9

SRI LANKA

Sri Lanka is chaos. Before we leave the Colombo airport, we partake in an unplanned appointment with a uniformed man (military? airport employee?) who has led us to his office and has not spoken for half an hour. The kids are goofing around on office chairs, sitting upside down and swinging their legs; Kyle and I are employing our official everything’s-all-right travel faces. We are clueless. Turns out we got bad advice about our visas before our arrival here; they should have either been purchased more than twenty-four hours in advance or at the airport counter in person, instead of what we did—buy them online mere hours beforehand, during a layover in Kuala Lumpur. Crisp American bills suffice as collateral for necessary passport stamps and stickers, and so with a stack high enough on the man’s desk and a conniving smile to prevent our eyes from rolling with annoyance, we are allowed into the country, this pear-shaped island southeast of India.

I have never before seen an airport like this. Past the baggage claim, we push our stack of bags on a trolley and walk through a gauntlet of furniture and appliance stores. We are now in a mall. Vacuum cleaners, reclining chairs, dishwashers, electric teakettles—the price is right on household goods in the airport. Who buys a washing machine after a transoceanic international flight? I wonder. There really are decent prices on Maytags. Too bad I don’t have a house to put one in.

We hail a taxi and have it take us from the airport appliance outlet to the commotion of the train station. We don’t know what to expect and we don’t exactly have a plan, other than to find a way to our guesthouse. We were told the train is the cheapest and most efficient means of traveling from the capital city of Colombo to our guesthouse in the town of Kandy. We were also told we wouldn’t need passport visas in advance.

Turns out it’s fine to buy train tickets at the station gate; there’s plenty of space in first class at five bucks a seat. There is no place in the station to store our bags while we wait for the train, however, and we are starving after our marathon journey from Sydney. A day ago, we left Australia’s capital city at ten o’clock in the evening and arrived in Kuala Lumpur at three the next morning. There, we piled together like bears in a den and slept on the dingy Malaysian airport floor until our flight to Colombo at 10 a.m. I think we’ve been traveling for nineteen hours, but Sri Lankan time is four hours, thirty minutes behind Australia’s, so who’s to say?

We keep the weight on our backs and search for food to take on the train.

Outside the station, men sit on curbs munching on corn on the cob and oranges; they stop midbite and stare at us, as if we’ve stepped out of a sitcom. Toddlers hold hands with grandmothers and uniformed schoolchildren run past us, rushing to a bus stop. Motorized rickshaw taxis slow down and walk with us, honk their childlike horns to announce their availability. Women in vibrant saris of green and gold flash against the sunlight, intermingling with men’s plaid wraparound sarongs and polo shirts. The sky is yellow-gray with pollution again; the air smells of factory smoke, curry, and sweat. Passing crowds slow down and stare once more at our flaxen-haired children. Vendors thrust fried samosas, oranges, brochures for grand tours of the capital city, and fake Rolex watches toward us.

The five of us circle back to the train station, find a tiny attached bakery swarming with customers vying for next in line, and push our way forward for sesame-covered rolls and a variety of samosas. For the kids, I hope at least one of the triangle pastries isn’t spicy. We load up on bottled water and pray that they weren’t refilled under the tap.

We trudge through the train station, wave at the ticket vendor who recognizes us, toss our bags on the ground, and sit on them. I open the bakery bag and pass out pastries. The kids nibble a feeble corner off their samosas, pass them to Kyle and me.

“No thanks,” they each say.

“Aren’t you starving?” I ask.

“Yes.”

I sigh and reluctantly give them the plain sesame-dotted rolls, and Reed picks off the seeds. Kyle and I eat the five samosas. The garam masala potato filling dissolves in my mouth; Kyle groans with pleasure. They are divine.

Looking at a map, this is an odd stop on our journey. Sri Lanka isn’t near anywhere else we are visiting, and neither Kyle nor I know anyone here. We don’t know that much about it, either, but when we planned our trip months ago, we noticed it was an even stop between the Australian and African continents, and huh—I wonder what it’s like? That seemed like a good enough reason to stop, and so, we are here because it’s here. It exists. It floats in the Indian Ocean, a teardrop southeast of India, and there probably won’t be another time we’ll fly across it.

