Christmas in Colombo

Our four days at the Galle Face were wonderful. Spectacular South Asian weddings took place all day every day at the hotel. In the mornings the lobby teemed with women in sumptuous sarees waiting for the day’s festivities to start. I loved circulating through them, studying the fabrics, regional patterns, and draping styles of their sarees. While we ate breakfast on the verandah we watched the wedding parties posing on the black and white checkerboard dance floor in front of the ocean-side palm trees. The brides wore stiff, ivory, silk sarees with elaborate gold floral embroidery draped in the Kandyan style. Each bride wore a version of the Nalapata, the traditional gold-link bridal headgear. The Nalapata is placed on the middle of the forehead with one stem extending down the middle parting of the hair and anchoring to the top of the bun over the occipital skull. Another two branches extend across the forehead down the hairline to the ears and anchor back to the bun on the sides. Some brides wore gold florets pined to the hair in the parietal regions of the skull. They all wore gold filigree earrings shaped like upside-down teacups. Around their necks they wore a mass of seven chains and pendants. The jewel-studded pendants were floral, or featured a goose or swan. Watching the weighed-down brides I remembered my conversation with Farhath about her wedding jewelry and smiled recalling how she explained that less would not be enough for the grandparents.

When we ventured away from the hotel we found a few pockets of café culture where we could have leisurely lunches and linger over cups of loose-leaf green tea and cappuccino. Inside these shady courtyards we could forget about the sweltering heat, filthy dust, and dead dogs rotting on the side of the road that we had to travel through to these sanctuaries. The wait staff at our favorite place, the Gallery Café, was attentive and professional. The all-male waiters wore white button-down shirts, black pants, and long black aprons. They did not loiter at our table telling us about their village. Neither the wait staff nor the other patrons gave me so much as a second glance. “It’s like they had some sort of cultural training intensive before working here,” I commented to Dan once over crisp gazpacho soups. Wrapped in our comfortable anonymity we would spend hours at the Gallery Café with our journals, books, and computers.

For our afternoon swim back at the hotel, the pool attendant provided us with Navy blue and white stripped beach towels to cover the blue canvass pads on the teak lounge chairs. The chairs were arranged to face the Indian Ocean on a patio built on the sea wall. After a few laps in the infinity pool we would dry off watching the huge cargo vessels inch along the bright horizon in the Gulf of Mannar. Despite the manned neighboring guard tower of the Indian High Commission next door and the taller tower with the small manned surface to air rifle 50 yards away, I felt very comfortable resting in my bikini watching the enormous waves cycling in to the sea wall.

For Christmas Eve dinner we went to the Hilton for a five-course set menu meal. Even though the Hilton was only about a mile away, we decided to take a cab for safety reasons. We had done the walk along the sea wall next to the chain-link fenced-in Galle Face Green polo grounds many times during the day, but it was lined with permanently rusted-closed food stalls that seemed sinister to me at night. The sidewalk next to the Galled Road along the other side of the polo grounds was utterly deserted at night except for soldiers on patrol and stray dogs running in large packs.

Once at the Hilton we sat at a candlelit table for two by the pool under a waning moon. Our waiter efficiently noted our selections for the set menu and took our drink order.

“This is amazing,” I remarked to Dan, taking his hand across the table.

“We’ve had a really great time haven’t we?” he replied smiling. Before I could answer, a young man brought bread to the table said “Welcome! Where are you from?” Dan explained in English that we live in Kandy. “Oh, Kandy!” he replied; “My wife, her family is from Kandy…” he began. He proceeded to detail the exact location of the village. He then told us about all of the different area hotels where he had worked in the last seven years.

“That’s a lot of hotels,” I commented flatly.

“Yes, yes, many hotels,” he echoed me in a jovial tone. He seemed to be waiting for some sort of feedback from us. When faced with our minimal replies he drifted away.

“He must sell drugs,” I commented to Dan as soon as he was gone.

“You think?” Dan asked.

“Sure.” I said. “We’re probably the right profile, young couple, no kids. If you were a guest at the Hilton how would you get your stuff? You’d have to ask someone who seemed friendly in the right sort of way. This guy does his friendly routine and puts himself out there. That helps to open people up and then they say ‘hey mate, do you know where we can get some hash?’ or whatever. He was totally over the top, but I felt like it was for a reason, just something in the way he approached us.”

“You’re probably right,” Dan replied with a sigh.

The Intrusive Bread Man did not resurface for the rest of the meal. We were served the rest of the excellent meal by our regular waiter. We talked about a new project Dan was planning on researching at the end of our stay focusing on Muslim-Buddhist relations. When we walked back into the snow-white marble lobby there was a European jazz band playing and we sat down to listen. The set of jazz standards was well-planned with only short organizational breaks between tunes. They were led by a clarinet player who took furiously arpeggiated solos. The piano player and drummer also had impressive solos. The bass player played a great walking bass line but did not solo. The pianist would sometimes sing the tune at the head of the song but otherwise the group was acappella. Listening to the group I realized it was the first time in months I had experienced live music that did not involve a Casio keyboard with a bossa nova beatbox loop playing. “Man I miss this,” I remarked to Dan wistfully.

“Yeah, these guys are pretty good,” Dan agreed. We listened for the rest of the set, waited out the break, and then listened to the whole second set. The lobby area was packed. Some people were talking, but the majority of the crowd seemed to be listening to the music and clapping for the solos. Only after the band had introduced themselves again, plugged their CD, and were starting to pack up did we get a cab back to the Galle Face.

We had to return to Kandy on the day after Christmas. After a final lunch at the Gallery Café, we took a cab to the Colombo Fort train station for our 3:30 train. We showed our tickets and entered the station through the security checkpoint. As soon as we established our position on the platform the thin mute man appeared again indicating that we should stand somewhere else. I noticed that he was clean and wearing a different shirt. When I started to open my purse he seemed very interested, but when I got out my camera to photograph him he waved his hand in my face and walked away. Malik had recently advised me that touts do not like to photographed, so I made a habit of keeping my little Olympus Stylus Epic camera with me at all times to encourage people to leave me alone. Once the mute man left Dan walked 10 feet to the one of the station guards to complain in Sinhala to one of the station guard about the man, but she just brushed him off with an amused little smile.

Looking around I noticed three or four blind beggars walking along with their tapping sticks working the various platforms. Because they were blind they were not able to single Dan and me out, so I could observe them in action on others. They clearly had the locations of the benches memorized and they would lean down into the faces of the people sitting on the benches rattling a few coins in their hands. I recognized one blind woman I had seen begging last week.

When the train arrived at the platform another mute man attempted to grab our bags to put them on the train for us and usher us onto the train. He was also clean and well dressed. We did not allow him to “help” us. Once we were situated on the train I said to Dan “Security obviously allows this since only ticketed passengers are supposed to be allowed on the platform.” Then the thin mute man boarded the First Class car and started working only the other non-Sinhala passengers for money, skipping the Sinhala in the First Class entirely. He showed the tourists a photo copy of some sort of document, perhaps a school. When he came to us I had the urge to take his piece of paper and tear it up, but I decided this would be mean. He was just a mute man in a Sri Lankan train station after all. I felt bad for having such a cruel thought.

“You know,” I remarked to Dan once the train was in motion. “I think part of what you mean when you say you hate it here is that you hate yourself here, that’s how I feel right now.”

“I know what you mean,” Dan agreed. “Sometimes it can really just get to you.”