Helen Brown - After Cleo

In the back of the van without a seat belt, I was probably in more physical danger than I’d ever been. There was no point worrying. A monk and two nuns on board put the odds in our favour.

Halfway up a hill, we lurched to a halt outside a bank so I could withdraw money for the van hire. When the driver tried to start the vehicle up again it refused to budge. Helpful bank guards gave us a push start up the hill – heavy work, and beyond the call of duty. The engine heaved reluctantly to life.Triumphant and sweating, the guards waved us off.

Villages gave way to rice paddies, pineapple fields and stands of banana trees. Landscape unfurled in shades of green ranging from gloomy to fluorescent. As the road became steep, winding its way toward Kandy, the senior nun pulled her hood up over her head and slept like a caterpillar. The other nun’s smooth head gleamed in the steam-bath atmosphere of the van. The air-conditioning had died. Opening the windows would’ve been futile. Inside and out were equally hot and dusty.

We passed trees with leaves the size of dinner plates, a truck graveyard and a roadside box with Buddha radiating a pulsating neon light aura. Despite the intensity of the heat, I was taken by the colourful spontaneity of the place. Roadside advertising posters were refreshingly free of the semi-pornographic images we’ve become inured to in the West. Women were portrayed as wholesome and modestly dressed. Anorexic models didn’t get a look in.

The clutch jerked violently as the road became even steeper and more perilous. Toiling up a hill through a village selling nothing but pottery, I was reminded of the first time I visited Ubud in Bali twenty-five years earlier. People always say Bali was better twenty-five years ago. If they want to find out what it was like before tourism took over, they should visit Sri Lanka.

‘Sri Lankans don’t think of themselves as poor,’ said Lydia. ‘They just think Westerners are ridiculously rich. When you look at any distribution-of-wealth chart, that’s a fact.’

My spiritual daughter has a way of presenting things with surgical clarity sometimes. She was right. Compared to Sri Lankans we’re awash with wealth, yet we mentally impoverish ourselves focusing on what we don’t have.

The people of this flood-ridden, war-torn, tsunami-drenched island seemed to have a humanity the West had somehow lost in its consumerist thrall. I found myself wanting to share Sri Lanka with the world and protect it at the same time. If tourists swarmed there, the country would gain monetarily but potentially lose a lot.

The monk instructed our driver to pull over at a sweet shop for tea. After the internal massage my organs were getting from the road, it was a relief to stop and get my legs moving. Curious faces watched the monk, nuns, Lydia and I make our way to the sweet store.

My eyes took a while to adjust to the store’s darkened interior. The decor was stark, but the ambience was friendly. I felt immediately at home. It was a Sri Lankan version of Spoonful. We chose homemade sweets from a counter near the door and sat down on a bench. Overstaffed by Western standards, the service was impeccable. There was one person to bring our sweets, another to pour the tea, and at least three assistants to watch.

A photo of a stern, handsome man with a handlebar moustache glowered down from behind the counter. An older, even more distinguished version of him stood at the door. I tried a smile. His eyes flashed handsomely back.

We gorged ourselves on strong tea and delicious sweets. Mouth-wateringly nutty, the sesame sweets deserved to be world famous. Jaggery sweets made from unrefined whole cane sugar came a close second. As for the coconut ice, I was an expert connoisseur because Dad used to make it when we were kids. The sweet shop’s version, layered in lurid pink and white sprinkled with fruit, was the best I’d ever tasted.

Back in the van, our driver made a brave assault on the last few hills to Kandy. Though he was willing, the clutch was not. It screeched, clunked and finally expired on a steep bend. Hot and tired, despite all the sugar we’d consumed, we piled on to the side of the road while the van driver and curious onlookers stared into the bowels of the engine.

An amiable cafe owner invited us to sit at tables with red and white checked cloths. We ordered cans of Coke and waited. The monk produced his mobile phone and called a mechanic. Flies circled above our heads and mosquitoes buzzed around our ankles. I reached in my handbag for the high-grade insect killer only to find its pump was missing. I’d brought it all the way from Australia and it didn’t work!

Under normal circumstances I’d have freaked out, wondering: How long would it take to get a mechanic? Would he know how to fix the van? Would we still be in this cafe in three days’ time? Was I going to get one of those mosquito diseases and die? But it was pointless worrying or looking at my watch. I had no control and therefore no responsibility. The sensation was surprisingly liberating. I hadn’t felt this free and on the edge of things since I’d travelled alone in Samoa in my twenties.

As Lydia and I sipped our Cokes and chatted, she was warmer and more open than she’d been for years. She wanted to hear about everyone at home – how Annie’s crawling was coming along, and if Jonah’s ‘little problem’ was still driving us nuts. Heartened, I realised that if she was going to become a nun and live in this country she’d still want to stay connected to us.

More time passed as we sat in the cafe on the road to Kandy. Hours and minutes, lateness or earliness, became irrelevant. If we were still stranded there at nightfall, the owner might be kind enough to let us sleep on the floor. And that would be okay.

The mechanic miraculously showed up and managed to fix the clutch with minimum fuss. In the meantime, the monk had been busy on his phone. He’d just found out he had important business in Kandy. A car collected him and he disappeared in a plume of dust, leaving the nuns and us to complete the final leg to the monastery with our apologetic driver. I’d hoped the monk might spare some time so we could have a serious discussion about Lydia’s future. Maybe tomorrow.

Sri Lanka is remote by many people’s standards. A lot of those living in Colombo regard Kandy as out of the way. I was soon to learn that most people in Kandy would have difficulty locating the simple forest monastery that was our destination.

Once we’d passed the turn-off to Kandy, the road became even narrower and bumpier, winding around the edge of a river canyon.

‘Just pretend you’re on a four-wheel-drive tourist excursion for this part,’ said Lydia as we veered off the main street up a perpendicular track. I gripped the side of the van as it carved through dense jungle. We were rocking so violently, I wondered if my abdominal scar might spasm. But anxiety would be counter productive. People in this country had far greater concerns.

The driver beeped his horn for a woman with a child on her hip, a man in a sarong and another carrying a sack of flour on his head. Their smiles lit the dark green gloom. We passed a sign for ‘Computer Repairing’ which seemed incongruous in the depths of the jungle. After we’d negotiated a hairpin bend and lurched over a particularly large hump, the senior nun turned to me, her eyes ablaze.

‘Look, Sister Helen!’ she cried. ‘There’s our mountain!’

If we’d been in a movie, heavenly voices would’ve surged over the background music just then. The heroine (Doris Day? Julie Andrews? No, Meryl Streep!), her eyes sparkling with tears, would have raised her face to the clouds.

Monastic

Old people bring many blessings

Laden with tropical growth, Boulder Mountain rose sharply above us. Its slope appeared to be held together by enormous stones, many of them larger than elephants. While a few creepers had the audacity to scramble over them, most of the rocks were bare and lined with age. Immovable sculptures of the forest, the boulders were both beautiful and forbidding in the heavy shadows of evening.