The Voyage of the Northern Magic: A Family Odyssey

by Diane Stuemer

  The hotel provided no top sheets. I yanked off the bottom sheet from the spare bed, revealing a panoply of dark splotches on the mattress. These, along with the wall prints, formed a kind of Rorschach test of my sanity as I awaited surgery in a dingy hotel in a big city in a foreign country convulsed in civil war. And in Colombo, the signs of that conflict were obvious: military police were posted every block or two, patrolling around with automatic weapons, stopping passing cars for inspections. Every day, while using a taxi, I was pulled over to be inspected at least once.

  The next morning, I set off in search of breakfast and an Internet café, but found neither of these within easy reach. The sign at the hotel promising a restaurant on the premises was a lie. So I settled for a small pack of arrowroot biscuits and a box of UHT milk, and continued tramping down one of Colombo’s main roads. I was surprised to see a group of eight small goats milling around in front of a restaurant, waiting their turn to cross the busy street.

  I walked past street vendors and beggars, churches and temples, putting miles on my battered old sandals. I spent most of the next two days walking. There were many places advertising Internet access, but I walked miles and tried no fewer than five before I found one that actually worked. Several of them said “Not working!” but frustratingly, two of them had personnel who didn’t know their own computer password to connect to the system. “Don’t you know it?” one of them asked me beseechingly.

  Because I never found a restaurant during my stay that sold anything in the morning other than curried chicken or fish, I never ate breakfast – or supper either, as it turned out, eating oranges and arrowroot cookies in my room on that awful stained mattress rather than wandering around alone after dark. I spoke to almost no one. At night, as I lay, hungry, in bed underneath a mosquito net, staring at those footprints, I missed my four men enormously. I had no way to communicate with Herbert other than by Internet, which always involved a day’s delay. Back at the boat, he was angry at himself for having let me set off alone. This wasn’t the way either of us had planned it to be.

  My surgery took place at six in the evening. I hadn’t expected the full-scale surgical set-up – a real operating theatre, complete with sterile fields, several nurses, and two surgeons. I quailed a bit at the overpowering sense that I was having a real operation, not just some snip-snip in an examination room. The surgeon poked around for a long time and eventually fished out not one, but two tumours.

  After changing back out of my hospital gown into my own clothes, I returned to the room where I had waited before in a wooden school chair. An old lady in a hospital gown and her hair up in a silly paper cap was still there, clutching her papers, just as she had been earlier. She was wearing the same extremely silly plastic flip-flop sandals with garish multicoloured plastic flowers on top that I had worn as part of my hospital ensemble. We were in a kind of all-purpose room, with nurses bustling back and forth, three desks cluttered with paperwork, and a doctor, face concealed by a mask, making an occasional appearance. We two patients looked and felt like intruders in this busy scene, sitting awkwardly in those two chairs squeezed in next to a desk covered with piles of papers.

  On that desk was a plastic jar containing someone’s excised body parts, large kidney-coloured nodules floating in a solution of formaldehyde. As I waited, my breast starting to throb as the anaesthetic wore off, I couldn’t keep my eyes off that jar, wondering whose nodules these were and why they were sitting there, unattended, in the middle of that mess.

  Then a nurse plopped down another jar. The papers she put beside it were mine. Suddenly, I realized that the second jar contained my very own body parts, two little fuzzy whitish nubs the size of marbles. Each was pierced painfully with a length of black thread. I stared at them in morbid fascination.

  I paid $150 for the surgery, and the nurse handed me my files as well as the jar and instructed me to take them to the lab. For the next fifteen minutes, I found myself wandering around the hospital, up and down stairs, through a maze of hallways, unsuccessfully trying to find the right place to deposit them. When I finally did find the lab, they waved me back to the cashier, one floor down, where I had to pay for the lab tests first. Then I climbed the stairs to the lab again to submit the specimen and my proof of payment.

