Yellow Oleander
The next day promised to be boring. I could not quite decide what to do with myself, when Maria phoned. She had a rare afternoon off from work and suggested we go on a drive along the coast. “We can go to a beach”, she said: “to swim and snorkle!”
I packed our beach gear at once and managed to get John up just as Guaratna, the driver, arrived with Maria’s pickup truck. As it was lunchtime, A and S went out to buy some ‘lunch-packets’ from the shop where we had dinner on our first evening. For 50-60 rs, these consist of a neatly wrapped parcel containing two vegetable curries, a piece of meat or fish, mallung (stir-fried leaves with onion, chillies and Maldive fish), sambol (the ubitiquous, fiery-hot coconut relish) and the usual mountain of rice, with a helping of extra chillies on the side. One of these would easily feed two. It never ceased to amaze me what huge amounts of rice were served in Sri Lanka. I have yet to see anyone actually finish their portion and that is saying a lot, considering John’s appetite. Thus sated, we got into the car. We would meet Maria at one of the resort hotels where she acted as a consultant on the landscaping of the grounds.
We had not driven far, maybe just past Negombe, when we passed an overturned lorry which had spilled its load of bricks across the pavement. A burly four wheel drive was mounted half-way up a traffic island in the middle of the road, facing in the wrong direction. It had been a head-on collision. There was no sign of the drivers or passengers, apparently the accident had happened some time ago. Two exhausted looking cops were drinking thimbili by the roadside. We winced.
“That must have been nasty!”
To be frank, it came as no surprise. All that boy-racing had to end in tragedy eventually.
.
The hotel was built in a saltwater marsh on the edge of a mangrove swamp, next to the sea. The waves broke angrily against a sea-defence of tumbled concrete bolders. There was no beach, or anything else for that matter. As we went inside looking for Maria, we passed several tour groups that had gathered in the bar for their introductory talks, the reps selling their excursions with the vigour of holiday reps everywhere. Some people were lounging around, looking bored. I hoped that somebody had informed the new arrivals that there would be no beer on sale today, because it was Poya Day.
The full moon, or Poya, is celebrated as a Buddhist holiday in Sri Lanka. Every Poya day has a specific significance. Most famous is the Wesak festival in May when Buddhists all over the world celebrate the birth and enlightenment of the Lord Buddha. The January full moon, Duruthu Poya, marked the Buddha’s first visit to Sri Lanka. I had made a note of the Poya days during our trip because I had expected the country to grind to a halt and because the sale of alcohol is forbidden.
All along the wall down to the lobby, excursions were advertised in English and German: ‘Let’s go on an exotic adventure!’ — No thanks. I could think of nothing worse than being shepherded around the sights with a group of tourists all trotting behind a guide. In all the years I have lived in London, I have never even been to the Tower, in common with most Londoners who only go to the ‘sights’ to show foreign visitors around. I shuddered. The whole place looked like a fortress, or a prison. The tourists would be whisked across Sri Lanka in air-conditioned minibuses without setting foot in the country, except for the excursions and the hotel grounds. They might visit ‘exotic places’ but in reality they never left home. I was glad to be out of there.
We drove down a sandy track that ran parallel to the main road along the coast, all the way to Chilaw. As we zoomed past rows of prawn-hatcheries and palm-thatch cottages, Maria gave us a running commentary of the vegetation. Colourful oleander bushes grew in the gardens behind fences of palm matting.
“That is yellow oleander, Thevetia peruviana,” she lectured: “Also called Kaneru, or ‘the suicide plant’. Taken with sugar, it causes an apparently painless death.” The seeds contain a toxin that slows, and eventually stops, the heart. Deliberate self-poisoning with yellow oleander is common in Sri Lanka, causing around 2000 deaths every year. In the nineties, Sri Lanka overtook Hungary as the country with the highest suicide rate in the world. Many of these occur among children and young people affected by war and displaced people in refuge camps in the north. In some of these
‘welfare centres’ the suicide rate is more than three times the national average. Oleander poisoning is the second most common method for attempting suicide in Sri Lanka.
