepily feeling my way half-
naked through wet brush bristling with broken bottles
and long snakes and, well,
dogs.
So we called Anil. We figured that if there's
something to be done about the
dogs, Anil would know. Quincy told him about the
problem, and then hesitated, a
little unsure of exactly what question we wanted to
ask. But Anil cut right to
the chase: "You want someone to kill the dogs for
you," he said. And before
Quincy could even respond, Anil once again filled the
gap. "I will look into it
tomorrow," he said, "I will arrange a
solution."
So what's going to happen now? We don't know. I have
the slightly
uncomfortable feeling that, without directly intending
to, we have just stepped
into some sort of shadowy canine-catching underworld
populated by lean men with
darting eyes and steady hands, where words are
whispered and rupees are passed
invisibly across tarnished tabletops, and the next
thing you know there's two
guys with rusty coconut knives setting off at night
after our local strays.
Yes, I worry that we might've just taken out a
contract hit on a dog.
Meanwhile, we're taking language lessons from a
private Sinhala tutor. We've
had two lessons so far, and they tend to be thematic. The
first day we learned
pronouns. On the second day, we learned words and
phrases to use when traveling
by bus and train. For the next lesson, I think I'll
ask our tutor to teach us
how to talk about mutts and mobsters and
misunderstandings. (I looked in our
Lonely Planet phrasebook and, although it provided perfectly
phonetic Sinhalese
translations of such seemingly superfluous phrases as
"No, I don't want it
extracted" and "What am I accused of,"
it fails entirely to tell me how to say
"No no, I don't actually require you to kill
anything after all; but I'll be
happy to pay you and your squinting associate anyway,
if that's what this
unexpected visit is all about.") It doesn't hurt
to be prepared. Even though
most folks around here do speak a little English, they
really appreciate it when
we try to adopt the local language.
Rajar and the "Love Me Tender" Van
[Early January, 2003]
I'm not actually wearing a skirt, it just looks like
it. It's a sarong, and
it's very comfortable. I bought it from this shop by
the railroad station in
the little beach town of Weligama. It's a beautiful
green batik, and it only
cost about 3 bucks U.S., plus another 50 cents for the
tailor to hem it while I
sat sweating next to his sewing machine, and I'm told
I paid him way too much.
Anyway, that's what I'm wearing right now. It's a very
common form of mensware
around here. And it's not a skirt.
Yes, the sarong is just an ordinary part of life
around here. Like the ants on
our walls and banana blossoms in our curries. Now that
we're deep in our third
month in Sri Lanka, it's great fun to be reminded of
the many things that once
were remarkable, but now seem so ordinary as to barely
merit notice. Like the
sounds that we hear. The way that the air is saturated
with sounds of the life
in the trees: the whine of crickets and the sudden
chirps of lizards, and the
constantly-changing mix of birdcalls from the
parakeets and the crows, the mynas
and bulbuls and minivets and kingfishers. Of course,
just as commonplace are
the inevitable midnight yowls from dozens of dogs, and
window-rattling
explosions from the firecracker bombs that Claudia
occasionally heaves off the
balcony to try to shut them up. Another common sound,
which I still get a kick
out of, is the random musical sounds emitted by cars
backing-up. It's the
equivalent of the familiar beep-beep-beeping that
kicks in on delivery trucks
when they shift into reverse. Except here, it's not
just big trucks that are
outfitted with that warning signal; here, it seems,
just about every other car
or van or three-wheeler has some sort of backing-up
sound. And they aren't just
beep-beeps either; they tend to be more
melodic-cavalry music and pop songs --
and very very loud. It's handy in more ways than one. For
instance, when our
friend Sheila arrived from the airport last month at 3
a.m. with the driver we
sent to get her, I was conveniently jolted awake by
the sound of "Love Me
Tender" blaring out of the rear of the van as it
backed up in our driveway.
Sheila arrived in early December and was here through
Christmas. Christmas
itself passed quietly enough. In keeping with family
tradition, we didn't do
much. Chistmas is, in its own weird way, a pretty
salient holiday to Sri
Lankans, even though very few of them are Christians. But
Sri Lankans love
holidays in general -- there seem to be at least four
or five of them per month,
covering all the Buddhist, Hindu, Christian, and
Muslim bases -- and find ways
of celebrating all of them. The main way Sri Lankans
celebrate Christmas, it
seems, is to stay up until midnight on Christmas eve,
and then light off
hundreds and hundreds of firecrackers. Woke us all up;
and Sheila -- seeking a
plausible explanation for all those explosions --
thought that Claudia had
finally cracked and was tossing every weapon from her
bedside artillery in the
direction of the dogs.
Jasper is still too young to require any sort of
extravagant Christmas. She
doesn't demand new toys. We've bought her a few,
though. Quincy just bought
her a baby doll ("Enjoy Milk Bottle For Endless
Fun Sucking Pacifier For Stop
Crying" says the label on the box) and she took
to it immediately. But it's
hasn't quite yet dislodged the various pieces of trash
-- an empty bottle, a
broken broomstick -- on the depth chart of favorite
playthings. And as far as I
can tell, nothing makes Jasper happier than finding
something that she can sit
on. She's been a very enthusiastic sitter ever since
she learned how, and she
tries out this talent on anything lower than her butt
-- boxes, balls,
stretched-out legs, sleeping dogs. Very cute. Although
sometimes, of course,
it ends in tears. Balls roll away, dogs wake up.
