After Cleo (37 page)

Bow to people – just because they're
old
? It was a complete reversal of cultural priorities.

‘Old people bring many blessings,' she explained with a radiant smile.

My first day in Sri Lanka had been filled with so many unfamiliar experiences I was beginning to feel like Alice in Wonderland. Strangest of all, coming from a culture that worships youth and detests grey hair, was to be actually
revered
for having a few wrinkles. Not that I liked to think of myself as ancient, just mature with a chance of wisdom.

Once the driver had handed over my suitcase, apologised again for the van breaking down, and left, Lydia escorted me up some outdoor steps to our rooms. Too weary to take much in, I registered apricot walls, a bare light bulb, a table with a white plastic chair and a bed with a blue mosquito net hovering over it.

The air was thick and warm. Lydia opened the windows, saying she hadn't had any trouble from mosquitoes in her room next door. Just as she was about to explain where to find the bathroom, we were plunged into darkness. The senior nun glided into the room with a lit candle creating a halo around her.

‘It's just an electricity cut, Sister Helen,' she said, placing the candle on the table and floating out the door again. The candle promptly went out and fell on the floor.

‘Did you bring a head torch?' Lydia asked.

There was a dull thud. Lydia assured me it was just her tripping over the candle.

Once our halogen lights were strapped around our heads we lit up like glow-worms. I followed Lydia's silhouette outside on to the balcony, then around a corner over a potentially treacherous hump to what she tactfully described as a ‘French-style' toilet – i.e. tiled floor with a hole in the ground, plus a bucket and scrubbing brush; flushing mechanisms non-existent. Compared to this, the lavatory in Kuala Lumpur had been the pinnacle of hygiene technology. What a prissy, screwed-up fool I'd been twenty-four hours ago!

I decided the hole in the ground was manageable providing it wasn't a breeding ground for scorpions. Actually, even if it was I wasn't about to go and pee in the jungle among snakes and whatever else was lurking out there. For the next few days it was going to be my hole in the ground – and Lydia's and whoever else had claim to it. I was simply going to have to learn to use a bucket and scrubbing brush.

Back downstairs I showered under a dribble of tepid water with a large cockroach for a friend. As the grime of the day trickled away, I decided it was one of the best showers of my life.

It was intriguing to see how simply Lydia had lived for weeks, sometimes months, at a time. My bedroom was identical to hers, the bed just a mattress on plywood about the right length for a ten-year-old boy. Once smoothed down with sheets from home and the travel pillow it looked incredibly inviting. After a day playing human tumbleweed inside the van, I was grateful for its stillness.

Lydia brought mugs of tea, so hot and strong they almost passed as soup. With trepidation, I produced a small parcel from my suitcase and handed it to her.

‘Wow!' she said, holding up the singlet top so the diamonds twinkled in the shadows. ‘Calvin Klein! How exciting!'

Her delight at the crass glitziness of the garment was wonderful.

After a while, Lydia kissed me goodnight and said to knock on her door if I needed her. Alone in my room with my head torch, I smiled at the electronic bleeping coming from her room. In these strange surroundings it was reassuring she had the same old quirks – like forgetting to turn her alarm clock off, and tripping over things.

Outside, the night had turned black as onyx. I'd naively assumed darkness in the jungle would mean silence, but a hypnotic chorus of male chanting echoed across the valley. The sound resonated through me, carrying me back through generations to anonymous forebears who lived before the Industrial Revolution, the Age of Enlightenment and the Renaissance.

After the chanting ended, other more insistent noises took over. Lowering myself on to the bed, I heard crickets (several types), birds, frogs, dogs and an unidentified range of creatures that trilled, squawked, honked, clicked, whistled, quacked and chirped. Competing loudly against each other, they took me back still further to a time when the prospect of evil spirits was feasible.

After a while, unnerved by the spooky symphony, I sprang off the bed and reached for my iPhone. A clearly pixelated image of Jonah draped like a beret over Philip's head flashed to life once I pressed a button. I was relieved it still worked. For a moment I'd imagined I'd slipped into another century.

