She talked me into several jabs and a fizzy drink for cholera. Disease prevention dealt with, I asked Lydia what gifts to bring. The nun’s feet were dry and cracked, she said. They’d appreciate soap and coconut body butter. Sweets, pens and mini torches (with batteries) for the boy monks. She asked if I’d bring her singlet top and sarong for the hotel pool. Remembering how she covered her arms when she came home from the monastery, I took this as a hopeful sign.
As for her teacher/guru, he could do with a new pair of maroon sheepskin slippers, size 9, she said, then sent a photo of the slippers she had in mind. I couldn’t find maroon scuffs anywhere, so Katharine and I went to a shop that made them to order. When I explained the circumstances, the shoemaker nodded wisely.
‘I’ve met monks,’ he said. ‘I went to a lot of monasteries in Asia until I realised they were just like the Greek Orthodox churches I grew up with. Bowing, lighting candles and praying. It’s all the same.’
He went out the back to find a sample of maroon leather. The colour was perfect. He recommended lining the slippers with the darkest fleece because ‘they go barefoot most of the time’. Monks have harsh lives, he said, and it’s tougher for them when they get older. He’d once made sheepskin boots for an elderly Tibetan monk whose feet got terribly cold.
‘Asian monks are trained to be very tough mentally,’ he added. ‘I had one in Thailand who used to hit me. He’d yell at me to get down on the floor. You can’t argue with them. They see the world from their perspective and that’s how it is. They’re not open to looking at it any other way.’
I told him what size we needed and paid the deposit.
‘Lots of people leave Buddhism because they realise they’re just sitting there observing life, not living it,’ he added. ‘Don’t worry about your daughter.’
Easy for him to say.
‘The slippers will be ready tomorrow. Would you like to meet my monk?’ the man asked, guiding us to the front of his shop and parting a row of moccasins on the second shelf.
Curled asleep in the shadows was a large tabby cat.
‘She’s seventeen years old and she knows everything. She tells me when to calm down and she knows when I’m sick. She talks to me all the time. When she’s hungry she winks at me.’
We admired the sleeping cat together for a while.
‘I don’t need those monks when I can have this cat,’ he said.
I wondered if some day Lydia might feel the same about Jonah. It didn’t seem likely.
Following advice from a well-travelled friend I visited the chemist for orange pills to block me up in case I got diarrhoea and yellow ones for the opposite effect, if necessary.
Next stop was an outdoor shop redolent with canvas and insect repellent. Philip adored those places but I’d spent my life avoiding them.
A Man vs. Wild type greeted me. ‘You’re going where?’ he asked.
He asked me to repeat the name of my destination, and was perplexed when told why I was going there.
He’d camped in Namibia, and we exchanged information about mosquitoes. Nasty buggers, he said, then talked me into buying a full-sized mosquito net soaked in repellent as well as a smaller net to go over my hat. Man vs. Wild had been grateful for his silk sleeping-bag liner (also impregnated with insecticide) in Namibia, so I bought one of those too. And while I was at it, some debugging powder to soak my clothes in. It was a major pesticide binge for someone who’d spent their adult years shopping organic.
Lydia had told me that a halogen torch to strap around my head was essential for power cuts (more importantly, to fend off the rat and to get to the loo during the night). I added a camping pillow (presumably no sheets meant no pillows), a fancy-looking tic remover and brightly coloured mosquito-repelling wristbands.
‘Enjoy,’ said Man vs. Wild, loading my stuff into bags.
He can’t have meant it.
Jonah was intrigued when I got home and spread my wares out on the table. He dabbed his nose in the packages, savouring the unfamiliar perfumes.
Katharine, on the other hand, was appalled.
‘Please tell me you’re not going to wear a hat with a mosquito net!’ she groaned.
‘It’ll be in Sri Lanka. You won’t have to see.’
‘But Mum, it’s sooooo uncool!’
Following Man vs. Wild’s instructions, I took the mosquito net into the back garden and draped it over garden loungers to air for twenty-four hours.
Jonah’s calming medicine wasn’t working so well as my departure approached. With his usual impeccable instincts about people’s comings and goings, he was getting clingy. Katharine took him outside for a walk on his lead in the back garden. Glancing up from the kitchen bench, I saw the mosquito net floating sideways like a ghost on a mission. Jonah had caught it between his teeth and was dragging it away.
On the night of 9 February, before I was due to fly out, Jonah deluged the curtains in the Marquis de Sade room. My nearly packed suitcase was mercifully spared.
With his jaw set, Philip unhooked the curtains to soak them in a bucket in the laundry. It was no time for ultimatums.
I reminded Philip it was Jonah’s first crime since Christmas.
That night I ran through my checklist – gifts, sheets, towels, pillow, clothes (mostly white to conform to monastery requirements), long white socks and Marcel Marceau gloves (to repel insects), mosquito nets, torch, toilet paper, antiseptic wipes, plus enough pills and potions to fill a chemist’s shop.
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.