We took advantage of Sheila's visit to explore the
island a bit. We hired Rajar
and his "Love Me Tender" van to drive us
around. There are lots of things to
notice on the Sri Lankan roadways. Like the tiny
roadside shops -- the sort
that sell coconuts and crackers and have about as much
floorspace as a yoga mat
-- with homemade hand-painted signs saying things like
"K-Mart" and "IKEA." I
also get a kick out the random mix of English-language
watchwords and slogans
plastered to the backs of vehicles. Things like
"No Hand Signal," "No Fear,"
"Super Benz," and "Backstreet
Boys." Spending hours amid the vehicular chaos of
the road also made me realize just how keenly skilled
Sri Lankan drivers are at
sensing when there is just barely enough room to pass
another vehicle. I mean,
there are lots of different sized things on the roads,
going lots of different
speeds. But drivers seem instantly to sift everything
into highly sophisticated
decision-rules that govern whether they jam on the
accelerator or the brake.
Like, "It's a narrow one-lane bridge but I ought
to be able to squeeze between
the overloaded motorcycle and the oncoming bus." Or
"That three-wheeler is
nimble enough to avoid me, so surely there's enough
room for me alongside the
truck, the tractor, and the ox-cart hauling
sticks." Or "If that bus slows down
to let people off, I may not find space to pass those
two adjacent vans without
hitting the family on the bicycle. But what's that
behind the on-coming truck?
An elephant? I'd better go for it while I can."
We spent a day up in the high hills, in tea country. Cold
rain and brisk wind;
the children of tea-pluckers playing cricket beside
the Tamil temple in the late
afternoon light. We rented a tea estate
"bungalow" for the night -- which is to
say we spent 50 bucks collectively to live briefly in
the sort of grand style
that folks like Sir Thomas Lipton lived a hundred
years ago, with a staff of
servants and a big dining room and a fire in the
fireplace and a never-ending
view. This bungalow also came stocked, bizarrely
enough, with bookcases full of
old issues of Readers' Digest. The dusty magazines
came in handy when we were
trying to resuscitate the sputtering fire in the
fireplace. No newspaper handy,
so I grabbed a 1975 issue of Readers' Digest, and tried
to get that wet wood
going with "Humor in Uniform" and
"Drama in Real Life: Attacked by Sharks!"
Spent a few days staying at a cheap guesthouse on the
south coast. Right on the
Indian Ocean. It's where I converted to sarongs,
Quincy stepped on a bee, and
Jasper befriended (and tried to sit on, of course) a
couple of dogs that we
nicknamed "Trouble" and
"Bulge-Eye." There's a heavy concentration of
foreigners at the guesthouse, like some sort of parody
of White People on
Holiday. A French couple on a romantic get-away. Four
old Germans who spent
their evenings playing "Yahtzee" in the
restaurant. And a young New Zealander
with a zen-slacker haircut who did very slow yoga on
the beach every sunrise.
We overheard him one night in the restaurant, leaning
into a Czech couple who'd
just arrived, telling them excitedly about the virtues
of hemp fiber and the
government conspiracy that keeps it from becoming
commercially viable.
Although must of our time at the beach was devoted to
laziness, we did go visit
a famous temple one day. The Weherahena temple,
celebrated for its Buddha
statue the size of 7-story building, and for its
comic-book art. Yes, whole
walls of the temple covered with step-by-step
pictorial depictions of the
Buddha's life. Panel after numbered panel illustrating
important scenes of
contemplation, enlightenment, and serenity. You know: (1)
old man; (2) old man
with lotus blossom; (3) old man with lotus blossom
meets fetching young woman;
and so on. To my ignorant eyes it looked like
storyboards from some recent
Woody Allen effort, but apparently it's deeply
spiritual stuff. There were even
more comic-book scenes in an underground chamber, but
Quincy and I didn't see
all that. We were hanging out with Jasper by the
sacred Bodhi tree where she'd
discovered a temple dog and a litter of temple
puppies, and she wanted to sit on
each and every one.
We also visited some of the famous sites in Sri
Lanka's "cultural triangle"
north of Kandy:
We saw the ruins of the extraordinary palatial
fortress of Sigiriya, perched on
a massive rock jutting out of the plains. It was like
climbing to the top of
the Houston Astrodome and finding the Playboy Mansion
perched on top -- except,
you know, the dome is a single solid rock, and the
mansion has fallen into
serious disrepair. No more bunnies, no more bathrobes,
no more plumbing.
We saw the ruined city of Polonnoruwa, where we
practically had to physically
subdue our over-generous driver Rajar, because we
wanted to walk the site, while
he felt certain that he should drive us around. "But
it's almost half a mile!"
he asserted, finding it inconceivable that we should
want to use our legs when
we'd already paid him to provide us with wheels. We
didn't exactly want to
mention that the cultural experience might be diluted
by the sudden sound of
Elvis Presley songs bouncing around the crumbling
temple walls and echoing
loudly off the big stone Buddhas.
We saw the famous cave temples of Dambulla, and their
amazing profusion of
Buddha statues. Dozens of dozens of dozens of statues,
indicating apparently
that these caves were a place of extraordinary
monastic devotion. Or perhaps -
and this is just my goofball theory -- that the caves
were something equivalent
to a warehouse or book depository or that bizarre
classroom at the University of
Peradeniya that is jammed floor-to-ceiling with broken
chairs and wooden desks:
Some sort of dumping grounds for unnecessary surplus
Buddhas. Of course, most
folks prefer Theory #1.
