To begin with the camp seemed a hive of activity but then a collective inertia seemed to set in very soon, as fatigue and despair increased with the passage of time and the drip, drip, drip of the implications of what had occurred swept across the people there like a second tsunami. Everyone was afraid that there would be an outbreak of cholera or typhoid. Many people just sat about unable to help themselves. Kids roamed around without supervision and adults wandered around the camp without any apparent purpose at all. There was nowhere for people to put their possessions, especially cars and carts, and there was litter everywhere.
For those who believe in God as an entity of universal good I can only imagine that their God must have been taking a very long nap while all this developed. Why should the oppressed people of Sri Lanka have deserved this fate when the advantaged and financially driven people of the West continued in their advantaged ways? How right the Buddhists are that suffering, dukkha in its many, many guises, is an inherent part of human existence. Lack of sleep, filth, poor sanitation, stench, lack of food, disease, constant reminders of extreme human misery were, in combination, far worse than the immediacy of the destruction that I had seen when the tsunami first struck; this was the long term reality of what it had caused.
I knew that the impact that I could make on that massive canvas was minimal but the camp at Galle became the place where I learnt so much and, despite its squalor and deprivation, it gave me much more than I could give it. The people there gave me recognition and an incredible warmth and appreciation. I cannot express adequately the extent of the acceptance and kindness that they offered to me nor can I adequately express my admiration and sense of being humbled by the struggles for dignity that I saw among so many people who were desperate to maintain a sense of pride and identity amidst the chaos that surrounded them.
So that is another reason why the letters to Josh meant so much to me at the time. They became my emotional outlet and, sometimes when I was overwhelmed by things that I had seen, my one bit of decency, of honesty. The guys at the camp were wonderful companions but their heads were equally full of thoughts and I could not tell them the truth of my own story – how could I possibly try to divert their sympathies on to me when all around them were people whose plight was many times worse than anything that I had known?
Josh knew though how I felt because I told him in my letters. What is more, he told me about his true thoughts in his. We both kept some of the letters that we wrote and I still have the emails that we sent to each other as well; before Josh came back here I used to type up some of his letters because I was afraid of losing them and typing them meant that I really studied what he was saying. The best I can do to describe the scene at the camp is to quote from one of the emails that I sent at the time:
‘From where I am sitting now I can look across to an area where there are ten tents in a row. There is a slight incline that leads down to a red-earthed path which disappears to a lower part of the camp, through some shrubs and thorny bushes. The tents are lined up away from where I am as I try to paint this picture for you and are on the other side of that path. The ground rises slightly and there is already the making of another path in front of the tents. The tents are much smaller than the ones in which you were working when you were here and are now mostly off-white. They have a sun shield in front of the main zipped door but that gives little protection from the sweltering heat and the temperature inside the tents is often unbearably hot. Most of them are heavily over crowded; they were probably designed to hold no more than four people but most of them are occupied by whole families. The sides of the tents flap gently in the mild wind and there is a peacefulness about them as I watch from here despite the chaos that goes on inside.
I can see mothers, still smartly and colourfully dressed, busying themselves with washing and food. There are open fires upon which the families are cooking or heating water and there are children playing in front of them. There are occasional bursts of noise either from the children or from the parents but, in the open air, the sounds are quickly dampened in a way that adds to the peacefulness. There is a constant smell of burning wood from the camp fires where rice and poor food, concealed by strong spices, are cooked. If I walk down past the tents I am always greeted with a smile and an offer of heavily stewed tea, food or just conversation. I am never asked for help and have to insist on giving it.
One family has a new born baby, a girl who was born a few days before the tsunami came, and the family do ask me to look at her to see if she is alright despite the fact that, unlike you, I have no medical capabilities; the mother is having difficulty providing milk for the baby and we have tried to call the doctors to see her but they have much greater demands on their time. Another family has an elderly grandfather who obviously has dementia; he is confused about where he is and gets very distressed about not understanding what has happened. There is so much to do and it is impossible to do as much as I would wish.’
I wrote to Josh many times in that sort of way, trying to paint images of what I was seeing and experiencing here in the chaotic world that I occupied, while he continued in the environment which he found so sterile in Sweden.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
The first thing we had to do in Unawatuna was to build somewhere for Raja and Sunil to sleep as they could not stay in the tent indefinitely, especially with the first monsoon coming in May. The base of their former home was still there but the rest of the structures were either entirely missing or, as to the few bits that remained, were so unstable that there was nothing for it but to knock them down. It didn’t take long, however, to put up a breeze block hut with a corrugated iron roof for them to sleep in and we then covered the roof with palm branches in an attempt to keep it cooler in the heat and quieter when it rained.
When that had been done, we put up a similar but slightly smaller affair for me and that became my home. It measured 12’ by 10’ so there was plenty of room for a bed, a desk and a chair. It had one small window which had no glass but, instead, had shutter-like slats which could be opened and closed by a lever on the side to let in the breeze or shut out the rain. It was painted white to reflect the sun but also had a bright blue, lockable door, even though there was nothing to steal and there were no thieves to steal things anyway. More than that I neither wanted nor needed and it was easy to make it bigger later on.
