Helen Brown - After Cleo

Then I remembered the monastery’s food quota of two vegetarian curries a day! No way would I survive on that. I’d be gnawing the woodwork by 8 p.m. Lucky the supermarket was still open. Two packets of nut bars and I was ready.

Next morning, I put on my compression socks and the moonstone earrings that’d been a birthday gift from Lydia. As Philip wheeled my suitcase to the car, Katharine stood on the verandah holding Jonah, lifting one of his front paws to wave goodbye.

‘He’s not purring,’ she said.

Island of Tears

‘Daughter am I in my mother’s house, but mistress in my own.’ Rudyard Kipling

As the plane shuddered off the tarmac, I experienced an exhilarating combination of fear and liberation. Whatever lay ahead, whether it was witnessing Lydia’s taking of robes or an inconvenient death from some romantic-sounding disease, there was no turning back.

I slid my shoes off and dozed, picked at a meal, watched a movie and checked the flight monitor. We were still over Australia! The country below resembled a rock pool – brown with flecks of blue and green. It was surprisingly beautiful.

The size of my shoes alongside those belonging to the tidy Malaysian man sitting next to me was embarrassing. To him, I must’ve seemed a mountainous, unruly woman. Yet he was friendly and accommodating.

Toward the end of the flight my new-found Malaysian friend passed me his business card, possibly to thank me for not rolling over and crushing him in my sleep. Together we stepped out of the plane into the spa-pool heat of Kuala Lumpur, where I had a twenty-four-hour stop-over. Coloured lights festooned the skyscrapers for Chinese New Year. People kept asking in concerned tones if I was alone. In restaurants waiters hurried to find newspapers and magazines to ease the non-existent discomfort of being a solitary woman.

One thing I’d deliberately forgotten to pack was Lydia’s old singlet top. In a glamorous department store I found one with a Calvin Klein logo twinkling in fake diamonds in the lower left-hand corner. A risky choice. I hoped there was enough of the old Lydia left to appreciate the glitz.

In the same shopping centre I visited the loos. A sign said ‘Queue Here’. The five cubicles were silently occupied. When I finally gained access I found out why. The toilet was a glistening white throne with foot holes either side of the bowl. There was no seat. It seemed to require removal of all the clothing on my lower body. Prickly with defeat, I bolted for the hotel. If I couldn’t handle a pristine loo in Malaysia, how on earth was I going to manage the plumbing of a Sri Lankan monastery?

‘Is the music the right temperature for you?’ asked the pretty masseuse at the hotel when I lay down for a much-needed rub.

A few minutes later I was wishing I’d avoided the ‘Traditional’ massage, thinking the only reason some massages are called ‘Traditional’ is that they’re too violent to become mainstream. My masseuse tugged my toes till they clicked out of their sockets. In one split second of agony my shoe size went up another notch.

The stop-over had been recommended to help ease jet lag, but staggering on to the midnight flight to Colombo I was still disoriented. In line behind young men wearing beach hats and the inevitable tattoos, I noticed their legs were hairy but their beards were barely perceptible. They smelt of bubble gum and brandished plastic bags of duty-free vodka. The world was their kindergarten. As they exchanged indecipherable banter, I thought the cabin announcement mentioned Columbia. Such was my dazed state that I momentarily imagined I’d made a mistake and was heading for the cocaine capital of South America to star in Banged Up Abroad .

I fell asleep watching the racehorse movie Secretariat and woke to the sound of the plane’s engines changing. The streetlights of Colombo were strung like pearls along the coast below. The country that had entranced my daughter and been witness to so much pain over the years was surprisingly peaceful.

The captain apologised for the bumpy landing. He said it was due to flood damage on the runway. I’d been too busy examining the other planes at the airport to notice. They were decorated like birds in an ancient painting. An illuminated Buddha statue glowed through the velvet darkness. We seemed to have landed in an exotic fable.

Adjusting my watch to three in the morning, I waited for the cabin crew to open the doors. With the monastery four hours’ drive away along difficult roads, Lydia and I had agreed I’d wait in an airport hotel until she reached Colombo around lunchtime. Someone from the hotel was supposed to collect me from the arrivals hall. I hoped he’d be out there already holding a sign with my name on it.

Stepping into the terminal, I steeled myself for the throngs of hustlers I’d encountered in places like Bali and Mumbai, but the atmosphere was surprisingly calm. I made my way past quiet, watchful faces – family groups, women wearing jewel-coloured saris – and another Buddha statue. A group of men held up a forest of placards emblazoned with names. My heart sank. Mine wasn’t among them.

A grandfatherly chap with distinguished white whiskers came to my rescue, and guided me to a car outside. The night was hot, but not unbearably soggy. Preparing to experience the perfumes of Sri Lanka, I opened my lungs. All I got was a waft of jet fuel.

The floods hadn’t been too bad around Colombo, the old man said, but in the East and North of the country it had been like another tsunami.

‘You’ve had terrible floods in Queensland too, have you not?’ he asked gently.

I was momentarily speechless. Certainly, the Queensland floods had been devastating, but nothing on the scale Sri Lanka had been suffering. It was incredibly gracious of him to express concern for people in a more fortunate country than his own.

‘Yes, but we didn’t have a million people lose their homes the way you have,’ I replied.

I was surprised the old gentleman was so well informed about our part of the world. Australia’s media had all but ignored the Sri Lankan emergency.

He hailed a car and a young driver sprang out to take my luggage.

‘The main road has been closed for renovations,’ the older man explained. ‘You will be taking the back roads. It’ll take about ten minutes to get to the hotel. Don’t be alarmed.’

Inside my head I store a list of famous potential last words: ‘Red light? What red light?’ ‘It’s not loaded.’ ‘These snakes aren’t poisonous.’ Climbing into the unmarked car I added a new one to the list: ‘Don’t be alarmed.’

In the darkness it was impossible to have any idea where we were going. We swung past a military checkpoint, another Buddha statue (Sri Lankans put the Italians to shame in the religious shrine department) and a wide stretch of road that appeared to be barricaded off. Presumably that was the main road the old man had mentioned.

We veered into a narrow street lined with advertisements for cough lollies. Dogs and people on bikes were just visible in the shadows. I wondered what they were doing up at this hour.

The car turned sharply and plunged into a narrow, winding road with no streetlights. We approached a bridge – not much wider than a footpath and half broken. The driver slowed down, as if he was evaluating the risk – then suddenly put his foot down and charged forward. Once we’d rattled across the bridge, the driver glanced over his shoulder and smiled victoriously. Craning my neck, I peered down at a silver ribbon of water shimmering far below. We appeared to have cleared a ravine.

In pitch darkness at 3.30 in the morning in the back streets of Colombo with a complete stranger driving an unmarked car, my thoughts turned to abduction. If I was being kidnapped, and my life was about to come to an end, I decided there wasn’t much to complain about. I’d had a good life – rich and wonderful in many ways. There’d been time to love, give birth to four fantastic children and experience joy, sorrow – and cats – in all their complexities.