Where are the lanes? I ask as we drive past shops: LADIES AND GENTS FINE LATHER SHOES, and a film-board shouting, Caged Beauties. The woman: lips pouting, back arched, breasts tilted forward but covered by a yellow starburst STRICTLY FOR ADULTS, it says. And everywhere the bullock carts, the motorcyclists in blue and green-checked sarongs, the cyclists with wife, daughter and five-month-old baby balanced precariously on handlebars and bicycle shaft.
Our three-wheeler, a kind of motor-tricycle equipped with metal chassis, weaves in and out between trucks and cars, bowing to the whim of vans and buses, then darting onto the curb to over-take traffic. The coconut trees sag a little along Negombo road, wilting beneath diesel dust and fumes. The three-wheeler jerks and accelerates, and I am amazed that we havent hit or been hit by any of the vehicles that litter the road.
Where I am going seems immaterial at the moment. I am in the city of cows set free by the vows of the faithful. A city where colossal Buddha statues form white-washed islands amidst swirling traffic. This is the city my parents left thirty years ago to go to London. Here I can find a network of relatives I met only once, sixteen years ago, when everything seemed less than pleasant without air-conditioning. My return to Colombo, memorable for its wooden-based buses and ticket-takers with long, pink thumb-nails, is a return to a city that is not my own.
From four oclock the slow-trains out of Colombos Fort station swallow more and more passengers until hands, groping for balance, squeeze under a thigh, or against ribs. Men lean, arms circling one anothers waists, into the open doorway, distilling the incoming breeze between stagnant armpits. Through a gap framed by chins, throats, shoulders, a greenscape unravels: paddy fields and trudging water-buffalo, men soaping themselves by a public tap, women wrapped in thin, wet cloths.
Three junior bikkhus stand in the vestibule of the train, orange robes fluttering in the wind. They are seventeen or eighteen years old with stubbly heads and sporty black DSI slippers. One chews animatedly on a wad of gum while giving me a bemused look. Hamaduruwas cannot be trusted, a cousin said to me once. You want to learn Sinhala? This is the way hell teach you the alphabet. First hell start with ayana, then dayana, rayana and eyana adaré love.
It is late October, the day before my mothers birthday, and I am glancing through the Island, one of the many newspapers draped across the coffee table in our living room. I am intrigued by the black-and-white face of a young woman. Her cheekbones are high, jaw pronounced; one eye gives a tired but amused look. But the other eye is frozen, like the painted eye of Cleopatra, and plastic. Her lips are full and almost smiling, her hair falls in curls, but still there is something wrong, something more than the eye, and then I realise: she has no neck.
I look at this computer-enhanced picture, and imagine the womans head sitting on top of a building, her jacket on the ground, torn apart by the Claymore mine that had rested against it only seconds before. Somewhere nearby lies the body of Gamini Dissanayake, member of the opposition United National Party and presidential candidate. There are other bodies, mangled, bloody: banal remnants of a suicide-bombing.
And only days before began an unravelling of time and secrets as bodies were discovered throughout the island. Mass graves vomiting up bullet-riddled skeletons, or more frequently, skulls pierced twice, once in the forehead, once at the back of the head. Everyone has a story to tell about the JVP uprising, the arbitrary murders carried out by the Janata Vimukti Peramuna, or Peoples Liberation Front, in the late 80s, and the UNP governments corresponding policy of extermination.
The old man who tends our garden squats down on the veranda beside my chair to relate the story of the three boys in handcuffs. They brought them here, he says. The police brought them to the place where I used to work, and asked for tea. Well I made it, what could I do? Later, I saw them leading the boys to a paddy field, and I saw those same boys falling into the water.
Falling? I ask.
They shot them.
My hopes of disappearing into the crowd vanish with the laughter that greets my short hair and batik trousers. Sudhikenek de? They ask one another in Sinhala Is she a white woman? And still even after my hair has grown longer and I abandon my trousers for a floral-patterned dress I am harassed. I have never experienced anything like this in Montreal, the city where I grew up, the city which I believed couldnt accept me without labelling me Anglophone, immigrant, ethnic.
We are walking through the market in Kandana, a suburb of Colombo, and I watch a seven-year-old boy hawk pumpkins and potatoes. Old women with wrinkled, sun-blacked breasts, bend over trays of betel leaves or plantains. Smug smiles are exchanged all around, and I am a walking miracle, a pregnant earth-goddess why else should they watch me with furtive, even blatant looks?
This morning I did not wake to the grunts of the neighbouring pig, but I have slept a little easier knowing that a giant, watery spider is tucked neatly away in the belly of a gecko. Walking the roads of this suburban town, I see white, two-tiered houses as well as flimsy, wooden shacks. The freshness of the air is infectious.
Scarecrow-like pambeyo hang from the exterior walls of new houses. Sometimes as simple as a line drawing, but usually human-sized rag dolls, pambeyo are erected to scare away potential evil-oglers. They hang, like dying criminals, legs drooping to the ground, stuffed faces stunned and dull. They fascinate me, these pambeyo, which dessicate in paddy fields and dress the walls of Ragama shacks and houses. I am told that evil spirits are routed by these spiritless bundles, and as I gaze at the pambeyo jerking in the breeze, I imagine the bodies of murdered boys, resurrecting from paddy fields, impaling themselves on sticks to shake in the wind by moonlight.
It is a Tuesday in December and I am lounging on a chair on our veranda. I am stunned by the heat; drugged by the scent of frangipani. The air is lazy with orange dragonflies. The sky, sometimes blue sometimes grey, shimmers like tin-foil. Pairs of butterflies pirouette over yellow flowers, and blackflies parabola off my toes. Everywhere there is the question-mark of a bird-call, beginning low and ending with a sharp, shrill, OK? OK! OK? OK! A magnificent Kingfisher sails into a siambala tree, its blue wings glittering between green leaves. And as I lazily brush away a gnat, I realise how effortless has been my acceptance of this life full of servants and languid hours on the veranda.
I sit and remember: the quiet industry of two dung beetles as they rolled their treasure along a gravely road in Kotté. The spewed guts of a baby monitor lizard baking at a quiet intersection in town. The slow whir of a brilliant turquoise beetle as it dipped and bumped through the air, body sinking, looking for all the world like a prototypical helicopter. And the flesh-toned skin of a black-eyed gecko, rising and falling as the creature breathed, stalking a winged-termite: meru.
Meru. In the evening after rain they swarm into the living room, beating their four wings toward the light. The geckos clamber out from their wall caves and gather around the light-bulbs for dinner. The black ants, too, are excited, pouncing on the fallen yet still alive meru, carting their twitching bodies into private corners. We sweep them away, the feasting ants, the dying meru, the lizard pellets; out the door into the grass, the sand, the night.
And tomorrow I will go out into the market streets of the city. I will watch the flea-eaten dogs and cowering cats; the flies, trembling like emeralds, on fish. And the free cows, roaming the dusty roads, sometimes going mad in the traffic and haze of Colombo.
