One Writer's Life in Sri Lanka

Mirissa

I live in a fishing hamlet named Giragala on the eastern edge of a tiny
teacup bay named Mirissa on the south coast of Sri Lanka. Don't look for it
on the map, you won't find it. Giragala has only about 100 souls in it.
Mirissa itself is a collection of five hamlets, including Giragala. These
line the road from Sri Lanka's capital Colombo to the national wildlife
preserves on south coast, and to the Hindu pilgrimage sites on the southeast
of the island where they do fire-walking as a part of the really big
festivals.

The Perfect Setting

Mirissa is a perfect spot to write books. There are no highways, no
supermarkets, no laundromats, no doctors, no dentists, no cafes, no bars, no
hotels, no restaurants, no traffic jams (and indeed not much traffic period),
and just barely TV and radio. There is no running water, everyone has a well.
About two thirds of the homes have electricity, but fewer than ten percent
have telephones, and my house has the only Internet hookup in a radius of ten
miles.

On the other hand, I eat dinner every night fifty feet from the Indian Ocean.
When the moon is between the crescent stage and nearly full, its iridescent
reflection off the water is like silk on brushed silver. Since the nearest
land in any direction is Madagascar 3,500 miles to the southwest and
Australia 4,500 miles the other direction, the air is as clean as you will
find anywhere except maybe Antarctica, a quarter of the globe from here, due
south. It's a long swim.

Mirissa. A soft blue cove with a blond sand ribbon swillowing as her hair. If
ever I had a daughter, that's what I'd name her. Her eyes are the stars at
night and she wears palm groves for jewels and emerald hills for a tiara. Her
tidal moods are so mild that a dog can nap all day a few feet above her
waveprints and never have to worry. Morning with Mirissa is the only physical
experience to approach mystical experience. When cookfire smoke flows between the vees of her hills, apocrypha, ephemera, and chimera become a chat at the well, the smell of tea, and what to do today.

Neigbors

My nearest neighbor is an elderly net mender who has a hut in a palmy portion
of the beach a hundred feet to the west. At dawn he has his day's workload of
torn nets spread out on the sand, and by midday's heat he has finished his
mending. He has but two tools, a fat conical dowel to separate wads of
beknotted cord, and the broad end of coconut frond to smooth them. His skin
looks like a prune after a month in the sun. 

Nearby, the village rope maker soaks coconut husks in the brackish water of a
lagoon. He forces them into submersion by circling them with a net weighted
with large stones. After several weeks of this the fibers finally give up to
the water's insistence on pliancy. The coconuts are husked and the fibers
spun into coarse rope. In villages all along the coast one sees an odd
architecture of long avenues of plaited-frond shacks on each side of paths
radiating away from a tree. The tree has a highly polished section of trunk
about chest high. This is where the rope makers work. Walking backward from
the rope's open bight looped around the tree, they braid each strand by
taking a handful of the coconut fibers and weaving them with a clockwise
twist into a pencil-thick cord-under, over, twist; under, over, twist.

Then three cords are spun on a machine whose giant spoked wheel and
bicycle-pedal power source might have added a chapter to Don Quixote. As they
braid their way backwards out from the tree, they twist in the opposite
direction. Over, under, twist. Over, under, twist. The conflicting frictions
hold the rope together and saltwater does the rest. The fibers are the color
of carnelian, so you can identify a rope maker by his reddish hands. The last
they see of their handiwork is when it heads out to sea on Mirissa's contingent of about thirty tiny fishing boats.

Lagoon

The little lagoon in front of my house is quite the community gathering place. It is a workplace for the unusual income niches that people on the lower edge of the survivability scale manage to create for themselves. Here the coconut fiber folks weight and sink their sacks. Net-throwing fishermen (or rather boys) come at dusk to try their luck with the tiny white fingerlings called sprats that breed and flit by the hundreds in the shallows; if they catch any, that's protein for supper to supplement the rice and vegetables.

