AS THE PALATIAL OCEANA STEAMED toward Ceylon, its passengers reclined on chaises longues, played deck games, and promenaded in the shade of canvas awnings. In the evening its passengers dressed for dinner. The women’s colorful gowns were consistent, wrote Clemens in Following the Equator, with the elegance of the vessel and “the flooding brilliancies of the electric light.” Clemens, who had not seen formal dress at sea before, attributed the custom to the calmness of the Indian Ocean. The sea was so smooth that games of cricket were played on the promenade deck, which was enclosed with netting to prevent the ball from escaping overboard.
“Peace, everlasting peace, and tranquillity,” he wrote in his journal, a day after the vessel turned northwest toward Ceylon. By now America and Britain might have transformed the Australians on board into his enemies, but no matter. “A ship is a world of its own — one does not trouble himself about other worlds and their affairs.”
Two days later he noted in his journal that it was “roasting hot,” as each hour brought them closer to the equator. Nonetheless, this was “ideal sailing — long, slow, gentle rocking of the ship, soothing and lulling as a cradle motion, the atmosphere filled with peace and far-from-the-worldness — just enough breeze to keep your fat from melting and running down and greasing your clothes.” That day the dining room began using punkahs, a kind of fan made by cloth strips hung above the tables and kept in motion by servants pulling ropes.
If there were few external irritations, other than “some ungoverned children,” Clemens managed to irritate himself. Early one morning, in “the calm and holy dawn,” as he told his journal, he resolved to swear no more. After bathing, dressing in white linen, and shaving, a “long, hot, troublesome job” that elicited no impieties, he remembered to take his tonic. As he was pouring out a second dose — he had dropped the first one — the ship lurched; the tumbler that he had placed on the washstand behind him crashed to the ground, and all but its bottom shattered into fragments; he picked up the bottom to toss it out the porthole; instead he threw out his measuring cup. “I released my voice. Mrs. C. behind me in the door: ‘Don’t reform any more, it isn’t any improvement.’ “
A few days later he had something more serious to complain about. “I am shut up in my cabin with another allfired cold on my chest,” he wrote to Rogers, declaring that the toll of carbuncles and colds had left him “tired and disgusted and angry.”
When the Oceana docked at Colombo a day later, on January 13, 1896, Clemens was still suffering from a bad cough. While Smythe supervised the transfer of trunks to the P&O liner Rosetta, on which the Clemens party would embark the next day for Bombay, Clemens stood at the ship’s railing and observed the diving boys, the catamarans, and the outriggers. He told a reporter on board that “you only see things like this in places like Fiji and places of that sort, and even there they are different. Those boats and those dresses of the natives are quite novelties … I never saw anything like that anywhere.” Soon surrounded by peddlers, he explained “that he was in no urgent need of a tortoise-shell shoehorn, a comb or a sapphire ring.”
For once, Smythe’s arrangements fell through. The influx of passengers from the Oceana strained the capacity of the Grand Oriental Hotel, which could not accommodate all the Clemenses. That afternoon Clemens was seen “with a tightly rolled umbrella and a hot weary look,” searching for accommodations, which he found in the nearby Bristol Hotel. Exhausted by four in the afternoon, he went to bed, but not before a disquieting encounter. In Following the Equator, Clemens described his Sinhalese room servant, Brompy, as “an alert, gentle, smiling, winning young brown creature” who wore his “beautiful shining black hair combed back like a woman’s, and knotted at the back of his head,” the male Sinhalese style at the time, and clothed his “slender, shapely form” in a jacket under which flowed a beltless long white gown. “He and his outfit quite unmasculine. It was an embarrassment to undress before him.”
Colombo overwhelmed Clemens. “I can see it to this day,” he wrote in Following the Equator, about a drive along the shore, “that radiant panorama, that wilderness of rich color, that incomparable dissolving-view of harmonious tints, and lithe half-covered forms, and beautiful brown faces, and gracious and graceful gestures and attitudes and movements, free, unstudied, barren of stiffness and restraint.” Into this romance marched a twin column of local schoolgirls, “dressed, to the last detail, as they would have been on a summer Sunday in an English or American village,” in clothes “destitute of taste, destitute of grace, repulsive as a shroud.” He looked at Mrs. Clemens’s and Clara’s clothes and then at his own, and was ashamed.
In today’s Colombo, schoolchildren universally wear the “ugly, barbarous” clothes of the West. As for adults, the semi-nakedness and whirl of vivid color that intoxicated Clemens has been largely replaced, for the workaday world, by conventional Western dress. Colombo is still colorful, but its tints and hues derive mainly from tropical flowers and the aquamarine sea.
A hipless waiter in a spotless white jacket and ankle-length sarong serves coffee. We’re sitting on the columned and balustraded veranda of the Galle Face Hotel, a grand Victorian establishment about a mile from the “Fort,” the city center in which the Clemenses stayed. Sheltered by three sides of the building, we look out at the smooth lawn and at its stately coconut palms. Beyond lies the sea. We listen to the waves crashing against the lawn’s stone retaining wall. On the roof of a nearby concrete tower, soldiers stand next to antiaircraft guns.