It has not yet been a full day since we were in Australia, where highways felt familiar and smells were commonplace. Now we are surrounded by mystery.

A train pulls into the station and we strap on our packs. First class proffers padded velvet seats, a spitting window-unit air conditioner, and a movie without sound or subtitles, starring B-list American teenage actors. The screen wobbles above the emergency exit, and a few minutes later, the sluggish train departs the station. We pass graffitied concrete walls and piles of trash, a few boys playing dangerously close to the tracks. I see some of Colombo’s skyscrapers and the coastline in the distance. The scenery gradually transfigures to stubby shrubs with giant leaves, towering banyan trees, rusted corrugated tin roofs, old women hanging brightly colored laundry, and young men on bicycles. As the train gains speed, it begins to gallop. Our bodies start to wave forward and back, our heads wobble; I feel like I’m on a high-speed carousel horse. My velvet seat begins to shift sideways.

“Mom, I don’t feel very good,” Finn moans.

“Me neither. You can lay down and close your eyes.” He curls up next to me.

Tate looks up from her book. “I don’t think I can do any school right now,” she says. Reed laughs at the roller coaster ride, sways with the rhythm, and bounces in his seat. He sits by himself and the rest of us close our eyes. I hear Finn snoring. Towns and villages bobble up and down, and I keep my head straight as I pray for a vomit-free journey. Nameless teenagers fight on the screen and shout silent obscenities.

I don’t know how we’ll find dinner tonight, and I hope for a corner store near our house for eggs and a few veggies—we are nutrient depleted and pastry bloated. It’s dark when we arrive in Kandy, and we hail a taxi. He speaks some English and offers a price that sounds extortionate. Kyle texts the German homeowner, who is currently in Europe, to verify the price.

“It’s fine,” he says. “A little much, yes, but typical for white foreigners.”

We climb in, and the driver silently drives the narrow, shadowed streets to our home. Neon lights shimmer on the ground in the puddles where it has just rained. The kids are shells, hollow with exhaustion and whimpering with hunger. My head nods in sleep deprivation.

The van pulls into a driveway, and an old woman stands in the yard to greet us. For thirty dollars a day, it seems our guesthouse comes with a cook available for all our meals. She lives in the other end of the house, across the courtyard, along with her elderly husband, who handles the house repairs.

We remove our flip-flops and leave them outside, then walk inside. The dining table is set with plates and silverware, covered serving dishes, and a pitcher of water. It smells like Sundays at Grandma’s house. Maari, the cook, asks, “Is chicken and rice okay, ma’am?”

My eyes water and I nod; I can’t speak. We sit down and dish out food. Finn puts his head on the table and falls asleep before he’s able to take a bite. Reed cries as he chews, confused with his combination of ravenous stomach and somnolent body. Tate takes a few bites, excuses herself, and finds a bed. It has been thirty-six hours since we left the McAlarys’ house in Glenbrook.

Kyle carries the boys to their room, and I find the bathroom, my skin clammy and desperate for a shower. I dig through my pack for shampoo and soap, extract my pajamas, pull back the shower curtain, and scream.

I run out of the bathroom and Maari runs in, confused. She laughs, shakes her head as she heads back to the kitchen, then returns with an aerosol can and a sheet of paper. I hear the spray of the can, and in a few seconds, Maari escorts a colossal, bristly tarantula on the sheet of paper, then out the back door. She shakes him out on the lawn.

“You may take your shower now, ma’am.”

That’s what she thinks.

I want to follow the kids into desperate, deep sleep. We inspect the folds of the sheets inside and out, I check for bumps between them and the mattress, and Kyle investigates underneath the bed frame on the floor. I peer inside the pillowcases. Lying down feels sybaritic after our day and a half, and my muscles quiver with relief. I strap on my eye mask and pull the sheet over my head, lest a friend of the arachnid’s drops from the ceiling in the night and calls my face home.