Another man - like so many men here he is dark brown, curly haired, craggy
skinned, and lacking most of his teeth-comes down to the beach at dusk with a
mask and snorkel. His feet are so toughened by a lifetime with no shoes that
he unconcernedly wades around in the littoral's sharp coral and spiny
urchins. He is after lobsters, and his luck hits only about once every week
to ten days. But when it does his catch is a beaut-I've seen (and bought!)
some that are wider around than my forearm and almost as long. He sells these
for about 600 rupees, which at 70 rupees to the dollar is roughly $8.50.
Bought any four-pound lobsters for that price lately?

Every morning around 9:30 a youngish fellow carrying a five-gallon plastic
jerrican comes down a path through a family graveyard to the west of my
house. In Sri Lanka you can bury people wherever you want, so most people
bury their ancestors in a graveyard on a plot the family owns. This man
passes his ancestors and heads for little lagoon, which is rimmed by rocks
and protected against the waves. He fills the jug in the shallows, rests
awhile, then shoulders it and goes back the way he came.

I wondered why he collected sea water every day. Seems an odd thing to be
collecting in a place almost totally surrounded by the stuff. It turns out he
raises aquarium fish for the fish dealers of Colombo, who in turn air-freight
them to Europe and the USA in special plastic baggies made for the purpose.
I've seen these little fish out on my snorkeling expeditions. Thousands of
tiny, flashing, brilliantly colored beauties flit and school before my mask.
It's like the Discovery Channel only a hundred times better.

The fellow raises his fish in a tank at his house. Like many Mirissans he is
so low on the income scale (which is not the same as "poor") that he doesn't
have electricity-to say nothing of the money to buy fancy aerating equipment.
So every day he comes down for fresh sea water for his little broods. Once
every couple of weeks a fellow from Colombo comes down the coast, stopping at
the shack of every guppy hatchery on the way down. The man buys what he needs and the rest get poured into the jerrican and returned to the sea. They're so itty-bitty even a cat wouldn't be much interested, and if he puts them back
in the sea, one of these months that Colombo collector will want that particular species, and there will be plenty to be had.

Octopus

Still the little lagoon isn't done with its entertainment value. Many times
I've been around when young kids catch an octopus in the shallows. The octopi
are usually around three or four feet long-once you manage to get them
stretched out, that is. These are worth maybe two hundred rupees at the local
arrack (coconut whiskey) joints where the owners grill them on a bonfire out
back to swerve along with the arrack that they sell. Two hundred rupees comes
to a bit less than three dollars, which is two or three days' income by local
standards.

The octopi lurk deep in the crevices and pockets of craggy underwater
terrain, The kids flush them from their from their holes by poking around
with a multi-barbed trident until they feel something soft, which is either
an octopus or a moray eel. They yank whatever it is out and bring it to a
sea-broken concrete wall, and there pound it brutally to a pulp that can be
cooked. Before that, though, if they've got a nice one and I'm in my reading
chair up on the grass at the sea's edge, they'll come over and show it to me.
To prove it is fresh they put its tentacles on my arm. Since the octopus
usually isn't quite dead yet, I'm treated to the eerie feel of those dozens
of suckers latching on and gripping as if I were a prey. Makes me very glad
my fate was to not be born a small fish down where the octopi feed.

If I'm not in an octopus mood for supper that night, the kids take it to the
fish-sellers' stalls down at Mirissa's open-air village market. The term
"fish-sellers" doesn't quite convey what it is like to buy a fish there. No
flaked ice and stainless steel basin like Safeway around here, nosiree. The
average coastal-village fish stall is a few planks whacked together into
something resembling a table, with a palm-frond roof overhead and a bucket of
sea water to splash over the fish every once in awhile to keep the flies off.
The nearby highway is lined with these fishmonger stalls, trying to entice
the passing array of local buses, families in Toyota vans, trucks, locals on
bicycles, and housewives on the lookout for a bargain for supper.  The "catch
of the day" can be an astonishing array of local varieties, from arm-thick
tuna to slabs of shark that would completely cover a dinner plate.

