Travels

by Paul Bowles

  It proved simple enough to get rid of Fernando, but it was not so easy to find another cook. Nobody seemed to like the idea of being on the island, even one separated from the shore by only a hundred yards. Eventually friends took pity on us and bestirred themselves to find us another cook. This one, an inhabitant of the region, insisted on bringing his son along as assistant. We now had six servants, including the lavatory coolie.

  A view from Taprobane (PB)

  THE SCREAMING OF the crows from the bo tree opposite the island is the alarm clock which wakens Gunadasa and prompts him to rise and make our bed tea. Each day he appears from behind the screen, chanting: “Good-morning-Master-tea-Master.” Fortified with two or three cups of strong Tangana tea and a few slices of fresh white pineapple, I make my regular early-morning tour of the island, usually coming to rest on a stone bench that commands a fine view of Weligama Bay. The sun, although scarcely risen above the headlands to the east, already is giving off an intimate, powerful heat, and the distant flotilla of fishing boats slips past the white line of the reefs into the open sea, their unfurled sails like the dorsal fins of giants sharks. Scores of timorous black crabs creep out of their crevices in the rocks and sidle towards me. A sharp pain rouses me from my meditations. Big red ants make their nests in the trees that arch high above the bench, and their bite is like a minor wasp sting.

  I rise quickly and go up to the house, where I work until breakfast is ready. The remainder of the morning is devoted to settling servants’ disputes, keeping the marketing accounts, and jumping into the sea when the breeze suddenly dies and the air becomes like a hot damp cloth pressed against the skin. After the lunch of curry, different each day but always so hot it draws tears (a phenomenon I have grown, for some strange reason, to enjoy), there is the afternoon nap, a quick descent into oblivion while the wind, then usually at its height, ripples the mosquito nets and fills the air with the salt mist of breaking waves.

  It is usually dark before the drums of the devil dancers begin. They do not drum every night; if they did, we should not get much sleep, for once they start they continue until the following noon. Not that they are so loud, but it is hard to stay home when you know what is going on. These ancient pre-Buddhist ceremonies were once of prime importance to the community, and although they have degenerated over the centuries into what is widely despised as a vestige of primitive “superstition,” a really good dancer can still revive the old gods and bring shivers to the watcher.

  Often we start out at night in our bathing suits, change on the opposite shore into our clothing which the servants have carried across on their heads, and go toward the drums. Sometimes the dances are held in a village home or in the market (we are always urged to enter the crowd, given ringside seats, cigarettes and soft drinks), but the most impressive rites take place in the palm forest, not far from the beach. Here in the dark, the howling masked figures leaping with their flaming torches among the trees achieve their full dramatic effect. Nominally a devil dance is a magical observance whose aim is to banish the demons of pain, psychosis and bad luck by inducing such terror in the subject that he will automatically expel them – a rudimentary shock treatment.

  It is astonishing to discover how few Ceylonese have watched one of these performances, and how completely uninformed (and, alas, militantly so) most of them are about their own folklore. Among our domestics at Taprobane, the Christians are disapproving and the Buddhists mildly amused; they all prefer to spend the night fishing off the rocks for lobsters and crabs.

  A GOOD MANY of the citizens of Weligama (and not a few from Colombo) have come across to the island and paid us courtesy calls. A doctor and his wife arrived one hot afternoon, very formally attired, and caught us lolling on the floor in bathing suits. Their principal interest lay in discovering why we had not yet begun attending the local Church of England. Another day the entire staff of the post office came to pay its respects. Various politicians and lawyers, the chief of police, the owners of several large rubber estates in the vicinity, reporters and photographers, and simple sightseers, all appeared unexpectedly, and all had to be entertained. One day eight young Buddhist monks came bearing a large clay figurine as a gift for the house; another day it was a delegation of Moslems who invited us to the mainland for dinner. When we hesitated, they explained that the banquet was already prepared in our honor, the food waiting to be served; obviously there was nothing to do but go. And what a banquet!

