Helen Brown - After Cleo

Eyes glowed along the roadside. When the driver asked them for directions they shook their heads or vanished into the jungle. A bus hurtled down the hill, nearly tossing us into the chasm. While both drivers stopped to regain their composure, the bus driver told us we were on the right road, and to keep going up.

Near the summit, a well-lit sign for the hotel shone reassuringly. A figure slid out from the shadows and approached our car; the driver wound down his window. The man tried to give him a piece of paper, but the driver put his foot down and charged up the rest of the hill.

‘These people are dangerous,’ he said. ‘He wants us to find someone in the hotel who probably doesn’t exist. He’s selling drugs. He’ll have us all killed. They’ll call the police and we’ll end up in the same cell. Two Sri Lankans and two foreigners.’

As we finally lurched into the hotel grounds, I was relieved beyond words. I prepared to bid farewell to the monk and his driver, but they said they had time for refreshments before leaving.

Inside, I revelled in the muzak, the unnatural glow of the swimming pool, and the staff uniforms with their pseudo references to Sri Lankan traditional dress.

As we sat down at a table, in my dazed state I noticed how versatile monastic robes are. They can look just at home in the lobby of a flash hotel as in the depths of a forest monastery.

After we’d had some tea, the monk cleared his throat. I was too tired and disoriented to imagine he might be about to say something important.

‘Lydia,’ he said, radiating his charismatic smile. ‘If you want to come to the monastery and be ordained as a nun you can stay and be the meditation teacher.’

Suddenly alert, I leaned forward and waited for Lydia’s response. This was the moment I’d travelled half the world for. If she was going to say yes, it would be okay. I might even get a shack in Kandy and spend several months a year in this crazy, beautiful place. But still . . .

Lydia stirred her lime and soda with her straw.

The monk, the driver and I waited for her to say something.

But, apart from the clink of champagne glasses at the next table and Elton John over the loudspeakers – there was silence.

Reverence

An enemy is sometimes a friend in disguise

The young man who cleaned our hotel room fell violently in love with Lydia. When she first spoke to him in Sinhalese, his eyebrows rose and parted like a drawbridge. His amazement melted into delight, solidifying into passion when he discovered she’d spent months living devoutly in a monastery.

When Lydia’s new admirer wasn’t lingering in the corridor outside our room, he was inventing an endless list of excuses for tapping on the door. The tea bags had forgotten to replenish themselves. Our pillows weren’t straight. The curtains needed closing.

Though he was very good-looking and charming, he was approximately six inches shorter than Lydia. However, the difference in their heights did nothing to dampen his ardour. Like her, he said, he was Buddhist and, he added earnestly, hoped to visit Australia some day.

Elvis was in nappies the last time I’d witnessed such a severe affliction of lovesickness. I warned Lydia the signs were blazingly obvious, but she shrugged me off. Since her religious phase had begun, she’d lost any ability to read mating signals. Any men who looked at her with interest were simply ignored. Unlike her sister, she was immune to bulging biceps and aftershave. While she could speak four languages, she’d become flirt illiterate.

Sinhalese is notoriously complicated. About the only word I could recognise was ‘oh’ for ‘yes’. Lydia and the young man chatted animatedly saying ‘oh’ and nodding a lot. Feeling like a spare incense stick in an ashram, I asked what they were talking about.

‘It’s Poya day,’ Lydia said, as if I should have known. ‘Full moon is a special day on the Buddhist calendar. It’s the best time to visit the Tooth Temple.’

The young man smiled in a besotted fashion at Lydia and promised that while we were away at the Tooth Temple he would do ‘something special’ with our room. He then excused himself and wheeled his trolley of forgetful tea bags down the corridor.

‘What does he mean something special ?’ I asked Lydia. ‘Is he kinky?’

‘Don’t worry about it,’ she sighed, inspecting my red linen shirt. ‘Just change your clothes. We’ll need to wear white.’

Thinking the religious part of my adventure was over, I’d scrunched all the white clothes in the bottom of my suitcase. Oh well. The crinkled look was so far out it was probably in.

Yet another demented tuk-tuk driver took us on a thrill ride over pot-holes the size of craters down the rutted precipice into town. He stopped outside different shops every now and then, explaining that this was the place he and his family bought all their gemstones/antiques/designer-label clothes and if we’d like to go inside and look around he would happily wait for us. Lydia explained this was common practice with tuk-tuk drivers. They’d revisit the store later to collect a percentage of anything we’d spent.

She waved him on good-naturedly, keen to get to the Tooth Temple before the day’s heat set in and the crowds became overwhelming. I hadn’t appreciated the importance of the Temple of the Sacred Tooth Relic in Kandy. Housing a tooth (or more accurately, the remains of one) that once belonged to Buddha himself, the temple is one of the most religiously significant places in all of Sri Lanka.

The incisor was wrenched from Buddha’s funeral pyre in 543 BC and smuggled to the island in the hair of a princess in the fourth century AD. Whoever holds the tooth relic is said to have the right to rule the country. Because of its importance, the Tooth Temple has been bombed several times, most recently in 1998 when eleven people were killed in a suicide truck explosion. The buildings have been restored every time, so they give no hint of a troubled past.

Every Sri Lankan Buddhist aims to make a pilgrimage to the Tooth Temple at least once in their lifetime. Though Lydia had been many times before, she had never been on Poya day.

Rising above limpid Kandy Lake, the Temple buildings and royal palace complex were every bit as imposing as I’d expected. Thousands of people, almost all dressed in white, thronged toward the entrance.

I’ve always been claustrophobic, which is one of the reasons I stay away from rock concerts and footy games. When I saw the Tooth Temple crowd, I toyed with the idea of sitting under a tree with a cool drink while Lydia went inside and merged with the multitude. But I’d stared down other phobias during this trip. I could surely conquer one more.

We hired a guide, took off our shoes at the door, and shuffled up a broad marble staircase. Crammed against so many others in stifling heat, I felt the beginnings of a panic attack. I concentrated on staying calm – it was essential to maintain dignity; for my daughter’s sake, if nothing else.

‘Keep moving with the people,’ our guide instructed repeatedly, his tone reassuringly matter-of-fact.

My shirt turned clammy and clung to my back. A rivulet of sweat trickled down my cheek as Lydia bought three white lotus blossoms for offerings to Buddha. She handed one to me, and one to our guide. Clutching the flower, he stared at the floor, embarrassed. A security guard laughed and teased him.

I dropped my flower and stooped to pick it up.

‘No! You mustn’t do that!’ snapped the guard. ‘The offerings must be clean and pure, not off the ground.’

At the top of the stairs we were shepherded into an open space interspersed with columns. Brightly coloured banners hung from a ceiling made of gold lotus flowers. Musicians wearing white caps and sarongs, the latter tied with red sashes, stepped into a shaft of light. Drums set up a mesmerising rhythm. Wind instruments wheedled out a haunting melody – music to trance by.