One afternoon, while relaxing at rural guesthouse,
Rajar drove us into a nearby
town to get something to eat. Along the way, Claudia
looked for a particular
side-road that she'd been told about, that would take
her to a nearby lake where
she could relax in the peace and quiet. We spotted the
road: A thin mud track
through a paddy field. "It's probably not
far," said Claudia, "I can walk from
here." Rajar stared at her. "We'll
drive," he said. He turned the van onto
the narrow track, and slowly navigated that narrow
strip of dry land between the
paddies. I kept
thinking: How are we going to get out of here? It's not even
wide enough to turn around! I imagined, with dismay,
that eventually we'd be
forced to inch our way backwards toward the main road
with "Love Me Tender"
blaring out the back of the van, resonating off the
water beside us, and
carrying on and on across the paddyfields beyond,
where the bent brown backs of
the rice-planters would straighten to stand up and
stare in irritation and
wonder, and the egrets would spread their white wings
to fly for cover. And
even after the planters eventually tired of their
curiosity and returned to
work, and the egrets finally resumed their muddy vigil
somewhere else, we would
continue to creep endlessly backwards in our piercing
single-song jukebox of a
van. Anyway, after about a quarter of mile of very
slow going, we were forced
to a stop; the narrow lane was washed out and
impassable. Claudia hopped out
and started walking. "Where is she going?"
asked Rajar. I told him that the
man in the guesthouse had said it was a nice walk to
the lake. Rajar looked at
me. "He's a madman," he said, and shifted
into reverse.
The Local News
[Early February, 2003]
Well, the war is still on hiatus. Representatives of
the government and the
LTTE (those are the Tamil Tigers-the "Liberation
Tigers of Tamil Eelam")
continue to trot off to Oslo and places like that to
hammer out agreements,
while all sorts of others folks continue to raise
objections to the nature of
the negotiations and worry about what the eventual
outcomes might be.
I must admit, though, that stuff seems awfully
abstract here in Kandyland.
Never was much war here. (Except for that bomb that
exploded in the Temple of
the Tooth a few years back, the main consequence of
which is that tourists now
have to walk past men with guns before proceeding
inside to see the container
that holds the container that holds the container that
allegedly holds one of
the Buddha's teeth). So, around here, the hopeful
peace is evident mostly in
symbolic forms, like the schoolkid's drawing that
adorns the cover of the new
phone books: blue skies, white doves, and a set of
children holding tight to a
single rainbow-colored parachute.
But one would be wise not to trust my impressions. I'm
still a rube, after all,
peering into Sri Lankan life through perceptual pores
that are more likely to
spot Bart Simpson on some Muslim kid's T-shirt than to
actually pick up an
accurate socio-political vibe. And I don't read the
news regularly either. I
mean, yes, we have internet access-our balky little
dial-up connection-and so,
in theory, we could be in touch with all the news in
the world. In fact,
though, I find myself logging on mostly just to check
out hockey scores from
time to time.
Of course, there's no shortage of daily newspapers to
look at. Colombo has more
English-language dailies than Vancouver does-or Los
Angeles or Chicago for that
matter-and I'll pick one up every once in a while.
I like the occasional enthusiastic headlines. "Rubber
Corp on the Mat!"
"Women-only Buses to Keep Perverts at Bay!" Of
course, most of the headlines
are a bit more sober:
"LTTE Assures Commitment to Peace Talks." "Govt, LTTE
Discuss Child Soldiers, Ceasefire Violations." Things
like that.
Beyond those headlines, it's not so easy to figure out
what the news is all
about. Compared to the spoon-fed stuff I'm used to in
North American papers,
these stories tend to be a bit underwritten, and I
always feel I'm lacking the
necessary background knowledge to decode the prose. (Even
the sports pages are
indecipherable, given that they're devoted entirely to
the results of
international cricket matches: "Hussain on seven
survived a desperately close
stumping chance of MacGill, which went to the third
umpire for adjudication two
overs from stumps...")
What's always interesting are the unsolicited,
unfiltered, and apparently
unedited opinion pieces that show up all over the
paper. I once read an alleged
news story that turned out to be a puff piece for the
coconut industry. Except
it was an unreadably dense piece of puffery, going on
and on in excruciating
detail on the biochemisty of coconut oil. More common
are long pieces like the
one I read the other day, which explored the complex
mosaic of Sri Lankan ethnic
politics within the framework of old-fashioned
Marxism. It was fun, in a
nostalgic sort of way, to read prose peppered
regularly with words like
"oligarchic," "proletariat,"
"Fourth Internationale," and "blind obeisance."
For a real glimpse into the life of ordinary Sri
Lankans-a life that's mostly
hidden from temporary rubes like me-nothing beats paid
advertising. Like the
Marriage Proposals:
Govi Buddhist
39 trained English Teacher (pleasant young looking) owns
a car, a
house, a coconut plantation, a tea plantation, and etc.
Retired
parents seek a partner.
G/B well
connected parents (professionals) seek for their son 26 tall
handsome
teetotaler nonsmoker undergraduate in a foreign university
suitable
pretty decent girl for prior association till marriage 1-2
years hence. Apply
immediately with family details, Horoscope.
Govi Buddhist
parents seek partner for pleasant daughter, Executive in
private sector
5'4", 32. Suwana Mars Saturn Eight House.
A Christian
Tamil family is looking for a fair beautiful bride. The groom
is a Manager
in a well-reputed BOI company in Kandy. He is 34 years old,
graduate,
educated at a leading school in Kandy, and a teetotaler.
Catholics,
Buddhists and Hindus also may reply. We don't treat any
differences,
but the bride must accompany him to the church where
he attends
after the marriage.
