The Attack of the Killer Rhododendrons (11 page)

T
HE ISLAND NATION
of Sri Lanka was not always renowned for its tea. In the mid-1700s, Dutch interests were making a good return on the harvest of cinnamon growing wild in the forests around the city of Kandy. Following a decline in cinnamon revenue, investors
turned to coffee, whose cultivation peaked at about 15,000 hectares in 1845.

But in 1869, a plantation superintendent named Donald Reid noted that things were going awry for the coffee plants near the community of Gallola. Coffee rust, a type of fungal parasite, was damaging the crop. Under the right conditions, some fungi can wipe out a crop in a matter of weeks. Destruction of the coffee industry by the rust was less rapid. Even so, within five years of its appearance, every coffee-growing district in Ceylon was infected, and within ten years the yield had declined from 4.5 hundredweight per acre to 2 hundredweight. The industry went into a spiral, and dead coffee trees were exported to Great Britain for use in furniture.

But when British capitalists arrived in Sri Lanka to make their fortunes from the cultivation of tea, they found that Sinhalese labourers interested in the new endeavour were hard to come by. Locals had their own interests. Investors didn’t have to look far to find workers. Just next door on the Indian subcontinent were millions of Tamil agricultural workers who could earn far more in Sri Lanka than they could at home. As the competition for the services of labourers in southern India rose, so too did local wages.

And it has been all about tea ever since. In 1967, D. M. Forrest described tea as the lifeblood of Sri Lanka. At the time, tea represented two-thirds of the country’s export revenue, and, directly and indirectly, was responsible for a massive portion of the country’s wealth. Sri Lanka was, said Forrest, the only country in the world whose economy relied on the harvest of tea.

A
FTER A BATH,
a nap, and a posh lunch that included a gin and tonic but no tea, Lisa and I were gathered up by Chaminda and Charu. Their wedding was to be at our hotel, the most popular spot for luxurious weddings in Sri Lanka, six days hence. I got the impression that not every detail was going exactly according to plan, but what wedding for 260 guests ever goes exactly according to plan? Charu was fretting and reportedly had been for several weeks, first in Canada and now in Sri Lanka. This had caused her
to lose weight, and while she was still a beautiful woman, we all hoped that she would lose no more.

We piled into a hired car and our driver aimed for the heart of Colombo, travelling north along Galle Road, probably the busiest street in the country. Lisa needed to be fitted for her dress for the wedding. She had decided to forgo Western garb and had opted for a traditional sari in the style of the region around the city of Kandy. Charu had earlier chosen a length of material, but we stopped at a fabric store to make sure that there wasn’t something Lisa liked more. Nothing could have suited her better than the maroon and gold material that complemented her hair and complexion. In a shop two doors down, Lisa was measured up and was assured that the completed sari would be waiting for her in a few days. The shop was only a few metres deep but was awash with employees. Chaminda said that the establishment had a good reputation, and that on a busy day it was impossible to get anywhere near a mirror.

Back on the street, our driver earned himself a 150-rupee fine for running a red light. By itself, the small fine was not enough to be a strong deterrent, but paying the fine required spending most of the day in a very long and lethargic queue at a police station. Vehicles all seemed to be equipped with seat belts, but absolutely no one used them. The blare of horns was nearly deafening, and in the traffic ballet they were clearly the most important piece of equipment on any vehicle. The city offered a constant and varied opera of smells. Some were spicy and pleasant; others less so. Lisa described it as discovering a previously unused sense.

Far off the main road, we waited in a courtyard while a beautician shaped Charu’s eyebrows in preparation for the wedding. The courtyard was awash with butterflies, ferns, and garden gnomes. On either side of the alleyway was a ditch carrying away water filled with human waste. While wandering up and down the alleyway, Lisa became the centre of attention. Young children and old ladies wanted to touch her face to see what white skin felt like. No offence was intended, and Lisa took none. Curiously, no one wanted to touch me.

