Roots Chapter IV

Roots

I am not overly fond of big hotels and generally like little guesthouses which have a homely feel or lots of character.  Other than that we are quite happy sleeping in old factories or prisons. Cheap and cheerful with bundles of charm. 

Before we had the kids we used our trusty Rough Guide and Lonely Planet to get us everywhere we went.  The books seem to have evolved for those young free things in the 90s who are now shackled and burdened with children, mortgages and irritable bowel syndrome in the noughties.  They are still my go to travel guide as they always deliver up a few little gems and remind you to get off the beaten track when you can.

Some of our favourite accommodation were these small guesthouses with three to five rooms.  They were homely and welcoming and made you feel like you were staying with friends.  One particular treat was a tiny little cottage in Kandy up in the forests away from the lunacy that is the traffic in that city.

Here we were welcomed by a lovely gentleman called Thomas who had the most sticking out ears I have ever seen in my life.  He was wonderful and both he and his colleague made absolutely incredible curry.  He welcomed us in, abused us for not eating enough, never asked me where I was from and then abused us some more for not eating enough.  It was like home.

Anyway, there is a particular smell about those places that connects me so powerfully to Sri Lanka, even after all these years.  It is a combination of mothballs, jasmine, the gorgeous clean smell of sandalwood soap and the toilet.  I know that sounds odd but even the smell in the bathroom after you have flushed is familiar to me.  This has nothing to do with my prawn explosion in 1988.  It is clearly something in the way the sewers works.  I don’t know.  It is just a smell that takes me back.   

Before we left I popped to a chemist and bought a block of sandalwood soap for $1.  It is already sitting in my soap dish at home and making the entire bathroom smell like Sri Lanka.  Unfortunately we don’t have the jasmine and sewer smell as well but I do have some mothballs so I have nearly recreated the environment from this holiday and those from my childhood.

It does seem to be the little things that connect you to places you thought were irrelevant to you due to distance and circumstances and the influence of your parents.  Neither of my parents had any pull to Sri Lanka.  Other than her brothers my Mother had no interest in the place and my Father wasn’t remotely bothered whether he went there ever again. 

He felt his real home was the UK and yet being a sentimental old duffer, my Dad kept hold of many things from his life in Sri Lanka before he left as a young man.   

Following his death, while arranging all his affairs and paperwork we opened an old leather briefcase that he had kept since his time in Sri Lanka.  Inside it was a treasure of items from photographs, stubs, tickets, letters that he had squirreled away and that we had never been allowed to see.  

One particularly striking photo was of my Mum.  It was a black and white portrait and she had two thick plaits in her hair.  

On our travels around Sri Lanka as the little girls spill out from school they all sported the same two thick plaits and looked adorable.  

I told my Mum about this observation and happily said, that nothing has changed in the 70 years since she was a little girl having her picture taken in her two thick plaits after school.  

She replied that she was 19 years old in that picture.  

Yet, as I pointed out in response, she still did her hair like a 10 year old.  It was all a bit Judy Garland trying to convince people she was 10 in the Wizard of Oz by wearing plaits when she was actually 48.

Amongst all his mountains of paperwork I found random papers from Sri Lanka.  Like his sarongs, my Dad liked his paper, thin and transparent but there was another type of paper that was thicker, coloured and had a very distinct smell of leather, mothballs, sandalwood and the 1940s.

I had forgotten all about this until we went to Kandy to watch a cultural performance.  It was terrible.  The performance that is.  Our tickets however were made out of the same paper I found in my Dad’s old leather satchel.  It felt the same and it smelled the same and as soon as I held it in my hand I once again felt a strong connection with this island.

In this world full of immigrants, me the child of two, I have up until recently always felt I needed a sense of place and home, somewhere I am totally connected. That place has always been the UK.  It was where I was born, grew up, studied, worked, married and had my children.  It was always the home of my parents.  More British than Sri Lankan due to their upbringing and one of the last few generations educated under the last vestiges of colonialism.  They did not feel they belonged in Sri Lanka.  England was home.