D/B parents
seek professional partner for daughter English teacher, fair
5' 26 dowry
800000/=. Horoscope essential. Caste immaterial.
And then there's the death anniversary notices: Big
ads with smart-looking
borders and smiling old photographs, fondly
remembering a family member on the
anniversary of his or her death. And not just the
first anniversary; there's
sometimes notices remembering someone who died three
or nine or twentysomething
years ago.
Some of these ads are simple and straightforward:
1st Death
Anniversary
In loving
memory of Ernest Nanayakkara
Born
18.05.1921 - Died 31.01.2002
A year has
passed / Since you are gone / A voice we heard is stilled /
A place is
vacant in your home / A place which cannot be filled
Others just seem simple and straightforward at first
glance:
7th Year
Anniversary / 31.01.2003
Miss K V S F De
Soysa
Chief
Librarian / Central Bank of Sri Lanka
In treasured
and undying memory of our precious Srima
Sadly missed
by your father sister brother niece nephews
brother-in-law
sister-in-law
But deeper textures emerge in the context of other
notices, more detailed and
revealing:
7th Year
Remembrance / 31st January 2003
Late Mrs
Violet Ranasinghe
A series of
Pinkamas have been arranged for the 30th & 31st January, 2003
including
restoration of an abandoned tank in Tanamalwila, which will be
handed over to
the landless peasantry of the area to confer merit on you
and 40 others
who lost their lives in the bombing of the Central Bank
on 31st
January, 1996 and several others who have been disabled.
May you attain
the Supreme Bliss of Nibbana
Seventh Year
Death Anniversary
To the
treasured memory of my darling daughter
Enoka Vinodini
Gunaratna
I only look at
the traitors with sympathy when they shake hands with your
murderers. The
guiding light of my life was dimmed seven years ago.
Time can never
heal my sorrowing heart. May you be our daughter
throughout
Sansara.
Ammi
Meanwhile, back in my little world, I recently gave a
talk at Peradeniya
University, in a surprisingly fancy room that had
microphones embedded in the
tables in front of every audience member. I felt like
I was talking at the
United Nations or something. Afterwards, I got to
chatting with a couple of
University folks, and I asked what their predictions
were for a lasting peace.
They seemed encouraged. One of them is a Sinhalese
political scientist who is
trying to promote ethnic harmony through the
establishment of Buddhist
meditation centers, which seems wildly idealistic. But
he's cynical as well.
He suggested that as long as George W. Bush pursues
his crowd-pleasing anti-
terrorism agenda, then the LTTE leaders will play nice
and give peace a chance.
"September 11," he said, "was a
godsend."
Not everyone feels that way. I picked up the paper the
other day and, in
addition to the usual kinds of local stories
("Rice Fraud in Jaffna," "India
Kept Informed on Progress of Peace Process"), the
news was all about the
impending U.S. attack on Iraq. And the considerable
local economic impact:
Record Tea
Crop Sales Threatened By Gulf War
Gathering war
clouds in the Middle East is about to deal a body blow to Sri
Lanka's tea
economy with an all time record production of 310 million
kilograms last
year destined to go without buyers who have already ceased
to actively
participate at the Colombo tea auctions...
I can't help but to think about the "butterfly
effect" that folks were always
yammering about in the 1980s when chaos theory was all
the rage-you know, that
phenomenon in which some tiny little local event has
big consequences far far
away. Like how a butterfly flapping its wings
somewhere in Brazil leads to a
massive hurricane that slams into Cuba. Or how a
random bad decision in ballot
design in Palm Beach Country Florida can have a causal
influence on a cascade of
events that, eventually, three years later, affects
the lives and livelihoods of
Tamil tea pluckers in the high hills of Sri Lanka.
A Failure to Learn the Language
[Late February, 2003]
As a written language, Sinhala is really beautiful and
- to my hopelessly
Eurocentric eyes - absolutely opaque. Now, bear in
mind that I'm not totally
unfamiliar with unfamiliar lettering. I learned to
recognize two or three
characters when I was in China many years ago. And
when I took that silly stab
at Russian as an undergraduate, I mastered the
Cyrillic alphabet within a week
(and muddled on to maintain a consistent B average in
that class for 4 straight
semesters). Okay, so that doesn't exactly earn me an
Endowed Chair in
Semiotics (although it apparently does over-qualify me
to be President of the
United States, at least in this post-Clinton era
where, it seems, intellectual
achievement is presumed to be a symptom of sexual
irresponsibility and moral
relativism), but I'm not a total lexicographic dunce. Still, Sinhala defies
me. Half the characters look like some variation on
the "@" symbol, as though
the language was invented one wet weekend by
half-drunk internet nerds. All the
characters have a whimsical curly quality. There's one
that looks like an
earlobe, another like an apple, another like a Mickey
Mouse hat, and another
like a shapely pair of buttocks. The other day I spied
a little tag on Jasper's
pants, and it looked like it was labeled in Sinhala -
which was weird, because I
was sure we'd brought those pants with us from
Vancouver. I looked closer and
saw that it wasn't Sinhala after all; it was a row of
teddy bears.
Well, as these illiterate little remarks plainly
reveal, I haven't learned to
read or write in the local lingo. I haven't even
tried.
But Quincy and I have made a few stabs at learning the
verbal version of the
language. For a while we were taking weekly tutorials
from a woman named Anula.
Anula's teaching style was a curious mixture of
authoritarian and digression.
She liked to tell us exactly how to take notes. "Draw
a picture of the body,"
she'd say, "and label each part. The head, the
neck...This is how you learn.
