by Helen Brown
It wasn’t fair. Ceylon had precious gems. As for tea, there was enough British blood left in our veins to know we’d practically die without it. I was jealous of Ceylon. In New Zealand all we were famous for was mutton and cheese.
Before it was known as Ceylon, the island had the even more romantic name of Serendipity. Straight out of a fairy tale, the word Serendipity has Arabic roots. Oddly enough, Serendipity has been voted one of the ten most difficult words to translate from English. Serendipity happens when a person discovers something they weren’t expecting to find. A happy accident.
Sri Lanka was the opposite of serendipity as far as I was concerned. Since Lydia’s fascination with the place, not to mention tsunamis, war and poverty, I’d thought of the teardrop island as a Land of Tears.
A text bleeped to life on my phone. It was Lydia saying it was raining in Sri Lanka. I sent one back saying the roses were out in our Gratitude Garden.
My days had become full keeping Katharine afloat for her last few weeks of school. The poor kid had pushed herself so hard she’d developed chronic tonsillitis at the beginning of the final term. I’d never seen anyone so sick from a sore throat.
Every time she started to get better, she was struck down by a bout worse than the one before. One doctor said it was the most severe case she’d seen in thirty years. Antibiotics stopped working after a while and Katharine started getting infections on top of the infections she already had. After twelve blood tests and five different GPs, she finally went to a specialist. He put her on steroids to get her through the exams on the understanding she’d have a tonsillectomy the day after school was out.
It had been heartbreaking watching our sunniest child languish in a mist of illness and misery for three months. At the beginning of the year she’d hoped to achieve marks high enough to get into Medicine. With so much time away from school sick, she’d tearfully let that dream go. Besides, she’d seen so many doctors lately she wasn’t sure she liked them as a breed. Their thinking was too narrow and scientific, she said. They didn’t see the whole person.
Every time I dropped her off at school for another exam, I half expected a phone call saying she’d collapsed. Yet with unbelievable tenacity she managed to slog through.
Jonah excelled himself during her illness, switching to superhero mode and watching over her constantly. He stood sentinel beside her on her desk while she studied, classical music pouring from her stereo. Devoted to the depths of his fur follicles, our cat pretended he really didn’t mind Bach’s cello suites so much after all.
When Katharine staggered home from exams and collapsed on her bed, not knowing if she’d flunked or passed, Jonah leapt on to her duvet, nestled into her neck and sang to her in a honeyed purr.
My wrists were sore from squeezing oranges. The blades of the smoothie-maker went blunt. Every packet of Panadol in the bathroom cabinet was empty.
Time after time, I delivered Katharine lectures on how unimportant exam marks were, saying they were just one square in the knitted blanket of life. If she didn’t do as well as she’d hoped, she could take off to cooking school in Paris or do an art history course in Florence and become a connoisseur of finer things. Smiling weakly, she asked if I’d include performing in musical theatre in that list.
Of course . . . anything, darling girl . . . just please get well.
When the exams were finally over, she was in no state to celebrate with her friends.
‘I just want to be separated from my tonsils,’ she croaked.
Which she duly was – and sitting up in a hospital bed on a post-operative high.
‘It was nothing, Mum. I feel great!’ she said.
The first night she was home, Philip and I were woken by the sound of Jonah galloping up and down the hall, yowling loudly. We opened the door. His eyes, a pair of black orbs in the shadows, glowed up at us. He led us upstairs, springing up them two at a time. Katharine was in bed, crying with pain. The hospital drugs had worn off. She was in agony.
‘Thanks boy,’ I said, stroking Jonah’s silky back.
Our feline sat neatly on Katharine’s pillow while Philip phoned the hospital and arranged to collect stronger medicine. Devil cat no more, Jonah was Katharine’s guardian angel.
A couple of hours later, after Philip had returned with the hospital painkillers, we opened Katharine’s bedroom door a crack. Through a beam of light from the bathroom we could see her comfortably asleep with Jonah curled up beside her.
Jonah raised his head as if to say, ‘It’s okay. I’ve got everything under control. You two can go back to bed now.’