The next morning coffee, orange juice, and omelets are waiting for us on the dining table.

After breakfast the kids are eager to play, but they’re scared of Maari’s husband. He’s harmless, but he’s wrinkled and toothless and smiles at them with affection. I am much more frightened of the yard. We’ve been warned that in Sri Lanka, cobras are as plentiful as Texas squirrels. Maari warns us of the monkeys; one must be careful of anything inadvertently left outside, because they’ll steal anything from oranges in the tree, to a pen dropped from your bag, to shoes left on the patio overnight.

I think of our flip-flops outside.

“Arrgh! Everybody’s are fine but mine,” Reed whines from the front porch. One of his is missing; the other is torn to shreds.

“Monkey.” Maari says, nodding. I pull out Reed’s socks and sneakers from the bottom of his pack. I can’t remember when he last wore them.

Maari schedules us a driver for the day. This is deemed safer and more affordable than testing out the ambiguous traffic laws as foreigners with a car rental, so an hour after breakfast, the five of us board a derelict Volkswagen van with no seat belts and springs in the seats jabbing through the fabric. The sliding door is bent, and it takes Kyle three tries to close it. I can still see the road through the bottom where it should connect with the rest of the van.

“Kids, if you so much as wiggle your bottoms in your seats, you’ll get extra math problems,” I say through clenched teeth.

“Where would you like to go?” Rishi, our driver, asks from the front seat.

“How about a tea factory? I hear there’s decent tea here,” Kyle jokes. Rishi jiggles his head side to side and reverses out the driveway. Here, nodding means no, and tilting your head side to side means “yes, okay,” and “sure, why not?” It also sometimes means the opposite, depending whether the person gives you the answer he thinks you want to hear.

The van turns left, and Finn falls out of his seat, toppling against the decaying sliding door. I briskly pull him off the floor and onto my lap, wrap my arms around him, which will do nothing if we crash. I squint my eyes closed and pray for mercy. A seat spring bores into my rear.

The first tea plantation in Ceylon, Sri Lanka’s original name, was opened in 1867 by a Scotsman named James Taylor. The alchemy of the island’s rain, sun, and soil boosted the drink from an exotic concoction from the Orient to a British mainstay, and it is now arguably the most popular drink in the world. Sri Lanka is currently the leading global exporter of tea; 23 percent of all tea leaves worldwide hail from this island. Almost any tea factory here will happily give free tours of their facilities, with the hope you’ll buy some leaves as a thank-you.

Rishi takes us to a nondescript factory housed in a metal warehouse. We walk through the front door and are greeted by a young woman in a pink sari, waiting as though she were expecting us.

“Would you like a tour?” she asks. She leads us upstairs to the top floor, where troughs of tea leaves are drying. Machines vibrate the troughs periodically to rotate the leaves, helping them dry evenly.

“This is called withering,” she explains.

“How long does it take?” I ask.

“It depends,” she says. “We wait until the leaves smell right.”

She leads us to the next room, where a cylindrical machine rolls across the leaves and ruptures the cell walls, releasing their juices. The room echoes with a mechanical roar as steel plates rotate in rhythm across round metal tables. Our guide speaks, but I can’t hear her. I look at our kids, whose wide eyes are entranced at being so close to factory-grade machinery.

We walk through the deafening room into another, where tea leaves either are spread out to ferment or skip this stage altogether (as it happens, green tea isn’t fermented at all; it’s this process that turns the same leaves into our black tea), then onto another room where women guide even more whirring and buzzing machines. The whole tea-making process takes about seven steps, and in its finale, the sorted leaves are shipped off to the government, who inspects the batch to ensure it qualifies as official Ceylon tea. There’s a reason it’s the best in the world.