Have you drawn the body? Let me see." And then
she'd tell us what brand of
rice we should buy. Every lesson was punctuated
periodically by Anula's telling
and retelling of a favorite anecdote about a man on a
bus. Seems there was a
man once, a foreigner, who was on a bus and wanted to
get off. But instead of
telling the driver, "buhhinowah ("I get
down"), he errantly said "nuhginowah"
("I climb up"). That's it. That's the whole
anecdote. Seems a simple enough
story (and an uneventful one too because, after some
prodding, Anula admitted
that the bus driver slowed and let him off anyway),
but Anula treated it as some
sort of highly-nuanced pedagogic fable, some sort of
instructional haiku layered
with subtle complex meanings. At least, that's what I
assume, because she told
us over and over and over again about the man on the
bus who wanted to get down.
No lesson was complete without at least one mention of
the man on the bus. And
sometimes, she bring it up 2 or 3 times in an hour, as
a sort of all-purpose
cautionary tale, illustrating for us what might happen
if we didn't study, if we
didn't enunciate, if we didn't learn our tenses, if we
didn't do exactly as she
instructed. "You must learn in context," she'd
say, "otherwise you'll be like
the man on the bus who wanted to get down." Or
"That's a body? That's not a
body. Where are the elbows. You must re-draw the body.
Otherwise you'll be
like the man on the bus. Have I told you about the man
on the bus who wanted to
get down? Yes? You know the story? I'll tell you: There
was a man..."
There are, of course, risks associated with knowing a
tiny bit of any language.
I know enough to ask a few simple questions, but not
enough to understand any
answers. One or
two over-rehearsed and poorly-pronounced words in Sinhala from
me can elicit a torrent of complicated Sinhala in
return, and I don't understand
a word of it. This happens regularly with the plumber
who comes around every
week or two, to help us with whatever our latest
water-supply problem might be.
A toothless old guy with a big smile and wide feet,
who scrambles around
shirtless and shoeless on the rooftop, or down hill in
the bushes where the
flimsy water main meets our overworked rusty pump,
wearing nothing but a plain
white sarong. His visits often end with water once
again flowing temporarily
through our taps. And they always end with him
standing in the kitchen rattling
on at me in elaborate detailed Sinhala. I nod along
dumbly, watching his gums
move up and down, and his big-knuckled hands gesture
here and there. But I
understand none of it, and I know that he knows that I
understand none of it,
and I know that it doesn't really matter because he'll
be coming again next week
or the week after that to once again work his magic on
our balky pipes, and
surely he knows that too.
What often happens, especially with strangers - a
three-wheeler driver, say, or
some random guy outside a bakery - is that whenever I
utter a single word in
Sinhala, they are amazed and impressed, and they'll
say "Oh, you speak Sinhala?"
And then I'll have to tell them that I don't, that I
only speak a tiny bit.
"Tikahk" (little), I'll say, or sometimes
"poonchi" (tiny). Of course, I'm not
even sure about this. I mean, I think they're saying
"Oh, you speak Sinhala"
but I could be wrong. All I hear is "something
something something Sinhala," or
sometimes "Sinhala something something." For
all I really know, they might be
saying "Oh, where'd you learn to speak
Sinhala?" (And I say "Little.") Or "How
much money would you pay me to teach you some real
Sinhala?" ("Little.") Or "If
you speak Sinhala like that, your head must be really
small." ("Tiny.")
Meanwhile, while Quincy and I struggle with Sinhala,
Jasper keeps on acquiring
English. She doesn't speak it, of course. Hell, she
oughta be a spy because,
no matter how much we prompt her and prod her and
torture her with our hopeful
little parental urgings, she refuses to talk. Oh, she
makes sounds, plenty of
them, and loudly too, and they reverberate throughout
our echo-chamber house;
but not many of them are yet recognizable words. She
makes a lot of animal
noises: Anytime you ask, she'll be happy to
"boooooooo" like a cow and
"ssssssh" like a snake. She also does a lot
of animal mime. No, not the kind
of mime with the whiteface makeup and stupid pants and
merciless facial
gyrations; not that kind of mime. More like this: "Jasper,
what's a buffalo
do?" And she'll hunch her shoulders up to her
ears. "What's a giraffe do?"
And she bends her neck so far she practically tips
herself over. And so on.
Last week, while she sat on the rooftop with me,
eating her bananas and filling
her diapers and watching the parakeets and the crows,
she learned to flap her
arms like a bird. (Well, actually, it looks more like
some sort of slow-mo
swimming stroke.) But as far as reproducing actual
words, she's thus far
mastered just one. Her first word: "buckle."
So, while Jasper's not spitting a whole lot of words
out just yet, she sure
takes a lot of words in. She is more than happy to
point, upon request, to a
bird or a tree or a belly button or a knee. And she is
really keen to learn
more: Endlessly pointing to something and asking
"What's that?" in her
idiosyncratic way, which is really not so much an
enunciated question as it is
an insistent semi-melodic yammering - the sort of
sound that, if she was older
and darker, and if she was dressed in some sort of
colorfully-fringed frock and
hat with tassels and standing on stage at the
Vancouver Folk Music Festival, she
might be able to convince gullible liberals like me
that she's producing some
authentic form of indigenous ethnic throat yodeling.
