Thursday 23 June, 2005

Evil

Last night, after what had been a difficult day, I took the steep path through the tea plantation behind the estate. I needed a break from the retreat, from my own words and company, and had planned to eat a meal at a restaurant called Shangri-La Tea Haven. I ordered a meal. The sun set, the wind began to blow and it became quite cold. A Sri Lankan man in a cowboy shirt approached me, asks me if I believed in God - he's a pastor, don't you know - and offered me his Alsatian puppy, Lucky, to pet. The dog is cold too and buries its nose under my arm and pushes its little fat body against my breast. After two hours I asked how that dinner was coming along and the waiter said to me, 'chef up in Badulla. Maybe an hour a way'. I gave up on food, and headed back down through the tea plantation with my head lamp before I remembered the Pemberley manager's warning that snakes slept at night in the warmth of the piles of cut and fermenting grass that lined the path. I heard a squeal and leapt back while a wild pig crashed off in the other direction. A line from Leonard Woolf comes to mind: 'all jungles are evil'. I rang Virginia on my mobile phone (at 1.00 in the morning Australian time) and tell her I'm hungry and there are snakes and pigs and that I'm frightened. When I finally got home I poured myself a large arrack (coconut spirit) and go back to Ondaatje. 'Apart from Knox,'he writes, 'and later Leonard Woolf in his novel A Village in the Jungle, very few foreigners truly know where they were.'

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