  As I was wandering around all these dingy back hallways, with my own little globules jiggling merrily in their jar, I considered that I know quite a few squeamish people who would have keeled right over when faced with their own disembodied parts – and, even worse, been asked to traipse all over the hospital with them. Some corner of my mind found this funny. I began imagining other scenarios, such as amputees hopping around with their severed leg balanced on one shoulder, looking, as I was, for the lab, but somehow never finding it.

  The laboratory itself was packed with people – a few patients, like me, but mainly lab personnel, the administrative clerks sharing desk space with the lab technicians themselves. There were about twice as many bodies as there were chairs or desk spaces. There was no horizontal surface visible anywhere that was not covered with papers and implements and files and specimens of human tissue in various stages of analysis. I wanted to scream and run out of there. But I simply handed over my jar and set off to the pharmacy to fulfil my prescription for a painkiller.

  There were a few people ahead of me at the pharmacy counter, behind which the harried looking staff bustled around. As new people came into the room, they jostled ahead and elbowed me out of the way, succeeding in getting their own prescriptions filled while I was shoved to the background. Perhaps in other circumstances I would have held my own ground better, but, tired and hurting, I had no stomach for this. Eventually, I thrust the prescription back into my pocket and left without filling it. Instead, I went outside and looked for a tuk-tuk to take me back to the security of my own hotel room, however stained and footprinted it might be.

  On the ride back to the hotel, my injured right breast reacted angrily to every pothole and swerve. After dark, Colombo looked different and, to my eyes, ominous. The driver took me back a different way than I had gone before, through small and creepy-looking residential streets. I felt vulnerable and very much alone. I fished around in my pouch and clipped my little can of pepper spray to an outside pocket.

  At the hotel I fled to my room and slept heavily until the first filtered glimmerings of dawn began to light the sky, and the travelling fish salesmen began their cheery morning singsong, “All-lo! All-lo!” in the street below. I had planned to take the train back to Galle that morning, but the surgeons had left in place a little plastic tube to drain away internal bleeding. I was forced to stay one more day. I felt guilty knowing that Herbert would be condemned to worry as the day dragged on and I didn’t arrive as planned. Eventually, I knew, he would take the long dinghy ride and head into town to check for an e-mail from me, but there would be a lot of fretting first.

  I had been completely oriented to leaving that day, and this time I really resented my long trudge to the Internet café, several miles away. I wanted a breakfast of bacon, eggs, and hash browns, but settled for some dry arrowroot biscuits instead. They make great cookies in Sri Lanka, but I was by now getting a little tired of them. From all my walking and my one-meal-a-day regimen, I was noticeably thinner than I had been four days before.

  I made my last trip to the hospital that night to have the shunt removed and my dressing changed. I walked in and then out of the pharmacy again without filling my new prescription, waited in two or three line-ups, visited the cashier twice more, and then left, a free woman at last. Early the next morning, I was on a bus for the bumpy, three-hour trip back to Galle. This time, the narrow streets, the cows placidly crossing in front of traffic, the row of shoemakers sitting under umbrellas near the old fort, the pineapple seller with his mountain of fruit, even the soldiers at the harbour checkpoint, all looked familiar and welcome.

  There was no use in delaying our departure while awaiting the results of the laboratory t
ests, which could take a week or more. Of course, if the diagnosis was bad it could mean the end of our trip. We arranged to get the results by e-mail, so after my return we immediately began our last major provisioning of the boat until Africa.

  We took a day off to accept an invitation from Ekka to visit his in-laws’ home in the country. Ekka and his wife had been growing dearer to us with each passing day, a badly needed beacon of light in what had been a rather dark and miserable time for all of us. I couldn’t help but compare Ekka, the trishaw driver, in his warm and loving little shack, to that vain and self-absorbed lawyer in his cold mansion. Later, from someone else, we learned that once a month Ekka and his wife visited a local orphanage to donate supplies to the children. I found this much more impressive than losing nine hundred dollars at poker. When it finally came time to say goodbye, Ekka cried, and of course, I did too.

