Sometimes I Still Hate It Here

A few nights ago, just after Dan had turned out the light and we were both comfortably settled into our sleeping positions, I felt him starting to roll over to get back out of bed. “What’s wrong?” I asked, gingerly shifting my weight to let him up. I had injured my back badly in yoga lesson three days ago.
“I forgot to lock the door,” he muttered groggily. I considered for a moment if anyone had come or gone today. Then I thought about yesterday.
“Did you lock the door after the pizza delivery guy the night before last?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Dan replied.
“Well then, it ought to still be locked since that’s the only contact we have had with the outside world in three days,” I replied.
“You’re probably right,” Dan answered, sinking back into the foam mattress.
“I think we’ve been in the apartment since I came back from yoga on Tuesday, it’s Friday night now,” I remarked into the darkness.
“Yes, I think that’s right,” Dan replied thoughtfully. I was quiet, reviewing things that might have taken me outside. Running or walking? No, I was on self-imposed strict rest for my back to heal. Food shopping? No, we had stocked up on the way home from the Sunday run. Trash bin run? No, the little parcels of trash were building up in the kitchen alongside the old Sunday Times and the Pizza Hut box.
“Yup, we haven’t been out of the house in three days,” I confirmed.
“Well, do you want to do something this weekend?” Dan asked. “We could go to Dambulla for the day,” he offered. “I’d like to stop by the site of that suicide bomb up north on the navy convoy last week. It’s right there. I’d like to see what sorts of memorials are being erected on the site.”
“You know that if that happened in America they’d make it into some sort of park or shrine or something and people would pilgrimage there to leave flowers, notes, and all sorts of crap,” I commented.
“You know, with almost a hundred people killed, it was the biggest suicide attack in Sri Lanka’s history, bigger than the Central Bank,” Dan informed me.
“Well, and just think, we were here to see it. I can say I’ve been on that road,” I remarked sarcastically. “But seriously,” I continued, “So we’d spend two and a half to three hours each way on those horrible roads around Kandy to see some cave temple and the burned out shell of a military convoy? No thanks. I’d like to do the rest of the north all at once,” I finished.
“Yeah, and I can send Thilak to photograph the wreckage and memorials, I’m sending him up there to interview some monks anyway,” Dan agreed, falling into silence.

We feel asleep to the sound of the rain on the roof. We had fallen asleep to the sound of the rain on the roof every night for the past three weeks since it rained every day starting at around noon and not finishing until well after we went to sleep. It was the wet season and with roads washing out and full of debris we had holed up in our apartment. When I had ventured out to yoga lesson earlier in the week my three-wheeler driver had to serve around as many giant mangos and avocados in the road as you would find on the supermarket shelves.

Around midnight one of the dogs started to bark ferociously for what seemed like half an hour, waking me up. Parading around town in my saree and philosophical runs in the Botanical Gardens seemed like a shadow from someone else’s life now as I tried to find a comfortable position in bed and turn my mind away from the sound of the barking dog, finally drifting back to sleep. At 4 AM the polecat, a nocturnal muskrat, furiously dug its way back into the drop ceiling from the outside. It used the already alarmingly bowed tile directly over my head for access, waking me up and reminding me how much my back hurt. I reviewed my yoga lesson in my mind. There was no one moment when I had felt a bolt of pain. I had felt fine the rest of the day after the practice, but woke up the next morning in pain. I analyzed my arms balances at the end of the practice, motion by motion, searching for the error like a computer programmer studying lines of code for the bug in the program. By 4:30 AM I was just found a tolerable position on my side and was starting to drift back off when the drumming and chanting started at the area monasteries and temples. Lying awake I thought about how special it was to live in this World Heritage Site Sacred City. By 5:30 AM the monks had died down but the ten crows that live in the trees on the compound start to squawk. I imagined a scene outside resembling Hitchcock’s The Birds and pondered how they made all those birds sit so still for the movie.

By a little after 6 AM it was getting light so I just got up and started the usual breakfast: coffee from the Embassy Commissary, oatmeal with the peanut butter my dad sent from the states, and the one type of bananas I like here. One of my goals was for us to eat our five servings of fruit and veggies a day. This is tough because most of the produce looked either like some sort of strange sex toy, or something you would need a machete or bush-hog to get rid of in your yard. For snacks I tried to stick with apples. I got four apples at a time and usually two would be edible, one would be good, and one would be rotten. The apples are kept behind a glass case in the supermarket, so you cannot pick them out yourself. I also liked the mangos, but these are very difficult to cut. I do not cut mangos for my own safety.

I made breakfast with a routine honed to maximum efficiency. It was important to get Dan his first cup of coffee before making the oatmeal for example. That way I could fill up his cup after the oatmeal and then clean and dry all the dishes all at once, including the coffee pot. This morning was more challenging because I was basically unable to bend over from the waist. If I wanted something down low then I had to squat, which still didn’t feel great. I listened to a podcast as I do every morning while cooking and cleaning the annex. If it were not for podcasts to help me feel connected to my culture and inspire me to keep doing yoga, running, and eating right, I am sure that Sri Lanka would have eaten me alive by now. I would be a lump of fatty flesh quivering in the fetal position most of the day. Today I knew I needed maximum inspiration, so I clicked on “Hip Tranquil Chick, a guide to life on and off the yoga mat,” by DC podcaster and yoga instructor, Kimberly Wilson.

Wilson’s podcast covers a wide array of topics from time-management techniques, to yoga, to belly-dancing. This morning I listened to “Ayurveda 201,” in which Kimberly interviews an Ayurvedic practitioner, Anna. Anna stressed the importance of eating in season regional foods. “Like I have a choice here," I grumbled to myself. Anna also mentioned that cutting back on dairy was helpful. “Not a problem here either,” I thought. Cheese was hard to find and basically inedible. Dan had been excited when he located a brick of frozen “mozzarella” at the supermarket. Once he got it home he didn’t even try to talk me into it, he just threw it straight out. Somehow Pizza Hut had good cheese, but they sure weren’t getting it from the local market.

After cleaning up the apartment it would be easy to just go straight past personal hygiene and to the computer as Dan worked on his dissertation. I did this for awhile, mossy teeth and everything. Then I heard one of the “Hip Tranquil Chick,” episodes on personal care and I was reminded that how transformative getting dressed can be. On this day I knew that I needed to pull out all the stops. I did all of the basic stuff and then plucked my eyebrows, put on make-up, and draped my favorite saree. When I finally sat down in my desk chair, carefully padded for extra back cushioning, I felt ready to tackle another day as a recluse.