After Cleo

Monastic

Old people bring many blessings

Laden with tropical growth, Boulder Mountain rose sharply above us. Its slope appeared to be held together by enormous stones, many of them larger than elephants. While a few creepers had the audacity to scramble over them, most of the rocks were bare and lined with age. Immovable sculptures of the forest, the boulders were both beautiful and forbidding in the heavy shadows of evening.

Other monks had tried to make a home here in the past, the nun explained, but they’d been frightened away by evil spirits. The current monk, Lydia’s teacher, was made of sterner stuff. Meditating in the cave near the summit for several years, he claimed the place.

Though the mountain air was cooler than it’d been at sea level, it was still and lifeless. I longed for a breeze, especially knowing 200 steps were hiding in the forest. My suitcase was ludicrously large. I wished I’d settled for a backpack.

As we slid out of the van, the driver gallantly hoisted my suitcase on his shoulder and disappeared up some mossy steps. We followed him, climbing and climbing. Jungle plants wrapped themselves so voraciously around the path that there was no view of the valley below. All I could see was the next set of steps ahead. Soon my eyes were stinging and my chest pumping. Stopping to catch my breath, I waved the others to go on ahead. To my relief, they vanished into the folds of the jungle. Only Lydia remained, waiting patiently behind me. I apologised for holding her up. She said not to worry, she felt like a breather herself.

When my lungs returned to normal, Lydia shadowed my footsteps with no sign of annoyance or frustration. Dad, who’d been an enthusiastic mountain climber, had a saying: ‘Always let the slowest go first.’ With gratitude, I realised it’s exactly what Lydia was doing. I made an effort not to count the steps, concentrating instead on scaling one set at a time without worrying how many more might be lurking on the slope above us. It was a good exercise in living in the present – perfect for the ascent to a Buddhist monastery, really.

Shadows grew longer as we reached the plain two-storeyed building that was the nuns’ quarters. I slipped my shoes off at the door and stumbled into a harshly lit room.

‘Sit,’ said the senior nun in a tone that wasn’t to be argued with.

Dusty and sweaty, I lowered myself on to a plastic chair covered with gold fabric. Not a word was said, but I later found out that seat was reserved for monks only.

A ginger kitten trotted toward me and rubbed against my ankle. As it gazed up at me through amber eyes, I thought of Jonah and wondered how he’d enjoy monastic life. Jonah’s personality was so pervasive I saw him everywhere these days, even in the eyes of racehorses and wild animals. His beauty and intensity seemed to be part of every animal.

‘What a lovely kitten!’ I said.

‘It’s not a kitten, it’s a cat,’ Lydia explained quietly. ‘The nuns found her mewing in the forest eight years ago. She’s had several litters, but none survived. She’s vegetarian.’

A vegetarian cat? I didn’t like to say anything. Maybe she was a high-minded feline. Or she was just conforming to monastery rules.

‘What’s her name?’

‘Puss. Just Puss.’

The van driver said goodbye and bowed deeply to both nuns. To my great embarrassment, he then turned and bowed just as deeply to me. Heat prickled up my neck. I must’ve been blushing.

‘It’s what we do for the oldest person present,’ the senior nun explained.

Looking at her, it was impossible to tell how old she was – thirty or forty? She had one of those unlined ecclesiastical faces. I later discovered she was just two years younger than me – we were closer in the walking-frame stakes than I’d thought.

Bow to people – just because they’re old? It was a complete reversal of cultural priorities.

‘Old people bring many blessings,’ she explained with a radiant smile.

My first day in Sri Lanka had been filled with so many unfamiliar experiences I was beginning to feel like Alice in Wonderland. Strangest of all, coming from a culture that worships youth and detests grey hair, was to be actually revered for having a few wrinkles. Not that I liked to think of myself as ancient, just mature with a chance of wisdom.

Once the driver had handed over my suitcase, apologised again for the van breaking down, and left, Lydia escorted me up some outdoor steps to our rooms. Too weary to take much in, I registered apricot walls, a bare light bulb, a table with a white plastic chair and a bed with a blue mosquito net hovering over it.

