by Helen Brown
The car rattled up into hills steep and green enough to have been digitally enhanced. Rounding a bend, we encountered a heavily armed soldier with a whistle pressed to his lips. He raised his arm and gestured for us to stop. My heart thumped, as I thought about how at least nineteen journalists had been killed in Sri Lanka since 1992. I didn’t consider myself a journalist anymore, just a housewife with an accidental bestseller, but the idea of encountering Sri Lankan military was unnerving. The instant the soldier saw our monk, however, his smile became so broad the whistle dropped from his mouth and he waved us on.
‘Look, Miss Lydia!’ said the driver, pulling to the side of the road. ‘A waterfall!’
We paused alongside a group of brightly dressed locals to admire the torrent charging over huge rocks. As I leant out of the window to take a photo, an ancient arm thrust itself into the car, the fingers curved up in the unmistakable shape of want. The arm belonged to a grey-haired woman, her eyes milky with age. Another beggar hovered ghostlike outside Lydia’s window.
The driver urged us not to give them anything, but it was my first encounter with begging in Sri Lanka. If I’d stayed home in Melbourne, I’d have met more beggars on Chapel Street by now. I rustled through my wallet for an appropriate note to offer, but the hand pointed to another note, the equivalent of $10 – a fortune by local standards. I gave it to her.
The driver grumbled as we roared away. Those people they do nothing, he complained. They expect others to do everything for them. But the monk reminded him beggars provide an opportunity for dharma.
Tea plantations rolled like plush green carpets over the hills. No wonder the British had loved it up here – a cool retreat away from the confusing bustle of the lowlands, with an endless supply of tea. Dotted among the rows of tea bushes were women workers wearing saris with large white sacks draped over their backs. Their bodies seemed permanently bent from picking tea, all for $2 a day.
It was getting near the magic hour of noon, before which the monk needed to eat. The driver pulled off the road and puttered up a driveway toward a graceful white building adorned with art deco swirls. Straight out of colonial times, it oozed refinement.
Stopping outside the gleaming entrance, our driver hooted the horn and waited. A smartly dressed waiter hurried out to the car with a menu for the monk to inspect. A cluster of staff gathered anxiously around our vehicle to await his verdict.
Although he thought there was a better restaurant further up the hill with a more open feel, the monk decided this one would do. Visibly relieved, the staff ushered us into their establishment.
A gracious building with a foyer bedecked with columns and armchairs, the place was straight out of another century. I admired the high pressed-metal ceilings as we scaled wide stairs to an empty dining room overlooking the hills. Lydia and I were escorted to a table near the window. The monk and the driver were shown to another table several metres way. I was getting used to this arrangement. In fact, I’d decided that separate-gender dining had the potential to enliven some social occasions back home. The blokes could drone on about sport while women exchanged free-range gossip.
Lydia and I ordered soda water and waited our turn to choose from the buffet. I was beginning to realise local food was far more delicious and safer to eat than Sri Lankan interpretations of Italian cuisine. The delicate flavours, as well as the variety of textures and colours of Sri Lankan cooking, had me hooked.
As we sat at our table admiring old photographs from Empire days, the driver approached us. He seemed almost distraught.
‘I’m sorry to say this, but your teacher is not well,’ he said.
We glanced across at the monk gazing thoughtfully out the window. He didn’t appear in extreme pain.
‘He must go to hospital immediately,’ the driver continued. ‘It may be something to do with his blood pressure. He has been too busy lately.’
We offered to help, but the monk and driver assured us there was nothing we could do. The monk stood up and said there was probably nothing to worry about. He seemed okay, but I knew that people can feel much worse than they look. The monk swept out of the restaurant with the driver in his wake.
Lydia and I exchanged glances across the table. Being abandoned in the Sri Lankan highlands hadn’t been on my itinerary. The old control-freak me would’ve had a meltdown under these circumstances. Phone calls would’ve been made. Taxis called. But if being in this country had taught me anything, it was to chill out and let things evolve. It was a perfectly pleasant restaurant.
