Travels: Collected Writings, 1950-1993 Read online

  “But germs exist,” you expostulate. “You can see them under a microscope.” Your unruffled companion will reply: “For you they exist, therefore they can hurt you. For us there is only the will of Allah.” And that is the stone wall against which any such argument inevitably crashes. The heavy casualties of the cholera epidemic in 1944 could have been avoided if the Moroccans had not refused to report their cases to the authorities.

  Little by little, things do change. There is less vermin in the homes than there was in 1931; I can attest that DDT is exhibited in certain shops so someone must buy it. Yet the following passage from El H’aoudh, a somewhat simplified version of the Koranic laws written in Berber for Moroccans a few centuries ago, still makes perfectly good sense today: “One may be excused from Friday prayers and from praying with the Imam if there is a great deal of mud or if it is raining very hard. One may also be excused because of elephantiasis, leprosy or old age, or if one has no clothes to put on, or is waiting to be pardoned for a crime, or if one has eaten onions. These are valid excuses. A wedding feast is not an excuse, nor is blindness if one can feel one’s way to the mosque.”

  Fish Traps and Private Business

  Journal (1950); Their Heads Are Green, 1963

  WELIDENIYA ESTATE, CEYLON, MAY, 1950

  THE LANDSCAPE IS RESTLESS – a sea of disorderly hills rising sharp bumps with a thin, hairy vegetation that scarcely covers them. Most of this is rubber, and the rubber is wintering. Mr. Murrow, the planter, says that in another week or two the present brownish-yellow leaves will be replaced by new ones. Where the rubber stops the tea begins. There the earth looks raw. The rocks show between the low bushes; here and there a mulberry tree with lopped branches, planted for shade.

  On top of one of these steep humps is the bungalow, spread out all along the crest. Directly below to the southwest, almost straight down, is the river with its sandy banks. But in between, the steep declivity is terraced with tea, and by day the voices of the Tamil pickers are constantly audible. At night there are fires outside the huts on the opposite bank of the river.

  The air is hot and breathless, the only respite coming in the middle of the afternoon, when it rains. And afterward, when it has stopped, one has very little energy until night falls. However, by then it is too late to do anything but talk or read. The lights work on the tea-factory circuit. When everyone is in bed, Mr. Murrow calls from under his mosquito net through the open door of his bedroom to a Tamil waiting outside on the lawn. Five minutes later all the lights slowly die, and the house is in complete darkness save for the small oil lamps on the shelves in the bathrooms. Nothing is locked. The bedrooms have swinging shutters, like old-fashioned barroom doors, that reach to within two feet of the floor. The windows have no glass – only curtains of very thin silk. All night long a barefoot watchman shouldering a military rifle pads round and round the bungalow. Sometimes, when it is too hot to sleep, I get up and sit out on the verandah. Once there was no air even there, and I moved a chair to the lawn. On his first trip around, the watchman saw me, and made a grunting sound which I interpreted as one of disapproval. It may not have been; I don’t know.

  The nights seem endless, perhaps because I lie awake listening to the unfamiliar sounds made by the insects, birds and reptiles. By now I can tell more or less how late it is by the section of the nocturnal symphony that has been reached. In the early evening there are things that sound like cicadas. Later the geckos begin. (There is a whole science of divination based on the smallest details of the behavior of these little lizards; while the household is still up they scurry silently along the walls and ceiling catching insects, and it is only well on into the night that they begin to call out, from one side of the room to the other.) Still later there is a noise like a rather rasping katydid. By three in the morning everything has stopped but a small bird whose cry is one note of pure tone and unvarying pitch. There seem always to be two of these in the rain tree outside my room; they take great care to sing antiphonally, and the one’s voice is exactly a whole tone above the other’s. Sometimes in the morning Mrs. Murrow asks me if I heard the cobra sing during the night. I have never been able to answer in the affirmative, because in spite of her description (“like a silver coin falling against a rock”), I have no clear idea of what to listen for.