Our guide leads us to the final tea room/gift shop where we’re allowed a complimentary cup of tea and it’s assumed we’ll buy much more. Reed and Finn take one sip, then return to the windows to watch more moving mechanical parts, so we invite Rishi to join Kyle, Tate, and me. He doesn’t speak English, but we raise our glasses and he does likewise; we nod our heads, and sip. There’s an understanding with tea. Tate is not quite ten but has already long consumed tea; having lived her early years in Turkey, she was drinking it as a two-year-old toddler. The taste, the ritual with sugar cubes and miniature spoons, is home for her. I grew to love its taste in Turkey too. She smiles at me, and I wink back. This field trip feels personal, comforting, hospitable. Tea drinking is a liturgy of comfort, and we partake of it everywhere in the world. It’s a ceremony of simplicity, nourishment for both the nomads in foreign teahouses and homebodies in their beds. We buy more than we can fit in our packs, and plan to mail some back to one of the kids’ tea-obsessed grandmas.

In the evening, Rishi suggests checking out the left canine tooth of the Buddha; it is Kandy’s claim to fame, displayed in the town center for all to admire. This isn’t exactly on our agenda, but this is the closest we’ve been to any of the Buddha’s teeth, and our itinerary isn’t exactly jam-packed. We jiggle our heads side to side. Sure—why not?

Kyle wraps himself in Rishi’s tablecloth-like sarong because he is wearing shorts, verboten in sacred temples. The five of us walk up the steps to the Buddhist temple where inside awaits Gautama Buddha’s tooth. Rishi waits for us outside. I have no clue what to expect. As a Christian, I can appreciate the devotion of the faithful Buddhists, but I’ve never been big on relic veneration. I’m especially not a fan of sensory overload, particularly in swarming crowds where I’m deluged with musty incense, thunderous chanting in a language I don’t know for an observance I don’t understand, dim lighting, and no obvious exit sign. We gingerly step through the temple doors. This is the wrong place for us to be, I think immediately. I look at Kyle, and the crowd behind us pushes us through. We’re stuck.

I hold the boys’ hands and we begin pushing our way through. Monks pound rhythmically on drums and the beat rattles between my ears like a tuning fork. Mobs of worshippers and tourists move through like cattle in a stockade, and we have no choice but to join. We inch our way upstairs with everyone.

A shrine of candles in front of a gilded door waits at the back of a large stone room, and the multitudes stare in anticipation. I can only assume that the Buddha’s tooth is behind the doors. We stand and wait.

There is no ventilation inside these thousand-year-old walls, and there are only six square inches of space for our bodies. The heat is sweltering. We wait for a glimpse of this tooth. And wait. And wait. And wait. Nothing happens. I stare at the gold-plated doors and my mind wanders about what’s behind the doors. I imagine a dining room set, like on The Price Is Right. The beat of the drums grows louder as the orchestra of monks marches closer to us. Tate covers her ears and stands on her tiptoes; she can’t see anything. The boys can only stare at other peoples’ backs centimeters from their noses. There isn’t enough room for me to pick them up.

“What’s going on?” Reed yells from below. I shrug my shoulders.

“I want to go home!” screams Finn, and he starts to cry. I’m desperate for an exit, but there is no way out of this crushing crowd, the walls closing in. There is nothing to do but wait and watch this door, and endure the continual boom boom boom of the drums. I struggle to breathe, pray that I don’t faint.

We wait for thirty more minutes as the surrounding devotees mumble their chants. Several tourists hold up their phones to record what they’re unable to see. Finn leans his head into one of my sides; Reed leans into the other. The boys try to sleep standing. Tate pushes her way to the front of the crowd so she can better see.

Finally, the gilded doors open. The crowd’s chanting grows faster, louder, eager with veneration. A monk emerges holding a golden dome atop a red velvet pillow, and he sets it on an altar. People inch slowly into a queue for a chance to pass by the tooth that was presumably under this gleaming dome and that we would not, it would seem, technically see.

Kyle and I nod, hold tight the kids’ hands, call for Tate to come back, and we force our way against the crowd. We zigzag down the stairs and through the halls, collapse out of the temple and into fresh air, and speed-walk to our van waiting for us on the street. We beg Rishi to take us home.

