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The snake

Not surprisingly, we needed to recover from our little stroll. My feet had swollen overnight, much to John’s alarm who thought I had contracted a tropical disease. I told him that it was probably filiariasis which can make them swell to the size of elephant’s feet, that it is incurable and that if I had it, he would get it too. I think he believed me until the same thing happened to A a few days later.

This morning, I was trying to convince myself that it was OK to take a break. We would be here for six weeks. Our friends would arrive in two days’ time, and I had to wait for them anyway. We would not need to get our visa extensions today or tomorrow or even before the beginning of January; besides, it was a Sunday. The Lagoon would still be there the next day. It would be sunny again tomorrow and the day after that and probably every day for the duration of our stay. There was no hurry. It was alright to relax. The simple truth was that, in the end, I was too knackered to move anyway.

Nevertheless, I remained restless. Relaxation does not agree with me. It would get dark around six and another jewel of a day would be lost with us confined to the gloom of the house. To take my mind of it, I went about our daily chores. A good sweep, which drew an amused glance and a grin from the teenage girl busy in the neighbours’ yard, a spot of grocery shopping and the laundry. I had soaked our sweaty clothes in a bucket of soapy water and washed them backpacker-fashion by stomping on them under the shower. As I went out into the garden to drape them over a line suspended between a coconut palm and a breadfruit tree, I spotted a slender striped cat lying in the shade. It fixed its beautiful green eyes warily on me. I stepped carefully around it. It followed me with its gaze but did not get up. Perhaps we would gradually win its trust.

Early in the afternoon, we were entertained to a side show. The neighbours, clearly nervous about A’s impending arrival, had sent their servant to clear up the garden. The poor man, who was in his seventies, had already spent the entire morning painting the wall. Thankfully, he was not alone. A toddy-tapper had been brought in to cut down the coconuts which were ready to drop from the trees.

Toddy is the sap of the palmflower, harvested from palms which have been set aside for tapping for up to 6 months at a time. This process seems to improve the future harvest of coconuts but toddy itself has many uses. Left to ferment for a few hours, it produces an alcoholic drink similar, I had heard, to cider. Distilled, it becomes the stronger arrack. Boiled down, it forms �treacle� and eventually jaggery, solid palm sugar. It is not only coconut palms which are exploited in this way. In the arid north, toddy is obtained from the ubiquitous Palmyra palm and in the southwest from Kitul (Sago) palms.

In time-honoured fashion, the durava (toddy tapper) tied a coconut-fibre rope between his ankles, grabbed a machete between his teeth and shinned up each tall palm in what must have been under 10 seconds. He made it look easy, but seeing the muscles rippling under his jet-black, sweat-glistening skin, I did not rate John’s chances. As he slashed the stalks, the nuts rained down from the trees with resounding thuds, like cannon balls. Each could have split open a person’s skull with ease. As part-payment for his services, the durava gathered them together and loaded them onto a cart for sale in the street.

Five minutes after the harvest was completed, there was a knock on the door. John and I exchanged looks. He had not shaved and wore a knee-length dressing gown with nothing underneath and I had adopted a similar loose dress-code for indoors. There was no time to run upstairs and throw on something decent. The knock came again, so I opened the door a fraction. On the porch stood the old servant with a patient smile, a freshly cut coconut in each hand with a straw sticking up in each. If he was embarassed by our atire, he didn’t show it. I smiled my thanks.

*****

It was time to re-claim the kitchen. I enjoy cooking and had even briefly trained as a chef. Cooking with rarefied Sri Lankan ingredients was something I particularly looked forward to. So what if the kitchen was a little sparse. We had a single pot which we used to boil up drinking water and I had picked up a wooden pestle and mortar along with a hand-crafted knife which would serve as my chef’s knife. The decorative swirl at one end could even be adapted as a garlic press. There was a vegetable shop across the road which sold a bewildering array of produce. There were aubergines of various shapes and sizes, gourds and plump red tomatoes, tiny shallots no bigger than a clove of garlic, chillies, sweet potatoes, carrots, kareela, several unknown vegetables and, surprisingly, cabbages and beetroot. The latter were definitely a legacy of the British. Trust them to invade a tropical island paradise bring along with them … cabbage! But cooked the Sri Lankan way, as part of a tangy mustard curry for instance, you could almost forgive them.

I stood in front of this bounty and thought that it seemed as if all the seasons had happened at once. In a way this is true, because it is cool in the hill country and tropical in the lowlands. When I spotted sachets of whole spices, my day was made. In our one pot, I successively cooked up some rice and a red lentil and coconut dhal with curry leaves and lime, a bit of Thai/Sri Lankan fusion, and a chicken stew with sweet potatoes and a colourful array of vegetables.

I began to feel at home. I had even made peace with the tiny red ants in the kitchen. They removed the scraps of food which were inevitably left on the dishes. In fact, with their microscopic mandibles they did a sterling job of cleaning them. Given a quick rinse before use, the dishes were as spotless as anything out of the dishwasher back home. Also, if I didn’t leave the cooking too late, the ants would have cleaned up the kitchen long before the cockroaches got a look in.