The air was thick and warm. Lydia opened the windows, saying she hadn’t had any trouble from mosquitoes in her room next door. Just as she was about to explain where to find the bathroom, we were plunged into darkness. The senior nun glided into the room with a lit candle creating a halo around her.

‘It’s just an electricity cut, Sister Helen,’ she said, placing the candle on the table and floating out the door again. The candle promptly went out and fell on the floor.

‘Did you bring a head torch?’ Lydia asked.

There was a dull thud. Lydia assured me it was just her tripping over the candle.

Once our halogen lights were strapped around our heads we lit up like glow-worms. I followed Lydia’s silhouette outside on to the balcony, then around a corner over a potentially treacherous hump to what she tactfully described as a ‘French-style’ toilet – i.e. tiled floor with a hole in the ground, plus a bucket and scrubbing brush; flushing mechanisms non-existent. Compared to this, the lavatory in Kuala Lumpur had been the pinnacle of hygiene technology. What a prissy, screwed-up fool I’d been twenty-four hours ago!

I decided the hole in the ground was manageable providing it wasn’t a breeding ground for scorpions. Actually, even if it was I wasn’t about to go and pee in the jungle among snakes and whatever else was lurking out there. For the next few days it was going to be my hole in the ground – and Lydia’s and whoever else had claim to it. I was simply going to have to learn to use a bucket and scrubbing brush.

Back downstairs I showered under a dribble of tepid water with a large cockroach for a friend. As the grime of the day trickled away, I decided it was one of the best showers of my life.

It was intriguing to see how simply Lydia had lived for weeks, sometimes months, at a time. My bedroom was identical to hers, the bed just a mattress on plywood about the right length for a ten-year-old boy. Once smoothed down with sheets from home and the travel pillow it looked incredibly inviting. After a day playing human tumbleweed inside the van, I was grateful for its stillness.

Lydia brought mugs of tea, so hot and strong they almost passed as soup. With trepidation, I produced a small parcel from my suitcase and handed it to her.

‘Wow!’ she said, holding up the singlet top so the diamonds twinkled in the shadows. ‘Calvin Klein! How exciting!’

Her delight at the crass glitziness of the garment was wonderful.

After a while, Lydia kissed me goodnight and said to knock on her door if I needed her. Alone in my room with my head torch, I smiled at the electronic bleeping coming from her room. In these strange surroundings it was reassuring she had the same old quirks – like forgetting to turn her alarm clock off, and tripping over things.

Outside, the night had turned black as onyx. I’d naively assumed darkness in the jungle would mean silence, but a hypnotic chorus of male chanting echoed across the valley. The sound resonated through me, carrying me back through generations to anonymous forebears who lived before the Industrial Revolution, the Age of Enlightenment and the Renaissance.

After the chanting ended, other more insistent noises took over. Lowering myself on to the bed, I heard crickets (several types), birds, frogs, dogs and an unidentified range of creatures that trilled, squawked, honked, clicked, whistled, quacked and chirped. Competing loudly against each other, they took me back still further to a time when the prospect of evil spirits was feasible.

After a while, unnerved by the spooky symphony, I sprang off the bed and reached for my iPhone. A clearly pixelated image of Jonah draped like a beret over Philip’s head flashed to life once I pressed a button. I was relieved it still worked. For a moment I’d imagined I’d slipped into another century.

By the light of my head torch, I dug my earplugs out of my toilet bag, thanking whoever was CEO of the heavens right now that I’d remembered to bring the orange plugs of sanity. Next, I counted out my nut bars. Two for each night. I hoped they’d get me through. If not, I’d just have to regard the monastery as a fat farm.

Sifting through my carefully thought out luggage, I felt ridiculous. Almost everything I’d brought for ‘protection’ was proving useless. I draped the pesticide-soaked net over the window in case Lydia was being optimistic about mosquitoes. As for the silk liner, mozzie bands, Marcel Marceau gloves, knee-length white socks and hat net – I needn’t have bothered. The blocking and unblocking pills languished inside their packets. I was almost hoping I’d meet a tic so the tic remover hadn’t been a waste of cabin space.