  We drink strong, dark tea six or seven times a day. No pretext is needed for Mr. Murrow to ring the bell and order it. Often when it seems perfectly good to me, he will send it back with the complaint that it has been poorly brewed. All the tea consumed in the bungalow is top-leaf tea, hand-picked by Mr. Murrow himself. He maintains that there is none better in the world, and I am forced to agree that it tastes like a completely different beverage from any tea I have had before.

  The servants enter the rooms bowing so low that their backs form an arch, and their hands are held above their heads in an attitude of prayer. Last night I happened to go into the dining room a few minutes before dinner, and old Mrs. Van Dort, Mrs. Murrow’s mother, was already seated at her place. The oldest servant, Siringam, suddenly appeared in the doorway of the verandah leading to the kitchen, bent over double with his hands above his head, announcing the entrance of a kitchen maid bearing the dog’s meal. The woman carried the dish to the old lady, who sternly inspected it and then commanded her in Singhalese to put it down in a corner for the animal. “I must always look at the dog’s food,” she told me, “otherwise the servants eat part of it and the poor dog grows thinner and thinner.”

  “But are the servants that hungry?”

  “Certainly not!” she cried. “But they like the dog’s food better than their own.”

  Mrs. Murrow’s son by a former marriage came to spend last night, bringing his Singhalese wife with him; she had already told me at some length of how she resisted the marriage for three years because of the girl’s blood. Mrs. Murrow is of the class which calls itself Burgher, claiming an unbroken line of descendency from the Dutch settlers of two centuries ago. I have yet to see a Burgher who looks Caucasian, the admixture of Singhalese being always perfectly discernible. It is significant that the Burghers feel compelled to announce their status to newcomers; the apparent reason is to avoid being taken for “natives.” The tradition is that they are Europeans, and one must accept it without question. The son is a tall, gentle man who wears a gray cassock and keeps his hands folded tightly all the time, a habit which makes him look as though he were prey to a constant inner anguish. He is a minister of the Anglican church, but this does not keep him from being of the extreme left politically. His joy is to stir up dissension among his parishioners by delivering sermons in which Communists are depicted as holding high posts in heaven. He has told me some amusing anecdotes of his life as a teacher in the outlying provinces before he was ordained. Of these the ones I remember have to do with the strange faculty the children have for speaking passable English without knowing the meaning of the words they use. One boy, upon being asked to answer which he would prefer to be, a tailor or a lawyer, was unable to reply. “You know what a tailor is, don’t you?” said Mr. Clasen. The boy said he did, and he also knew the functions of a lawyer, but he could not answer the question. “But why?” insisted Mr. Clasen, thinking that perhaps some recondite bit of Buddhist philosophy was about to be forthcoming. But the boy finally said, “I know tailor and I know lawyer, but please, sir, what is be?” Another boy wrote, “The horse is a noble animal, but when irritated will not do so.”

  When you ask a question of a Singhalese who does not know English, he is likely to react in a most curious fashion. First he looks swiftly at you, then he looks away, his features retreating into an expression of pleasant contemplation, as if your voice were an agreeable but distant memory that he had just recalled and thought it worthwhile to savor briefly. After a few seconds of giving himself up to this inward satisfaction he goes on about his business without ever looking your way again – not even if you insist, or wait a bit and make your inquiry afresh. You have become invisi
ble. At the resthouses in the country, where the members of the personnel feel they must put up some sort of front, they say, “Oh, oh, oh,” in a commiserating tone (“oh” is “yes”), as if they understood only too well, and were forbearing to say more for the sake of decorum. Then they wag their heads back and forth, from side to side, a gesture which reminds you of a metronome going rather too quickly, keeping their bright eyes on you, listening politely until you have finished speaking, whereupon they smile beautifully and walk away. The servants who do speak English insist upon calling you “master,” which is disconcerting because it seems to imply responsibility of some sort on your part. They also use the third person instead of the second: “Master wishing eat now?” The youngest generation, however, has almost unanimously adopted the more neutral “sir” (pronounced “sar”), as a substitute for the too colonial-sounding “master.”