To help quench Jasper's thirst for silent vocabulary,
we've bought her a few
picture books from local booksellers. We bought her a
book of fruits. One
fruit per page. She gets not just boring old banana
and pear and grapes, but
also guava, pomegranate, chickoo, papaya, fig,
jackfruit, and custard apple. We
also bought her a picture dictionary that she really
likes, part of some "My
First Book of..." series that a publishing house
in Delhi puts out. (This one's
actually titled "My First Book of Picture
Dictionary.") It's great stuff.
Aeroplane, ant, auto rickshaw. Boy, ball, bat (a
cricket bat, that is; not an
Indian flying fox), bone, bus, bullock cart. And so
on. It's got entries for
'kingfisher' and 'lotus'; it's got an 'umpire'
standing behind a set of wickets;
it's got a 'radish' that looks like a carrot. What
really kills me are the X's:
There's six entries total and three of them - xebee,
xeme, and xiphias - I've
never heard of before in my life. Apparently, these
Indian English-education
kids are expected to have a remarkably advanced
vocabulary by the time they
cruise through the end of their first book of picture
dictionary. Next time I'm
playing Scrabble, I want a Tamil toddler on my team.
Snorkelling With
Monks
[Mid-March, 2003]
Around here, monks are a dime a dozen. Back in North
America, it's a pretty
striking sight to see Buddhist bald guys walking
around with orange robes draped
across their shoulders and flowing to their feet. At a
purely visual level,
it's still a pretty nifty sight around here too. (Those
robes do dazzle the
eye, and -- as anyone who watches NBA basketball can
attest -- there's also
something aesthetically pleasing about a dark bald
head.) But it's also very
common. Monks are everywhere. Walking down the street.
Hopping on buses.
Taking classes at the university. Teaching classes at
the university.
Everywhere.
And they're big healthy guys too, many of them. From a
culinary point of view,
monks are treated very well. Folks getting up early to
bring them alms in the
form of breakfast, that sort of thing. I've seen
hundreds and hundreds of monks
and I've yet to see one who looked unhealthy. And
there are some malnourished
folk around. I regularly walk by a log-splitting
operation staffed by half a
dozen wraith-like men -- guys with blunt axes and bare
feet who look like they
last had a decent meal a decade ago. But monks eat
well, I think, and
nutritiously (plenty of Pringles in the markets here,
but none in the temple
kitchen I'll bet), and they take good care of their
bodies too. Underneath
those robes, I'm thinking that most of them probably
look like world-class
cricket players or Sri Lanka's equivalent of the
Chippendale dancers.
In the last few weeks, I've been seeing a lot of the
monks at a temple not too
far from our house. It's a nice destination for a
walk. And because the temple
is undergoing some renovations, there's a big pile of
gravel that Jasper likes
to play in. Sometimes, on windy days, the monks fly
kites. A few weeks ago I
took my camera with me. No kite flying that day, but
two of the novice monks -
each about 11 years old -- were outside taking a break
from their studies. As
always, they looked terrific in their saffron robes,
and I asked them if I could
take their picture. They bobbled their heads
"yes." I took a photo and then
one of them stuck his tongue out at me while the other
looked and giggled. I
took a picture of that too. A week or so later, I
wandered over to give them
the photo (not the tongue-sticking-out one; I kept
that for myself). They liked
it a lot and asked for more. So I came back the next
day with my camera again,
and I shot up a whole roll of film. Different poses,
different positions,
different props: In front of the dagoba, overlooking
the river, cuddled around
a cow. There was even a costume-change: They suddenly
all disappeared in a
flash of orange into the temple and re-emerged moments
later in dark red robes
instead. It cracked me up. It was like a fashion
photo-shoot or something.
Only without the bright lights and the cigarettes and
me saying stuff like
"That's it baby! Yeah! Yeah! Work it, baby! Work
it, work it!" Actually,
come to think of it, despite the many poses and the
costume change, it really
was exactly unlike a fashion photo-shoot. These are
monks after all; they eat
better than any anorexic model.
A couple of weeks ago we spent four days in the little
beach town of Mirissa,
way down at the southern tip of the island. There was
a temple somewhere in the
trees around the bay from where we were staying. One
day around midday I saw a
bunch of monks emerge from those distant trees and
carefully pick their way out
to the end of a long rocky spit that protects the bay
from the big waves beyond.
After hanging out there in the sun for a while, they
worked their way back and
disappeared once more into the trees. The next day I
went walking down toward
that end of the beach myself. Not a lot of folks on
that end of the beach -
just me and a couple of goofy English tourists (she
with spiky short Laurie
Anderson hair and he with a shaved head that reminded
me again that dark bald
heads look much more pleasing that stubbly pink bald
heads). I hurried past the
Brits and then saw three Sri Lankan guys in the ocean
waving to me, beckoning me
to join them. So I waded in and swam over. They were
in their late teens,
probably. They asked the usual questions ("Where
from?" "How long?" "Your
name?"), and then one of them produced a snorkel
mask and shoved it at me.
"Fish. Very Beautiful." Actually, it turned
out the fish was sort of dull.
What caught my eye, though, were the flashes of orange
swirling around the legs
of the three Sri Lankan guys. Hey, these guys were
monks! They still had the
lower half of their robes on under there. And they may
be monks, but they're
also 19-year old guys, who do the sorts of things guys
do: They have fun, they
horse around, they skin their knees; and when they get
a break from their
studies at the temple, they grab their snorkel mask,
strip to their waists, and
go for a larkish swim. I swam with them for a while,
working our way up and
down both sides of the rocky spit, trading that snorkel
mask back and forth.
They kept pointing out schools for fish for me to look
at. I kept being
distracted by the sight of their robes catching the
sunlight through the water,
swirling and folding in slow motion around their
gently kicking legs.