  Although I should have appreciated more privacy during the first few months, because of my work, I was impressed by the people of the region, who showed an astonishing and disinterested friendliness such as you practically never find when you first settle in a foreign land. For a while I chained and padlocked the entrance gate at the landing jetty, but the keys were always getting misplaced and we kept finding ourselves imprisoned on the island. Then I put up large, carefully-lettered signs in Roman, Sinhalese, Tamil and Arabic script, announcing that admission to the domain was only by previously granted permission. This was a patent absurdity; the visitors hallooed and pounded until the gardener went down and, after arriving at some sort of financial understanding whose details were scrupulously kept from me, took them on a tour which included everything but entry into the house itself.

  Perhaps owing to language difficulties, it took me about three months to convince my gardener that the extra revenue he got from tourists was not one of his inalienable rights. One visitor who had brought a delegation of schoolteachers from Colombo said to me: “This gardener is proud to be the custodian of a national monument, and you, sir, are a very lucky man to be living here.”

  That was a truly enlightening remark; I began to feel not only lucky but apprehensive. It is not a reassuring experience to be told by a citizen of a new and intensely nationalistic country that your home is a part of the national heritage. However, I tried to look pleased, and agreed with him.

  In a densely populated, prosperous nation like Ceylon, motorists must have somewhere to go; it is a small country most of whose high points of interest lie well off the main highways, and Taprobane is listed in the guidebooks as easily accessible. Nevertheless, I was a little taken aback when I discovered that tourists arrived from as far away as Bombay. I mentioned this fact to an American lady who was spending a fortnight with us. (She had come to Asia, she confided, partly in the hope of meeting a real live maharaja; her other interest was in finding Lhasa terriers in the Himalayas.) One day while we were sitting at lunch, the gardener and his wife appeared, in a state of some disarray, to say that they had just had an altercation with a party of eight Indians down at the gate; the struggle had culminated in their pushing the one gentleman down the steps in such a way that he had knocked over two of the ladies and a little girl. We expressed polite concern, thanked them, and went on with our lunch. A little later the gardener returned and produced from his sarong a piece of paper. “From Indian master,” he said. “Giving paper before fight.”

  I read it and handed it to my guest. Her cries were heartrending. The gentleman requested my kind permission to allow his entourage to walk about the premises, and the note was signed “The Maharaja of Bhand.”

  Ceylonese law stipulates that any alien who remains in the country a day longer than the six tax-free months which are allowed him during the year will be subject to full taxation on his world income for that year. (The rates are high.) This automatically excludes the possibility of my living permanently at Taprobane.

  Early one morning a parade of men advances through the waves from the island toward the shore, each with a valise on his head; bullock carts are waiting at the rest house to pull the luggage to the station, and the last pilgrimage of the season into Weligama gets under way along the narrow road past the Buddhist temple with its clean-swept vihara, past the ayurvedic pharmacy, the mango tree where the chained spider monkey capers, Abd el Azeez’s Wireless and Photographic Emporium, and all the other familiar, touching landmarks. As each one moves past, I look at it ha
rd and ask myself: “Is this the last time? Or shall I see them all again?” Nowadays it seems wiser to take nothing for granted.

  Village Ceylon and Kandy Lake – two 1950s postcards from Paul Bowles’ papers

  Letter from Ceylon

  The Nation, 13 April 1957

  JUST WHAT WOULD one’s first impressions of Ceylon be? Mine were formed a little over seven years ago, but although the country has changed considerably since then, very likely I should notice the same details today: fireworks, flags and lanterns of festival time, thousands of clowning and chattering crows, Christmas-tree bulbs strung through the branches of the trees, catamarans like primitive wooden sculptures beached on the sand, zebus pulling enormous painted carts, umbrella-shaped shrines in the Buddhist temple precincts, the Sinhalese with their frail bodies and betel-stained lips and, more than all the rest put together, the reckless luxuriance of the vegetation. It is hard to visualize any scene here without its backdrop of trees, so completely do they dominate the landscape. They are always there, the vast rain-trees and the ancient bo-trees with their quivering sequin-like leaves, the bread-fruits and the jaks, the abnormally tall cocos (in the neighborhood of my home they grow to eighty feet) and the incredibly thin areca palms. If there were no verdure more noteworthy than the tea bushes and the rubber trees, the countryside would be rather more monotonous than most.