In Colombo, no vista fails to be filled with people or punctuated by evidence of celebration. It was hard to tell which decorations had been erected for Christmas and which were in general celebration of living in Sri Lanka. Among the endless parade of shops along the Galle Road, I spied World O’ Bangles, Rickshaw Pasty Shop, Fertility Well Woman Centre, and the Shine and Shine Restaurant, which offered fried rice, fried noodles, and devilled chicken; I can only imagine what special behaviours chickens might have when possessed by Satan. I am not certain what lectures are like at the Colon Tech, but when it comes to bowel movements, I like to keep things simple.

Tuktuks, strange little boxes with two-stroke lawnmower engines, were everywhere. These three-wheeled motorized scooters serve as taxis over large portions of Asia. Among the most popular models in Sri Lanka are the Super RE, the Super RE Salon, the Super Edition, and the Super Sport. I mentioned to our driver that I had yet to spot a woman piloting a three-wheeled taxi, and he indicated that out of many thousands of drivers in all of Colombo only three women were registered to pilot these craft. It quickly became apparent that in the crush of traffic there was a hierarchy. Buses outrank trucks, which in turn outrank minivans. Next down the list were cars, which bully tuktuks, which outdo motorbikes, which push aside bicycles. The only thing to outrank a bus is a sufficiently large mass of pedestrians.

Back at the hotel, Lisa and I joined the happy couple for an elegant dinner on a deck overlooking the crashing Indian Ocean. Our food included spices that my tongue had known only in dreams, and fruit that must have still been on the tree when we entered the dining room. Tea was on offer, but in the heat of the late afternoon I couldn’t resist a beer, Three Coins, which was almost entirely acceptable.

As we wound down, I asked Charu and Chaminda what they loved most about Sri Lanka. They said that though they had lived in Canada for many years and were at home there, they both felt as though they most belonged to the country of their birth. For them, Sri Lanka had a sense of place. Even though they were scheduled to return to Calgary so that Charu could defend her
doctoral dissertation, and although they were likely to spend the next portion of their lives working in Canada or the United States, they felt that their hearts would eventually draw them back to Sri Lanka.

I
N THEIR
1931 b
OOK
on the production, harvest, and processing of tea in Sri Lanka, E. C. Elliott and F. J. Whitehead had a lot to say about tea plants. They explained that tea,
Camellia sinensis,
is an evergreen plant of the Camellia family, native to China and northeastern portions of India. The hardy plant flourishes in Sri Lanka from sea level to just over 2,000 metres, surviving a wide range of soil and climate types. Whatever else a tea plant might be willing to cope with, it needs a minimum of 150 centimetres of rain per year, roughly the same quantity received by Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

A tea plantation is all about tea bushes, but this is not the form the plant takes outside of cultivation. In their natural state, tea plants are sturdy forest trees, growing to ten metres. This wouldn’t make for an easy harvest by small-statured women, so the plants are routinely pruned to a height of about 100 centimetres. And the plants live on year after year. Despite the establishment of new plantations and the need to replace dead plants, in 1965 it was estimated that 70 percent of tea plants being harvested in Sri Lanka were over eighty years old.

Tea is so valuable that the best cultivation practices have long since been worked out. Here are a few things you will need to know to grow a hectare’s worth of tea plants. Each plant requires a little more than a square metre of ground, resulting in about 1,450 plants to the hectare. Plants mature to the point of plucking in two years in the low country, but require at least four years of growth in the cooler highlands.

There are many grades of tea, largely based on the size of the leaf fragments that remain after processing. These include Broken Orange Pekoe, Orange Pekoe, Pekoe, Souchong, and Dust. You don’t want Dust; you want Broken Orange Pekoe, which is derived
from the smallest and youngest leaves and looks a bit like small chips of wood.

W
HILE SETTING UP
with the hotel’s cashier, we were approached by a gentleman who asked, “Are you Glen?” I always feel a bit unnerved when strangers in foreign countries know my name. The man doing the asking was middle-aged and well-dressed, and sported a neatly trimmed greying beard. This was Lincoln De Silva, our driver and tour guide for the next three days.

Lincoln had a number of important things working in his favour. First, his use of English was impeccable. Not only could he define words like “impeccable,” but unlike me, he could probably spell them without looking them up. It was immediately evident that he was a superior driver, managing to navigate the chaotic and perilous streets of Colombo without running anyone over. He had developed a love of Sri Lankan birdlife, and could either identify every bird or make something up quickly. As we left the capital, Lincoln pointed out Open-billed Herons, White-chested Kingfishers, Indian Pond Herons, and both Cattle and Indian egrets. Best of all, Lincoln could take us to see tea. Not in-a-bag tea, but growing-in-a-field tea.