And I got such a kick out of the whole thing. I mean,
you know how it is: One
minute you're on the beach trying to hustle past a
couple of pasty tourists, and
the next minute you're in the Indian Ocean snorkeling
with wet-robed Buddhist
monks. It was
like one of those random Sri Lanka moments that Claudia always
seemed to be stumbling into during the three months
she was living with us. She
was always coming home telling us about some crazy
thing that happened -- like
hitching a ride for miles on some stranger's brutally
uncomfortable bicycle, or
hopping off a train in some town she wasn't even
planning on being in and
spending the night at the house of the sister of some
random three-wheeler
driver. Quincy and I never seemed to have those kinds
of Claudia moments (we
have Jasper moments instead). Except suddenly I was. This
was like some sort
of ultra-Claudia moment, and I was getting a big big
kick out of it.
And naturally, I couldn't just get a kick out of the
moment. Not being
particularly monkish myself, I'm not particularly
practiced at being in the
moment. For me, it seems, everything is part of some
sort of self-styled
narrative. So, just as I was swimming with the monks
and getting a kick out of
it, I also sort of had to swim alongside myself,
watching myself getting a kick
out of it, and getting such a kick out of that I kept
thinking about how fun it
was going to be to tell Quincy about it. After a
little while, I couldn't take
it any more; I was afraid I was going break out into
socially inexplicable,
post-modern meta-experiential giggles. (Nothing like a
little post-modern
thought to take the experiential oomph out of the
moment.) I said goodbye to
the monks and clamored out of the ocean and onto the
rocks and hustled on back
down the beach to our guesthouse, smirking and smiling
to myself, already
rehearsing my loopy little self-satisfied narrative
about snorkeling with monks.
Jaffna
[Late March, 2003]
After three days in Jaffna, the rest of Sri Lanka is a
serious shock. Semi-
squalid Colombo suddenly seemed like Singapore or New
York City. So many
people. So many things. Office buildings and appliance
dealerships and
ceramics showrooms, furniture stores and fashion
outlets, fast-food franchises
and billboards and cars. After Jaffna, it all made me
want to cry.
Jaffna was so quiet. That's the first thing I noticed
when we got there.
Actually no, it wasn't the first thing. The first
thing I noticed was all the
soldiers and all the guns. Anti-aircraft at the
airport. A half-dozen men with
AK-47s at the open-air shed near the runway where we
waited while our bags were
searched. An armed escort on the airline bus that
traveled the recently re-
opened road into Jaffna town, past concertina wire and
military checkpoints,
past bombed-out temples and deserted roofless houses
with crumbling walls. And
in Jaffna, soldiers in sandbagged bunkers on street
corners, or riding in twos
or threes through the streets on bicycles with their
guns across their
handlebars.
There are almost no cars at all in Jaffna. Some buses.
A few transport trucks.
The occasional brand-new Mitsubishi pick-up truck
roaring by with a don't-bomb-
me flag flying and the insignia of the UN or MSF or
GTZ or some Danish de-mining
group. But almost no private cars at all. And when you
do see a car,
unbelievably enough it's some old British model from
the 1940s or 50s which has
somehow remained in running condition since the
colonial days and has survived
the war. There are a lot of plain black bicycles. And
collapsed buildings and
vacant lots and barbed wire. It's very very quiet.
And yet, it wasn't a depressing place to be. Not at
all. Or rather, yes it was
- it was grim and sad -- but it was so much more. In
some weird way, Jaffna was
also one of the most uplifting experiences I've ever
had. It's hard to explain.
It's mostly because of the people there, I think, and
the nature of our
interactions with them.
It's the only place I've been in Sri Lanka where I was
never once treated like a
tourist. No hawkers hawking. No loud touts sidling up
with gratuitous offers
to show me the sights. No kids thrusting out their
hands and shouting
"Chocolate!? Bon-bon!? School pen!?" Maybe I should give a little bit more
background on this. Throughout the rest of the island,
you see, white folks
like us are always getting this same
extraordinarily-specific request from Sri
Lankan kids. It gets a little old after a while,
because I always feel like I'm
disappointing them by not coming through. And it's
weird because I don't know
anyone who carries a stash of candy and pens on their
person. I keep wondering
how this odd expectation arose in the first place. Is
there some sort of
misinformed old-style Margaret-Meadish kind of
cultural anthropology of White
People that indicates that along with our many other
peculiar traits - our big
noses and thick shoes and curious custom of wiping our
butts with wads of paper
- that we also have deep pockets bulging with sweets
and school supplies? Or
was there some specific incident that set this myth
into motion? Was there once
some sort of colonial-era self-styled Johnny
Appleseed, who traveled the rural
island roads on a wacky mission to promote penmanship
and tooth decay? I don't
know. In any case, the legend of the bon-bons and
school pens doesn't penetrate
the Jaffna peninsula. Or, if it once did, it too seems
to have been shelled into
submission.
Folks also seemed so open and matter-of-fact about
their circumstances, so
persistent in the face of the devastation that has
been part of their lives for
20 years, and continues to be part of their lives
during the current ceasefire
and the slow uncertain progress of peace talks. People
bear their scars and
carry on.