  There is a long, thin, green adder that likes to lie in the sun on top of the tea bushes; one of these bit a woman recently while she was picking. Mr. Murrow hurried to the scene and, taking up a pruning knife, cut off the tip of her finger, applying crystals of potassium permanganate to the flesh. She was saved in this way, but as soon as she regained consciousness, she went to the police and filed a complaint, accusing Mr. Murrow of causing irreparable damage to her finger. When the investigator came to the estate, he heard the details of the case and told the woman that thanks to Mr. Murrow’s quick action she was still alive; without it she would have been dead. The woman’s husband, who was present at the hearing, jumped up and drew a knife on the investigator, but was prevented from hurting him. When they had subdued the man, he wailed across at the investigator: “You have no sense! I could have collected plenty of rupees for that finger, and I would have given you half.”

  The public toilets in the villages, instead of being marked Ladies or Women, bear signs that read: Urinals for Females.

  A sign on the side of a building in Akmimana: Wedding Cakes and other thing Supplied for Weddings in Convenient Times.

  Another, in Colombo: Dr. Rao’s Tonic — a Divine Drug.

  A Burgher who works in the travel agency of the Grand Oriental Hotel and who had seen me when I first arrived, said to me a few weeks later when I stopped in, “You’re losing your color.” “What?” I cried incredulously. “After all this time in the sun? I’m five shades darker than I was.” He looked confused, but continued patiently, “That’s what I say. You’re losing your color.”

  KADUWELA

  THE LUNAWA RESTHOUSE was a disagreeable place to stay, being directly opposite the railway station in the middle of a baking and unshaded patch of dried-up lawn. In the concrete cell I was given it was impossible to shut out the sounds made by the other guests, who happened to be extremely noisy. The room next to mine was occupied by a party of eight men, who spent the entire afternoon and evening giggling and guffawing. When I would walk past their door I could see them lying in their sarongs across the two beds which they had pushed together. In the dining room the radio never ceased blaring at maximum volume. The food was ghastly, and there was no mosquito net available for my bed and, therefore, no protection against the tiny insects that constantly brushed against my face in the dark, seeking to get under the sheet with me. When I finally got into the state of nerves they had been trying to induce, I jumped up, dressed and rushed out, to the horror of the boy lying on his mat across the front doorway. He too sprang up, went to an inner room to fetch the keeper, and together they cried out after me across the dark lawn: “Master going?”

  “Coming back, coming back!” I called, and began to walk quickly up the road toward the lagoon. When I got to the bridge I stood awhile. The water was absolutely still, and there were dozens of pinkish flames guttering in lamps placed just at the surface, each with its unmoving reflection. And each lamp illumined a complex scaffolding of bamboo poles; these pale constructions scattered across the black expanse of water looked like precarious altars, and the fact that I knew they were fish traps made them no less extraordinary, no less beautiful. To break the silence a drum began to beat on the far shore. Presently a man came riding by on a bicycle; as he passed me he turned his flashlight into my face. The sight of me standing in that spot startled him, and he pedaled madly away across the bridge.

  I walked on to Lunawa Junction, where I stood in the road listening to a radio in a corner “hotel” play Tamil music. (What the Singhalese call hotels are merely teahouses with three or four tables and a tiny space back of a screen or partition where there are mats on the floor for those who wish to rest.) People wandered past now and then and stared at me; I was clearly an object of great interest. Europeans never appear at night in such places. When I sat down on a culvert I was soon the center of a semicircle of men, some clad only in G-strings and with hair that reached halfway down their backs. It was no use talking to me in Singhalese, but they went right on trying. One who spoke English finally arrived and asked me if I would like to race him down the road. I declined, saying I was tired. This was true; it was after midnight, and I was beginning to wish there were some comfortable place in the neighborhood where I could lay my head. The English-speaking man then told me that they had all been asleep but had got up because someone had arrived with the news that a stranger was standing in the road.

