Latest / What’s the Story: The Sri Lanka Podcast / On Being Absolutely Still | Learning New Tricks In Sri Lanka
Transcript
- On Being Absolutely Still | Learning New Tricks In Sri Lanka Is life really what you best hear when you're absolutely still? And if so, does knowing the names of different trees help at all? A bird is calling. The sun has just started to light the more distant taller hills, but the ones nearest me remain in a deep blue shade as it is still barely 6 am – bang in the very middle of The Blessed Time, that moment from say 5 to 6.30 am - the golden 90 minutes, before the signs of any other humans really emerge: just me, 5 dogs and the Sri Lankan jungle. I mean to eke it out in spirit at least until as late as possible. Key to this is staying in my pyjamas until midday, and only then breaking my fast. By then, Dissanayake will have prepared his magical, sugar-coated, crocodile-shaped buns, infused with cinnamon, a treasure to unfurl. But that's all still to come. For right now, it's awfully hard to move at all, lest I miss something, sitting here, looking out over these waves of green hills and valleys, like a guardsman who has woken up having misspent the night sleeping above the defensive entrance gates of some remote and tiny city. From here, from this balcony beyond my bedroom doors, you get a sense of the first hills of Sri Lanka as you approach it from the north. And I love that sense of all that lies beyond. The whole of what is called the Rajarata stretches out – reaches from my bedroom - all the way to Jaffna with the occasional interruption of a rocky outcrop like Sigiriya or, further to the east, the Knuckles. But that aside, the Rajarata’s huge, great, broad, flat, low coconut-dotted plain goes all the way from the bottom of these hills right up to the beaches of Jaffna, Manar, Delft Island, to Negombo on the west, to Trincomalee on the east. For this is an island you can touch from side to side, top to bottom, just within your head. You get a sense of all that from right here, sitting on this particular hill, a watcher, watching. And now, at least, in some small part, a watcher equipped with a few facts and a rudimentary map of history. It's no longer just nameless, unknown, unrelatable hills and valleys that stretch out beyond me here. I know the names of the trees that cover them. I know what they do at different times of the year. I know what's been planted recently and what is much older. I know whether a house deep in the valley is new or merely enlarged. I know when the temple will broadcast its mournful Poya prayers, when the Imman will sing. When the bread van goes past on invisible jungle roads, playing a piece of Beethoven to tell its customers it's time to buy a loaf. And I know too where I sit in relation to where everyone else on this island is, the towns, the capital, the many old, discarded capitals, the forts. I sit on the ramparts of the hill country watching. Most of all, I know how little I know. Which makes it all the more comforting to watch those lucky wild beasts that have no mind but now. The many Toque Macaque monkeys are feasting on young jak just beyond my window. A pair of iridescent blue kingfishers is combing the adjacent amphitheatre. And out into the deeper jungle below, flocks of parrots, mostly plum-headed or emerald collared ones that like to bait the eagles. I remember Beata reading a book in Oxford called I am no one doing nothing, a somewhat Buddhist tome about just being. That title's stuck with me. And, when I think of it now, as I sit here, the light slowly begins to light up newer sections of the hills and valleys in front of me, I see what Emily Dickinson meant – “I'm Nobody! Who are you? Are you – Nobody – too? Then there's a pair of us! Don't tell! they'd banish us – you know!" Trying to be nobody is much harder than trying to be someone, like moving imperceptibly across an abyss; the slower you go, the more you see. Given all that has come before, this challenge of just being is addictive. I was so busy all the way through my twenties, my thirties and forties, rushing around, going to films and restaurants and holidays and buying stuff, and having dinner parties and opinions, talking and talking and working. Yet life is really what you best hear when you're absolutely still. It’s the hardest of all skills, one that eluded my busy mother, even as she lay dying, over 3 long years, making lists in her head – of her favourite curries, or golf courses, recounting the jackals at Tollygunge. These different dishes made up rice feasts in downtown Jakarta or the little stations on the way to Ooty. Each was an invitation to relive the experience, to stay busy despite being paralysed – but even then, I thought, there ought to be more to life than just living – or reliving. Some tick or method for putting all that activity into perspective and fathom what it was all for and why. And even whether any of it did any good to anyone else. I envy the pious with their apparently strong beliefs, balancing religious devotion with family or civic duty and levelling the whole formula with the Gifts of the Spirit – though it seems something of a blasphemy ever to believe anyone can ever define a god, still less what a god might want or order. Which leaves just faith, unrooted now in these most secular of times, scrambling to establish itself on something other than the obsessions of our times – perhaps for me here on these jungle hills and the slow arranging day. That was a production written and recorded by David Swarbrick at The Ceylon Press, based in the jungle north of Kandy, at The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel, and set up to tell the story of Sri Lanka.