Anniversary

March 14^th marked the day I sat eavesdropping on a conversation Dan was having with one of his advisors at a Charlottesville coffee shop. When we met, Dan had already applied for the Fulbright-Hayes grant to come to Sri Lanka. In April he found out that he had been awarded the grant. The shadow of the coming separation hung over us as we enjoyed dating and falling madly in love and we avoided discussing it. One evening we were sitting on the futon at his house discussing a recent dinner party when the subject of the grant came up, “Why don’t we ever talk about it?” I asked annoyed.

“Do you want to talk about it?” he replied.

“Yes, we need to figure this out,” I told him.

“Well,” he began slowly, “I see three options.”

“Ok,” I replied, nodding my head.

“First, we shake hands and say goodbye and say we’ll see when I get back,” he started. “But I don’t want that,” he quickly added. “Second, you could take a vacation and come to Sri Lanka soon after I got there and see if you liked it. If you liked it then you could stay,” he paused. “Or third, you could come with me,” he exhaled. “I don’t want a long-distance relationship,” he explained. “I’ve done that before and it just doesn’t work.”

“I agree,” I replied. “It’s not like you would be in California or some place I could reasonably visit on a regular basis. It would even be a pain in the ass to call,” I added. “No long distance relationship,” I confirmed. “If I am going to come along, then I need to just pack up my stuff, quit my job, and just come along,” I continued. “My lease is up in June. I need to either move out or sign a new lease. They won’t give me any time off from work anyway. Remember that I do mandatory overtime as it is. The only way is for me to quit, put my stuff in your basement, and just leap,” I finished, raising my eyes to look at him.

In June Dan went to India for a month on a program to study Jain religion and culture while I began to pack up my life and move it into his basement. In July he returned to Charlottesville to help me finished packing, moving out of my house, and driving my car to its new home in my mom’s garage in Houston. After visiting various friends and relatives along the way, we arrived in Sri Lanka on August first to begin our life together.

We were both in total agreement on how to spend our first Anniversary, two nights at the Galle Face Hotel, with lunch at Gallery Café and dinner at The 1864, the Galle Face’s fine dining restaurant. At check-in we got upgraded to the honeymoon suite again. After as afternoon splashing in the ocean-side infinity pool and reading under the cream-colored canvas beach umbrella on the seawall, I washed up in the garden tub and started getting dressed at the mirrored dressing table. I chose a white saree with a silver border and custom-made blouse-piece for the evening. The saree was much longer and wider than I was used to, requiring me to tuck more of the top hem into the petticoat and make more kick-pleats in the front of the saree. The cheaper sarees I wore around the house at least once a week to practice and master my pinning techniques were much shorter and stiffer. After draping the saree, I sat at the bench to apply my make-up as Dan watched a TV show on crazy Aussies who wrangle sea-snakes on the National Geographic channel.

When I was finished, we walked from the Classic side of the Galle Face Hotel, down the Verandah restaurant where breakfast was served, to the newly renovated luxury Regency side of the Galle Face Hotel. On the Regency side rooms started at $170 a night, ranging up to $600 for the deluxe suite with the hot-tub on the balcony overlooking the sea. The 1864 restaurant was an Asian fusion restaurant located in the Regency side with open-face brick walls and a tasteful modern wood carving filling the entire back wall of the restaurant.

The waiter asked us if it was a special occasion, nodding to my white saree.

“Yes,” I replied happily, “it’s our Anniversary, our first Anniversary,” as we were shown to our table. Each table had a square sunken area in the middle filled with water, rose petals, and a votive candle. Dan studied the appetizers as I studied the wine list. “Let’s get a bottle,” Dan instructed me.

After a delicious meal including a cold avocado soup, lobster tails, and the dessert sampler washed down with a bottle of white wine, I felt just full enough but still able to float back out of the restaurant in my white saree. Then the waiter and manager came out of the kitchen area with a small chocolate cake covered in white chocolate shavings with the phrase “Happy Anniversary” written in red frosting on the top and a single candle. All of the staff told us congratulations as they gave us the cake. I happened to have my camera with me so the waiter snapped a picture of us with the cake.

“I can’t eat this!” I confided to Dan when the restaurant staff had dispersed.

“Just, have a little,” he encouraged me. I felt terribly guilty as I cut a thin piece on the side to divide between Dan and me. The hotel had done this wonderful thing for us and we couldn’t enjoy it. I was hoping the cake would turn out to be the usual disappointing Sri Lankan mangling of cake, but devastatingly, the cake was excellent.

“We’ll just have to take it back to the room,” I rationalized. But we were leaving the next day and I knew that we wouldn’t eat it for breakfast.

We left The 1864 and walked back along the ocean before returning to the room with Dan holding the cake in it’s little box. “It’s been an amazing year,” I commented, stopping and looking out into the dark ocean.

“Are you glad that you came?” Dan asked, fishing for a little more validation.

“Oh course!” I replied, “Sri Lanka is tough though. It’s hard not to be able to just walk out my front door, get in my car, and drive to a coffee shop, the downtown area, or one of the parks by the Rivanna River. There’s nowhere that I really want to go anymore in Kandy except for the Gardens and it’s a six dollar three-wheeler ride to get there. I feel like a prisoner in my own house now,” I shrugged. “I feel like I’m sort of in the gas-giant phase of a supernova right now as far as being in public in Kandy is concerned,” I admitted. “I’ve given up. I feel like I can do the errands I need to do for the next two months before I totally implode and become this black-hole of anger and resentment, but I feel it coming a little more every day and I can’t stop it. I used to try and motivate myself to keep getting out and keep looking for that running route, that coffee shop, or that restaurant where I felt comfortable. I told myself that all of the little local bullies weren’t going to get the best of me, but now I’m over it. I’m done. I’m done looking for a yoga teacher, finding my way to Abhidharma meetings, and doing self-tours of Kandy,” I commented, squinting to see the lights from a big ship in the Gulf of Mannar.