‘Still want to send him to a farm?’ I asked Philip as we stumbled downstairs, drunk with tiredness.
Philip shook his head and put his arm around me. There was no need to answer. Jonah was our daughter’s greatest round-the-clock comforter. For all the ups and downs we’d been through, from carpet destruction to cat Prozac, from grandchild envy to incontinence, he was part of our family.
Next morning, another text message came through from Lydia saying it was still raining in Sri Lanka. For all I knew, she might’ve taken her vows and become a fully-fledged nun by now. That was exactly the sort of sanity-challenging information she’d choose to withhold from me in favour of weather reports. I replied quoting a cover story from Newsweek saying meditation helps the brain grow. No answer. Perhaps she was meditating.
As Katharine grew stronger, the calendar flicked over into January, and her astonishing exam results came through. Her marks were so high she could go straight into Medicine if she wanted. I was relieved when she opted for a Science degree instead. A few years of broader studies would give her time to kick back and consider her options.
Meanwhile, Sri Lanka had crept like a cat into my mind. The teardrop island kept turning up everywhere – in my dreams; on the news. (Terrible flooding this time, misplacing a million people. Lydia’s weather reports hadn’t been exaggerated.) When Philip and I went out for a night at the opera, it was to The Pearl Fishers, a doomed romance set in, of all places, Sri Lanka. I opened a biography of Virginia Woolf’s husband, Leonard, to learn that before their marriage he was a British official in Sri Lanka, overseeing public executions and indulging in local women.
If Lydia had become a nun, I mused, there wasn’t much I could do about it except offer my support. If, on the other hand, she was still thinking about it, well, that was up to her. The least I could do was visit the monastery and take an interest.
Though I had previously had no real desire to go to the teardrop island, it mattered a great deal to Lydia. And if it was important to her . . .
* * *
As I lay on the bed with Jonah one afternoon, he rolled playfully on his back in a shaft of sunlight. I grasped his front paws gently between my thumb and fingers and stared down into his serious blue eyes.
‘What do you think I should do?’ I asked, lowering my forehead to touch his.
Gazing up at me without a blink, he beamed a single word: Go.
‘But what about my health?’ I asked, rubbing his nose.
My energy levels were still pathetic. On outings, the family sprinted ahead while I trailed in their wake, pretending to admire the scenery. I was slower. My lungs seemed to have shrunk. I still huffed and puffed.
Viruses invited themselves into my system more often and took longer to go away. I no longer sailed around mindlessly inside my body. I’d started experiencing numbness down both arms, which an MRI revealed was due to compression in my upper spine, but (the doctor added cheerfully) no tumour.
The enormous smile scar across my abdomen wasn’t without issues either. If I sat up suddenly, or twisted in an unusual way, I’d seize up with paralysing pain. I Googled the symptoms to find others who’d had the same surgery got it too. ‘Charlie horse cramps’ they were called. It was indeed like being kicked in the stomach. According to the Googlers, the cramps got worse with time.
Countless What Ifs whirled around my mind. My creaking, panting, c
ramping, infection-prone body was hardly up to Sri Lanka. What if I couldn’t make it up the monastery steps? Or if I caught a horrible bug and died in the jungle?
One morning while I was chomping through my muesli, Jonah winked at me and sent some more words: Does a brush with death mean you’re going to stop living?
He’s right, I thought. I could stay home drinking green tea, avoiding stress and being obsessed with the fact I wasn’t going to live forever, or I could follow my daughter’s example and live.
Seizing the phone, I punched in the nonsensical sequence of numbers needed to reach the monastery. The line crackled, then buzzed, and for once the call went through. A melodic female voice answered. Probably a nun. Tropical birds whooped and chortled in the background as she went off to find Lydia.
‘Is it still raining?’ I asked our daughter. ‘Has the monastery been swept away by the floods?’
Lydia assured me she was fine. Even though it was raining a lot where she was, the actual flooding was further south. She always made it seem the trouble was somewhere else.
‘I’m thinking of coming over in February,’ I said.
‘To stay at the monastery?’ Lydia asked, sounding pleased and nervous at the same time.