Still, I thought, easing cautiously back on the bed in case it was more fragile than it looked, the trip wasn’t over. There was plenty of time for things to go wrong. Even through the earplugs, I could hear the screeching jungle – but was too tired to care.

I’d hardly fallen asleep when I was woken by the sound of a woodpecker drilling a tree. After a while, I realised it wasn’t a woodpecker at all, but a drum roll – the monks’ morning wake-up call. Soon after, their eerie chanting began. Using harmonies even Schoenberg couldn’t have dreamt up, their mahogany voices drifted across the jungle canopy. The sound was from another world – music a shoal of fish might make if they could sing.

Pink light filtered through the curtains. Over more than three decades, motherhood had taken me to all sorts of places – from pinnacles of joy in maternity wards to utter desolation at a graveside. Through all those years I’d never imagined it would bring me to a remote monastery in Sri Lanka.

I was relieved that the monks hadn’t issued an invitation to attend the pre-dawn chanting. Maybe it was a male-only thing. Monastery life didn’t seem to encourage mingling of the sexes. The monks were housed across the hill well away from the nuns’ accommodation.

Getting back to sleep was impossible. I lumbered out of bed and wondered what Trinny and Susannah would recommend under these circumstances. White trousers and a mostly white long-sleeved top seemed logical – and of course I was happy to take on the role of student, whatever that might mean. Pale clothes deflected heat and kept insects at bay. Pulling on the knee length white socks, I toyed with the idea of the Marcel Marceau gloves – and put them back in my suitcase.

Lydia escorted me downstairs to the dining room, which was a simple space with two small tables covered in plastic tablecloths, a sink and a microwave. A wall of windows overlooked a mass of plant life glistening happily in the sun. I recognised a banana tree and some coconut palms, but they were squashed together, bigger and greener than anything I was used to, as if they were on growth hormones. Most of the trees and plants were unfamiliar. Not for the first time, I felt overwhelmed by ignorance.

The table was laid out with flat bread, dhal, delicately flavoured rice balls and bananas. There was also a tub of garishly labelled margarine and a jar of Vegemite. Apart from these two imports, almost all the ingredients were fresh from the monastery surrounds. The breakfast was wholesome and filling. When I commented it felt health-enhancing Lydia explained it was based on Ayurvedic principles of food being medicine.

Approaching the day ahead with an open mind, I wondered if Lydia’s teacher might hold some classes I could sit in on. It turned out he’d had to stay in Kandy on business overnight and sent his apologies. Lydia offered to show me around, and suggested we could maybe go into town with the nuns later on. Oh, she added, and a fortune-teller was coming up from the village mid morning.

After we’d washed our dishes and put them away, Lydia showed me the meditation hall further up the hill. She’d spent many hours alone there, sometimes more than twelve hours a day, doing sitting and walking meditation. The room, largely unadorned, was steamy and still.

Trying to understand what she’d been doing there, I asked her to give me a short, guided meditation. Perched on a blue cushion on the floor, I closed my eyes and listened to her voice. Sounding strong and authoritative, she urged me to concentrate on my breathing; I tried but a river of sweat trickled down my back and I started to feel dizzy.

Like an unco-operative school child, I interrupted to ask if she’d mind if I stretched out on the floor. She nodded graciously. Even horizontal I was still uncomfortable. My right leg twitched and my throat was dry. Maybe it was jet lag, but I was relieved when the session finished.

Lydia showed me her teacher’s house, a pleasant cottage with a view over the valley. We then wandered past the monks’ quarters, where maroon garments were draped over a clothesline. Nine monks currently lived there, she said. Most of them were teenage boys ranging in age from twelve to nineteen. We strolled past the classroom – an open-sided hall with benches and a whiteboard – where she taught the young monks English and Neuroscience. Neuroscience?

Some monks were more interested in Neuroscience than others, she confessed, but the links to meditation and its effects on the brain were particularly relevant. Apparently, happiness can be measured by heightened activity in the orbital frontal cortex. Scientists had discovered that the man with the happiest brain in the world happened to be a Buddhist monk.

Before there was time to ask more, we needed to hurry back to the dining room to meet the fortune-teller. Neuroscience to fortune-telling seemed an easy leap in this unworldly place.