‘How long do you think we’ll be here?’ Lydia asked, smiling.
‘If he gets admitted to hospital it could be a while,’ I replied. ‘They might forget about us altogether.’
The lightness of not knowing what was going to happen was surprisingly liberating. We finished lunch and ordered a large pot of tea. A visit to the bathroom (Wow! Flushing toilets!) was followed by another pot of tea.
An hour or two later, we talked about finding our own way to the hotel, figuring it was probably only about four hours’ drive away and that getting there wouldn’t be impossible. Just as we were about to leave, there was a flourish of maroon at the entrance to the dining room and Lydia’s teacher sailed toward us, benevolent and trouble free as ever.
‘There is absolutely nothing wrong with me,’ he confided.
The driver reinforced the hospital doctor’s diagnosis. After careful examination the conclusion was that the monk was in perfectly good health.
‘We will now go straight to the tea plantation,’ the monk added.
‘You can’t possibly take us,’ I said, thinking wistfully of sinking into a hotel swimming pool. ‘You need rest.’
But the monk would have none of it. We climbed back into the car to wind on up and over more hills to Mackwoods Tea Plantation which had ‘Over 165 Years of Excellence’.
At the tea plantation car park we had our first glimpse of tourists. Staring out of their white flabby bodies through designer sunglasses, they resembled creatures from another planet. Disgorging from buses and hire cars in khaki shorts, stout walking shoes and 50 UV sun hats, they huddled in fearful groups. In almost any other circumstances I’d have been just like them.
Travelling in some kind of cultural submarine, they snatched bite-sized glimpses of the sights around them before turning their attention back to each other, reassuring themselves theirs was the Real World.
They worked themselves into a frenzy inside a shop selling alluringly packaged tea, as if there might soon be a world shortage. In the canteen they drained pots of tea and chocolate cake down their white saggy gullets. Hungry, always hungry for food and shopping.
In the Buddhist Wheel of Life, Hungry Ghosts are tormented by cravings that can never be fulfilled. Not fully alive, they’re incapable of appreciating the present moment and are therefore in a constant state of rage and desire. Whoever painted Hungry Ghosts with thin necks and bulging bellies must have been thinking of tourists.
Outside the canteen we saw a rarity in Sri Lanka – an overweight child. Pasty faced with eyes like raisins, the young boy waddled about in a brand-name T-shirt and a cap that was too small for him. Weighed down by the consumerist society he came from, he was a pitiful sight.
While tourists took photos of themselves buying tea, drinking tea and standing outside the tea factory, Lydia’s teacher started feeling much better. He was keen for us to embark on a guided tour of the factory, which exuded a sweet, trippy aroma.
A charming young woman explained the tea manufacturing process, which was surprisingly unencumbered by modern technology. It took less than twenty-four hours from leaf to packet. After admiring conveyor belts of green leaves destined to end up brewed in pots all over the world, we headed back to the car park.
While the others visited the bathrooms, the driver took me aside and fixed me with an earnest look. He would, he said, give me a house with furniture and everything, if I could find a nice man to marry his daughter. I’d want for
nothing if I could find her a man with a good heart.
Struggling to respond, I thought of all the women I knew, ages ranging from sixteen to seventy-five, who lamented the difficulty of finding a decent bloke, and assured him it was a universal problem.
With the tea tour completed, we assured the monk and driver we’d be more than happy to be taken to the hotel now.
‘But you must see Little Britain!’ the monk urged.
For a fleeting moment I thought he was referring to the television comedy.
‘Nuwara Eliya was built in the nineteenth century and it’s just like an English town with red brick buildings and hotels on a lake,’ he continued. ‘It’s very beautiful. And we must go to the botanical gardens.’
The car twisted and surged until we reached Little Britain. To complete the Englishness of it all, shafts of rain fell into the lake. We stopped at a handsome old hotel where Queen Victoria still reigned. A pianola in the lobby played Christmas carols even though it was February. Out in the garden, white-haired couples from Surrey swayed to Engelbert Humperdinck under a magnolia tree while women in saris and men in white jackets kept them topped up with tea.
