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.