And yet, since leaving the UK, I feel an increasing disconnect.  If I had a choice as to where I would want to live out the rest of my life it would always be the UK but I would come back feeling the need to start life anew.  I feel no connection with Singapore other than my little family resides here and yet after this trip to Sri Lanka I feel an increased pull to that teardrop in the Indian Ocean.  Maybe I need to give up a little of the UK to allow Sri Lanka in.  After this last trip, it is not a difficult thing to do. 

 

Irrespective of where I am or where I go, my roots are there.  It is the birthplace of my parents, it is a hundred photographs in our albums from the 1930s to the 1950s, it is the smell of sandalwood, leather briefcases and thick green paper.  It is the backdrop to the young lives of my Mum and Dad.  It ties me to family and friends and the memories of loved ones departed.  

I had hoped this holiday would help my son understand why he has flat enormous knees and huge feet and his lower legs are the size of chopsticks.  It didn’t.   

In 27 years, like the rest of the world, young Sri Lankan men have become handsome, taller and burlier.  Gone are the days of the small, skinny young lad with his creepy moustache and too short trousers whom I used to laugh at with my cousins, while being all superior and looking cool wearing my banana clip, batik poncho and sporting a similar moustache.  

Arthur’s legs, I guess are just from another time and when he looks at the old photos of my Dad standing in front of his house in Colombo in his white school uniform in the late 1930s, with his big flat knees and his huge feet and chicken legs, he will know that half of his roots lie in Sri Lanka too.

Dedicated to Uncle Thamby. 

A kind and gentle soul and the tallest member of my Mothers’ family because he used to hang upside down by his feet like a bat in order to not be cursed with the short DNA afflicting everybody else.

He was right.  Gravity did overcome genetics in this instance.

I am glad we saw you before you had to go.

You will be missed.

Roots Chapter III Little Britain & Curiosity Killed the Man Who Asked that Question One Too Many Times

Little Britain

I don’t want to turn this into a travel blog as you can get a guide book for that. Besides my blog provides no travel information whatsoever.   

We will swiftly move on from people irritating me in Sigiriya with yoga and at the beach in Mirissa with yoga, oh and sarongs, and skip through Kandy which was fantastic and pick up our story in the Hill Country of Sri Lanka. 

This part of the country was incredible.  We stayed at a converted tea factory which is half hotel and half museum and received a fascinating education into the processing of tea.  

We got to pluck our own tea at the small plantation owned by the hotel, see it processed, packaged and then given to us as a small parcel when we departed. It was one of the highlights of our trip.  

The hotel was incredible.  I am rather fond of kooky hotels and with the exception of sleeping in a converted prison, this was one of the best and most unusual places we have ever stayed. 

 

While in the region, we did visit a working tea factory where their produce is processed and packed for export.  We wandered out into the sea of tea leaf bushes and watched the women, young to ancient plucking tea at an incredible rate.  They work from 8am to 6pm and pluck around 16-18kg a day.  That is about how much weight I have put on in the last two years so I can completely appreciate how heavy those baskets must be for them.  They get paid around 625 Sri Lankan rupees which works out to around 3 quid for a days work.  It is back breaking.  We went tea plucking for forty minutes and collectively had barely enough to fill a cereal bowl.  

I felt desperately sorry for these ladies and the hard, heavy lifting they did all day.  Their fingers were rough and calloused and their skin blackened by hours in the harsh sun. “Iyo, what happened to you, you use to be so pretty, you got so dark”.

On our last night in Nuwara Eliya, our last stop in the Hill Country, we had a nice Sri Lankan curry for dinner and sat in the hotel bar by the log fire, as it gets quite cold in the evenings.  We drank tea and watched the T20 cricket and said to each other.  I don’t think we have ever been more English than we are being at this very moment. 

  

From Nuwara Eliya we caught a train to another little town on the eastern edge of the hill country called Ella.  Highlighted as one of the finest rail journeys in the world we were so excited about this stretch of the holiday as the views were supposed to be absolutely breathtaking.