  Ceylon has no true rain forest such as you see in South America; that is a phenomenon too forbidding to be thought of in purely aesthetic terms. Here, on the contrary, no matter how primeval the scene, you have the feeling that it has been studiously arranged to please the eye; once you leave the city, any vista looks like part of a lavish botanical garden. If you go to the Yala Game Preserve you get the same impression with regard to the animals. At sunset you can come upon a score of elephants at a water hole half a mile away, but if you want to photograph them you must do it from inside your car, since for safety’s sake it is forbidden to circulate in the area without a tracker, whose principal function is to see that no one under any circumstances ever gets out of his automobile. In the final analysis you feel as though you were in a tremendous zoo whose inmates had been placed there for your amusement. The rogue elephants and buffaloes are dangerous enough; it is not uncommon for a car to be attacked and its occupants injured or even killed. But knowing this does not change the impression you get of being in a place which for some reason seems artificial. Perhaps it is because a few miles outside the sanctuary you see what look like the same buffaloes working placidly in the paddy-fields, and very similar elephants moving slowly along the roads, tinkling their bells, being led and talked to by their mahouts. As for the leopards and bears, you’re lucky if you find even the footprints of one outside the kitchen of the circuit bungalow when you wake up in the morning.

  Friends in Ceylon used to insist that if I liked tea I must never visit a tea factory. And it is true that the coolies walk in with cow dung on their bare feet and shuffle through the heaps of tea, and that from then on the tea is in no way sterilized before it reaches your cupboard. However, I still drink it with as much enthusiasm as ever. There is a local brand, called Tangana, which is quite the best I have ever tasted.

  You hear a good deal of talk these days about plans to nationalize the tea industry. About ten million rupees have been spent in acquiring several estates and setting them in motion on a cooperative basis. The aim is not so much to raise the living standard of the workers as it is to keep the money in Ceylon. And it is no surprise to be told by the planters that estate land for which the government pays nine hundred rupees an acre is “really” worth three thousand.

  Tea-growing used to be a highly remunerative occupation here for the man with the capital to acquire a few hundred acres of land. Let us suppose you have a small to middling estate of four hundred acres of tea; you will need five hundred laborers to work them, and you will get approximately four hundred thousand pounds of tea each year from your bushes. Yet each plant, which is picked every fifteen days throughout the year, gives only four and a half ounces per picking. This means that the picker, who is paid according to the number of pounds she can gather in a day, must move fast. It is significant that the people who perform this poorly paid work are not only Tamils, but Tamil women. No particular skill is required; the picker needs only to recognize what is called the “soap leaf on each stem, and count upward from there in order to take exactly the right leaves. The same plant can give five different grades of tea, depending on the size of the leaves, which are put through sieves of varying mesh; the best Ceylon variety is Broken Orange Pekoe.

  Tea-processing is simple; from plant to cup can take as little as twenty-four hours, although thirty hours are recommended. Tea is everyone’s drink here; at each little station on a local train, vendors hand it up through the windows to the passengers. Alcoholic drinks are more difficult. There is a great deal of legislation about how, where and when arak and toddy can be sold. (These two Ceylon institutions are analogous to Mexico’s tequila and pulque respectively; the difference is that they are made from the areca palm rather than from the maguey plant.) Imported drinks are for the very rich; a fifth of gin costs $8.20 in U.S. currency. Ceylon is no longer a cheap country for the tourist. On each of my five visits I have found prices higher, until this time hotel rates and meals are double what they were in 1950, although both the official and the black-market rate of the dollar have remained the same.

