‘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.
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.