Sri Lanka: Ayubowan

Already I know some basic Sinhala courtesy of some enthusiastic friends. Dhanith Sri tunes are on my Spotify rotation, and coconut sambol and jaggery have ingratiated themselves into my peripatetic palate. In short, I feel (after some dedicated planning) that I am well-equipped and perfectly qualified to take my mother around Sri Lanka.

It has been two full years since we saw each other, the pandemic having wedged itself in between.

I arrive first on an Emirates flight, early on a humid evening. I make it quickly through the din and hubbub, and escape into the air conditioned anonymity of the waiting hotel sedan. The chauffeur is inclined to chat, and there’s not much to see outside anyway, so the small talk stretches until we pull into the warm light of the hotel foyer spilling over into the driveway. It’s Friday night; the restaurants are in full swing, and well-coiffed revelers glitter and flutter in their spangled clouds of perfume through the gilt-and-copper lobby.

For someone marooned on a spit of rock and coral in the Indian Ocean for the past five months (a couple of quarantines included), it is as if a portal to normalcy has materialized; and when I step into the freshly turned down guestroom, with the dark-blue box of housemade pralines and the skyscraper views of the winking lights along the coast, I feel as though I have come back to life.

My mother arrives past midnight on Singapore Airlines, bright-eyed and vigorous despite the fact that she has just travelled almost five thousand kilometers. Our long-awaited reunion gets an unexpected jolt, however when she suddenly realizes that she has… taken someone else’s luggage with her.

Now there are many, many things to question here, such as how airport security let that happen or how she managed to unthinkingly unlock the case, only to discover what were decidedly not her things – but being a Type-A eldest-daughter type I immediately picked up the phone. Let me handle it.

And it is in these micro moments that you realize that the roles started to be reversed a long time ago.

To the hotel operator’s credit, they were efficient, and within minutes I had managed to get on the line to the airport’s lost and found, where they (perhaps questionably!) gave me the name and number of the luggage’s rightful owner. And thank all the deities, because it was not someone who was heading out of Colombo — the lady lived in the area, and could come to our hotel in half an hour. Her luggage is returned to her without fuss and with profuse apologies.

I think you stole a VIP bag, I muttered to my mother when she and her husband had left. Did you see how the duty manager recognized them?

It looked exactly like mine! she protested.

By now it was almost three, and we still had to go back to the airport – nearly an hour away – in the hopes of retrieving her actual luggage. At BIA I handled the preliminaries, but was left skulking outside in the pre-dawn cold as they would only allow one person back in to search in lost and found.

Finally my mother came back, trundling her trusty gray Samsonite along.

Is that really yours now? I said, just to be sure.

Yes!

It looks nothing like the other one, I huffed.

They were the same height.

We return to the city before sunrise, and are up in time to catch a generous breakfast buffet. Black swans float on a fairy-green pond; trees keep the city sounds at bay; the coffees are served with a smile. It is altogether a wonderfully serene first morning in Colombo.

My phone lights up, intrudes on the calm reverie. It was the driver who would take us to Kandy.

I am sorry to be early, he said. But there is a protest taking place and we need to avoid the traffic.

It is April 2022, and the good citizens of Sri Lanka want Gota to go home.

***

A week and a long drive down from the green-gold hills of Nuwara Eliya later, we return to the capital at dusk. The setting sun paints the city on the shores of the Indian Ocean rose-gold, the car crawling in a slow-moving swell, the resplendent lion flag fluttering in the sky. An attractive city, even to the casual traveler peering out of a window, with a memory of recent conflict and fresh tragedies like an old bloodstain underneath.

The pain seeps through their contemporary literature, as I later learn when the next day we pick up books by Ashok Ferrey — and an incongruous Wodehouse at the Wicket because this cricket-mad country will do that to you. (The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka would win the Booker Prize later in the year.)

From One Galle Face we settle in for a yum cha lunch in the familiar perfumed interiors of the Shangri-La – one of the hotels targeted in the horror of those Easter Sunday bombings only three years ago. The large glass windows afford views of the well-guarded entrance and the mechanical movements of security checks, and across to the ocean, a bright cobalt backdrop to the weekend’s demonstrations.

And we find time to visit St. Anthony’s Shrine, the first Catholic church that bore the brunt of that same attack. It is heavily fortified now, and the deep gouges and blast marks still visible on the floor only add to the oppressive atmosphere – the first time I have ever felt this in a house of God.

The following day is Easter.

We stroll around Cinnamon Gardens, stopping by the town hall and post office before attending service at the Baptist church. Afterwards we join friends for a proper family lunch by the lake, where the Easter Bunny makes a surprise appearance via seaplane. There’s fish and roast chicken, fried mushrooms and cucumber salad, papadum with mango chutney, all laid out invitingly. I am judicious with my portions, much to the hosts’ consternation, but am all too happy when the platter of desserts comes by: buffalo curds and honey, wattalapan (spiced coconut custard) and coconut toffee. Harima rasai, as they have taught me to exclaim.

To be in Colombo is to be constantly jarred by shifting contrasts.

And all too soon it is time to pack, to make sure we haven’t left any wayward packets of tea or Kandyan souvenirs behind, and say goodbye at the airport.

Waiting for the flight back, I start to read Nayomi Munaweera’s Island of a Thousand Mirrors. It begins with “It is 1948 and the last British ships slip away from the island of Ceylon, laboring and groaning under the weight of purloined treasure.”