The next job was to rebuild the outside eating and drinking area. The concrete base had also remained intact and just needed clearing and after that was done we set about creating a wooden trellis around the edge, which we painted light blue as it apparently had been before. However, the major task was to build cabanas where people could stay because the old ones had all been destroyed in the tsunami and that work was not nearly complete when Josh returned; it took until the following year, 2006, to finish entirely.
Although there was a government led reconstruction programme here after the tsunami, there was not much order to it. A 100 metre inland clearance zone was introduced in January 2006 with the intention that no new building should take place within 100 metres of the sea line, but by that stage a lot of the redevelopment had already happened. The official line was that the creation of the zone was to protect against the risk of similar destruction if there should be a further tsunami but it was also said that it was an attempt by the government to control the beaches. Housing that was constructed beyond the 100 metre mark became eligible for assisted funding under the government led Cash for Repair and Reconstruction programme which provided grants, with all the bureaucracy that goes with that.
More recently, the clearance zone has been reduced to 35 metres but that relaxation came two years after the tsunami by which time even more of the work had been done. For a region that is dependent on tourism and which had not seen anything like this tsunami before, a 100 metre clearance zone was never going to be realistic or controllable; tourists want to be as close to the beach as they can get. It was also inevitable that the ingress of aid would
be chaotic and pretty haphazard with the result that the developments which sprung up with that aid were also haphazard although there was also a constant undercurrent of anxiety that the government would move in with bulldozers to clear out any offending buildings.
So, that is what was going on in Sri Lanka during those first months when Josh was away. It was the first time since I had left England that I found any sort of role in my life and I look back on it now as a time when a kind of triangle developed between Sunil, Raja and me, a triangle that later became a square when Josh returned.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
I have had to move to another hotel in Colombo. I had been at the last one for over three weeks, writing away, and questions were being asked about how long I would be staying. A lone Englishman hiding away in his room all day is bound to be the subject of chat in a place like this, so it was time to up sticks. Even the chambermaids started to look at me in a way that made it plain that they thought I was odd, a weirdo, and I suppose they were not far wrong. They had to clear up around me most days and I was not like the other visitors. When I did leave my room and go to other parts of the hotel I found it really difficult to be in a place surrounded by other people, especially families.
I also started to feel unsafe there. There is a build-up of security here as the new offensives are planned against the LTTE in the north under the no-compromise Rajapakse presidency. There are military displays in the city which remind me of the newsreels showing the old might of the USSR and soldiers are to be seen everywhere – mostly young men with rifles that are almost as big as they are. There is a dreadful air of oppression and power, with constant news bulletins blaring out of TVs and radios all buzzing with jingoism. It’s not a nice place to be at the moment and, what’s more, I know that it only takes one phone call to the police for someone to collar me and then I would be bundled out of the country and dumped back in England, where I really don’t want to be. Anyway, the hotel was expensive.
So I have come to a much cheaper place in the Nawala area of Colombo, which is further inland and in the heart of the city, away from the main tourist drag. I spent a couple of days wandering around the streets here and sat in the park for a bit but there is nothing to do and no one to talk to, so I have felt drawn back to writing. So I am just going to pick up where I left off.
My communication with Josh provided the third dimension to my then life – away from the camp at Galle and away from caring for Sunil and seeing Raja fall apart at Unawatuna. The phone calls were frustrating and difficult. Although I tried to tell him what I was doing and he tried to do the same, the reception was intermittent and it was difficult to put any tone or context in a conversation that was interspersed with ‘can you hear me?’ Text messages are necessarily short and cannot convey much information either although, because they are instantaneous, we both used them to write about immediate things – for instance ‘my new home completed – four beds, swimming pool, air conditioning, modern kitchen,’ or something like that, when the shack was finished. We did email each other but I had to go to one of the hotels and ask to hack into their Wi-Fi system in order to get a reception, so it was the letters that made all the difference. Letters usually took about seven days, sometimes longer, to pass between Sri Lanka and Sweden and I had to collect his letters from the pretty makeshift Post Office but I used to long to be told by the woman who ran it: ‘Letter for you, Simon.’
Having moved hotel I have taken some time to re-read some more of the letters that we exchanged, a real trip down memory lane, to a time when, thousands of miles apart, we were feeling our way forward with neither of us knowing where we were going. I can see now how it was that my letters helped unwittingly to draw to a head Josh’s inability to continue with the life that he was living in Sweden - I was doing the very things here that he wanted to do and I was telling him all about them in my letters.