Instead, it poured with rain for the entire journey, it got dark early and we didn’t see anything.   

You should go.

Curiosity Killed The Man Who Asked That Question One Too Many Times

Our holiday was going absolutely perfectly.  We couldn’t fault it apart from the rubbish train ride but we blamed the weather for that.  After all we were in the Hill Country and being terribly British, so yes, it was the weather, cats and dogs and so forth.

However, I was growing grizzly.  Once again, I was the subject of much interest.  This time, I was asked straight off by total strangers, “where are you from?” I always answered, the UK, I was born there, but my parents are originally from Sri Lanka.  The response to this was invariably,  “aaaaaaahhhhhh". That's it.

Now, on this trip, I had no weird hairdo as that was cleverly hidden under my dorky Tilley hat.  None of my clothes were transparent and I was clean shaven so no moustache to speak of therefore why on earth was I getting hounded about my origins.   

I think I preferred the staring instead of the interrogation, as now I am older and more grumpy  I will go in for a staring contest with the best of them, whereas when I was 12, I would quickly avert my eyes shyly out of embarrassment.  Now, I will glass yer, pub brawl style.

I know people were just being friendly and curious but given we covered so much ground on this trip, when you are asked the same question 4-5 times every day for 16 days it does become very wearing. 

I was also frequently asked whether I speak Sinhalese, so like a performing monkey I would rattle off the few words I know, some might even have been Tamil, I can’t tell the difference:  Mother, Father, Little Brother, Grandmother, Little Sister, Small Girl, Big Sister, Small Boy, Bum, How Are You?, Can I Have A Shower?, Hiccup And I Went to Galle, Hiccup Stayed There And I Came Back (Sinhalese rhyme for getting rid of hiccups which you say in one breath), What’s the matter?  Fart.   

The final straw conversation went like this:

Chap: Where are you from?

Coconut: Me, we are from the UK?

Chap:  Oh.  Where are you originally from?

Coconut: The UK (I was only being pernickety on day 15 because I was fed up by this stage)

Chap:  Oh.  It is just you look Asian.

Coconut:  (In my head: DURRRGGGGGHHHH!).  Well, yes, of course.  I have a dusky hue my good man, as my parents were born in Sri Lanka

Chap: Aaaaaahhhhhhhh.  I thought as much

Coconut:  (In my head.  Congratulations Sherlock.  Cracked it).

I was so desperate to find a fellow “checkerboard” chick to ask if she had suffered the same fate as me, but no luck. 

My hubby in fact told me off for being snippy with the gentleman in the shop on day 15 but appreciated I was getting a little tired of the same questioning.  I now have some sympathy for Hollywood actors who have to do those endless press junkets.  That said, I am not paid 20 million dollars to answer the same questions over and over again, so I take that back.  In fact, the only way I can stop anyone asking me the same questions is to buy something in their shop for 20 million dollars. 

Rob said that if and when we ever make it back to Sri Lanka he will brown / black up for me.  I suggested he just does his face but doesn’t do his neck, arms and legs.  Thought it would be quite funny and might shift attention to him over me.  

Although, knowing my luck, I will still get asked all the same questions and added to that will get grilled as to why my husband has a skin disorder.

Next Time: Chapter IV Roots

Roots Chapter II Warms The Cockles, Coconuts & Yogis

Warms The Cockles

I consulted my Lonely Planet and planned out a proper, living out of a suitcase, epic adventure, travelling all around Sri Lanka.  We did not have time to do the very north but we covered as many of the main sites as we could.  

I was looking forward to it.  Ever since we moved to Singapore everyone we met had been chuffing on about how chuffing brilliant Sri Lanka is with its beaches, wildlife, temples, hill country and colonial history.  There was no question it really did have it all.  I had forgotten about my personal horrible histories when I started planning this trip.  

It probably helped that I was no longer going through puberty as I think some scientists say it can skew your judgement a little.

