There is a fable, most likely over 1000 years old, that goes like this. To teach his sons the value of practical experience beyond their ivory-tower education, the King of Serendib sent his three sons overseas, to the Sassanid Empire. They came to the traces of a missing camel – lame, blind in one eye, missing a tooth, carrying honey on one side and butter on the other. When Shah Bahram V heard about their claims, he immediately accused them of theft. In their defense, the three princes demonstrated thusly: only three hoofprints in the sand indicate a leg being dragged, the grass was eaten on the side of the road where it wasn't as green as the other, demonstrating a blindness in one eye, clumps of grass the size of a camel's tooth remained, showing one missing, and flies were drawn to the honey spilled on one side of the road, and ants to the butter spilled on the other.
To the Enlightenment philosophes, this was a perfect example of the triumph of reason, of the power of inference. And yet their homeland – Serendib – gave rise to another idea, the idea of serendipity, something completely determined by accident, by fate.
Serendib was what the ancient Persians called an island off the south tip of India.
And after that, it was Ceylon, a name that conjures up images of the twilight years of the Raj, sighing tea planters and pith helmets and cricket whites.
And since then it has been Sri Lanka. And what is in that name?
To those of us living in the post-Internet age, it is a name that evokes elephants and glittering beaches, perfumed jungles, travelers with mandala tattoos looking for enlightenment and cheap beer. Yet for decades before, the name “Sri Lanka” conjured up a sequence of horrors, purges and inter-ethnic violence, machete hacks and suicide bombings at crowded railway stations, panic in the stifling tropical humidity, weeping mothers and bloodied headscarves and crowds of men chanting slogans.
Where does the truth lie?
What I can only say is what Sri Lanka was for me, from the moment I arrived at Bandaranaike International Airport to the moment I departed from it.
It started with that standard third-world cab ride into the city, the first encounters with the heat, with the local accent, then passing houses in rural clearings, nighttime palm fronds, Honda motorbikes illuminated by insect-swarmed fluorescent lights, railroad tracks with barking dogs, tiny mobile phone shops with pictures of local celebrities, all with vaguely Europeanized features, promoting the various local 4G networks, billboards in English for housing developments aimed squarely at the anglophone elite, embassies behind heavily guarded perimeter walls. The forms repeat themselves from country to country. It is only when you emerge from the taxi that the subtle contours of locality emerge.
One comes to understand a country not through its monuments and landscapes, but its incidentals. To get a beer to enjoy before bed in my hotel room, I have to go to a “wine shop” with the vibes of a methadone clinic and wait in line with a couple dozen other exclusively male and restless-looking customers, before a cashier in a banker's cage hands me a bottle of Lion Lager from the fridge. To get around, I take a tuktuk plastered with slogans, from anodyne self-help – “don't be a worrier, be a warrior” – to confusing manifestations of global phenomena – the bizarrely common “Red Indian,” and here I was thinking I was in feather-not-dot country – to the WTF – a naked woman and the caption “The unknown. Who know this?”
But the incidentals were accompanied by moments of absolute loveliness.
There were the long strolls around the lake at Kandy, a city supposedly brought into glory by the Buddha's tooth in the central reliquary of the Sri Dalada Maligawa, and up into the hills, to be followed by a drink at the antique bar at the Queen's Hotel where Lord Mountbatten acted out his role as Supreme Allied Commander in Southeast Asia, and it's hard not to imagine the place full of David Niven types with pencil-thin mustaches, sipping pink gins and smoking Dunhills as they gesture towards detailed relief maps of parched Burmese hills – you see their forms like ghosts in the hazy orange sunset, floating between the bougainvillea blossoms. There was the long hike up to the top of the sacred rock of Sigiriya, wondering how humans could have possibly thought to built something like this in such an improbable and difficult location. There was the sheer joy of staring out at a landscape of layered mountains and cloud forests and plantations of tea, cinnamon, and cardamom as I sipped my masala chai and samosas, leaning back in my slow-moving train carriage. There were the long happy swims in the turquoise seas of the south coast, where I ate freakishly large crustaceans, and chatted with whoever came by, a surfer on a trip around the world, a few local longhairs with their arms around tatted-up British PAWGs, while I sat with my notebook and my arrack drink and my shirt buttoned down, trying my best to channel some combination of Ernest Hemingway, Robert Mitchum, and Miki Dora, and in all likelihood failing miserably. And I walked the cobblestone streets of Galle, the city on a little peninsula littered with the ruins and remnants of a dozen or more empires, where couples posed for pre-wedding photos, where schoolboys ran along the seawalls that futilely held back the waves of the Arabian Sea. The end of the earth – because from here there was nothing, all the way to Antarctica.
My reception among the locals was largely positive, and it always warmed up as soon as I said I lived in Thailand. This had the function of identifying me as a fellow tropical – someone who could cope with the heat and crowding, who could appreciate the spicy food, i.e. not a total Western dumbfuck. This carried more currency than I would have suspected, and it was only later that I realized what it actually was – a recognition that I also recognized the neocolonial fuckedness of things in countries below 25 degrees of latitude.
Because the fuckedness was everywhere. It was in the power cuts that beleaguered my stay – first eight hours a day, then ten, then twelve. In the food that, while tasty, so largely consisted of colossal portions of starch and fat, with minimal protein, bombarded with spice to make it flavorful. In the metal detectors and bag searches at the entrance to every shopping mall, and the abundance of armed guards in the most innocuous of locations. In the way that conversations with locals largely began with their disgust with the government of the Rajapaksas, a family that currently occupies the positions of president, prime minister, and nine cabinet-level ministers, whose abysmal mismanagement, including a harebrained attempt to make all farming organic, has led to food price shocks, a full-on Chinese debt trap leading to a loss of control over the Port of Colombo, and the increasing likelihood of the velvet glove of the IMF disguising an iron fist of austerity, which, when combined with global fuel-price spikes, has led to a country doing its cooking by candlelight.
As we wait for a generator to hum to life, a couple waiters at a nice seafood restaurant bum a smoke off a Russian tourist. They don't smoke with him, but pocket the cigarettes. That's not a good sign.
Which again leads me to flashbacks of those earlier images – of bombed libraries and targeted assassinations, of invocations to the serene Buddha, to peace being upon the prophet Mohammed, to the infinite beatitudes of Ganesh and Parvati in the name of Kalashnikov fire and the burning of corrugated-aluminum shacks.
Along with the cardamom plantations, seawalls, and gentle surf lapping at my bare feet.
One's experience of a place, as a tourist, consists of glimpses, ephemera, hazy memories triggered by smell and sound, the vague reminiscences when you look at the little lacquered box you bought at a faraway market.
And accordingly, each of these things is a trace. A clump of grass with a tooth-sized piece left intact, honey and butter spilled on the sides of the road. Dogs howling in the darkness as we wait for the lights to turn back on, the long views across the verdant mountains as I take a sip of soursop tea. The camel itself is much more elusive.
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