Drawing a breath, I pictured the 200 steps. And the hole in the ground that would most probably be my toilet. Plus the nonexistent towels, fluffy or otherwise. (Guests were instructed to bring their own linen.) Then there was the information Katharine, in an uncharacteristic fit of kid-sister brattiness, had recently confided – Lydia had discovered a leech ‘on her vagina’. (I’d managed to raise two daughters who didn’t know the difference between a vagina and a vulva.)
‘Yes.’
Three nights at the monastery would be enough, I told her. After that I’d move to a four-star hotel, where she’d be welcome to join me. To my surprise, she was enthusiastic about staying in a luxury hotel.
One of the things I dreaded most about going to Sri Lanka was having the inoculations (my pathetic needle phobia again). I even toyed with the idea of not having any. Then Heather next door told me about a friend of hers who’d just returned from Sri Lanka with typhoid and malaria. Frankly, the prospect of falling ill in Sri Lanka didn’t worry me as much as being a nuisance.
Steeling myself I went to the doctor’s. She seemed perplexed when I told her where I was going.
Her list of recommended vaccinations was sobering. Adult diphtheria and tetanus, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, polio, rabies, typhoid, swine flu, varicella (for those who haven’t previously had chicken pox) and possibly malaria tablets. ‘Typhoid’, ‘cholera’, ‘malaria’ – romantic sounding names engraved on headstones throughout the Empire.
Seeing my expression, the doctor said I could maybe get away without some of them. Fixing her gaze tactfully on her prescription pad, she asked if the trip might involve an exchange of bodily fluids. I was flattered, but in a monastery? At my age? I was more likely to have a heart attack on the 200 steps.
She talked me into several jabs and a fizzy drink for cholera. Disease prevention dealt with, I asked Lydia what gifts to bring. The nun’s feet were dry and cracked, she said. They’d appreciate soap and coconut body butter. Sweets, pens and mini torches (with batteries) for the boy monks. She asked if I’d bring her singlet top and sarong for the hotel pool. Remembering how she covered her arms when she came home from the monastery, I took this as a hopeful sign.
As for her teacher/guru, he could do with a new pair of maroon sheepskin slippers, size 9, she said, then sent a photo of the slippers she had in mind. I couldn’t find maroon scuffs anywhere, so Katharine and I went to a shop that made them to order. When I explained the circumstances, the shoemaker nodded wisely.
‘I’ve met monks,’ he said. ‘I went to a lot of monasteries in Asia until I realised they were just like the Greek Orthodox churches I grew up with. Bowing, lighting candles and praying. It’s all the same.’
He went out the back to find a sample of maroon leather. The colour was perfect. He recommended lining the slippers with the darkest fleece because ‘they go barefoot most of the time’. Monks have harsh lives, he said, and it’s tougher for them when they get older. He’d once made sheepskin boots for an elderly Tibetan monk whose feet got terribly cold.
‘Asian monks are trained to be very tough mentally,’ he added. ‘I had one in Thailand who used to hit me. He’d yell at me to get down on the floor. You can’t argue with them. They see the world from their perspective and that’s how it is. They’re not open to looking at it any other way.’
I told him what size we needed and paid the deposit.
‘Lots of people leave Buddhism because they realise they’re just sitting there observing life, not living it,’ he added. ‘Don’t worry about your daughter.’
Easy for him to say.
‘The slippers will be ready tomorrow. Would you like to meet my monk?’ the man asked, guiding us to the front of his shop and parting a row of moccasins on the second shelf.
Curled asleep in the shadows was a large tabby cat.
‘She’s seventeen years old and she knows everything. She tells me when to calm down and she knows when I’m sick. She talks to me all the time. When she’s hungry she winks at me.’
We admired the sleeping cat together for a while.
‘I don’t need those monks when I can have this cat,’ he said.
I wondered if some day Lydia might feel the same about Jonah. It didn’t seem likely.
Following advice from a well-travelled friend I visited the chemist for orange pills to block me up in case I got diarrhoea and yellow ones for the opposite effect, if necessary.
Next stop was an outdoor shop redolent with canvas and insect repellent. Philip adored those places but I’d spent my life avoiding them.
