by Glen Chilton
ALL OF MY CONTACTS in Vancouver promised to stay on top of the story and to let me know if Crested Mynas were seen again. If a few weeks went by and none of the 4 million eyes in the area spotted one, I felt it was pretty safe to consider them extinct in the wild in North America.
And then, exactly two weeks later, I was roused from my well-deserved Saturday morning lie-in by a long-distance telephone call from my younger brother, Ross. “Weren’t you looking for Crested Mynas?” I explained that I had been, and asked him why he felt it necessary to wake me up to confirm a rather minor detail. “There is an article in this morning’s Vancouver Sun that I think you might be interested in.”
According to the article, a Vancouver store for bird enthusiasts had a strange visitor in mid-February, exactly the same time I was searching for the last of the Crested Mynas. Employees of the store guessed that this fellow was in his fifties and said that he spoke with a German or eastern European accent. He claimed to have found the bodies of the last two mynas at the warehouse location. General speculation was that one bird had been hit by a car while foraging on the street, and that the second individual kept returning to the spot until it was also struck and killed. The folks at the bird store asked the mysterious stranger what he had done with the corpses. He claimed that he had buried them together in a quiet spot in Stanley Park. Even though they didn’t get the gentleman’s name or contact details, employees of the store were inclined to believe him.
There were no further sightings of mynas in Vancouver, and it seemed safe to assume that the species was represented in North America by Morris alone. As healthy as he was, he couldn’t last forever, and passed away in September of 2007. In a way, Morris was an icon of the changing face of North American avifauna.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Curse of the White Guys
REASON NUMBER FIVE FOR INTRODUCING A FOREIGN SPECIES: BECAUSE MY PREVIOUS CROP GOT WIPED OUT BY A DISEASE.
IN THE FIRST MUZZY MOMENTS after waking, I could make absolutely no sense of the world around me. Lisa was on the other side of the king-sized bed, which virtually guaranteed that I had not died and gone to hell. Instead, it started to look as though I might have landed in Heaven. I spied a package of anti-malarial tablets on the bedside table, and so assumed that we were somewhere tropical. Wherever it was, we had gone in style. The room, five-stars or close to it, was decorated in dark wood and brass. Over the dull hum of a ceiling fan I heard the crash of surf, and after retrieving my eyeglasses I spied palm trees. Wherever we were, it was very exotic. All I needed now was a good book and a nice cup of tea.
When it comes to an easy-reading book, it is hard to beat the Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle. When Doyle got tired of writing about the great detective, he turned his attentions to a dazzling array of other short fiction—dazzling mainly because it is so blindingly awful that even undergraduate students of English literature are not required to read it. As evidence, I offer up the short story “De Profundis,” written by Doyle in 1892. In “De Profundis,” a man dies at sea from smallpox and his body is tossed overboard by his shipmates. A couple of weeks later, his corpse pops to the surface just as his widow sails by. She spots her husband’s corpse an instant before it is devoured by a passing shark. To me this is a shockingly bad storyline.
However, in “De Profundis,” Doyle also wrote about the production of tea in Sri Lanka, then called Ceylon, and is frequently quoted by persons proud of that industry. He wrote,
Those were the royal days of coffee-plantation in Ceylon, before a single season and a rotten fungus drove a whole community through years of despair to one of the greatest commercial victories with pluck and ingenuity ever won. Not often is it that men have the heart when their one great industry is withered to rear up in a few years another as rich to take its place, and the tea-fields of Ceylon are as true a monument to courage as is the lion at Waterloo.
It is a shame that such a good quotation comes from such an awful piece of piffle.
I had been drowning in tea since childhood, but I really didn’t know much about the life of tea before it hits the hot water. And so, when the opportunity came to attend the wedding of friends on the island of Sri Lanka, coupled with a trip to see tea in a field instead of just a cup, I couldn’t resist.
Charu Chandrasekera has enough personality for three people. She has deep copper skin and broody eyes, and I have never seen her in a mellow mood. When she arrived at the University of Calgary to begin graduate studies in medical physiology, the match between Charu and her supervisor was gritty, bordering on incandescent. After consulting with a graduate student advisor, Charu was directed to speak with my wife, Lisa, a little further along in her graduate degree. Knowing many of the pitfalls, Lisa helped Charu avoid some of the nastier ones. Charu came to think of Lisa as a big sister, and me as a big brother by extension.
Charu eventually took up with fellow Sri Lankan Chaminda Basnayake, who was working toward a Ph.D. in engineering. Chaminda has an unfair advantage over other males; he is impossibly handsome, but in a boy-like unthreatening way. Chaminda saw Charu in all of her moods and loved each of them. The fullness of time saw them married in Prince Edward Island, but something was left unfinished. The marriage wouldn’t be quite complete until it was solemnized by a wedding in Sri Lanka. And we, as honorary brother and sister, were invited.