I was advised to get a driver who you can hire for the duration of your trip and they take you wherever you want to go.  I was put in touch with an old family friends’ son who has a travel agency in Sri Lanka and he sorted me out with a lovely driver.  We popped to the office to meet my friend on arrival. 

I have to say those twenty minutes of talking to him warmed my heart.  The group of children of my parents’ generation (all of us in our 40s & 50s now) who remained in Sri Lanka use the same hilarious vernacular and nobody did it better than my pal Nishad. 

The finest way to illustrate this is the Sri Lankan’s I know, when discussing their children, never refer to them by their name but instead use the following lingo:  “the big fellow is in Melbourne”, “the small fellow is at home”, “I have to be home in time to feed these people”, “those jokers are playing cricket”, “that child is at piano lessons” and “the other fellow is asleep” or “that bugger, I haven’t seen him in ages”, “what a morose beggar that bugger is” and the like.

This brief conversation made me so happy.  As my parents’ friends are slowly thinning it warmed the cockles to know their voices were not gone and still existed in their children. 

While I sport a hoity toity London posh pants accent, you should know that I can slip into this very specific Sri Lankglish chit chat pretty easily.

Coconuts

One cousin on my Father’s side, one of my parents’ dearest friends and my Mother’s brothers remain for me in Sri Lanka.  Everyone else is gone of this earth or abroad.  I hadn’t seen two of my Mum’s brothers since 1988 and we popped in to see them on the day we arrived. 

This time I was without a banana clip and see through poncho but instead brought with me a refined English gentleman husband, two small mudbloods and myself, the coconut (you know, brown on the outside, white on the inside). 

This is a popular and derogatory term for the children of Sri Lankan immigrant parents who after moving to Europe, Oz and North America had their brown offspring who developed very un-brown accents and for quite a few of us, a rather poor level of understanding and knowledge of our origins.  

Do note however that this derogatory term was not hurled at us by skinheads in the streets in the 1970s, but was instead coined by our parents as a means of ridiculing our lack of cultural identity with the motherland.

Might I add, the fault of my lack of language skills and cultural awareness is entirely due to my parents’ lack of interest in teaching me anything about it.   

When being criticised for not sending me to Tamil lessons or learning traditional dance, my Dad softly laughed and said I have no need for that and encouraged me to learn the European languages of which I did French, German, Italian and Spanish through my high school and university years.  You will be delighted to know I speak none of them and can just about manage English on a good day.  I should have done Tamil.  At least I can do the accent.

Eat, Pray, Love.  Now Bugger Off

If you follow my sporadic blog regularly (how is that for crap word usage. Told you I should have done Tamil) you may remember I entitled a previous blog post with the above moniker.  I am afraid I am going to repeat myself, as I am incensed.  

At my last health check up, it was qualified medically, that I am in fact, a woman.  Therefore, as a woman I am allowed to berate other women.  I am not into all this sisterhood and "bigging" each other up IF IT IS NOT DESERVED!   

Just like the Bali birds which spawned the vitriol in my previous Eat, Pray, Love post, Sri Lanka with its booming tourist industry has now attracted the same sort of floaty idiot woman to its shores.

In the middle of the country is an incredible rock known as Sigiriya or the Lion’s Rock.  It does hold spiritual significance for some and has proved a slight mystery for archaeologists as to whether it was a monastery or a fort. As we are not spiritual or Indiana Jones we just wanted to climb it because it was a big rock in the middle of a very flat landscape and it looked challenging, scary and would provide us with incredible views of the surrounding countryside. And it was there.  So there.

I was suffering with a full blown hypo that morning but through total bloody mindedness, the shakes and atrophied legs I climbed to the top.  The last section of steps with a sheer drop is not for the faint hearted.  That said, my 9 and 6 year old ran up it while I was trying very hard not to pass out.  Strangely, heights only bother me climbing up.  I am less bothered when I can see how far I can plunge to my death and have no issue standing on the edge of cliffs.  However, like Kung Fu Panda, climbing stairs is a terrifying challenge.