“In terms of public culture,” Dan replied, “Most of the educated, English-speaking natives that haven’t managed to immigrate to Australia or the UK have very quiet social lives in their homes that center on their families and a few friends,” he explained. “Nobody is taking a walk after dinner, nobody goes out for coffee, and people don’t really eat out. Most people have servants to do the shopping for them and they rarely go into town themselves. If they need a tailor or whatever, the world comes to them. People live way up in the hills in their compounds like little islands on this big island. There is no demand for anything like Gallery Café in Kandy. Gallery Café is almost unique in Colombo, there is barely demand for it here,” he finished sadly.

“I’ll never take my freedom in the West for granted again,” I continued, feeling the sea breeze on my face and smelling the polluted ocean water as it crashed against the sea wall. “I will never take clean, safe, public places for granted again. I am going to embrace American public culture and events like never before,” I vowed. “But Sri Lanka has changed me in good ways also,” I furthered. “I used to think that all I could do was work as a nurse on the night-shift at that prison. I did my job very well and I got lots of positive re-enforcement from all sides but when I was off, I just sort of hung out with people from work. Now I feel like when I get home, I can do so many things. I could do yoga teacher-training and or further my meditation practice. I could go to a retreat at Yogaville. I could work part-time and go back to school for my Masters or for massage therapy. All of that seems possible now,” I paused. “In terms of getting a job when I get home,” I continued, “There’re so many areas of nursing in Charlottesville where I know people now; I’m networked into the Health Department, different departments at UVA, and even the Regional Jail. I feel like if I can do this, live here, I can do anything,” I finished.

“I’m really happy sweetie,” Dan replied, balancing the cake on one hand, putting his other arm around me, and kissing me on the forehead as I leaned against his chest.

After lunch at Gallery Café we headed to the Colombo Fort Train Station at 3:00 for the 3:30 Colombo-Kandy Intercity Express. The train arrived early, so we loaded onto the train and took our seats to wait. I felt relieved that we didn't have to stand on the platform anymore where we typically got frequent harassment. I felt protected in the train so I relaxed and was looking out across the other platforms when I saw a middle-aged blond-haired blue-eyed Western man, probably Australian, staggering down the platform led by a young Sinhala holding onto his arm. The white man was very tall, thin, and looked sun-burned. He wore a red shirt and long surfer-style shorts. "Look at that guy;" I said to Dan, "he's crazy as a shithouse rat." Dan nodded his head and we both continued to watch. The white man carried a cheap black nylon computer case that I doubt contained a computer. That was the only luggage carried by either of the two men. The Sinhala man was tall, taller even than the white man, and also thin. He wore jeans and a polo shirt. Strikingly, he was bald. In Sri Lanka usually only monks are bald. They walked to an area behind a small hut-shop on the platform, right across an empty set of tracks from my window. The white man seemed to know that they had arrived at their location, setting down his computer case and leaned against the hut-shop. A Sinhala woman and her daughter passed them and the white man made silly faces at them. The Sinhala escort man leaned against a column and put his foot up on one of the steps up into the hut-shop. Then another young Sinhala man approached, greeting the bald Sinhala man. He wore a dress shirt and dress pants. The bald man introduced him to the white man who grabbed the new Sinhala man in an awkward embrace; I thought for a second that he was going to kiss him. The Sinhala man pulled away, he and the bald man started laughing hysterically. The white man looked like a confused child trying to join in the joke. "This is evil," Dan commented, "Whatever is going on is truly evil." I nodded my head in agreement.

Dan left to go and tell the police that something was going on. I continued to watch as a third, shorter, Sinhala man joined the group. The white man tried to embrace the Sinhala man in dress pants again and they all roared with laughter. They way the young men laughed at him reminded me of the way the boys at the Botanical Gardens laugh at me whenever I run past them. Their laughter was painful to me because it reminded me of the countless taunts I endured when I went into public. I studied the white man, his facial features were even and well-balanced, he did not display traits of retardation from birth. He seemed aware enough of his environment to try and fit in with the Sinhala men and take his cues from them, so I didn't feel like he was having a psychotic or manic episode. His face was not puffy and he did not have a gut as I would have expected in an individual who made a habit of being drunk in the middle of the afternoon, but he could have been drunk or high.

Dan returned to the seat next to me and told me that he alerted the station police.

“I just told them that something was going on,” he shrugged, “I really didn’t know what else to say.”

“I know, I just can’t figure this out,” I replied. “Is he drunk? Or high? Did you see him hugging that one guy?”

“It really makes me mad that this, whatever this is, drugs, sex tourism, whatever, is going on in broad daylight, in the middle of the day at the busiest train station in the country. This station ought to be a hub for tourists to access the whole country, but instead it’s a nest of touts and crime” Dan commented angrily. “It just shows a total lack of control.”

“It is sad,” I confirmed. “Sri Lanka has so many amazing places to see, but it’s just really hard unless you’re on a package tour and don’t have to deal with any of this,” I remarked, gesturing out the window. “I was looking at the itineraries for those two or three week package tours,” I continued, “Those people see more of Sri Lanka than I will living here for ten months because they have nice air-con minivans to whisk them around and guides to smooth out the rough edges,” I added ruefully. As the train started to pull away to take us back home to Kandy, I saw the back door of the hut-shop open and the three Sinhala men step inside, leaving the white man on the platform.

“That was a strange end to a wonderful weekend,” I commented to Dan as the train pulled out of the Colombo Fort station, taking his hand across the dividing armrest.

“It sure was,” he replied stroking my forearm with his other hand.