Lincoln proved to be a wealth of knowledge about his homeland. We learned, for instance, that rice had been introduced in antiquity to Sri Lanka from the Far East and had long been a staple of the diet of most residents. New varieties were being developed to best suit local growing conditions by the Rice Research and Development Institute. In a land without winter, rice farmers had been able to harvest two crops a year. New varieties with shorter growing periods meant that a farmer could get an additional crop each year, even if the rice was of slightly lesser quality and got a somewhat lower price at market.

I told Lincoln that the verdant hills reminded me of my image of Eden. He explained that some people believe that Adam and Eve had been set down in Sri Lanka at a site known as Adam’s Peak. It wasn’t only Christians who revered the site. Buddhists know the
spot as Sri Pada, and believe that a large impression in stone at the peak represents the footprint of Buddha as he departed Earth for Paradise. Others feel the footprint might be that of Lord Shiva or of St. Thomas. Spying the cross hanging from the car’s rear-view mirror, I asked Lincoln if he was a Christian. Only 6 percent of Sri Lankans are Christians, lagging behind Buddhists (70 percent), Muslims (8 percent), and Hindustani (7 percent). “I am,” he said. I asked him if he thought that the hilltop in Sri Lanka might really be the Garden of Eden. He said, “I haven’t travelled much, so comparison isn’t easy, but yes, I think it could be.”

The road climbed to Kandy. It had been constructed by the British in the 1860s under the direction of a Major Skinner, who was described in Sri Lanka as “The Father of Roads.” After the roadway had been completed, a linear community sprung up along it. Lincoln explained that this has happened throughout Sri Lanka. Even though we had gained considerable altitude, Lincoln told us that we were not yet in “Hill Country,” but rather “Up Country.” “Verdant,” “lush,” and “fertile” were insufficient adjectives to describe our surroundings. The last road to our hilltop hotel was steep, steep, steep, but provided the most magnificent view of Kandy. The incessant honking of horns far below did nothing to diminish the experience. The windows and doors of our hotel room carried a warning: “Beware of Monkeys.”

After dinner at the hotel, Lincoln drove us to the Kandyan Arts Association Hall, a modest facility but covered against the driving rain. For about $3 each, we got to take in the cultural show. After the Sri Lankan national anthem was broadcast through cheap speakers, the evening’s performances of the Traditional Kandyan and Low Dances began. We were mesmerized. Dancers were accompanied by percussionists, who slammed away on traditional drums for the better part of an hour. In their turn, men and women performed elegant dances with exotic names like the Pooja Dance, the Cobra Dance, Panteru Netum, and Mayura Vannama. The young women were delicately seductive, the young men were brutally athletic, and the costumes were enchanting. A banquet of
flying insects, drawn by the stage lights, was picked off by a parade of small bats throughout the performance.

As the proceedings drew toward the finale, Lincoln led us to the concrete stage steps so that we would have an unimpeded view of the evening’s grand climax—fire dancers who drew flaming batons across their bare chests and tongues and walked across braziers filled with red-hot coals. All of the young people involved in the evening’s production were amateurs and had not had the joy of performance sucked out of them by professionalism. On occasion, a dancer might fall out of step with the rest, but each had the self-conscious smile of the person who is truly enjoying the movement and being applauded for their efforts. Lincoln explained that this troupe was managing to revive dance traditions that might otherwise die out.

To close out the evening, we were driven to a hill overlooking Kandy. Music and singing drifted from below. Kandy, a World Heritage Site, is a true wonder. Its population is variously given as 100,000, 120,000, and 190,000. On that particular night, just ten days before Christmas, those people were not generating a lot of light, and I had to remind myself that not every community feels the need to light itself up like Los Angeles.

M
Y ANTI-MALARIAL DRUGS
were working, at least at some level. I awoke from a dream in which I was dreaming. In my dream’s dream I was flying, and in my first-order dream I wondered if that was evidence of mental instability.