  18

  We Place Last at the Chagos Fish Olympics

  On our passage to the Maldives, Christopher asked to join his older brothers in taking his turn at watch, so he was given the eight to nine morning shift, with supervision. Promoted to a position of such responsibility, our eight-year-old puffed up his chest with pride and vigilantly kept watch for the first time.

  After three days at sea, we caught sight of the atolls of the Maldives. They first appeared as smoky smudges on the horizon, tricking us into thinking we were looking at distant ships. What we were seeing were palm trees, as the islands themselves were only a metre or two above sea level and hidden until we were almost upon them. Mariners of the past often discovered this too late, and the spectacular azure waters of the Maldives are studded with the wrecks of unwary ships. If the sea level rises because of global warming, the Maldives will disappear.

  We had been expecting something rather primitive and were therefore surprised to see the tall buildings of Malé, a town of 65,000, rising up on the horizon. Many of the buildings were four and five storeys, brand new, and painted in the vibrant colours of the coral on which these islands are built – rose, aquamarine, white, yellow. The gleaming golden dome of a mosque glinted brightly in the afternoon light.

  Malé is a pretty little town, a labyrinth of seemingly identical narrow streets paved in interlocking stones right up to the edge of its coral-rock buildings. Between the colourful architecture and the signage throughout the town featuring the distinctive swirling script of the Dhivehi language, which is unique to this place, it made a very pleasing and exotic effect. We began our exploration of Malé around noon and were charmed by the call to prayer that echoed through the narrow streets, the musical chant evoking mental images of far-away Arabia. We then watched with surprise as shop shutters rolled down, store doors were locked, and little signs, saying, Closed For Prayer, sprouted everywhere. Men swarmed the streets and made their way to the mosque, where they removed their shoes, washed their feet carefully in pools and fountains provided for this purpose, put on head coverings, and knelt on the floor of the beautiful and airy interior.

  Every afternoon, we had to plan our shopping around these prayer times so as not to find ourselves being shooed out of a store because its owner needed to pray. Since almost everything closed for half-hour periods around noon and three-thirty, there was nothing to do during these interludes but stand around and wait for the men to stream back and reopen their shops. However annoying this was for us, there was something very touching about the Maldivians’ devotion to their faith.

  “I think Muslim people are a lot more involved in their religion than Christian people are,” Michael observed.

  The Maldives provided us with a break, and it was one we badly needed. Sri Lanka and its frustrations had not been good for us. We were crabby and homesick, tired of the extreme heat and the constant rolling. We had not enjoyed a calm anchorage or a good night’s sleep for almost three months. Deadlines for my lab results had twice come and gone without any word. But the morning after we arrived in Maldives we received the e-mail message we had been awaiting. The tests were clear; no cancer had been found.

  Sometimes you don’t realize how dark the day has been until the clouds disappear and the sun begins to shine through. Certainly, it was a glorious day now, as we raised our anchor and headed off to where a tiny island beckoned in the distance, our own little quiet corner of paradise.

  We decided to take our time meandering through the Maldives. Our plan was to sail twenty or thirty miles each day, stopping by mid-afternoon for a swim, supper, and a good night’s sleep. It would take us ten or fifteen days to make it to the southernmost atoll this way, but the Maldives were so beautiful, and we weren’t in a rush, so we adopted this unambitious plan enthusiastically. We had by now all developed our special routines for negotiating our way around the reefs. Christopher had appointed himself to the job of colouring in our black-and-white photocopied charts to highlight reefs and shallows, a painstaking and important task at which he excelled. Michael climbed the mast and shouted instructions from the spreaders, Jonathan either stood at the bow or stationed himself at the GPS, reading out our position to the captain, who stayed at the helm, while I perched myself on the foredeck transmitting instructions from one crew member to another. At most anchorages we snorkeled as often as we could, marvelling at the amazing undersea world around us.