The scene was unexpectedly touching. All participants, both foreign and local, were taking part in a game of Let’s Pretend the Empire Never Died. The British tourists were ecstatic to relive the glory of their ancestors. And locals, dressed in ethnic clothing, were content to nurture the foreigners’ fantasies with tea from a silver urn . . . for a price. As the skies opened they scurried for the shelter of the magnolia.
A man on the roadside assured us the botanic gardens were a thirty-minute drive out of town. Concerned it might be past dark by the time we got to our accommodation, I suggested perhaps we didn’t need to see the gardens. But the monk insisted they were unmissable.
On the way we encountered devastating flood damage. An entire hillside had collapsed into a valley. Bulldozers and diggers clawed the earth trying to reclaim a track that could eventually become a road again. For once the magic of travelling with a monk didn’t work. A man in a hard hat held up a stop sign and made us wait . . . and wait. About forty minutes later we were finally waved through and it was nearly 4 p.m. by the time we reached the garden gates, ten minutes away from closing time. The entrance fee would be US$10 per person plus an extra fee for the car. Daylight robbery by local standards. In no mood to argue if it meant we could head for Kandy straight after, I opened my wallet.
We glided past a white concrete pillar engraved with 1861, passing wrought iron gates and heading up the driveway. The gardens were lovely, but not much different in layout to any of that era. The monk and driver agreed it wasn’t the best time of year for flowers.
After a quick circuit of the gardens we were finally allowed to start the five-hour journey to the hotel. Lydia seized the opportunity to ask her teacher to bestow a Buddhist name on her.
I squirmed uncomfortably while he hummed and hawed, running through several options aloud. Lydia had been named after Dad’s mother, an equally determined woman by all accounts. A lot of thought had gone into calling her that. A name is a brand, a theme song. Hers was a good one with a worthy heritage. The ancient land of Lydia (in the region of modern Turkey) was the first country to produce coins. In the Bible there’s a Lydia who sells purple cloth.
If our daughter was going to reject everything else she’d grown up with, it was logical she’d bin her name. But surely if she was going to do something that serious, and take on a new one, it would happen in a temple, not in the back seat of a Japanese car? The monk eventually decided on the title Nanda, meaning Radiant Happiness. Maybe that’s who she was going to be from now on: Sister Radiant Happiness.
To my embarrassment, Lydia asked him for a Buddhist name for me. Then again, if he was comfortable bestowing a Buddhist name on someone who didn’t belong to the religion, maybe it wasn’t such a big deal. After more deliberating, he settled on Ramani, meaning One Whose Blessings Come from Nature. I was secretly pleased with it. Maybe the monk understood me better than I’d imagined.
As darkness enveloped the car, the driver’s eyelids became heavy in the rear-view mirror. He’d had a demanding day, what with kamikaze traffic on farcical roads and the mercy dash to hospital.
To keep him awake, Radiant Happiness and Blessing From Nature encouraged him to talk about his passion – cars. According to him, a Toyota was the best brand in Sri Lanka. He asked what sort of vehicle we had back home. He shook his head at the thought of a Subaru. Spare parts were too expensive. He’d once driven a Ferrari, but his dream car would be a Lamborghini.
‘By the way,’ he asked. ‘Do you know the way to this hotel?’
Thank Buddha for Google Earth. The instructions were clear, but as the driver said, we seemed to be on the safari route. As we reached the outskirts of Kandy the map told us to scale a cliff face. I’d heard the road to the hotel had been closed during the floods. Maybe this was an alternative approach. Jolting through the obsidian night, I was starting to tire of unpredictable adventures.
Eyes glowed along the roadside. When the driver asked them for directions they shook their heads or vanished into the jungle. A bus hurtled down the hill, nearly tossing us into the chasm. While both drivers stopped to regain their composure, the bus driver told us we were on the right road, and to keep going up.
Near the summit, a well-lit sign for the hotel shone reassuringly. A figure slid out from the shadows and approached our car; the driver wound down his window. The man tried to give him a piece of paper, but the driver put his foot down and charged up the rest of the hill.
