Karma at the Colombo Airport
It’s best to keep your karma within reach—in your carry-on bag.
It was all too clear, when I came down with a violent, upwardly mobile stomach bug on my last day in South Asia, that I had accrued some seriously bad karma.
My episode of feet-slapping, stomach-buckling sprints to the bathroom, cloaked in the midnight steam room heat of our Colombo apartment, began just hours before our flight back to Los Angeles, after seven weeks in Sri Lanka—on the one day we didn’t eat street food but splurged on a beachfront fancy restaurant with a Frenchy name. The chances that this food on this day would make me sick were too absurd.
Besides, we were in a country of tens of thousands of Buddha statues, in which saffron-clad monks are the highest-class rank, and everything happens for a reason.
Halfway through the trip, my partner, Aruna, who is Sri Lankan by blood and literally begins to glow after a few weeks in the heat and humidity, got laid up for three days in our Colombo apartment with his own nasty, delirium-inducing stomach bacteria. After he recovered, I trilled on about having a stomach of steel and being safe from all manner of invasive critters because I was a vegetarian.
A few weeks after that, Aruna and I lied, saying I was sick, to get out of one of many compulsory audiences with a group of extremely extended family members. When they showed up at our door in Kandy anyway, offering stackable stainless steel containers of rice and curry, we were caught, red-faced and ashamed, and I found myself putting on a good show of having a fit of loose bowels.
So really, it made a lot of sense that I would be hit with a day of “nonstop vomiting,” as Aruna’s mother knowingly called it, just in time for our thirty-hour journey home.
When it got to the point that I couldn’t stand up straight and couldn’t even keep down the lime and garlic tincture a local friend made for me, we knew we couldn’t just wait it out. But it was 3 A.M., the Ayurvedic clinic next door didn’t have an emergency division, and there were no hospitals listed in the Lonely Planet. Luckily, the taxi we had reserved to take us to the airport was able to come early and knew of a private clinic. Ten dollars and a couple suppositories later—prescribed by a steely woman doctor who asked me only my first name, my age, and my symptoms, and administered by a nurse who looked to be about fourteen-years old—we were on our way to the Bandaranaike International Airport.
The good news was, thanks to a tactic I had devised of hanging half-mast, Uttanasana-style and quietly moaning, I made it through two hours of waiting in line for check-in and customs without puking on anyone. Well, almost.
Just as our customs official was scrutinizing our passports, carefully stamping and initialing this and that, it became clear I could last no longer.
Even though I’m pretty sure this a high-ranking sign you’re a terrorist, I dropped my carry-on, grabbed my passport from the official’s hands and galloped, convulsively bucking, toward the terminal. Aruna stammered apologies behind me as I begged an unsympathetic luggage clerk, “Bathroom?!” without breaking my gait.
It’s amazing how quickly the mind works when you’re about to vomit. I imagine this lucidity is akin to “life flashing before your eyes” as you await death, or “going internal” just as you’re about to give birth.
Something inside me calculated the exact seconds I had until eruption, and, like the Terminator’s computerboard mind identifying John Connors, I zeroed in on a nearby standing ashtray as my target.
The whole mess couldn’t have been better choreographed by Danny Boyle. Just as bile was coursing up my gullet, I flung myself, long-jumper style, across the final stretch, shoving an unassuming woman in a sari out of my path, and retched a thin mixture of water and dehydration salts into the narrow receptacle.
As I whimpered, spat and snotted into the ashtray, Aruna patting my back, handing me tissues, and apologizing to the woman I’d taken down, I thought, trembling:
You win this one, Buddha. You win this one.
Jessica Langlois has an MFA in Creative Nonfiction and works as a freelance journalist and instructor in English composition. Her writing has appeared in American Literary Review, the East Bay Express, and the Oakland Tribune, and she is the creative nonfiction editor for Generations Literary Journal. She is currently at work on a memoir about her mother’s life in Austria, and her and her sister’s relationships to their mysterious paternity. She blogs about travel, pop culture, and nostalgia at www.asupposedlyfunthing.com.