DON’T BOTHER LOOKING for a direct flight to Colombo from anywhere else you might be because there isn’t one. Instead, Lisa and I took a flight to London, followed by a long layover in Heathrow’s Terminal 3. We then made a jump to the United Arab Emirates. The departure lounge for the flight to Abu Dhabi was, by far, the most boisterous I have ever encountered. It was a carnival of shouting—one passenger to another, through cellphones, and at the television screen broadcasting BBC One sports highlights. When the call came for passengers in the first three rows to board the plane, almost everyone rushed the gate.
Lisa and I couldn’t afford tickets in the Diamond Zone, or even the Pearl Zone. No precious or semi-precious stones for us; we were to be seated in the Coral Zone, but judging from the stampede of kittens that tried to get on the plane ahead of us, it was a misspelling of “Corral Zone.” The flight began with a prayer in Arabic. I was praying that the flight attendants would manage to keep the kittens in line without having to throw any of them out.
At Abu Dhabi International Airport, the gentleman attending the X-ray machine that scanned our luggage passed the time by burning his hand with a confiscated cigarette lighter. We faced a fourteen-hour layover. As pretty as the airport is—based on a blue desert-flower motif—no one would want to spend fourteen hours there, so a travel agent had arranged for us to spend the layover in a local hotel. We were rounded up and handed from agent to agent in a tentative way that suggested that this sort of arrangement had never been tried before. Eventually we found ourselves on a bus to the hotel.
At an intellectual level, I had always realized that the United Arab Emirates is in the desert. I have been to deserts before, but somehow I wasn’t ready for the full enormity of the desert that blankets this part of the planet. Once away from the well-watered, tree-lined avenue from the airport, the world was sand. Not scrubby vegetation clinging to the ground wherever it could find a bit of water, but sand. Great mounds of the stuff as far as the eye could see. We rolled past small communities composed of identical white houses in the style of Scottish castles. Each community had its own mosque, but not a lot of chlorophyll-based life forms.
Poor Lisa. As I caught some sleep, she came to terms with gathering nausea, probably the result of the inflight meal, which had contained a lot of garlic, which Lisa’s stomach doesn’t tolerate. Instead of sleeping, she stared up at the orange sign on the ceiling, which indicated the direction of most holy Mecca.
And so after my first, very brief, trip to the Middle East, we faced a jump across the Indian Ocean. As we approached Sri Lanka, we were told that “Health regulations require spraying of the a
ir before landing. We will be doing this shortly.” There was no mention about what the spray contained. DDT? Arsenic? Lemon-scented furniture polish? We were advised that, should we wish, we could cover our mouths and noses with handkerchiefs. Who carries a handkerchief anymore? Lisa and I did our best with tissues but were the only ones to do so. Flight attendants marched up and down the cabin emptying aerosol spray cans, discharging what smelled like hair spray. Perhaps this was Sri Lanka’s contribution to ozone depletion. It all led to bouts of sniffing and coughing. I’ll bet the rich snobs in the Diamond Zone didn’t get that sort of treatment.
Airport arrivals always remind me of cattle ramps at livestock auctions, with each new arrival getting the undivided attention of the assembled throng. This applies to Colombo International more than most. Behind a barrier on the right as we passed customs were thirty-six eager chauffeurs, each holding a placard with one or more surnames. As Lisa and I glanced toward them, all thirty-six cards went up, like thirty-six chicks begging for a meal. On our left, behind another barrier, were 250 people awaiting the arrival of friends and family. The scene was very orderly, particularly for four thirty on a hot and sticky morning. In Colombo, waiting had become a spectator sport.
There was no sign of Charu and Chaminda, so we took the opportunity to have a little look around. There was a sprinkling of Christmas decorations, including what can only be described as multicoloured disco balls. We found a very liberal air-conditioning unit to stand under. Time passed without any evidence of our friends. We had slept just a few hours in the past forty-eight, and the heat and humidity were washing over us like an incoming tide. The grind of endless bodies was starting to make me dizzy. What does this country look like after it has woken up?
And then our hosts arrived, their faces full of joy and welcome. They reclaimed their cab, and we headed from the airport, through Colombo, and south toward our hotel in the community of Mount Lavinia. We got little more than impressions in the predawn light, but those exotic scenes made my eyes dance. Even at that ungodly hour on a Monday morning, buses were disgorging workers at garment factories. It was raining and some people had umbrellas; the remainder didn’t seem to care about getting wet. Traffic was crushingly heavy, with an equal mixture of buses, minivans, commercial trucks, three-wheeled taxis, motorcycles, and bicycles. Few of these vehicles had headlights. Pedestrians were shown no mercy. Stray dogs showed no mercy. I felt swelling motion sickness for the last thirty minutes of our seventy-minute journey. I needed a cup of tea.
THE 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.
AFTER 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 moto
rbikes, 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.
IN THEIR 1931 bOOK 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.