Fish-Drying

Just to the west of Giragala Village is a fish-drying man whose living is
made by flaying fresh-caught skipjacks down the middle and spreading them out
to dry in the sun. The owner of this particular drying pad is a grizzled,
skinny fellow-or rather "emaciated" since he's done quite a bit of the local
white lightning called kasippu in his time. He is perhaps fifty but looks
eighty. I've never seen him in a different loincloth-and here, a loincloth
versus a sarong is what really separates the workers from the softies.

His workplace is a table slapped up from half a dozen raggedly sawn pieces
that the woodcutters trim off when they're squaring up a log to saw into
planks. His roof is two coconut trees. If it rains, well, everything in the
tropics gets wet sooner or later. And besides, since it never gets below
about 85 degrees Fahrenheit in Mirissa, once the rain stops everything dries
again in a few minutes. Yesterday I'd no more than put my nicely wrung-out
wash out on the line to dry when a squall came along and soaked it
completely. An hour after the sun came back I was hauling it off the line.

Domestic Affairs

As you might expect, wash day is no fancy affair. My laundry gets washed by
soaking everything with detergent in a plastic tub for two days, scrubbing
out the dirt by rubbing the cloth back and forth between my fists, and then
washing off the suds in the shower. Nothing is overly complicated around here.

This fellow owns one of the skinny dugout catamarans that are a commonplace
landscape item pulled up on the beaches here. For all their seeming
primitivity, dugouts are a superbly evolved piece of purpose. The fishers go
out just after sunset and return just before dawn. It's no piece of cake as a
job. They have to get through combers six to ten feet high just to get to the
work site three miles out into the rolling seas. Given that kind of commute
congestion to contend with, they've learned to move a boat using only one oar
yet with astonishing speed. The stroke they use to propel their dugouts
forward is the same push-out-and-twist stroke the Venetian gondoliers use.

We know each other by honorifics. He calls me Mahataya ("Master", a carryover
from British colonial days, especially in elderly gents who were educated
while the British were still here). I call him in turn Mahalu-taya ("Mr.
Fishman-sir"-all respectable occupations rate a dignifying "Mr." here). He's
not the kind of person one easily forgets. Five-day growth, face like a lava
flow, gaunt as a ghost, and reeking of fish, he is inexhaustibly fascinating.

He always leaves two or three skipjacks unsliced on his table for any
potential customers who might chance down the highway desiring fresh rather
than dried fish. He's against stiff competition. In any given mile of highway
there's at least three mahalu-tayas . Today when I passed another seller's
stand it sported two gorgeous skipjacks, two calamaris, and an octopus. The
skipjacks were about eighteen inches long, slimmer than a football but
roughly the same shape, silver with airbrushed blackish stripes, big-pupilled
eyes with yellow irisis like an owl's. Just looking at them I had fantasies
of fork in one hand, knife in the other, and napkin to my chin.

Silver bullets of the sea, the skipjacks are. I've seen them while out
snorkeling. They are almost incredibly agile and fast. I'm glad they don't
eat humans, or I wouldn't be writing this letter. And to think that all that
enormous, lithe mass of muscle exists for one overriding purpose: to evade
sharks. I can't think of any other creature whose beauty of purpose serves
such a desperate end. On the other hand, I contrast that with Giragala
Village, whose desperateness of purpose serves such a beautiful end.

The skipjacks go for about 500 rupees each. That's US$7.15 and they weigh
about six to seven pounds. Calamaris are about half that. Everything is
priced by weight. With one arm the mahalu-taya holds up a rusty iron scale
whose dented bowls are held by three chains. He puts the fish into one bowl
and adds lumps of iron to the other side till it balances. A wad of bills and
some coins change hands, and yet another family is going to have a superb
supper tonight.

Bits of Forever

A little while ago a boy and a girl, sixish or so, were digging sand right at
the wave lappet line where the sand is firmest. Having a grand old time at
it, they were. Tossing tiny fistfuls of sand first at each other and then at
Dad, who was sitting in his sarong on the wave side of them to protect them.
The waves would wash over him, again, again, again, but not the little ones.
A lot of sand as well as water was getting washed into his sarong.