Driving past the beaches, Maria pointed out the vegetation: Opanchia cacti, characteristic of the arid coastline, acacia trees and fabulous screw pines which grew on the sand right by the ocean. We got out of the car for a closer look and she pointed out the spiky shore grass Spiniflex littorus, locally known as ‘the beard of the devil king’ and tiny Ipomea with purple flowers, both of which bind the sand and prevent erosion in a manner similar to our own dune grass. Cajurina shrubs, introduced from Australia, were widespread as the land became drier. In the area around Chilaw, we left the wet zone behind and entered the intermediate zone. Among the mix of vegetation, palmyrah palms became increasingly common. We stopped at a little hotel for coffee.
“Ask if they have curd and treacle!” I pleaded, but again I was unlucky. Not a single eatery in Sri Lanka appeared to have it. We made do with delicious jaggery cakes instead. Maria vowed to find me curd and treacle before the trip was over.
“And Toddy!”
“It’s Poya day!”
Damn.
Back on the main road, we picked up our conversation. All this talk about suicide plants had put S in a morose mood and for several miles, they discussed different methods of comitting suicide. I listened with unease. For me, there had been a time when this was no joking matter. S was dismissive; he simply could not understand how anybody would contemplate such a thing: “Except perhaps when you are sick and in pain and there is no hope or the pain is too bad…”
“Its just like that,” I said: “the pain doesn’t have to be physical!”
He wouldn’t understand, so I gave up.
In Battulu-Oya, we passed another accident. The wreck of a bus was facing us, its front crumpled, the windsceen shattered. A crowd had gathered around. There was a body on the driver’s seat. We drove past. There was nothing anybody could have done for the person in the mangled bus.
I was still shaken when Guaratna jumped on the brakes. A large water monitor, black with yellow markings, waddled speedily across the road and dissappeared into a tank on the other side.
We were now in the dry zone and at Palavi, we turned off towards the Kalpityia peninsula. The vegetation changed once again, marking a further transition to the arid zone. Wild brown donkeys walked past us on the sandy ground. A familiar scene from many years ago…
“By God!” I exclaimed:”if those palm trees were dates instead of coconuts, this could be Egypt!
“We get date palms here too,” said Maria.
Sri Lanka struck me as a miniature Africa. There are Baobab trees on Mannar Island, and even a tiny desert, complete with sand dunes, at Manalkadu on the Jaffna peninsula. Elephants roam in the bush and Sinharaja is a rain forest reserve. Nearly every tropical ecosystem seemed to be represented on this island the size of Latvia.
Africa was much on my mind during this trip. Exactly 20 years ago I had embarked on my first big journey from Cairo to Capetown (for a budding zoologist, there had never been much doubt about the destination). Even back then, that particular road was well-travelled. I would regularly meet up with other travellers at check-points such as the clocktower in Arusha in the shadow of Mount Kilimanjaro, which reputedly marked the half-way-point — a pit-stop on our unofficial race to the Cape. Most people travelled in organised groups. I too had started the journey that way, but when our group predictably split up in the Central African Republic, I was not ready to return home. We had crossed the desert, but I had yet to see the jungle and the savanna. I did not hesitate for long before resolving to continue on my own. It was on that journey that I had caught the travel-bug.
At numerous places, we passed mangroves complete with their associate ferns, shrubby ground coconuts and Suria trees with yellow flowers and heart-shaped leaves. Where the land was drier, with water confined to tiny puddles, the mangrove ecosystem appeared stunted; some of the puddles were surrounded by bonsai mangroves no bigger than Scottish heather.
We passed numerous coconut plantations dotted with Toddy taverns, every single one of which was closed on Poya day. But I learned to recognize them, the Sinhala script for ‘toddy’ looked a bit like a little sigma followed by a right-hand square bracket.
We drove through Talawila, a bustling town two thirds up the peninsula. It is home to St. Anne’s Church, which houses a venerated shrine to the Mother of Mary and is a sacred site for catholics in Sri Lanka. The church was festooned with banners. People were dressed in black or white, the Christian colours of sorrow and joy. Judging from the crowd it was not possible to determine whether they were mourners at a funeral or celebrated a wedding although the former was more likely. Maria was tempted to stop, but we had to press on, it was getting late.
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Denni