Helen Brown - After Cleo

‘We will now go straight to the tea plantation,’ the monk added.

‘You can’t possibly take us,’ I said, thinking wistfully of sinking into a hotel swimming pool. ‘You need rest.’

But the monk would have none of it. We climbed back into the car to wind on up and over more hills to Mackwoods Tea Plantation which had ‘Over 165 Years of Excellence’.

At the tea plantation car park we had our first glimpse of tourists. Staring out of their white flabby bodies through designer sunglasses, they resembled creatures from another planet. Disgorging from buses and hire cars in khaki shorts, stout walking shoes and 50 UV sun hats, they huddled in fearful groups. In almost any other circumstances I’d have been just like them.

Travelling in some kind of cultural submarine, they snatched bite-sized glimpses of the sights around them before turning their attention back to each other, reassuring themselves theirs was the Real World.

They worked themselves into a frenzy inside a shop selling alluringly packaged tea, as if there might soon be a world shortage. In the canteen they drained pots of tea and chocolate cake down their white saggy gullets. Hungry, always hungry for food and shopping.

In the Buddhist Wheel of Life, Hungry Ghosts are tormented by cravings that can never be fulfilled. Not fully alive, they’re incapable of appreciating the present moment and are therefore in a constant state of rage and desire. Whoever painted Hungry Ghosts with thin necks and bulging bellies must have been thinking of tourists.

Outside the canteen we saw a rarity in Sri Lanka – an overweight child. Pasty faced with eyes like raisins, the young boy waddled about in a brand-name T-shirt and a cap that was too small for him. Weighed down by the consumerist society he came from, he was a pitiful sight.

While tourists took photos of themselves buying tea, drinking tea and standing outside the tea factory, Lydia’s teacher started feeling much better. He was keen for us to embark on a guided tour of the factory, which exuded a sweet, trippy aroma.

A charming young woman explained the tea manufacturing process, which was surprisingly unencumbered by modern technology. It took less than twenty-four hours from leaf to packet. After admiring conveyor belts of green leaves destined to end up brewed in pots all over the world, we headed back to the car park.

While the others visited the bathrooms, the driver took me aside and fixed me with an earnest look. He would, he said, give me a house with furniture and every thing, if I could find a nice man to marry his daughter. I’d want for nothing if I could find her a man with a good heart.

Struggling to respond, I thought of all the women I knew, ages ranging from sixteen to seventy-five, who lamented the difficulty of finding a decent bloke, and assured him it was a universal problem.

With the tea tour completed, we assured the monk and driver we’d be more than happy to be taken to the hotel now.

‘But you must see Little Britain!’ the monk urged.

For a fleeting moment I thought he was referring to the television comedy.

‘Nuwara Eliya was built in the nineteenth century and it’s just like an English town with red brick buildings and hotels on a lake,’ he continued. ‘It’s very beautiful. And we must go to the botanical gardens.’

The car twisted and surged until we reached Little Britain. To complete the Englishness of it all, shafts of rain fell into the lake. We stopped at a handsome old hotel where Queen Victoria still reigned. A pianola in the lobby played Christmas carols even though it was February. Out in the garden, white-haired couples from Surrey swayed to Engelbert Humperdinck under a magnolia tree while women in saris and men in white jackets kept them topped up with tea.

The scene was unexpectedly touching. All participants, both foreign and local, were taking part in a game of Let’s Pretend the Empire Never Died. The British tourists were ecstatic to relive the glory of their ancestors. And locals, dressed in ethnic clothing, were content to nurture the foreigners’ fantasies with tea from a silver urn . . . for a price. As the skies opened they scurried for the shelter of the magnolia.

A man on the roadside assured us the botanic gardens were a thirty-minute drive out of town. Concerned it might be past dark by the time we got to our accommodation, I suggested perhaps we didn’t need to see the gardens. But the monk insisted they were unmissable.

On the way we encountered devastating flood damage. An entire hillside had collapsed into a valley. Bulldozers and diggers clawed the earth trying to reclaim a track that could eventually become a road again. For once the magic of travelling with a monk didn’t work. A man in a hard hat held up a stop sign and made us wait . . . and wait. About forty minutes later we were finally waved through and it was nearly 4 p.m. by the time we reached the garden gates, ten minutes away from closing time. The entrance fee would be US$10 per person plus an extra fee for the car. Daylight robbery by local standards. In no mood to argue if it meant we could head for Kandy straight after, I opened my wallet.

We glided past a white concrete pillar engraved with 1861, passing wrought iron gates and heading up the driveway. The gardens were lovely, but not much different in layout to any of that era. The monk and driver agreed it wasn’t the best time of year for flowers.

After a quick circuit of the gardens we were finally allowed to start the five-hour journey to the hotel. Lydia seized the opportunity to ask her teacher to bestow a Buddhist name on her.

I squirmed uncomfortably while he hummed and hawed, running through several options aloud. Lydia had been named after Dad’s mother, an equally determined woman by all accounts. A lot of thought had gone into calling her that. A name is a brand, a theme song. Hers was a good one with a worthy heritage. The ancient land of Lydia (in the region of modern Turkey) was the first country to produce coins. In the Bible there’s a Lydia who sells purple cloth.

If our daughter was going to reject everything else she’d grown up with, it was logical she’d bin her name. But surely if she was going to do something that serious, and take on a new one, it would happen in a temple, not in the back seat of a Japanese car? The monk eventually decided on the title Nanda, meaning Radiant Happiness. Maybe that’s who she was going to be from now on: Sister Radiant Happiness.

To my embarrassment, Lydia asked him for a Buddhist name for me. Then again, if he was comfortable bestowing a Buddhist name on someone who didn’t belong to the religion, maybe it wasn’t such a big deal. After more deliberating, he settled on Ramani, meaning One Whose Blessings Come from Nature. I was secretly pleased with it. Maybe the monk understood me better than I’d imagined.

As darkness enveloped the car, the driver’s eyelids became heavy in the rear-view mirror. He’d had a demanding day, what with kamikaze traffic on farcical roads and the mercy dash to hospital.

To keep him awake, Radiant Happiness and Blessing From Nature encouraged him to talk about his passion – cars. According to him, a Toyota was the best brand in Sri Lanka. He asked what sort of vehicle we had back home. He shook his head at the thought of a Subaru. Spare parts were too expensive. He’d once driven a Ferrari, but his dream car would be a Lamborghini.

‘By the way,’ he asked. ‘Do you know the way to this hotel?’

Thank Buddha for Google Earth. The instructions were clear, but as the driver said, we seemed to be on the safari route. As we reached the outskirts of Kandy the map told us to scale a cliff face. I’d heard the road to the hotel had been closed during the floods. Maybe this was an alternative approach. Jolting through the obsidian night, I was starting to tire of unpredictable adventures.