On the road with Jesus but without elephants

February 9, 2020

NAWAGATHTHEGAMA - "You want to visit the temple?" Pathiraja asks. To be honest, we're still not sure if Pathiraja is his first or last name; there is only so much you can establish by gesture and names appear flexible in our one day of experience.

Pathiraja makes those slender and finely decorated pillars that hold up most of the verandahs and tea stops of the Indian sub-continent. He, his wife and a collection of other people we can't quite class run the small homestay that we chanced upon on the road. The pictures on the billboard suggested a luxury that only millionaires could afford but we have already established that trade descriptions are applied flexibly in Sri Lanka.

We're tired and sweaty and still a little disorientated. We say no to the Hindu temple, though with regret, in favour of a shower.

"In that case, come," Pathiraja insists enthusiastically. "I show you my work." We'd admired the mural of blowing trees on the wall of his house and, by pointing at it and then at him, we think we established that he had painted it. But, to be honest, he may have thought we were asking something quite different. He was clearer about his day job.

"You come," he says. When Europeans ask to be followed, they turn their palm upwards and curve the fingers inwards. In Asia, it's the other way round, a gesture that looks like scratching a cat's back. It's the same movement but it takes a moment to get used to.

In half-darkness we step over a shin-high wall and into a yard where batches of pillars wait for a customer. They are grouped by the two dozen, identical and lonely in each other's company as the moon replaces the sun. Further on stands a tribe of another design, and beyond them a scattering of urns, pots and a small lorry accustomed to its coat of dust.

To you and me they're just pillars. To others, they're a life's work

"I have showroom in town," Pathiraja says, "and two work yard."

It gives me that feeling I often have in trains, when I look at the hidden side of town, the side where people make cogs and shoelaces and beach balls, and every time I wonder how the owners' lives turned in that direction. What makes someone who has studied science and literature and the lives of other nations conclude that what really makes sense is to make shoelaces?

Or stone pillars.

There are many ways to tell you're in a different country. One is when a man pulls up on a motor-scooter and says "Don't ride this road after five o'clock, because of the elephants." We were safely at our day's end well before five so that we never did see elephants, but it was good to know they were there.

Elephants don't like the heat and they lie low, or as low as an elephant can get, during the day. That makes them hungry and so, with a sense of entitlement that cares nothing for human road maps, they wander where they choose in search of food. If that means crossing a road, so be it. And if an elephant feels threatened, or that its young are threatened, it's capable of lifting a bus off the road and sending it on its side.

No elephants, then, but we did slow to let an iguana slither awkwardly across a dust road, and Steph saw peacocks and monkeys. And, having left the busy roads for tracks of partly compressed red-yellow sand, we rode unchallenged by noise other than the repeated calls of "Hallo, how are you?" from every corner.

A saddhu walking the other way came close to acknowledging us before thinking better of it. Saddhus are Hindus who have renounced all possessions, often including their clothes. This man hadn't gone that far and he was wearing a small and grimy loincloth. He walked with short steps, taking his time, his only possession. His chest was so flat it could have been crushed.

There are many religions on the sub-continent and still more when you count the internal subdivisions. Most of them are more cross with fellow-believers than they are with the unholy, which is often the way of the faithful. Today we have been in an area divided between Hindus and Buddhists, to judge by their buildings, with the Buddhists having the edge.

Christians get a look in, usually across the road from the Buddhists, each side looking at the other with a sense of superiority that comes of True Faith. Buddha is fat and usually jolly, although sometimes he's soporific and thoughtful, and Jesus seems to be a white man.

It was a big day for Christians today. We came across a kilometre of them, walking two or three abreast, led by a band of youngsters in white and blue and preceded and concluded by earnest adults holding banners. They all wore smart clothes and kept devotedly to the left of the road as policemen in brown uniforms wondered whether to let the traffic pass or to make it wait.

They walked to the sound of the band, even if those at the back could hear nothing but the distant plop of the bass drum. Most of the banners were in Sinhala but the drum announced allegiance to the Church of Our Lady of Lourdes.

The end of the procession had the best banners

They reached us when, by chance, we came across a lettered arch over a driveway that led to a building that could have been a church or temple. An old lady took our photo, smiled wordlessly, and moved on. A man peeled off from the parade to tell us it was a feast day.

"You are Catholics?" he asked in good English.

We said we weren't.

"'Well," he said, "it is the feast of Maria today. You know her? She was the mother of Jesus."

We can only guess that the procession was supposed to have passed through here. But it walked on and then turned round

We thought he'd peeled off to make sure the parade passed beneath the arch. Perhaps he had. Instead, it carried on up the road. And then, as though the band realised it had walked too far, it halted, changed sides of the road and pointed back the other way. But crowds are hard to organise and they all move at different speeds. Those at the back cottoned on only when they reached those at the front. Several old women got down and prayed, but I think more for their souls than the orderliness of the procession.

It was then that the police stepped in to impose more temporal order. Policeman in khaki shirt and trousers and policewomen in khaki shirts and skirt and what looked like brown surgical stockings waved good-humouredly for everyone to stay still and let the traffic pass.

The band, which had made the transition early, looked at us and giggled. And then the drummer opened up and they all set off the other way and set back off to the archway, which of course entailed crossing back across the road and bringing the traffic to a halt all over again.

At their second attempt, they got to where they'd intended

It was all done with smiles and waves. Nobody tooted, nobody forced a way through. It was just another day.

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