Arriving in Sri Lanka after several months in India, we are especially struck by the absence of throngs of people, so much less traffic, deeply breathable air, spaces to stroll, the relative quiet, the relaxed expressive manner of people, what seems like so little garbage littering the roadsides. All in all it feels like a more humanly manageable, calmer, even happier world.
This is a green world – vibrant wet rice paddy greens, hillsides of laurel-leaf tea greens (the newest leaves lime-toned, deep forest greens beneath), the greens of coconut and banana palms, pine, mahogany, teak, satinwood, ironwood and ebony tree greens, dusty eucalyptus greens, fig tree greens, bamboo grove greens, spice plant greens: cinnamon trees, cardamom, nutmeg, pepper. Sun glistening greens, shower mist greens. Vine and creeper greens in leafy loops up, down and around and up again. And not just a green world but one abundant with flowers: pinks, reds, oranges, yellows. Acacias, flamboyants, bougainvilleas, hibiscus, fantastically large-deep-throated creamy tulip blossoms.
This, at least in the central and southerly regions, is also the Buddha’s world. Buddhas sitting white and monumental on hilltops, their sleepy eyes staring across towns and countryside. Buddhas in glass roadside shrines. Buddhas sitting on bus dashboards and featured in glittery images hanging from bus windshields and shop walls. (Buddhism has often had an angry face in Sri Lanka, taking a turn into nationalism and violence for many decades. Influential groups within the Buddhist hierarchy, eagerly supported by monks and nuns, have often led the call for a more Buddhist, a purer Sri Lanka, and have repeatedly attacked those calling for tolerance and diversity, a genuinely multi-ethnic, multi-belief country.)
After India … As we walk along roads and pathways we are greeted with a genuine-feeling “Good morning” or “Hello” and natural smiles unconditionally offered – all so rarely experienced in India. These easy smiles make us aware how, in memory, fewer people in India seem to smile, how eyes stay focused on the crowded way ahead, the anonymity of so many moving bodies.
Even the bus ticket collectors and drivers here seem characteristically helpful. People at stations seem to know their buses and trains and offer mostly reliable information. Crowded buses and trains there are, but the atmosphere seems more congenial, as if people know that further down the line, or on the next journey, things will be easier.
Most things here feel as if they are functioning at a relatively smaller, less complicated scale. We have mostly been in modest sized cities or small towns, each one of which would be so much larger and teeming in India, along with more vehicles, more exhaust, more noise. In Dambulla, Kandy and other Sri Lankan towns there are uncluttered sidewalks. The streets have painted cross-walks at which drivers actually stop and enable pedestrians to cross in safety. I don’t remember seeing any of this in India. In Kandy a grated barrier separates main streets and sidewalk, thus preventing the usual Indian clutter of motorbikes, cars, tuk-tuks, bicycles, shop merchandise and dropped garbage that make walking so frustrating and tiring.
Some things, though, haven’t changed between countries – like the rupee-squeezing auto-rickshaw drivers and the aggravation of never arriving at anything like a fair fare without a struggle. One well-meaning guesthouse host tells us that she and others also have to endure this annoyance, but we quickly learn that sharing the pain doesn’t help either.
Somewhere like this … I look around – out bus windows, down streets, into yards – and find myself thinking I might be in St. Vincent or St Lucia. Why? Perhaps it is the flouncy, layered, brightly-patterned, embroidered skirts worn by the women, or their blouses with sleeves puffed and frilly at the shoulders, the un-Indian clash of pattern and colour, the many-coloured umbrellas protecting against the searing midday sun. Perhaps it is the small cottages washed in pastels, tucked among banana trees, with their red tiled or corrugated metal roofs, laundry drying on bushes and rocks, a pack of dogs (the ones that yapped all night) on the prowl or sleeping in the shade. Something in the physical features of people? The number of people pedaling ancient bicycles? A quality of the voices and speech: softer, a little slower, much gentler than where we have been? I don’t know … but the association keeps returning as if somehow existing out there.
Greenland again … A walk amongst lovers and families through the calming Royal Botanical Gardens outside Kandy. Memories of its bamboo groves, a collection of fantastically coloured and shaped orchids, undeniably a female flower, gangly fig trees, palms twisted, soaring and paunchy. Young lovers, of which there were many, cuddle in shady half-hideaways, chatting, planning, dreaming, enjoying this leafy refuge from family and friends. A father in casual slacks and cool short-sleeved shirt takes photos of his sons and their mother, the latter an upright black presence covered head to feet in black burqa, fingers appearing and vanishing, pupils, irises and scleras flitting along a narrow slit in the fabric, sparkles hinting at jewelled sandals and anklets.Another day: the train from Kandy to Haputale, a six-hour ride, rising into dense misty rain forests. Tree giants, more crowded than the people in Paharganj’s Main Bazaar, soar skyward as if in desperation. The upper canopy sprouts dark branches, like the bare ribs of an upturned, wind-shattered umbrella. The train now winds round hill after hill, some soft-sloping, some jagged and precipitous but all covered in tea plants. Lanes curl along the plantation slopes like great inch-worms. The trunks and crowns of the plantations’ lanky shade trees hover in the ebbing, flowing mist, seeming to play cat-and-mouse with the prowling rocky crags beneath.
In the afternoon we climb Little Adam’s Peak, a series of four sharply rising peaks, their summits just below the cloud line. South through Ella’s Gap sits the Sri Lankan lowlands and the hazy beyond. The warm sea, then Antarctica, are out there somewhere. To the west Ella’s Rock – our destination tomorrow – disappears into the clouds. (See the posting on “Mr Gindasa.”) A tall bearded man, standing for a surprisingly long time in the yoga tree posture on the summit’s summit, describes to a companion how “there must be a market for a spa, you know a really authentic place, a true healing place in these hills.” Immediately beneath us, the tea plantings tumble downwards through the glow and shadows of broken clouds until they dissolve into a plain of rice paddy greens and sky-blue lakes. Travellers to Sri Lanka will sooner or later come upon the story of how, more than one-hundred years ago, in the 1890s, Thomas Lipton – another of those many restless Scots, “son of poor Irish immigrants, a childhood amidst the slums of Glasgow,” “hugely successful entrepreneur,” the biographers write – stood on these same hills and imagined a land covered with tea, his tea. With next to cost-free land and indentured labour (today’s official Lipton Tea site refers to “5,000 hands”), he planned to bypass the traditional trade and marketing channels of the tea business and sell directly, and cheaply, to the untapped working class market. “Direct from the tea garden to the tea pot,” was his brightly-packaged teabag catch-phrase.
It is now said, in that verbal short-hand so often taken as reliable history, that “Lipton” created this landscape. And what of those “5,000 hands,” originally and still mostly Tamils, still among the poorest of the poor in Sri Lanka, living in “lines” of small houses, the women with little privacy and at risk of sexual harassment, many girls working the plantations by adolescence? Looking across these hills, I – the retired, labourless traveller – see this place as theirs, a land that they have made … in all its green-hued beauty, its absolute stillness, its swift movement, its enchantment.
No comments:
Post a Comment