Our letters also had a very strong religious theme to them which came naturally to Josh but represented the first time that I had really written like that. During my travels in India I had seen many different religions and had always found it easy to keep them at a distance. I found the multi-theism of the Hindu faith way beyond my comprehension and the culture and the absolutism of the monotheistic religions, such as Christianity, Islam and Judaism increasingly alien. But at the camp I met Buddhism properly for the first time. There were many young monks and disciples of Buddhism at the camp but it is there that I met Mahendra, whom I saw teaching the children and explaining things in such a way that I found myself drawn to what he was saying. I want to write a lot more about this later because Josh and I both went on a journey of religious discovery when he returned to Sri Lanka and Mahendra was very involved in that. However I wrote to Josh about what I was seeing and beginning to learn and it opened up our letters to all his yearning for the God that he felt that he had lost when he left the priesthood.
I have found this in one of his letters, I have corrected some of the few mistakes in his English:
‘I used to carry God around with me in my head, everywhere that I went, talking to Him and seeing things through the eyes of Christ’s teaching. Feeling Him within me gave me confidence and strength and allowed me to make choices without difficulty by applying a set of fundamental beliefs about a God who was the most important thing of all to me. I studied many of the great Christian writings and works of art and built a world around me based on my faith. How could anything be more important, or matter more, than God? As I found myself being drawn into recognising that I am gay, that it is part of my adult identity not just a part of growing up, the torment that I felt was as if my soul was being torn apart as my feelings pulled me in one direction and my faith pulled me in another. But then, I told myself, did not Christ suffer the ultimate torment on the cross and how could I compare my self-created troubles with his? How could I think that my God would stop loving me because, in this worldly life, I feel attracted to men? I told myself that God loves me too, even though I am gay. And so I managed that destructiveness through the chosen course of celibacy. Not because I denied what I felt but because I had a companion in God who gave me fulfilment and love. Further, celibacy fitted in with my family’s expectations as it would have broken my parents’ hearts if I had announced myself openly to be gay.
But then I began to question what it meant to have a life after death and the more I thought about it the less it made sense. How can we each remain the characters and personalities that we are without bodily form? Who are we if we are so cleansed in death that we become compatible with God’s perfection? Does God have form and appearance - plainly not - but then, what is God? If I lose all yearning, emotion, affection, sadness and all other human feelings, who am I? Am I still gay in heaven and, if so, what could that possibly mean in a sexless environment? What is the driving force of the spirit without a functioning brain? Is everyone in heaven the same? If I lose all aspects of my worldly personality in the spirit world, how can what is left be me?
I could write pages about the questions that I put to myself and, rather than find answers to those questions from within my religion, every answer that I did find took me further and further away from the God in whom I had believed for so long. The realisation that I could no longer hold on to my beliefs felt as though the ground had opened up under my feet and I was falling, in fear, within an endless vacuum. I lost my belief and, with it, my life’s companion.
That is when I first really hit the gay scene in Stockholm, feeling that I had wasted so much time on a fable. But I did not belong in the gay scene either and could not stand its pretence, its dominance amongst those who belonged to it and its angry rejection of so many aspects of society. It did not provide the answer. So, I moved into a time when I had no God and felt that I did not belong in myself; I just did my job and lived a quiet, orderly and characterless life. That lasted for a very long time, until I met Edvin. I have told you what happened next.
Now, I have come back to that quiet, orde
rly and characterless life here whereas you surround yourself with chaos, colour, opportunity and purpose. You have taken the risk and searched for meaning. I wish that I could say the same for myself. I open the door of my flat and I see a dimly lit corridor with similar doors leading into similar flats. You open your door onto the beach at Unawatuna or on to the camp in Galle. Which of us is the richer? I know the answer to that question, and I hope you do too.
Please don’t stop telling me about your world. I can only wish that mine had so much opportunity.’
That letter, that’s Josh. He always ended his letters ‘I send my love to you, Simon.’ I can picture him easily in Stockholm. Neat, wearing short sleeved buttoned shirts, clean, routined, tidy, living in a small but organised and bright flat, meeting friends but without any commitment. Potential going to waste and very, very different to the Josh that I came to know and love here.
Our letters drifted into a pattern where they began with me telling him about the things I was doing and him telling me more of his thoughts. Josh’s letters were long, full of detail, full of concepts but increasingly started to express his yearning for more, his longing to share in what I was doing. He responded to everything that I said in my letters, picking on things I described and asking me about them. He always asked about Sunil and wanted to discuss how he was getting on. He wanted every detail of how the hotel was developing and how Raja was doing. He wrote very little about his work, his social connections in Sweden or his family, his letters leaving me with the very clear picture of the clean and unfulfilling life he was living, someone stuck in his thoughts. My letters about Raja’s collapse, Sunil’s struggles and the life at the camp were an overwhelming magnet for you, I can see that now.
And so my letters also started to become full of my wish that I could make things better for you, my attempt at immersing myself in the thoughts that you had and how good it had been to spend time together here. I asked for your advice, especially about Sunil and Raja and how I should look after them. I could think of nothing else but you and what I wanted to write to you, as you became my one emotional outlet, my obsession. It was like being locked on to something; it was the most powerful feeling I have ever known as an adult...I think.
The Water Is Warm Page 22