Like this guy Shankar who showed us a copy of his
torture report. His torture
report. It came up in the most mundane and casual way:
He just happened to be
driving us to the University, and someone else just happened
to idly tell me
that Shankar had been in jail. And one thing led to
another and soon enough,
I'm holding this Xeroxed portfolio in my hands, with
Red Cross documents and
medical examination diagrams with terse notes like
"Contusion 6 X 7 cm lower end
in the 10th inter costal space" and
"Silencer burns 2 x 2 cm 1 Yr back." And an
extensive police report typed on a blurry typewriter
with sticking keys: "... I
said that I do not know & all the things belongs
to me. They kicked me on the
face & put a polythene bag over my face. I felt
irritates around the back of
neck, felt a smell like turpentine or tinner ... I was
taken to the room next to
it and was asked to put on the jeans. They wrote 3
foolscap sheet and asked to
sign, I signed..." It went on like this. "
... One person struck me with a
heavy wooden rod on the spine. I could not bear the
pain & said I will come
with you... I was taken to another room and asked to
remove the cloth and
assaulted telling that you have given everything now
give me the parcel the size
of lemon box ... I don't know about this assaulted
with hands, boots, pole, etc.
Burnt with [illegible] on left leg. I fainted..."
And on and on. "...In the
evening he took me to a room by the side of temple
& put into a dark room. He
assault me on the joints with wooden pole... Was taken
back to K.K.S. was
assaulted by S.I.Navaratnarajah by tying around the
[illegible] & assaulted with
wire & pole to all parts of body by two people ...
On the 3rd of August, Nine
pages were produced in Sinhalese, & asked to sign.
I refused and I was taken to
the same tree & assaulted with wire ... I aggreed
to sign." I read this while
Shankar was serving us coffee at his house where he
brought us to meet his wife
and daughter (his daughter's Jasper's age and was born
while he was in jail).
And when I asked if I could have a copy of it all, he
was happy to send his
brother by bicycle to the copy shop to make the
copies, and refused to let me
pay for it.
In general, people in Jaffna seemed so guileless and
generous and giving.
Especially when Jasper was in evidence. Smiles and
waves from the soldiers
sitting bored in their bunkers. People running out of
the shadows of their
homes and shops, wanting to touch Jasper's skin and
hair, to pick her up and
carry her, and to give her stuff. A banana, an apple,
a couple of chocolate
bars. (Hey, if
anything, I was the one who could've been scoring bon-bons and
school pens.)
For reasons I can't quite explain, my favorite
encounter occurred one morning
while Quincy was giving a talk at a local hospital,
and I was out exploring the
streets with Jasper in my arms. We came across a
deserted bombed-out roofless
church, with weeds growing up through the cracks in
the floor and, in a still-
standing vestibule, a crumbling statue of Christ
flanked by jars of brand-new
orange plastic flowers. There are (there were) a lot
of churches in Jaffna
town. Turns out it was a hotbed of missionary work
back in colonial days. Some
are still going strong, and some aren't. Graveyards
with bullet-ridden
tombstones. Free-standing Anglican arches where walls and
roofs used to be,
and people used to come. This one, I found out later,
was destroyed in an air
attack in 1996. I walked toward the main entrance
where once there must've
swung one of those big wooden arch-shaped doors, but
now there was just empty
space and sunlight flooding out. And I suddenly saw a
woman step out of the
shadows near where the pulpit would've been; and then
a little boy and girl
beside her. For a second I had the terrible thrilling
thought that they lived
in this desperate husk of a church, that its crumbling
walls and archways
provided them their only thin shelter against the rain
and the sun, like some
fantastic survivors in a "Mad Max" movie or
something. Well, happily, they
didn't. They lived in a crude little house just behind
it, with laundry strung
on a line above the dusty yard. Evidently, the vacant
church with its broken
walls was now just part of their path to the street. The
kids - who were maybe
six and seven years old - were spectacular. The boy
with bright eyes and
flashing smile. The girl with beautiful thoughtful
face and fancy flowered
dress and earrings and silver bracelets dangling from
her bare ankles. I
prowled around the ruins, where old memorial plaques
were still embedded in its
pitted wall. Plaques saying things like this: "In
Loving Memory of Eliza
Gertrude Speldewinde / Born 20th September 1835 / Died
11th August 1913 / Peace
Perfect Peace" - weird names, weird words, to
encounter in the tenuous imperfect
peace of Jaffna today. Meanwhile, the kids played with
Jasper among the
crumbled concrete and discarded shoes and flowering
vines. A bony dog wandered
up and fell asleep in the shade beside them. A goat
ambled over and rubbed its
horns against an arched doorway, and then lay down
beside them too. It was all
very quiet. The kids picked pink flowers and handed
them to Jasper, and Jasper
plucked the petals and dropped them to the ground.
That's it. I don't know why it seems so beautiful to
me now, but it does. I
think of being there - and I look at the photos I took
of those kids - and it
brings tears to my eyes and makes me smile. It's hard to explain. The weight
of tragedy and terror for twenty years. The simple
pleasures of children
playing. Desolation. Perseverance. It's complicated. And
there was something
about that little Tamil girl, so pretty and
self-possessed, sitting in her
spotless dress and short smart haircut and dirty feet
on a chunk of fallen
church-wall, silently fiddling with the unsolicited
pen I gave her with a
faraway look in her eyes. I can't imagine what she
thinks about, what things
she's seen in her few years; and it's scary to think
too hard about what the
next six or seven years might bring her way. I want to
be hopeful, and even
with the ruined buildings and the automatic weapons
all around, there are some
signs of hope. The ceasefire, such as it is, has held
for more than a year.
Some roads are re-opened. There's a renovated
water-system with public faucets
on practically every block. And there's that gleaming
clean fresh flowered
dress she's wearing. The town's in tatters, but the
kids look good.