So finally he had enough and got up, went out to a belly-deep spot to wash
out the sand by unwrapping the sarong and jumping up and down into the water
several times while the sarong emptied the sand out the bottom. Then he
re-tied it again. On the way back spotted something in the water I couldn't
see. He took the hem of his sarong, held it out in front so it made a scoop,
then lifted up with whatever it was he saw, droplets dripping out through the
cloth. It turned out to be one of the little sprats. The kids enjoyed it no
end, touching it with their fingers and then jerking them back as if they'd
touched a spider. They laughed, he laughed, and then they all went home.

These tidbits happen all the time. They are to me bits of forever. I suppose
it is best to glimpse them in bits and glimpses as I go out on breaks between
the writing spells, because I'd probably get bored with it all if I sat out
there watching this sort of charm all day long.

Shopping

The same can be said of my weekly visits to the next nearest real town,
Weligama (lovely in Sinhala, but much less romantically "Sand Town" when
translated). I go there to the post office and to buy things like paper and
do things like get a haircut. Despite the fact that Weligama is hardly five
miles away, I only get there once or twice every couple of weeks. That's why
I always see something new and delightful when I do. If I lived there and
walked its streets every day, I wouldn't see the things that I'm all eyes for
when I visit once a fortnight. 

Weligama is a busy little place. It's the only shopping burg for five miles
in a region dense with houses that are hidden along byways through the palm
forests, and so laced together with paths it must take a entire childhood to
learn them all.

Weligama's streets are always crowded. The town is huge bowl of eye-candy
made up of hundreds of colors and faces and shop signs under the white sun.
Except for when the muezzin calls Weligama's sizable contingent of Muslims
into the mosque for prayer, Weligama is raucous with fruit/fish/meat
stallholders hollering out there wares to the accompaniment of Sinhalese folk
music blasting from the cassette, CD, and video rental shops. A couple of
times there will come the clang-clang-clang of the railway crossing signal.
The arms shudder their way down to a jolty stop, which the pedestrians and
bicyclists blithely ignore as they bustle across. Only when the train gives
its final warning whoot does anyone take this seriously. Then they stand back
and cover their faces-the Sinhalese woman with their osaris (the sari
shoulder piece that falls to the ankles in the back) and the Muslim women
with their headscarves-to hold back the blinding whirls of dust that the
locomotive raises.

But today a new clamor was added. A couple of local fisherman had struck it
rich last night, and had netted in a sizable haul of juvenile skipjack tunas
about a foot to fifteen inches long. Now they had arranged them in ice-filled
plastic washtubs just like the kind I do my laundry in. They were shouting
"Lu! Lu! Lu!" at the top of their voices. "Lu" is short for malu which is the
word for fish. Repetition being ever the hypnotizer, both were repeating it
at a clippety-clop pace that went on for so long I wondered how they stopped
for breath.

The fish were arranged in concentric circles around the tub, tails facing up
and noses into the ice. They smelled gloriously of sea and salt. One
fisherman had cut a fish crosswise in half so everyone could see its pinkish
mauve color, the color of skipjack when fresh. When it's been frozen and
thawed-which happens a lot when the storms hurl up huge fish-blinding
waves-then the fisherman have to draw on their stash at the local ice plant.
Even the youngest customer knows that a thawed fish's flesh is a reddish
black and doesn't smell of the sea.

The Marketplace

I'd like to say these gorgeous fish were selling like hotcakes, but they
weren't. A few women would stop, ask the prices, look awhile more, and leave.
If I came back around sunset time when housewives buy for dinner, sales at
the fish stalls would be a very different story. Women in Sri Lanka shop for
every meal just before making it. The reason isn't because the food items are
replenished every hour from some local farmer in an ox-cart, because they're
not. Just the opposite: the veggies gets more wilted and meat more tinged
during all those long hot hours in the sun. Nor is it, as romantic storytellers would have us believe, to give the women a chance to chat at the marketplace. In a place as worn thin from hard work as a fishing village in Sri Lanka, you see sullen determination a lot more than you see cheery chat.

