Dusty and sweaty, I lowered myself on to a plastic chair covered with gold fabric. Not a word was said, but I later found out that seat was reserved for monks only.
A ginger kitten trotted toward me and rubbed against my ankle. As it gazed up at me through amber eyes, I thought of Jonah and wondered how he’d enjoy monastic life. Jonah’s personality was so pervasive I saw him everywhere these days, even in the eyes of racehorses and wild animals. His beauty and intensity seemed to be part of every animal.
‘What a lovely kitten!’ I said.
‘It’s not a kitten, it’s a cat,’ Lydia explained quietly. ‘The nuns found her mewing in the forest eight years ago. She’s had several litters, but none survived. She’s vegetarian.’
A vegetarian cat? I didn’t like to say anything. Maybe she was a high-minded feline. Or she was just conforming to monastery rules.
‘What’s her name?’
‘Puss. Just Puss.’
The van driver said goodbye and bowed deeply to both nuns. To my great embarrassment, he then turned and bowed just as deeply to me. Heat prickled up my neck. I must’ve been blushing.
‘It’s what we do for the oldest person present,’ the senior nun explained.
Looking at her, it was impossible to tell how old she was – thirty or forty? She had one of those unlined ecclesiastical faces. I later discovered she was just two years younger than me – we were closer in the walking-frame stakes than I’d thought.
Bow to people – just because they’re old? It was a complete reversal of cultural priorities.
‘Old people bring many blessings,’ she explained with a radiant smile.
My first day in Sri Lanka had been filled with so many unfamiliar experiences I was beginning to feel like Alice in Wonderland. Strangest of all, coming from a culture that worships youth and detests grey hair, was to be actually revered for having a few wrinkles. Not that I liked to think of myself as ancient, just mature with a chance of wisdom.
Once the driver had handed over my suitcase, apologised again for the van breaking down, and left, Lydia escorted me up some outdoor steps to our rooms. Too weary to take much in, I registered apricot walls, a bare light bulb, a table with a white plastic chair and a bed with a blue mosquito net hovering over it.
The air was thick and warm. Lydia opened the windows, saying she hadn’t had any trouble from mosquitoes in her room next door. Just as she was about to explain where to find the bathroom, we were plunged into darkness. The senior nun glided into the room with a lit candle creating a halo around her.
‘It’s just an electricity cut, Sister Helen,’ she said, placing the candle on the table and floating out the door again. The candle promptly went out and fell on the floor.
‘Did you bring a head torch?’ Lydia asked.
There was a dull thud. Lydia assured me it was just her tripping over the candle.
Once our halogen lights were strapped around our heads we lit up like glow-worms. I followed Lydia’s silhouette outside on to the balcony, then around a corner over a potentially treacherous hump to what she tactfully described as a ‘French-style’ toilet – i.e. tiled floor with a hole in the ground, plus a bucket and scrubbing brush; flushing mechanisms non-existent. Compared to this, the lavatory in Kuala Lumpur had been the pinnacle of hygiene technology. What a prissy, screwed-up fool I’d been twenty-four hours ago!
I decided the hole in the ground was manageable providing it wasn’t a breeding ground for scorpions. Actually, even if it was I wasn’t about to go and pee in the jungle among snakes and whatever else was lurking out there. For the next few days it was going to be my hole in the ground – and Lydia’s and whoever else had claim to it. I was simply going to have to learn to use a bucket and scrubbing brush.
Back downstairs I showered under a dribble of tepid water with a large cockroach for a friend. As the grime of the day trickled away, I decided it was one of the best showers of my life.
It was intriguing to see how simply Lydia had lived for weeks, sometimes months, at a time. My bedroom was identical to hers, the bed just a mattress on plywood about the right length for a ten-year-old boy. Once smoothed down with sheets from home and the travel pillow it looked incredibly inviting. After a day playing human tumbleweed inside the van, I was grateful for its stillness.
Lydia brought mugs of tea, so hot and strong they almost passed as soup. With trepidation, I produced a small parcel from my suitcase and handed it to her.
‘Wow!’ she said, holding up the singlet top so the diamonds twinkled in the shadows. ‘Calvin Klein! How exciting!’
Her delight at the crass glitziness of the garment was wonderful.
After a while, Lydia kissed me goodnight and said to knock on her door if I needed her. Alone in my room with my head torch, I smiled at the electronic bleeping coming from her room. In these strange surroundings it was reassuring she had the same old quirks – like forgetting to turn her alarm clock off, and tripping over things.
Outside, the night had turned black as onyx. I’d naively assumed darkness in the jungle would mean silence, but a hypnotic chorus of male chanting echoed across the valley. The sound resonated through me, carrying me back through generations to anonymous forebears who lived before the Industrial Revolution, the Age of Enlightenment and the Renaissance.
After the chanting ended, other more insistent noises took over. Lowering myself on to the bed, I heard crickets (several types), birds, frogs, dogs and an unidentified range of creatures that trilled, squawked, honked, clicked, whistled, quacked and chirped. Competing loudly against each other, they took me back still further to a time when the prospect of evil spirits was feasible.
After a while, unnerved by the spooky symphony, I sprang off the bed and reached for my iPhone. A clearly pixelated image of Jonah draped like a beret over Philip’s head flashed to life once I pressed a button. I was relieved it still worked. For a moment I’d imagined I’d slipped into another century.
By the light of my head torch, I dug my earplugs out of my toilet bag, thanking whoever was CEO of the heavens right now that I’d remembered to bring the orange plugs of sanity. Next, I counted out my nut bars. Two for each night. I hoped they’d get me through. If not, I’d just have to regard the monastery as a fat farm.
Sifting through my carefully thought out luggage, I felt ridiculous. Almost everything I’d brought for ‘protection’ was proving useless. I draped the pesticide-soaked net over the window in case Lydia was being optimistic about mosquitoes. As for the silk liner, mozzie bands, Marcel Marceau gloves, knee-length white socks and hat net – I needn’t have bothered. The blocking and unblocking pills languished inside their packets. I was almost hoping I’d meet a tic so the tic remover hadn’t been a waste of cabin space.
Still, I thought, easing cautiously back on the bed in case it was more fragile than it looked, the trip wasn’t over. There was plenty of time for things to go wrong. Even through the earplugs, I could hear the screeching jungle – but was too tired to care.
I’d hardly fallen asleep when I was woken by the sound of a woodpecker drilling a tree. After a while, I realised it wasn’t a woodpecker at all, but a drum roll – the monks’ morning wake-up call. Soon after, their eerie chanting began. Using harmonies even Schoenberg couldn’t have dreamt up, their mahogany voices drifted across the jungle canopy. The sound was from another world – music a shoal of fish might make if they could sing.
Pink light filtered through the curtains. Over more than three decades, motherhood had taken me to all sorts of places – from pinnacles of joy in maternity wards to utter desolation at a graveside. Through all those years I’d never imagined it would bring me to a remote monastery in Sri Lanka.
I was relieved that the monks hadn’t issued an invitation to attend the pre-dawn chanting. Maybe it was a male-only thing. Monastery life didn’t seem to encourage mingling of the sexes. The monks were housed across the hill well away from the nuns’ accommodation.