Inheriting Colombo

I look at this city sometimes, and try to peel back time. Try to peel back the grand hotels and shopping centres, the busy junctions and their blaring car horns, the milling mass of people on the street. But time has a different scale in cities; they adapt and age much faster than the people who remember them. Sixty-five years is a long time in a human life, but it’s an aeon in the life of a city.

Sixty-five years ago my grandfather landed in Ceylon, in a thick khaki uniform, perhaps stiff with salt from weeks at sea. They sailed in to Trincomalee, and he was met, startled, by the noises of the birds, so loud they drowned out the ships engine. He had yet to even see the jungle’s parrots, but their disembodied wilderness of voices, the first sign of land for ages, must have been a strange and mixed welcome indeed. A grateful return to solid land, but the kind of land, foreign and confronting enough to desolidify his very notions of the world.
I feel like this still, as my weeks in this country pass by, more slowly and loosely than I’m used to. I sometimes feel myself dissembling, as each difference forces me to change my shapes of thought. It’s not unpleasant.
Everyone is advising me not to go to Trinco, as it might not be a safe harbour any more.

Of all the places he has been and all the things that he has seen, my grandfather will not talk about the war. I can’t blame him; I almost don’t want to hear the kinds of things so far beyond my understanding. I can’t know how a war smells, how it tastes in the quiet of night, and it’s a privilege that I understand is rare. In 1942, my grandfather, Arthur, was en-route to Singapore, when the impregnable city fell. The soldiers who were there became the stuff of myth, imprisoned and emaciated under the Japanese. While the Army debated where to redeploy his unit, my grandfather was sent over to Ceylon.
Ceylon was a respite, the calm before the storming of fortified islands in the Pacific. A young man, abroad on full pay and few responsibilities, in a country of beautiful beaches, warm weather and warmer people. It is only of this, of Ceylon, that he will speak. It is how Ceylon first blipped onto my radar, and how I ended up here, sixty-five years later.

To understand his stories, you have to understand the world he was coming from, and how it made him understand the one he suddenly found himself in. He was young, so young, and had lied about his age at the army recruiting station so he could be accepted. Like most of his regiment, he had never before left home. Never travelled outside of the city of his birth. Australia in the 1940s was provincial and quiet, and still saw itself very much as a distant outpost of the British Empire. The White Australia Policy- restricting immigration of people from outside Britain- was resolutely in place. He would have seen very few people in his whole life who spoke a different language, or had dark skin.

A boy from this world would only ever have eaten apples, bananas and oranges, or peaches and pears out of cans. Mulberries and passionfruit, stolen from neighbours’ backyards, were the most exotic of his fare. Meals were spiceless, grilled meat and three vegetables, a roast on Sundays, the occasional splash of English sauces or pan gravy.
Imagine eating papaya for the first time, from the soft blush of flesh to the dark surprise of pips cloistering like fat nuns inside. Shaping the word guava. Discovering that coconuts come in different shapes and sizes and sweetnesses.
There was variety, and there was abundance. Australian soldiers had good wages too, and delighted in the prices of the local produce. Arthur paid a neighbour once, for some ripe mangoes he’d seen growing on a tree, who’d grinned, and probably wagged his head:
“Just a minute, just a minute! The boy will get them.”
The neighbour disappeared. A rickety-legged old man, wrinkled and white-haired, proceeded to scale the tree in his sarong, tossing the mangoes casually down to Arthur.
It was their favourite way of supplementing their dull and over-processed army rations. They would band together, and gather all the fruit they could find –mangoes, pineapples, wood apples, grapes. A huge cluster of bananas, its hooked branch still attached and carried down a strong man’s back. They would cut them up, into the pots big enough to cook for an entire troop of men. And then add several cans of sweetened condensed milk, stirring it into a sticky tropical trifle. He always says the English troops, who were not paid as favourably, would watch on sometimes, torn between jealousy and disgust.
It’s the vegetables here that fascinate me; especially the gourds. Long, thin and green, some dappled and streaky as woodwork, some scaly and warty as animals. The snake gourd, slender and slippery. The luffa, that my Australian housemate has decided to name ‘cactus,’ and tastes mildly, sweetly of earth. I love the word brinjal, how it’s as throaty and seeded as an aubergine. The freshness of kangkung.

The army tried to keep their soldiers busy, despite the hazy, lazy heat; tried to drill them to remembering that despite the calm here, the quiet locals’ smiles, the world was still at war. So they formed work gangs, building fences, trenches, roads. One day, my grandfather’s group of four were digging by a roadside, when a local man approached, and sold them a bottle of liquor. They swilled it like the beer they’d always drunk at home. And all four passed out cold. It was his introduction to arrack, and to army disciplinary hearings. A searching army truck had found them in the dirt, fearing kidnap or desertion, when none of them came home.
“Watch out for arrack,’ he’d told me, grimly, although his grin said something different. I, of course, have listened to the grin.