A Man vs. Wild type greeted me. ‘You’re going where?’ he asked.
He asked me to repeat the name of my destination, and was perplexed when told why I was going there.
He’d camped in Namibia, and we exchanged information about mosquitoes. Nasty buggers, he said, then talked me into buying a full-sized mosquito net soaked in repellent as well as a smaller net to go over my hat. Man vs. Wild had been grateful for his silk sleeping-bag liner (also impregnated with insecticide) in Namibia, so I bought one of those too. And while I was at it, some debugging powder to soak my clothes in. It was a major pesticide binge for someone who’d spent their adult years shopping organic.
Lydia had told me that a halogen torch to strap around my head was essential for power cuts (more importantly, to fend off the rat and to get to the loo during the night). I added a camping pillow (presumably no sheets meant no pillows), a fancy-looking tic remover and brightly coloured mosquito-repelling wristbands.
‘Enjoy,’ said Man vs. Wild, loading my stuff into bags.
He can’t have meant it.
Jonah was intrigued when I got home and spread my wares out on the table. He dabbed his nose in the packages, savouring the unfamiliar perfumes.
Katharine, on the other hand, was appalled.
‘Please tell me you’re not going to wear a hat with a mosquito net!’ she groaned.
‘It’ll be in Sri Lanka. You won’t have to see.’
‘But Mum, it’s sooooo uncool!’
Following Man vs. Wild’s instructions, I took the mosquito net into the back garden and draped it over garden loungers to air for twenty-four hours.
Jonah’s calming medicine wasn’t working so well as my departure approached. With his usual impeccable instincts about people’s comings and goings, he was getting clingy. Katharine took him outside for a walk on his lead in the back garden. Glancing up from the kitchen bench, I saw the mosquito net floating sideways like a ghost on a mission. Jonah had caught it between his teeth and was dragging it away.
On the night of 9 February, before I was due to fly out, Jonah deluged the curtains in the Marquis de Sade room. My nearly packed suitcase was mercifully spared.
With
his jaw set, Philip unhooked the curtains to soak them in a bucket in the laundry. It was no time for ultimatums.
I reminded Philip it was Jonah’s first crime since Christmas.
That night I ran through my checklist – gifts, sheets, towels, pillow, clothes (mostly white to conform to monastery requirements), long white socks and Marcel Marceau gloves (to repel insects), mosquito nets, torch, toilet paper, antiseptic wipes, plus enough pills and potions to fill a chemist’s shop.
Then I remembered the monastery’s food quota of two vegetarian curries a day! No way would I survive on that. I’d be gnawing the woodwork by 8 p.m. Lucky the supermarket was still open. Two packets of nut bars and I was ready.
Next morning, I put on my compression socks and the moonstone earrings that’d been a birthday gift from Lydia. As Philip wheeled my suitcase to the car, Katharine stood on the verandah holding Jonah, lifting one of his front paws to wave goodbye.
‘He’s not purring,’ she said.
Island of Tears
‘Daughter am I in my mother’s house, but mistress in my own.’ Rudyard Kipling
As the plane shuddered off the tarmac, I experienced an exhilarating combination of fear and liberation. Whatever lay ahead, whether it was witnessing Lydia’s taking of robes or an inconvenient death from some romantic-sounding disease, there was no turning back.
I slid my shoes off and dozed, picked at a meal, watched a movie and checked the flight monitor. We were still over Australia! The country below resembled a rock pool – brown with flecks of blue and green. It was surprisingly beautiful.
The size of my shoes alongside those belonging to the tidy Malaysian man sitting next to me was embarrassing. To him, I must’ve seemed a mountainous, unruly woman. Yet he was friendly and accommodating.
Toward the end of the flight my new-found Malaysian friend passed me his business card, possibly to thank me for not rolling over and crushing him in my sleep. Together we stepped out of the plane into the spa-pool heat of Kuala Lumpur, where I had a twenty-four-hour stop-over. Coloured lights festooned the skyscrapers for Chinese New Year. People kept asking in concerned tones if I was alone. In restaurants waiters hurried to find newspapers and magazines to ease the non-existent discomfort of being a solitary woman.