The next morning, the five of us go on a walk through the country’s national botanical gardens, not far from our house. Monkeys follow our steps; diminutive brown toque macaques scampering across suspension bridges and hiking paths. They stop when we stop, then start again when we continue walking, like a comical classic movie. Finn takes a hundred photos of them, finds them hilarious.

This morning is our calmest so far on the island, and it is a relief to let the kids run through grass. Locals stare. The boys inch close to a termite hill, and I holler for them to move away.

“Not termite hills,” says Rishi. “Cobra houses.”

We move to a forest grove, and are surrounded by vanilla vines, cocoa, nutmeg, cinnamon, and coffee trees. It smells like Christmas morning.

Sri Lanka is best known for, aside from Ceylon tea, its enormously high concentration of spices—some of the world’s most significant spices hail from this unassuming island. Its rare blend of acidic soil, humid air near the equator, and relative protection from other environmental threats make for ideal growing conditions for beloved staples like vanilla, nutmeg, curry, and cinnamon.

I pluck fallen nutmeg pods from the ground, slide them in my pocket. Their dark seeds are covered in a waxy red coating, like European cheese. They smell like comfort, pie, a fireplace. I’m hit with a pang of homesickness.

Our flight out of Colombo is in the middle of the night, so on our second-to-last day in Sri Lanka, we gallop back on the train, first-class to the capital city, and watch the same American teen movie. We plan to hole up and catch up on work and school before boarding the plane because we’ll soon hit African soil running, and we won’t have much Internet access there. We book a guesthouse with a backyard pool two miles from the airport.

At the train station, Kyle negotiates a price with a driver, but he forgets to ask about his type of vehicle. We strap on our backpacks and find our driver waiting for us with his three-wheeled motorized rickshaw with a backseat bench sized for two adults.

I sigh. I’m so tired.

He crams our bags around his feet, behind the bench, and in between his seat and ours, then positions our bodies just so. I prop my foot high on a steel bar so I don’t slide off the bench and onto the highway with Finn on my lap. Tate and Reed squeeze in the middle together, and Kyle miraculously sits sideways on the edge. The driver pulls into traffic and speeds up to forty miles per hour, dodging in and out of what would be lanes if lanes existed in Sri Lanka. With one hand I hold on to the rickshaw, with the other I squeeze Finn; I pass the time ignoring my itchy nose and reading passing bumper stickers in English, like Your love gives me thunder. The ride takes an hour, and the kids pass the time with skip-counting math songs, their mouths singing inches from my ear. Kyle stares straight ahead, eyes darting with the traffic as if he’s playing a video game. He loves this.

When we eventually pull off our bags, we see that the driver shoved Tate’s pack against his greasy gearshift, and her doll’s face was propped out of the zippered enclosure. The doll’s nose and chin are smudged with grease. Tate hides her tears. The driver laughs, asks for more money than was originally agreed.

The guesthouse we booked is already filled with guests, says the owner when we arrive. But he also owns the house next door, still under construction, and hopes we’ll find it accommodating until tomorrow morning, when the original guesthouse can be solely ours until our flight. I exert all my physical strength to not roll my eyes in weariness. In the backup house, we toss our backpacks on stacks of shrink-wrapped new tile, eat Indian takeout on the floor, and take cold showers. Before crashing into bed, we unwrap the guesthouse’s new pillows from their plastic bags.

Early the next morning, we walk over piles of stone, past flip-flopped jackhammering construction workers in the yard, to our booked house. The backyard pool is full of chemicals and won’t be ready until tonight, the owner says. But the cook that comes with the house helps us bide our time with a breakfast of eggs, sausage, and instant coffee, and I thank God that back in Sydney I loaded all our e-readers with books. That feels like a lifetime ago.

We read chapters and chapters that day, suspended in this Sri Lankan intermission. At seven in the evening, the kids begin to swim, and they stay in the cloudy water for three hours. At midnight, we wake them up, toss on clothes, and climb into the four-door car waiting for us outside, a quiet sedan with seat belts. The drive takes two minutes. Sri Lanka remains a mystery.