  At Mulaku Atoll, we anchored in front of a tidy little village. It seemed to be a merry place, for the shoreline was peppered with playing children, the air full of their laughing voices. We were quite used to being the object of friendly curiosity wherever we went, but we still weren’t quite prepared for the enthusiastic reception we received in a village that rarely saw a white face. Every head turned curiously in our direction, and a glance from us was more than enough to provoke a beaming smile in return.

  It was in the faces of the children that the most surprising reaction took place, for they skittered and laughed and made way for us exactly as if we were furry creatures from space: funny and cute, but different enough to be just a little scary. The schoolboys laughed openly, while the girls giggled with their hands hiding their mouths, looking away shyly and peeking over their shoulders when they thought you weren’t looking, then collapsing in convulsions of self-conscious laughter when they saw that you were. Younger children ducked behind houses when you looked their way, and then, when your back was safely turned, came bravely rushing up behind you. All it took was a quick swivel of your head to make them run away, shaking with laughter. Eventually we began playing a game in which we would duck around a corner and spring out with a roar, making them scatter to the wind in gales of giggles.

  Our final hop took us to Addu, the last atoll in the chain. As everywhere in the Maldives, it was all impeccably neat, its inhabitants smiling, as if still ready and waiting for the inspection by Her Majesty that never came. We had two major items on our agenda for Addu.

  The first was our final provisioning before heading for Chagos, an uninhabited archipelago about five hundred kilometres to the south. We planned to spend several weeks there, waiting for the monsoon season to set in and the southeast trade winds to establish themselves for our onward journey to Africa.

  At the best of times there was not a lot of fresh food to be had in the Maldives; about the only things that grew were bananas and papayas. We’d tried our best while in Malé, the capital, to stock up, but by the time we hit Addu we were hungry for fruit. Everyone grew what they needed, so the way to get fruit was by going from house to house and buying whatever you saw growing in someone’s yard. It took a little longer than going to the supermarket, but it definitely was more social.

  Our second order of business was celebrating Jonathan’s twelfth birthday. For weeks, we’d been pulling Jon’s leg, telling him that we hadn’t bought him any presents that year. This wasn’t as outlandish a tale as it sounds, as it had been months since we had been anywhere with any kind of reasonable store. In fact, on our overland trip in Sri Lanka, we had each bought Jon a special souvenir: Herbert and I had found him a bras
s ceremonial dagger, Michael a carved mask, and Christopher a painted drum. By the time his birthday rolled around, we had got him so well primed for disappointment that he had actually agreed to be content with one small, four-dollar pack of Magic Cards.

  The night before the big day, we went to bed at our normal times, and thus were all fast asleep at 12:20 a.m., our consciences giving us no qualms whatsoever about the trick we were playing on a hopeful, innocent boy. Soon, all would be set right.

  The next thing I knew, something was wrenching me out of a deep sleep. It was dark. It was the middle of the night, and there was some kind of ruckus outside. I could hear men’s voices.

  Shaking Herbert awake as I clambered over him, I staggered to the main hatch. Alarmingly, there were men standing right there, in our cockpit, and they weren’t other yachties. A dark face with a black moustache was peering into the cabin, holding a bright flashlight. Behind him I could make out the shapes of four more large, dark strangers. I couldn’t understand the muttered words they were exchanging with each other.

  The men backed up a bit as they saw me climbing the companionway ladder. As I emerged, I could see that the man with the flashlight was holding something long and tubular in his other hand. Another man was holding something flat and round that glistened strangely. The men were tall, muscular, and Maldivian. They were wearing T-shirts and jeans. I recognized none of them.

  “What’s going on?” I asked in a croaky, sleep-clogged voice.

  “Surprise!” they shouted. “It’s a happy birthday surprise!”

  I shook my head as Herbert popped up behind me, and then comprehension slowly began to dawn. What the men were holding were presents. Their faces were wreathed in broad smiles.