Maybe it was the stress of the climb or the lack of glucose to my brain but as we sat down in the quiet and peace of the early morning to take in the stunning views, our vista was fouled, fouled I tell you, by some chick who had carried her yoga mat up with her and was now doing her full yoga routine in front of us.  

Now this really gets my pants in a bunch.  Is this really necessary?  Is this just not exhibitionism?  Showing off?  Look at me, I climbed a huge rock and now I am rocking this Hindu Buddhist stuff.  Check ... Me ... Out.

I certainly was checking her out and contemplating how hard I could kick her toned bottom, as she did her downward dog in front of my burning eyes.  

I have the same issue with tiny dogs wearing FBI jackets. Before you go all animal rights dog day afternoon on me I am not alone in this as I was with a very nice friend who unlike me does not have a single mean bone in her body and even her reaction to the canine FBI agent was, I wonder how far I can kick that.  Anyway, I digress again.

Isn’t spirituality quiet, private, personal?  I don’t know.  I am neither religious nor spiritual.  That said, while I do not believe in it myself, I do respect other peoples’ religions and beliefs.  

Well, that is actually a lie.  I don’t really. 

Case in point.  When we were at Colombo airport on our way back home a huge group of what I thought were Sri Lankan Nuns came through the airport, fully clad in white from head to toe.  I suddenly noticed that there were men too and then realised they were pilgrims.   

Shortly after check in, one of the elderly lady pilgrims took a massive tumble on the first bit of the escalator.  We all rushed forward to help but she was quickly assisted by her fellows.  They helped her via the stairs and when we got to the top of the escalator her sandals were there but she was still making her way up.   

About five minutes later we heard another massive clatter as another one of these people fell down the escalator.  There was a small part of me that genuinely felt the reason they kept falling on the escalators was because and only because they were pilgrims.

There you go.  I am not fond of religion and my reasons are valid.   

Religion is incompatible with escalators.  And escalators are very important, particularly when it is hilly and the climate is hot and you have luggage.   

Anyway, as if the lady yogi on Sigiriya wasn’t enough, when we spent a couple of days at the beach towards the end of our holiday, we learned our lovely little guest house hosted Kundalini yoga sessions in the morning from 8 until 10am.   

I can’t say I didn’t groan.  

Midway through my breakfast we had to listen to them all shouting “Sun” “Sun” “Sun” “Sun”.  Now I am aware of the yoga position, the sun salutation, but I didn’t realise you had to shout “sun” for 5 minutes while doing it.  This was all news to me and I have to say, it put me off my eggs. 

I have many friends who practice and even teach yoga and I do apologise if I have offended you.  Well, actually I don’t apologise.  Do your duty, pull these rebel yogis in line so they stop blocking the sun with their downward dogs asses and upsetting the most important meal of the day.

Even though I am a woman I am now going to attack holidaying men too because I like to be fair and not show any gender bias.   

On one side we have the prescribed spirituality of the daffy 30 something single woman and on the other side you have the European male out of his natural habitat and sporting a sarong. 

Now I am all fine with getting into the culture and spirit of the locals but do your research.  If you are going to wear a sarong you have to commit to it buddy!  That means no pants no pants no pants. 

A sarong is basically the Lankan version of a kilt but far more risky as it is tied with a knot, has no areas within which one can conceal a little knife and there is no sporran behind which you can hide your packed lunch. 
 

Generally, I have been told the older the sarong the better as it is much softer, silkier and therefore provides better ventilation.  It also therefore has the downside of being more transparent.  

My Dad’s sarong was threadbare and he did not wear any pants under it.  Admittedly, he is my only point of reference in which case maybe he was just weird.  Still, it was his night time attire, hence, no pants.

Anyway, I saw countless westerners strutting around in their sarongs while clearly wearing pants underneath.  It does not count if it falls down or you cross your legs at the bar and we can see you are wearing your speedos underneath.  If you are going to do it, commit to it or go home you damn Guylian's (you know, white on the outside, brown on the inside).

Oh and Sigiriya was fantastic.  You should go.

Next Time: Roots Chapter III Little Britain & Curiosity