‘These people are dangerous,’ he said. ‘He wants us to find someone in the hotel who probably doesn’t exist. He’s selling drugs. He’ll have us all killed. They’ll call the police and we’ll end up in the same cell. Two Sri Lankans and two foreigners.’
As we finally lurched into the hotel grounds, I was relieved beyond words. I prepared to bid farewell to the monk and his driver, but they said they had time for refreshments before leaving.
Inside, I revelled in the muzak, the unnatural glow of the swimming pool, and the staff uniforms with their pseudo references to Sri Lankan traditional dress.
As we sat down at a table, in my dazed state I noticed how versatile monastic robes are. They can look just at home in the lobby of a flash hotel as in the depths of a forest monastery.
After we’d had some tea, the monk cleared his throat. I was too tired and disoriented to imagine he might be about to say something important.
‘Lydia,’ he said, radiating his charismatic smile. ‘If you want to come to the monastery and be ordained as a nun you can stay and be the meditation teacher.’
Suddenly alert, I leaned forward and waited for Lydia’s response. This was the moment I’d travelled half the world for. If she was going to say yes, it would be okay. I might even get a shack in Kandy and spend several months a year in this crazy, beautiful place. But still . . .
Lydia stirred her lime and soda with her straw.
The monk, the driver and I waited for her to say something.
But, apart from the clink of champagne glasses at the next table and Elton John over the loudspeakers – there was silence.
Reverence
An enemy is sometimes a friend in disguise
The young man who cleaned our hotel room fell violently in love with Lydia. When she first spoke to him in Sinhalese, his eyebrows rose and parted like a drawbridge. His amazement melted into delight, solidifying into passion when he discovered she’d spent months living devoutly in a monastery.
When Lydia’s new admirer wasn’t lingering in the corridor outside our room, he was inventing an endless list of excuses for tapping on the door. The tea bags had forgotten to replenish themselves. Our pillows weren’t straight. The curtains needed closing.
Though he was very good-looking and charming, he was approximately six inches shorter than Lydia. However, the difference in their heights did nothing to dampen his
ardour. Like her, he said, he was Buddhist and, he added earnestly, hoped to visit Australia some day.
Elvis was in nappies the last time I’d witnessed such a severe affliction of lovesickness. I warned Lydia the signs were blazingly obvious, but she shrugged me off. Since her religious phase had begun, she’d lost any ability to read mating signals. Any men who looked at her with interest were simply ignored. Unlike her sister, she was immune to bulging biceps and aftershave. While she could speak four languages, she’d become flirt illiterate.
Sinhalese is notoriously complicated. About the only word I could recognise was ‘oh’ for ‘yes’. Lydia and the young man chatted animatedly saying ‘oh’ and nodding a lot. Feeling like a spare incense stick in an ashram, I asked what they were talking about.
‘It’s Poya day,’ Lydia said, as if I should have known. ‘Full moon is a special day on the Buddhist calendar. It’s the best time to visit the Tooth Temple.’
The young man smiled in a besotted fashion at Lydia and promised that while we were away at the Tooth Temple he would do ‘something special’ with our room. He then excused himself and wheeled his trolley of forgetful tea bags down the corridor.
‘What does he mean something special ?’ I asked Lydia. ‘Is he kinky?’
‘Don’t worry about it,’ she sighed, inspecting my red linen shirt. ‘Just change your clothes. We’ll need to wear white.’
Thinking the religious part of my adventure was over, I’d scrunched all the white clothes in the bottom of my suitcase. Oh well. The crinkled look was so far out it was probably in.
Yet another demented tuk-tuk driver took us on a thrill ride over pot-holes the size of craters down the rutted precipice into town. He stopped outside different shops every now and then, explaining that this was the place he and his family bought all their gemstones/antiques/designer-label clothes and if we’d like to go inside and look around he would happily wait for us. Lydia explained this was common practice with tuk-tuk drivers. They’d revisit the store later to collect a percentage of anything we’d spent.