By the light of my head torch, I dug my earplugs out of my toilet bag, thanking whoever was CEO of the heavens right now that I'd remembered to bring the orange plugs of sanity. Next, I counted out my nut bars. Two for each night. I hoped they'd get me through. If not, I'd just have to regard the monastery as a fat farm.

Sifting through my carefully thought out luggage, I felt ridiculous. Almost everything I'd brought for ‘protection' was proving useless. I draped the pesticide-soaked net over the window in case Lydia was being optimistic about mosquitoes. As for the silk liner, mozzie bands, Marcel Marceau gloves, knee-length white socks and hat net – I needn't have bothered. The blocking and unblocking pills languished inside their packets. I was almost hoping I'd meet a tic so the tic remover hadn't been a waste of cabin space.

Still, I thought, easing cautiously back on the bed in case it was more fragile than it looked, the trip wasn't over. There was plenty of time for things to go wrong. Even through the earplugs, I could hear the screeching jungle – but was too tired to care.

I'd hardly fallen asleep when I was woken by the sound of a woodpecker drilling a tree. After a while, I realised it wasn't a woodpecker at all, but a drum roll – the monks' morning wake-up call. Soon after, their eerie chanting began. Using harmonies even Schoenberg couldn't have dreamt up, their mahogany voices drifted across the jungle canopy. The sound was from another world – music a shoal of fish might make if they could sing.

Pink light filtered through the curtains. Over more than three decades, motherhood had taken me to all sorts of places – from pinnacles of joy in maternity wards to utter desolation at a graveside. Through all those years I'd never imagined it would bring me to a remote monastery in Sri Lanka.

I was relieved that the monks hadn't issued an invitation to attend the pre-dawn chanting. Maybe it was a male-only thing. Monastery life didn't seem to encourage mingling of the sexes. The monks were housed across the hill well away from the nuns' accommodation.

Getting back to sleep was impossible. I lumbered out of bed and wondered what Trinny and Susannah would recommend under these circumstances. White trousers and a mostly white long-sleeved top seemed logical – and of course I was happy to take on the role of student, whatever that might mean. Pale clothes deflected heat and kept insects at bay. Pulling on the knee length white socks, I toyed with the idea of the Marcel Marceau gloves – and put them back in my suitcase.

Lydia escorted me downstairs to the dining room, which was a simple space with two small tables covered in plastic tablecloths, a sink and a microwave. A wall of windows overlooked a mass of plant life glistening happily in the sun. I recognised a banana tree and some coconut palms, but they were squashed together, bigger and greener than anything I was used to, as if they were on growth hormones. Most of the trees and plants were unfamiliar. Not for the first time, I felt overwhelmed by ignorance.

The table was laid out with flat bread, dhal, delicately flavoured rice balls and bananas. There was also a tub of garishly labelled margarine and a jar of Vegemite. Apart from these two imports, almost all the ingredients were fresh from the monastery surrounds. The breakfast was wholesome and filling. When I commented it felt health-enhancing Lydia explained it was based on Ayurvedic principles of food being medicine.

Approaching the day ahead with an open mind, I wondered if Lydia's teacher might hold some classes I could sit in on. It turned out he'd had to stay in Kandy on business overnight and sent his apologies. Lydia offered to show me around, and suggested we could maybe go into town with the nuns later on. Oh, she added, and a fortune-teller was coming up from the village mid morning.

After we'd washed our dishes and put them away, Lydia showed me the meditation hall further up the hill. She'd spent many hours alone there, sometimes more than twelve hours a day, doing sitting and walking meditation. The room, largely unadorned, was steamy and still.

Trying to understand what she'd been doing there, I asked her to give me a short, guided meditation. Perched on a blue cushion on the floor, I closed my eyes and listened to her voice. Sounding strong and authoritative, she urged me to concentrate on my breathing; I tried but a river of sweat trickled down my back and I started to feel dizzy.

Like an unco-operative school child, I interrupted to ask if she'd mind if I stretched out on the floor. She nodded graciously. Even horizontal I was still uncomfortable. My right leg twitched and my throat was dry. Maybe it was jet lag, but I was relieved when the session finished.