There are photos in the foyer of the Galle Face Hotel, framed sepias of the building in its grounds throughout the past. It stands alone, at first, wide and white between the sea and a single palm, one rickshaw ambling past. I scan them all for a glimpse of my grandfather’s city, but the images stop in the 1930s. Still, walking through the ballrooms and the bar, I can imagine him here on day leave, almost. Thin and dapper in his uniform, drinking gin and ginger beer with his mates, as the band played The White Cliffs of Dover; songs of a motherland that really wasn’t his. But even this must be fiction. He’s told me how he’d every week gamble away his pay, and then have nothing left to play with on days off. Unless his friends were inhumanly forgiving, or generously tipsy, there’s no way he could have paid. I can smell the effuse from Beira Lake as I sit, and watch the waves.
Near the hotel, my friend points out the current army grounds, and I catch a fleeting glimpse as we drive by. I can’t know if this was the place where Arthur stayed, and it’s too dark to see if another generation of soldiers are drilling for their smaller, longer, dirtier war. Some streets further, and the shrapnel scars from last April’s suicide bombing have been painted into an image of a screaming man. This is war. They were trying to forget, but it was war.

He always grins when he tells me he learnt some Sinhalese, and still remembers. Ekka, dekka, thunna, hathara, paha he says, and lassana kelle. Young men anywhere, it seems, still act the same. But it’s different here for me. My grandfather’s Colombo would never have included roving hands on buses, and awkwardly-worded propositions from strangers. His uniform, his unit, his very masculinity, perhaps would have protected him from the car horns and lingering stares that stick to me like thirsty mosquitos, itching at my skin.

Driving south to Galle, I watched the city thin, the forest thicken. The road slices slowly between the coastline and the rail line, the market stalls begin to display fish, and carven wood. Despite the signs written in English, the Coca-Cola advertisements on cool spots and hotels, these towns seem closer, somehow, to the type of place my grandfather fell in love with. As if age has been less brutal here. The sheer size, and thickness of tropical leaves. The villagers singing and giggling by the road. My driver stops, and with unexpected generosity, buys me a king coconut to drink.
My grandfather marched this road. They may have wanted to keep the soldiers in training, and out of mischief; they were sent on long-haul hikes, for days through this countryside. They may have imagined these were conditions they’d face later. fighting in the Pacific, the heat, humidity and beachfronts. They marched, columns of uniformed and vaguely menacing men, alien in this landscape. The people they passed would have been unused to army jeeps, and modern weaponry, I realised, as I passed through a checkpoint.
My grandfather can’t recall the name of the town they were marched to. Only that they stopped a while, and ate, then turned around and marched back to Colombo.

One day, a soldier came to the camp with a newly-bought pet monkey, leading it by a rope around its neck. It delighted Arthur, smaller and more colourful than any he’d seen at the zoo. The men built it a run using a washing line strung between trees, so it could scamper around, but not escape. They named it, patted it, played with it. But none of them had any idea exactly what monkeys eat.
After much deliberation, they fashioned a drip-feeder, filling a condom with sweetened condensed milk. It worked like a charm, he always says.
All of my young Sri Lankan friends have horror stories about trying to discreetly buy packets of condoms at a pharmacy. I can only imagine this one came as a regulation part of a soldier’s kit.

The fuss and colour, the busyness and noisiness of Pettah fascinated Arthur; he’d light up whenever he mentioned it. All my advisors and supervisors have told me to avoid the area, not only as a lone female, but also as the crowded streets make it attractive to insurgents. It’s my first time into the Fort, and the old facades of public buildings, the open spaces and sweeping boulevards seem like a different city altogether, something quieter and more fragile than the mad suburbs that engulf it. More like the city my grandfather would have seen, except that razor wire and soldiers zigzag madly through the streets.
I can’t believe I’ve been avoiding the dried fish salesmen of Pettah, the shoe hawkers and fabric stalls, the spice merchants with their woven bags that I want to plunge my arms right into. Their headiness is dizzying, even to me, who has seen and used them, mostly, before. How much more vividly they must have marked my grandfather.

Arthur’s proudest purchase in Pettah was a porcupine quill box. He was unused to bartering, but so proud when he beat the price right down, haggling over what may not have been the minute amounts of money I often catch myself arguing about. There was a department store he loved, with a name he’s inevitably lost, where he retired for his lunch. And where the exact same things were being sold for far less than he had paid.
He never got his box home, either. On his ship home to Australia, his entire kit bag was stolen. I trawl through Pettah for hours, searching for something, anything similar, a kind of half-a-decade late souvenir. Vendors jump out constantly, to try and sell me mens’ underwear, or mobile phone accessories. I can’t find a porcupine box, and a part of me is not sure that I want to. You can’t souvenir a city that no longer exists.

I’m not sure that I can understand the Colombo that I’ve landed in, let alone the one I’m trying to imagine. This place is mad, sometimes, and maddening as well, and its contrariness both fascinates me and appals. All I can know is that I’ve fallen in love with this city. and the burdens it bears weigh on me, too. In sixty-five years, that much has stayed the same. This is a city that crawls underneath the skin of those who inhabit it, even if only a while.