I knew I had arrived in Sri Lanka when the previously mild-mannered passengers of Sri Lankan flight 142 instantly jammed themselves into the aisle of the plane and began pushing towards the exit. The situation could just as easily have been on a rush-hour train in the Fort Railway Station in Colombo. The flight arrived in the early morning, and I spent the rest of the day fighting to stay alert enough not to look the wrong way while crossing streets in Colombo (the cars drive on the left here). I spent the next few days in Colombo doing mostly official stuff: two days of orientation lectures and activities at the Fulbright commission followed by a reception for the current Fulbrighters, the Sri Lankan alumni of the program, and the US embassy people. On the whole, the orientation was quite interesting and useful. The highlights: listening to Colombo University Law professor Rohan Edirisinghe talk about the current political situation, and then during the tea break, hearing one of the state department officials shout into his cell phone “This isn’t diplomacy, this is the truth!”
After all of that was over I made the great trip to Kandy. It was as pleasant as a Colombo-Kandy trip can be: fast, with appropriately crazy driving (which happened to involve crossing the divider to get around a slow-moving bus, and continuing on the wrong side despite there being oncoming cars), and stops for pineapple, rambutans, and rice and curry lunch. The trip through Dangolla (the neighborhood between Peradeniya and Kandy where I used to live, along with most of the other ISLE students) was giddy and breathtaking – it so closely resembled the way I remember it that I almost doubted whether it was real.
It turned out that it is real. In the couple of days after I arrived I dealt with enough frustrations to remove some of the rosy nostalgia. The day after I arrived I went back to Dangolla to look at a couple of annexes and meet up with Toby and Peter, and then spent the afternoon wandering around in a sleep-deprived daze, trying to accomplish errands that can’t be accomplished in Kandy on a Sunday, and feeling increasingly dejected. I went back to my guest house to nurse a slightly upset stomach, and after that was soothed with a cup of ginger tea I began to feel seriously restless and uncomfortable. Finally I worked up the nerve to call my old host family. Appachchi picked up the phone, and immediately invited me over for tea. I frantically dug through my suitcase trying to decide what to wear, and since none of my clean shirts matched any of my nice skirts, I settled on the rather ornate shalwar that Amma had picked out for me the last time I was there. I didn’t want to seem like a slob when I came to see them for the first time in two years, but then I felt a bit silly when Appachchi opened the door wearing a sarong and t-shirt.
After the initial shock of first seeing them (which consisted of a long chat with Appachchi about what happened while I was gone, and then an aggressively warm hug from Amma when she came home), and the inevitable tea and sweets, the evening settled into something similar to evenings when I lived there: the Bandaras came over and chatted with me and then left after a while (but Bandara Uncle kept popping in, as usual), I hung around Amma while she threw together a quick dinner of red rice, dhal, green papaya, and pol sambol, we ate (this part was a little different: Dhanasri, now 13, didn’t whine about eating and just fed herself a decent portion), then hung around and chatted some more, half-watching the news in Sinhala. Dhanasri’s room is now messy like a teenager’s, but most of the house looks the same. They also have a new fishtank in the living room which was supposed to have eight goldfish and one black fish (which according to Amma is an auspicious feng shui thing), but has evened out at nine goldfish and one black fish since several died and several others reproduced. Seeing them suddenly made me feel comfortable in Sri Lanka again - when I was in Dangolla before that I was constantly looking over my shoulder in case someone I knew would see me and be incredibly shocked. Now I can walk around Dangolla and actually start to feel at home.
Feeling at home in Dangolla is good, because that’s where I’m living now. The search for an annex had been going quite badly – everything I saw was either way too far away from places I need to go in the Kandy area (Peradeniya University, the ISLE center library), or was lacking in basic things that I think I might need, like hot water, ceiling fans, or a refrigerator. There was one place that I thought was going to be perfect – it had two bedrooms and was on Meda Bowala road (where I used to live), close to Peradeniya road and the bus, and Phil and Flynn had described it as really great (though Phil had decided to take a different place in the end). Toby and I went to see it in the middle of the day, and the place was like an oven – the ceilings weren’t finished and the one ceiling fan (in the living room) was attached right to the corrugated metal roof, and there was no hot water. Over tea with the owner I realized why Phil and Flynn had talked the place up so much: the woman was incredibly charming and sweet, and talked about how sad she was that Phil hadn’t decided to take the place. Later on when I called her to decline, she made me promise to tell any other students about it who might be looking for a place, and I’m sure that Phil must have made the same promise.
But then Peter (another Fulbrighter) offered to let me and Toby stay with him and then take over his place after he leaves in December. The place is perfect, and Peter seems really excited to have some company after living alone for several months. He also harbors an extreme hatred for mosquitoes, which means that there are screens over most of the windows, and that special care must be taken when going in or out – you unlock the door and then leap through and slam it behind you. (slamming it is the only way to shut it sufficiently quickly) Also, at any time Peter might leap up and go into a frenzy of chasing and clapping if he spots one. Moving involved taking my suitcase in a three-wheeler in the rain, but happened not a moment too soon – the night before I was stuck in my guest house room without company except for a brief visit from Damayanthi, the owner, who came to apologize that the hot water had been turned off earlier. I must have looked absurd when she came to the door: I was wearing pajamas and had tears streaming down my face from the takeout packet of chicken biriyani that I had been eating (which I only ordered medium-spicy). I spent the rest of the evening doing some reading for my project but mostly letting my attention wander to listen to the layered rhythms of the rain, the dripping from the tiled roof, the chanting and Kandyan drumming from the monastery next door, and the occasional drone of a three-wheeler going by on the road around the lake (sometimes also punctuated by a honk or the ridiculous melody of a bus horn). My first night in Dangolla felt deafeningly quiet – just the soft rain and the wind in the leaves.
Dangolla