  ON THE FRONT PAGE of this morning’s Daily News, (“Largest Circulation in Ceylon”) appears an article bewailing the fact that anti-Chou posters cropped up here and there in the streets on the eve of Chou Enlai’s arrival in Colombo. “Who could have been responsible, when almost all political parties approved of this visit? Could it have been done through some foreign agency?” demands the News. This xenophobia is ridiculous; not native to the average man, it is being carefully manufactured, along with the rabid intolerance of non-Buddhist citizens, by the demagogues of the moment. It is, of course, mistrust directed solely at the West. According to the editors, China is the greatest Buddhist nation in the world. Says the Times of Ceylon, (today’s edition): “Ideological differences need not stand in the way of political and economic cooperation.” But the Times does not go on to say whether the ideological differences are religious or social; obviously they are not political. Today’s Ceylon Observer reminds its readers that Wendell Willkie was dazzled by Chou’s personal charm to the point of writing: “If this man is a Communist, I say, let’s have more of them.”

  Everyone seems to agree that there are no Moscow-trained Ceylonese in the local Communist Party. It is an intimate, provincial affair, in which the leaders themselves will appear with their wives on the scene of a strike and give out handbills to the passers-by. A characteristic note was struck a few years ago in Matara, a Communist stronghold on the south coast, when party members, on learning of the defeat of their candidate, shaved off their eyebrows as a token of mourning. Another Ceylonese political oddity is the existence of the Lanka Sama Samaja, a Trotzkyist Party which is an active influence in the political life of the land. Since I first arrived I have been assured many times over that a wedding between the local Third and Fourth Internationals was imminent, but since the latter is still around, it would appear that the announcement was only an expression of wishful thinking by the former.

  THE ORGANIZATION running the country at present, called the Mahajana Eksath Peramuna, or M.E.P., is a coalition group which at the time of its formation gathered into one pile most of the disaffected elements of Ceylon’s political life, including the Sri Lanka (Bandaranaike’s own Socialist group), the Sama Samaja and the Communist Parties. There was great discontent with the conservative United National Party, which had held power since the beginning of the independent regime. The very fact that its official name is in English rather than in Sinhalese is considered to indicate its orientation. By the time the U.N.P’s Sir John Kotelawala had reached the end of, his term, he had managed to alie
nate just about everyone in the country (if for a variety of opposing reasons); even so, the landslide accorded to the M.E.P. with Bandaranaike as candidate came as a big surprise to everyone, perhaps most of all to the victors, who were incompletely prepared to take over the responsibilities of government.

  An employee of CARE, which is administering an extensive school-lunch program here at the moment, tells me it is not an uncommon occurrence for him to arrive at an isolated country school whose master casually confides to him that his salary has not been paid for the better part of a year. “How do you live?” the American asks. “I, borrow,” says the schoolmaster. “People will lend because I work for government. Presently government will pay.” Each time the American has checked with the Department of Education on such a case, he has discovered that the poor schoolmasters are quite wrong; procrastination is not at all the reason why their checks have not come through. They have been teaching in schools which do not appear on any official list; the Board of Education has not even been aware that their schools existed. The CARE man adds that at the time of the switch of government a good many records were lost or destroyed, sometimes by design, in order to make the incoming group’s task the more onerous – a bit of spitefulness which turned out to be largely gratuitous, inasmuch as the disparity between the M.E.P’s grandiose Utopian promises and its record of achievement is fast becoming all too clear even to M.E.P enthusiasts. There is a widespread conviction now that the U.N.P. (not headed by Kotelawala) will take over at the time of the next elections, if not before – i.e., in the event the present government falls. But it looks as though there will be some very difficult terrain to cross before then. Those who assume that it will be possible for the country to step back peacefully into pre-M.E.P. conditions would seem to show a certain lack of imagination.