There are certain things a guidebook ought to level with you about right up front, before all the gushing about the exotic culture, pristine sandy beaches and friendly people. Number one, page one, straight flat out:
YOU ARE GOING TO A COUNTRY THAT CAN’T KEEP THE ROAD TO ITS ONE INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT PAVED, AND LINES THE ROAD IN AND OUT WITH BOYS WITH NO FACIAL HAIR HOLDING MACHINE GUNS.
Lurching into and out of potholes on the road to the beach, dim yellow headlights illuminated scrawny street dogs, sneering from the road, teeth in road kill. We took the diplomatic approach and decided, let’s see what it looks like in the morning.
*****
In the pre-dawn gray the fishing fleet already trolled off the Negombo shore. The last tardy catamaran, sail full-billowed, flew out to join the rest.
Sheldon had already been out and back. A slight fellow, just chest high, with a broad smile under his tight-clipped mustache, Sheldon showed me his catch, in a crate, a few gross of five or six inch mackerels.
He took me to meet all the other guys and see their catches, too, stepping over nets they were busy untangling and setting right for the afternoon. He led me to his house, just alongside and between a couple of beach hotels, shoreside from the road. It was a sprawl of a dozen thatch huts.
He’d built it himself.
Sheldon took me inside, immensely proud, to show me how he had arranged
two hundred woven palm-frond panels on top of one another to build the
roof. He told me “two hundred” several times.
A thatch wall divided Sheldon’s house into two rooms. The only furniture was a rough wooden bed with no linens.
A very young woman dressed in a long blue smock with her hair pulled back, Sheldon’s wife rose to smile and greet me, and their precocious four and six year old daughters danced around us all. He took his son, just one year old, into his lap as we talked.
We all sat together near a crack in the wall where sunlight came through so they could look at postcards of where I was from. They served sweet tea. I drank it fearing I’d be dying of local water later that day.
Sheldon walked me back toward Hotel Royal Oceanic, two hundred meters and several worlds apart. On the way, he explained to me that he was 31, his brother was “41, 42 sometimes. Lives nearby, mama too. Papa no.”
*****
- Excerpted from the eventual book, Common Sense and Whiskey, by Bill Murray. We visited Sri Lanka in 1999, before the 2004 Asian tsunami. Sheldon and his lovely young family, above, lived a few sand dunes from the ocean. Walls made of thatch were their protection. We don't know how they fared.
Photos from EarthPhotos.com. See more photos from Sri Lanka on EarthPhotos.com.
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