We linger over the coffee. Normally we would have left the hotel an hour ago in order to read microfilms at the town archives, or take notes at the town library, or inspect sites associated with the Clemenses’ visit. But this morning, feeling slightly feverish, I’ve decided to stay put and write postcards. Alice plans to visit a bookstore downtown, where she hopes to find the reprint of a Victorian guide to Colombo, but I’ve persuaded her to stay a few more minutes to keep me company.
We are chatting about nothing in particular when a tremendous boom shocks us into silence. A second later, great slabs of glass crash down from the windows of the south wing, which faces the Fort. Waiters sprint onto the back lawn, disappear around the south wing, and return. A swimmer hauls himself from the pool and runs dripping across the lawn and into the hotel.
We enter the lobby to join confused, shocked staff and guests, including members of a wedding, the women in gorgeous gold-embroidered saris. Next to the front door, whose glass has been blown out, stand ornately wrapped presents. Fire engines, police cars, and ambulances, their sirens wailing, race toward a dense cloud of dirty smoke arising from the Fort. Hotel staff, worried about their family and friends in town, look helplessly toward the disaster. A half-hysterical British tourist asks a staff member, “Did my friends come back? Did my friends come back?”
We return to the veranda, as a dazed woman with a bloody face and arms is helped to a seat. She speaks with a Scottish accent. To the guests who wash and bandage her cuts, she explains that she was in her room at the Intercontinental Hotel, in the Fort, when she heard gunfire. She moved away from the window and dropped to the floor, just before a great blast blew the window frame into the room and shattered glass fragments and splinters all over her. She dashed down seven flights of stairs to the lobby, where water was gushing through a collapsed ceiling and blood-soaked victims were being carried out through a thick pall of smoke. She ran for a mile along the shore to our hotel. She has suffered only minor cuts.
The English-language radio station, which advertises itself as providing “uninterrupted news,” ignores the explosion. We try to call each of our children in turn to tell them we are safe, but the outgoing lines are jammed. Eventually we learn that a Tamil suicide squad drove an explosive-laden truck into the Central Bank, killing more than seventy people and wounding more than 1,200. The central business district is a shambles. In a decade of terrorist bombings in Colombo, this is the deadliest since 1987, when a car bomb killed more than one hundred people at the central bus station.
The Tamil Tigers, based in the north of the country, where Tamils form a majority, are fighting for a separate state in order to protect their people from Sinhalese domination. Tamils began emigrating from southern India 1,000 years ago, and it is from this ancient community, rather than from the descendants of Tamil laborers imported during the nineteenth century, that the Tamil Tigers are drawn. The conflict reflects the poisonous mixture of nationalism and religion: most of the Tamils are Hindu, whereas most of the Sinhalese are Buddhist.
The rivalry between Tamils and Sinhalese was not obvious in Clemens’s day, at least not to the casual European or American visitor. Sectarian and interracial jealousies flared into violence only after independence, as a slowing economy intensified competition and as Sinhalese politicians preyed on their constituents’ fears of being swamped by millions of Tamils from India.
When Clemens disembarked at Colombo, the only religious issue in the news concerned resentment at the dismissal of Mr. LeMesurier from the Colonial Service of Ceylon. This civil servant, after failing to obtain a divorce from his recalcitrant wife, converted to Islam and married, according to Muslim rites, an Englishwoman who had also converted to Islam. He was dismissed from his post on those grounds. The case was arousing considerable excitement, both in Ceylon and in India, because it violated the principle that the British should observe strict neutrality in matters of religion.
Among the news the Clemenses received when they arrived in Colombo was that an attempt two weeks earlier to foment revolution in Johannesburg had failed, and that war between America and Britain seemed less imminent. Clemens noted in his journal that America had asked Britain to protect American citizens in South Africa, and that this request was considered a sign of improved Anglo-American relations.
The Clemenses left Colombo the next day, on Tuesday, January 14, after only one night on the island. Their ship, the Rosetta, sailed too early to permit an At Home in Colombo, but Smythe hoped to arrange engagements several months hence, after the conclusion of the Indian tour, when the party would return en route for Mauritius.
On the day of their departure, The Times of Ceylon published a warm welcome “to one who is as well known in this British Colony as he is in the States … We may say without fear of contradiction that no community that we know of in the world claims a larger proportion of admirers of the great American humourist than that of the European residents of Ceylon.” Before his departure, Clemens was taken on a tour of Colombo. Intoxicated by the town’s radiant beauty and exoticism, he was shown, first of all, the new post office, much to his disgust.
Despite his guides’ obtuseness, he was soon to tell a reporter in Bombay that his day in Colombo was “the most enchanting day I ever spent in my life. Everything was absolutely new — all that beautiful nakedness and colour, all those costumes which one hears of but never sees, and which if you see them on the stage you never believe in. It beggars all description: one simply laughs at the painter’s brush; it is impossible for him to reproduce it.”