Paying the price

February 29, 2020

WEERAKETIYA - It left its traces, yesterday. After 46km, we pulled over at mid-day and stopped at a hotel on a slight rise out of town. It created astonishment that anybody would want a room, at that hour or any other.

It took three people, talking among themselves and each unsure whose job it was, to find and open a room. The manager's surprise at the slightest comment was theatrical, wide-eyed and stunned. Yet if this suggests a dusty roadhouse with creaking hinges and bending floorboards, the opposite is true. The leaves don't blow to eery harmonica music. Instead, our room is clean, well-finished and has little sign of anybody stabbed in the shower.

We stopped last night at a bed-and-breakfast just short of the carnival of the elephant refuge down the road. The man who answered our phone call from the oppressively long and difficult sand road that got us there never materialised. Nor had he passed the message to his wife, who welcomed us without knowing we were coming.

She was a bright, intelligent woman you'd guess had a degree and a professional job. Or that she used to.

"I'm from Colombo," she told us, unable to keep a hint of sadness from her voice. "This was my husband's property."

"So you moved out of love?"

I meant it as a pleasantry but it struck a nerve, a nagging disillusionment.

"You could say that," she replied neutrally. Certainly without warmth. And she took our dishes and went off to the kitchen. There was a sadness we couldn't define. Maybe a longing for the city rather than changing beds and making coffee in a remote village. Maybe sadness that her husband, presumably the man who answered the phone, had fallen ill. Beside the phone were the results of diabetes tests. But for whom, and of what gravity, we didn't know and couldn't ask.

Her daughter, Lililee, was too young to understand. She is four and an expert at pulling heart-tearing faces with huge eyes and a wide mouth. She and her mother speak both Sinhala and English to each other. We got the impression that she was encouraged to talk to visitors, to communicate by showing her school books, to prepare her for something better than bed-and-breakfast and maybe love gone wrong.

Lililee brought us a folding chessboard and asked to play. She could place all the pieces. Beyond that her strategy was to move everything in any direction she wanted, sometimes curves. But who would expect better at four from anyone than a potential grand master?

On a shelf inside the house we saw a jigsaw, Cute Pets, and - again in English - a challenge to form three-letter words. Lililee was in good hands.

I wish I'd asked the woman's name. I asked the word order in Sinhalese. "Do you say I see a dog or I a dog see?"

"I see a dog." Then she laughed and said that, no, she didn't.

"I've never thought of it before. It's just the language I speak. It's 'I a dog see', not like in English.

"And do you say 'a big dog' or 'a dog big'?"

"A big dog," she said.

I told her that, in French, the adjective could come before or after a noun but sometimes with a change of meaning. Un homme grand is not the same as un grand homme.

That possibility had never occurred to her. She was astonished. Most people wouldn't be but it was a sign of her intelligence that she was.

Sri Lanka has been independent since 1948 but some of the post boxes still celebrate the last king

The ride from there was a mix of unsurfaced roads past buffalo, past men waist-deep in a lake they hoped was full of fish, of narrow path roads surfaced in concrete or stone-studded tar, and a few kilometres of busy road.

I can't say much in praise of the place we're at tonight, although it's clean and comfortable. We didn't plan to eat here. Instead, we walked into town to the greetings of those on the way and ate rotis and drank sweet milky tea in a café in which the walls suggested it had once been a motorcycle repair shop.

Question of the day: why do some tuk-tuks carry a symbolic spade?

Traffic here runs easily and efficiently and we have never felt in danger. We have never been run off the road, as others have reported from India.

The tooting can get on your nerves. But it is a warning of approach and then of greeting. Everybody gets it, not just cyclists.

The smallest and most self-important are the tuk-tuk drivers. Their three small wheels and handlebar steering let them slide through small gaps, which can be alarming, but they have no more interest in an accident than we do.

Now and then they can be over-ambitious. Steph was riding towards our lunchtime café, the one where we met the long-nailed estate agent, when a tuk-tuk driver behind her tooted it was imperative that he pass. And he did, without any risk to Steph. His mistake was to do it on a blind bend and on the wrong side of the road. His downfall was that a brown-uniformed policeman chanced to be there. The tuk-tuk therefore passed Steph but not me, brought low between us by the imperative gesture of a raised hand.

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