BEING HERE
It is so simple, really, that I wonder why it amazes me. I am sitting in Swannanoa looking out at Four Brothers mountain with the low today of about zero, and then I sit in a plane (four in this case with travel mixups thrown in) and the next day, after a four hour car ride am in Anuradhapura where the low is 73 and the high 90. Here are palm trees and high wide spreading fan like trees and streets full of motorcycle rickshaws and small automobiles with people walking everywhere. What is ordinary to the people of Anuradhapura is either marvelous or dumpy to me depending on my mood. For people here I am just a creaky 86 year old nondescript white man. But within this 86 year old walking slowly down the street everything is fresh and different and stimulating. In Swannanoa everything is routine and predictable to the point that I notice very little. Here the food is all exotic with new taste sensations. Talatha serves three meals a day, none of it familiar, every meal with me eating alone while Winsor and Talatha look on to see if I approve, and then when I am well started Winsor joins in. I don’t know when Talatha eats, but it must be right afterward. Talatha’s cooking is marvelous and most of it new. For breakfast are hot, hard, round roti, to be eaten with Indian yellow dal or spicy fried onions, with sliced pineapple on the side and spicy cinnamon tea, not a Waffle House breakfast.
The weather is not only 90 degrees but feels like 90 percent humidity, muggy. To everyone else here this clammy feeling is so normal that they don’t notice it. It is the way the air should feel. When Winsor has visited Asheville he must find the air uncomfortably dry accentuated by airconditioning in the summer and central heating in the winter. Here. next to the equator, there is no winter of summer, just wet and dry, and the weather now is supposedly turning dry although it rains every day. The overhead fans whirl above keeping people cool.
And then there is the different economy, now just pulling out of a financial crash two years ago that for awhile allowed no gas for cars or gas for cooking into the country so everyone used firewood to cook with. The bad economy is visible with people begging for money and by people selling fruits and household items in stalls set up along the road. Hard times. But because they were doing well before the financial crash the infrastructure, modern stores and guest houses and new cars, looks as if peole are still doing well. But no new cars are allowed into the country, gasoline is very expensive, and the pandemic tanked the tourist industry, which is starting to recover. As an outsider I can sense the change but not feel the pain that people are going through.
And this is all in two days as seen through the fog of jet lag. For the people caught in change, these new times are inexplicable, no one saw this coming, and no one was ready, but government over borrowing and corruption have led to this sudden collapse and overnight their lives were turned upside down.
But for me it is simply all different requiring me to be fully alert since I don’t know how to do anything and everything is different. In Swannanoa I know the value of everything from a toothbrush to a Big Mac. Here I have a wad of rupees in the thousands and have no idea what the price of anything is. I am almost floating along in a magical dreamland, which I guess, is the reason I came, to be jolted into paying attention and to be brought to life.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 