The only disconcertment of the day were loud bangs which shook the walls periodically from somewhere down the road. I wondered whether there was quarrying going on in the area or perhaps explosives were fired to scare birds off the fields. Or elephants. When the banging continued into the evening and intensified during the night, it was clear that neither was the case. There had to be a wedding in the neighborhood and the guests were letting off firecrackers of military proportions, which exploded with a bang louder than any I have ever heard in the West. In these parts, a wedding can last for three days. Thankfully we had brought earplugs.

Around bedtime, a cockroach the size of a mouse emerged from underneath the cupboard, unfolded its wings and flew straight into the wall whereupon it ended up on its back, legs flailing in the air. The roaches seemed to be getting progressively lifelier, it was as if things were waking up in the house. Earlier in the day I had noticed fat, black wasps which had an array of small nests in the ceiling beams. I carefully kept my distance from them and wondered whatever would come next. Snakes?

The phone rang. It was S. He and A would leave for the airport in a few hours time and wanted to check that everything was alright.
“All is fine apart from a slight problem with cockroaches”, John said, “Hang on, one has just crawled into my shoe. I’ll see you tomorrow. Oh, and bring coffee filters!”
He hang up.
“You didn’t have to find a pre-text to cut off S.” I scolded.
John didn’t answer. Face tight, he picked up his shoe and, holding it stretched out in front of him, walked outside where he shook it out. He hadn’t been kidding. Something had to be done.

*****

The earplugs only proved partially effective at blocking out the noise but the wedding celebrations slowed down towards the morning. The crackers still went off but at longer intervals. After a particularly loud bang woke me up at six, I managed to doze off again only to be woken by a persistent hooting that drilled into my head. I held my hands over my ears and thought grumpily that people here love noise for no apparent reason. On the main road, cars, lorries, tuk-tuks and buses were blaring their horns constantly both as warning and greeting. So I ignored the cacaphony and tried to get back to sleep until it dawned to me that the house was actually not on the main road. I sat up with a start. S and A had arrived, waving from a van which was parked outside the locked gate.

Bleary-eyed, I grabbled for the keys, threw on a dress and rushed downstairs. Thankfully, both appeared happy and excited. We had expected them to be irritable after their long flight and their wait outside the gate, but they were in good spirits. Within minutes, A had sourced scrambled eggs, stuffed chillies, fish patties and fresh bread. What a difference a native speaker can make! While we were tucking into our breakfast, she recruited a man from the neighbourhood to clean up the whole house. It was not before time. Earlier, I had rescued a tiny tail-less baby gecko which had fallen into the kitchen sink. It appeared that the cockroaches did not go hungry during the night.

The man got around to the cupboard under the stairs by lunchtime. The roaches had vanished from the back of the door but inside the cupboard were a couple of impressive termite mounts which accounted for the thick layer of dust that had built up under the staircase. They also provided a source of sustenance for the cockroaches. We de-camped to the verandah where we sipped iced water under the breeze of the fan while the poor guy got on with cleaning up the mess. Suddenly, A shouted something in Sinhala, pulled her legs up onto the chair and stared wide-eyed at what I thought was the floor under the table, where I was stretching my legs.

“Snake!” she exclaimed.

I was gripped by an instant animal panic, a chill engulfed me, my heart quite literally missed a beat. I remained motionless, frozen to the spot. Images of a cobra sinking its teeth into my ankle flashed through my mind.

“Where?” I whispered.

John and S just kept sitting where they were, as cool as cucumbers. They were facing the door where the man now stood. He held a stick in fron of him with a tiny snake draped over the end. It was half-dead, having been whacked over the head. When he put it on the ground in the garden, it slowly started moving its head from side to side, turned half way over then started to writhe around. My heart went out to the poor thing. I was tempted to fetch the kitchen knife and dispatch it quickly, but I did not want the gathered crowd to think I was some sort of deranged killer. Eventually, the man picked up the snake on his stick once more, carried it across the road to a ditch and burned it. Alive.

A told us to spare our compassion, that snake was poisonous. The man had found it in the cupboard where it had apparently been feeding on the cockroaches. That cupboard seemed to have harboured a neat little ecosystem. According to local lore, these particular snakes are said to creep into your bed at night and suck blood from your toes. Their poison will put you to sleep from which you never wake up. I do not quite believe in vampire snakes, but I conceded that if it was poisonous, it would be dangerous to have in the house or indeed in a residential area. Also according to the lore, if you kill one of these snakes, seven others will turn up unless you burn it. I began to understand. I shuddered at the thought that last night I had reached into an old defunct oven in a corner of the kitchen floor to take out a griddle which we could use to construct a BBQ. I had given the thing a good bash to check whether any cockroaches came scuttling out and then reached in without giving a thought to any snakes I might have alerted in the process.

Scare over, we resumed our chat. A translated what the hawkers cycling down the street were shouting out. Malu means fish, fresh from the market to your door. Kiri-peni, literally “milk and honey”, is buffalo curd with palm-treacle. The guy currently cycling past had a cobra in his basket which he wanted to show us. We waved him away.

*****

With our friends’ arrival, my waiting was at an end. I turned my thoughts to onward travel. I could not wait to get to Trincomalee. That evening over dinner, A casually mentioned that she might know somebody who knows the Trincomalee harbour master, would that be of any use? Hey, I don’t know. Would I like to meet Oasis after the gig? With free booze thrown in? I said I’d call her from Trinco, once she had a chance to check out her contacts.

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