Lydia showed me her teacher's house, a pleasant cottage with a view over the valley. We then wandered past the monks' quarters, where maroon garments were draped over a clothesline. Nine monks currently lived there, she said. Most of them were teenage boys ranging in age from twelve to nineteen. We strolled past the classroom – an open-sided hall with benches and a whiteboard – where she taught the young monks English and Neuroscience.
Neuroscience?

Some monks were more interested in Neuroscience than others, she confessed, but the links to meditation and its effects on the brain were particularly relevant. Apparently, happiness can be measured by heightened activity in the orbital frontal cortex. Scientists had discovered that the man with the happiest brain in the world happened to be a Buddhist monk.

Before there was time to ask more, we needed to hurry back to the dining room to meet the fortune-teller. Neuroscience to fortune-telling seemed an easy leap in this unworldly place.

I'd expected a village fortune-teller to have white hair and no teeth. But she was a good-looking woman in her thirties with prominent hooded eyes and long dark hair tumbling over her shoulders. She looked like the sort of woman I might've made friends with at a playgroup not so long ago. Unfortunately, she spoke no English.

The senior nun, who'd had her fortune told with surprising accuracy on a previous occasion, agreed to translate while Lydia took notes. The psychic didn't ask to look at my palm. She gazed disinterestedly out the window instead.

‘You make a lot of money but you waste it,' she said.

I couldn't argue with her there.

‘Your family lives near you. Brothers, sisters – some over the back fence, some next door.'

Well, even the best fortune-tellers miss the mark sometimes.

‘In your house there is the ghost of an old man,' she continued. ‘He is followed up and down the stairs by a cat. Do you have a cat?'

I nodded.

‘The cat and the old man's ghost – I think it is your father. They are good friends.'

Lydia and I exchanged glances. Perhaps Jonah had been trying to tell us something when he'd sprayed Dad's old piano. Dad had always liked cats.

‘You've had a very hard time with your health lately,' the fortune-teller went on. ‘But things are okay now. You'll get another health problem when you're sixty but don't worry. It won't be serious. You'll live till . . .'

She took the pencil from Lydia's hand and wrote ‘82' on the paper.

I was happy with that.

‘You had a terrible time when everything was very bad,' she added, her eyes suddenly veiled with a memory of pain. ‘You wanted to end your life, but you became strong instead. You lost all fear and started a new life.'

It's only natural to want to catch a fortune-teller out. I asked how old I was when I had this experience. Without hesitating she replied ‘28' – exactly the age I was when poor Sam was killed. She was right. There was no doubt I'd felt suicidal.

I asked her about my work.

‘I see two books,' she said. ‘They will spread sunshine over the world.'

I was hoping the woman would go on to tell Lydia's fortune, but she seemed to have run out of energy. She said Lydia would have three children and needed to be careful driving her car.

The fortune-teller then asked if Lydia and I might be interested in buying gems to clear impurities from our blood. Her partner, who happened to be waiting outside, sold such gems and would make them up into pendants for us at an excellent price, much cheaper than we'd pay in our own country. While I was happy to do anything to support the local economy, Lydia put her hand on my arm. Despite her spiritual tendencies, she'd always been astute with finances. Thanking the psychic, and paying her several times the going rate, she said we'd think about cleansing gems.

After the fortune-teller and her partner had left, Lydia and I savoured a lunchtime banquet of potato curry, green vegetables, salad, lentils flavoured with turmeric, and soy beans. Thanks to the Sri Lankan sweet tooth, desert was equally sumptuous – dry noodles decorated with yoghurt and honey, then drizzled with jaggery syrup. In case that wasn't enough, papaya and bananas had been added to the table. The monastery cook was a food poet, a culinary Cezanne. And to think I'd considered starvation a possibility!

The Sri Lankan tuk-tuk is basically a lethal weapon on wheels. As a motorbike with a small cabin attached behind the driver's seat, it offers several forms of torture. If you don't choke to death on the exhaust fumes, it can shatter your bones as it bounces along goat tracks disguised as roads. It has potential to topple over and hurl you into a river, or simply smash head on into a truck full of livestock. Alternatively, you can try fitting three people into the cabin and risk having the life crushed out of you.