  While I sat there doing my best to make some sort of polite conversation, three older men in white robes came by and, seeing the crowd, stopped. These were obviously of a higher social station, and they were most disapproving of what they saw. One of them, who had rapidly been delegated as spokesman, stepped forward, indicated the band of wild-eyed, long-haired individuals, and said: “Hopeless people.” I pretended not to understand, whereupon all three set to work repeating the same two words over and over, accenting equally each syllable. I was so fascinated with their performance that nearly all the nudists had disappeared into the dark before I realized they were leaving, and all at once I was sitting there facing only these three serious, chanting men. “Come,” said the leader, and he took me by the arm and helped me up and started me walking – I won’t say forcing me to walk, because his firmness was expressed with too much gentleness for that – but seeing to it that I did walk, with him and his friends, back to the road intersection where bats dipped in the air under the one street light. “Now you go to resthouse,” he said, showing that he knew more English than the two-word refrain which had sufficed him until then. But then a second later, “Hopeless people,” he sang, and the others, looking still more grave beneath the light, agreed with him once more. Lamely I protested that I should go back presently, when I felt like it, but they were adamant; it was clear that my personal desires were quite beside the point. They called to a boy who stood under a tree near the “hotel” and charged him to walk the mile with me back to the resthouse. For perhaps a minute I argued, half laughingly, half seriously, and then I turned and started up the road. They called good night and went on their way. The boy kept close beside me, partly out of fear, I imagine; and when I got to the bridge and stood still for a moment to look at the water and the lights, he pressed me to go on quickly, pretending there were crocodiles in the lagoon and that they came out of the water at night. I don’t think he believed it at all, but he wanted to accomplish his mission and get to the safety of the resthouse as fast as he could. Trees harbor spirits here; the older and larger ones have niches carved into their trunks where the people put long-burning altar candles. The flickering lights attract the spirits, like moths, and keep them from leaving the tree and doing harm beyond its immediate vicinity. At the resthouse the man and the boy were waiting up for me. My road companion had no intention of augmenting his ordeal by going back across the lagoon unaccompanied; he curled up on the floor of the verandah and spent the night there. The gigglers had gone to sleep and there was quiet at last, but the insects were more numerous and active than they had been earlier. I did not have a very successful night.

  Bowles included this image, captioned ‘Peasant, Centr
al Ceylon’ in Their Heads are Green. The ‘peasant’, and the men ‘clad only in G-strings’ mentioned in this piece, are probably Vedhas – descendants of the island’s indigenous tribal people (PB)

  I had already made arrangements to spend the next night at Homagama, where the resthouse is, or at least appears to be, somewhat superior. When the elderly resthouse keeper showed me his rooms there, he tried to get me to take an extension of the dining room, on the pretext that it would be quieter. The only other available room was next to his quarters, and that, he said apologetically, he was sure Master would not like at all. Since the room he was trying to give me had only three complete walls, the fourth being merely a wooden screen about five feet high over which I could see two gentlemen drinking ginger beer at a table, I unwisely decided upon the room adjoining his quarters. Once I was settled, with my luggage partially unpacked, and the servants had hung the mosquito net and brought in a very feeble oil lamp, I discovered my error. This room also was only a section of another room; in the part not inhabited by me a baby began to wail, and presently the voice of an extremely old woman rose in incantation. Whether it was a lullaby, a prayer, or merely a senile lamentation, I am still too unfamiliar with the culture of the land to tell. But it went on intermittently until dawn, when the sounds of the poultry, the crows in the mango trees, and the locomotives which passed by the doorway, blotted it out. Whenever the old lady would stop, the infant would wake her up; as soon as the baby ceased crying, she would start afresh and awaken the baby.

  In the morning I discovered that there was a third room but that it was due to be occupied any moment by what is euphemistically called a “honeymoon couple.” At six-thirty in the morning they arrived, and when they had left in the late afternoon, I was allowed to take it. It was vastly better, and I kept it for the next two nights, much to the keeper’s disgust, since he had to put all the couples that arrived during that time into the other rooms. Given the fact that by far the larger part of his personal revenue comes in the form of gratuities from such parties, it is understandable that he should like to provide them with the best accommodations. Another expression used by resthouse keepers to refer to their honeymoon couples is “private business.” Those concerned do not sign their names in the register, and for that privilege leave relatively large tips. The keeper at Kesbewa informed me that his rooms were all reserved for private business for the next six weeks.