Traditional Mindset

Instead, tradition in slow-motion places like Sri Lanka is an ethical code
based on honoring other people who do things the same way you do them, and
gossiping into dishonor those who don't. The same mindset occurs when
fetching water from the well-an old-style spherical water pot is considered
more honorable than fetching it in a plastic jerrican, even though the
jerrican makes much more sense.

Fish Sellers

The fact that trade was slow didn't bother the fishermen one bit. They know
that at the end of the day they can do one of two things. The first option is
take the day's unsold fish to the ice locker and wait for another day. That's
the easy way out and most will do that so they can then breeze on down to the
arrack shop to re-celebrate their haul with a dram or two-actually, more likely a dozen or two given the way things happen in the arrack shops around here. Arrack is about as vile a liquid as one can imagine pouring into oneself. That doesn't stop it from being poured. It is an unfortunate fact that the households that don't have new clothes on the kids are usually headed by a money-earner who spends most of his time in the arrack shop. It is also an unfortunate fact that in Lankan villages, women are child-bearing chattel, have virtually no life of their own beyond chitchat with other women at the well, and have been obliged into this state by an unbreakable tradition of arranged marriages in which the parents satisfy dynastic ambitions by putting under one roof two people who barely know each other until a week or two before the wedding. For the foreigner who wants to live here, the first requirement is to give up all sense of thinking you know how things should be done in this world and accept that which has long been done without you.

The fisherman's second option is to hire a "tuk-tuk" three-wheeler (the local
carry-anything vehicles that look like a miniaturized cross between an SUV
and a golf cart) to take both fish and tub down to a table alongside the road
where all the Southern Province traffic must pass. It's a delightful and by no means uncommon sight to see a tuk-tuk with a man's legs sticking out one
side and a bunch of fish tails out the other. Other gems from my memory book
are stacks of lumber sagging out both sides, golden clumps of king coconuts
on the way to market, a big pile of greens for a cow or elephant, an entire
bicycle (its tireless front wheel being a self-writing story of why it wasn't being ridden), and the gangly feet of three or four kids on Mommy's lap. From the tuk-tuk cargoes alone you get a pretty good idea of the utility-is-necessity philosophy of village life around here.

The main highway fronts the sea and is a fish seller's paradise. They sit on
their haunches and wait. If they see local autos, they do nothing. They know
that someone who really wants a fresh fish for supper will stop for it. Hence
there's no use expending energy waving one's hands trying to flag someone
down trying to convince them otherwise. Unsurprisingly, there's no word in the
 Sinhalese language for "marketing".

Another Kodak Moment

If the fishermen see a tourist bus, however, they'll hold a fish up in each
hand and stand directly in front of the oncoming bus. If it shifts over into
the other lane to get by, the driver is late on his schedule. If the driver
is in dawdling mood he will stop. (He is also fully aware that he will get a
piece of the now highly inflated price for each fish a tourist buys.) This
little side-deal is accomplished while the tourists are busily snapping
photos of the man and his fish tub, the boats bobbing just offshore, and each
other against a backdrop of palm trees and the sea.

It's a perfect paradise-isle moment for everybody. The tourists are delighted
at this photo-op with a real Sri Lanka fisherman-six-day growth of beard and
all-and it's a real win-win for the fisherman, who would never make such a
profit dealing with the dour-fisted rupee hagglers in the marketplace.

And to think, with the exception of the obvious modernities, this is what
Christmas was like when Jesus walked the earth.

See where Douglas works ... Photos: http://members.xoom.com/giragala/

Like to join a writer's retreat on Mirissa? Click here to read more.

Contact Douglas here: Kantalai@aol.com

Interested in writing for the Asian market? 

More hints.

Home | Contact | Order | Site Map |Subscribe   

Copyright 2006 Jennifer Stewart Write101.com