I’d expected a village fortune-teller to have white hair and no teeth. But she was a good-looking woman in her thirties with prominent hooded eyes and long dark hair tumbling over her shoulders. She looked like the sort of woman I might’ve made friends with at a playgroup not so long ago. Unfortunately, she spoke no English.

The senior nun, who’d had her fortune told with surprising accuracy on a previous occasion, agreed to translate while Lydia took notes. The psychic didn’t ask to look at my palm. She gazed disinterestedly out the window instead.

‘You make a lot of money but you waste it,’ she said.

I couldn’t argue with her there.

‘Your family lives near you. Brothers, sisters – some over the back fence, some next door.’

Well, even the best fortune-tellers miss the mark sometimes.

‘In your house there is the ghost of an old man,’ she continued. ‘He is followed up and down the stairs by a cat. Do you have a cat?’

I nodded.

‘The cat and the old man’s ghost – I think it is your father. They are good friends.’

Lydia and I exchanged glances. Perhaps Jonah had been trying to tell us something when he’d sprayed Dad’s old piano. Dad had always liked cats.

‘You’ve had a very hard time with your health lately,’ the fortune-teller went on. ‘But things are okay now. You’ll get another health problem when you’re sixty but don’t worry. It won’t be serious. You’ll live till . . .’

She took the pencil from Lydia’s hand and wrote ‘82’ on the paper.

I was happy with that.

‘You had a terrible time when everything was very bad,’ she added, her eyes suddenly veiled with a memory of pain. ‘You wanted to end your life, but you became strong instead. You lost all fear and started a new life.’

It’s only natural to want to catch a fortune-teller out. I asked how old I was when I had this experience. Without hesitating she replied ‘28’ – exactly the age I was when poor Sam was killed. She was right. There was no doubt I’d felt suicidal.

I asked her about my work.

‘I see two books,’ she said. ‘They will spread sunshine over the world.’

I was hoping the woman would go on to tell Lydia’s fortune, but she seemed to have run out of energy. She said Lydia would have three children and needed to be careful driving her car.

The fortune-teller then asked if Lydia and I might be interested in buying gems to clear impurities from our blood. Her partner, who happened to be waiting outside, sold such gems and would make them up into pendants for us at an excellent price, much cheaper than we’d pay in our own country. While I was happy to do anything to support the local economy, Lydia put her hand on my arm. Despite her spiritual tendencies, she’d always been astute with finances. Thanking the psychic, and paying her several times the going rate, she said we’d think about cleansing gems.

After the fortune-teller and her partner had left, Lydia and I savoured a lunchtime banquet of potato curry, green vegetables, salad, lentils flavoured with turmeric, and soy beans. Thanks to the Sri Lankan sweet tooth, desert was equally sumptuous – dry noodles decorated with yoghurt and honey, then drizzled with jaggery syrup. In case that wasn’t enough, papaya and bananas had been added to the table. The monastery cook was a food poet, a culinary Cezanne. And to think I’d considered starvation a possibility!

The Sri Lankan tuk-tuk is basically a lethal weapon on wheels. As a motorbike with a small cabin attached behind the driver’s seat, it offers several forms of torture. If you don’t choke to death on the exhaust fumes, it can shatter your bones as it bounces along goat tracks disguised as roads. It has potential to topple over and hurl you into a river, or simply smash head on into a truck full of livestock. Alternatively, you can try fitting three people into the cabin and risk having the life crushed out of you.

‘Are the three of us going to fit in that thing?’ I asked, peering at a passenger seat wide enough to accommodate three budgerigars.

The senior nun and Lydia assured me we would.

‘Just hold on tight,’ said Lydia as the driver plummeted down the hill into the jungle. If the van had been adventurous, the tuk-tuk was plain suicidal. We crashed over pot-holes, through lakes of mud, then spun around corners narrowly avoiding toppling over precipices. When we finally staggered out on to the village street, it felt as though my heart had rearranged itself to somewhere in my abdomen and that my bowels had been transplanted to my chest.

As we started walking, two girls wearing headscarves stared at us as though aliens had landed. A group of women in saris nodded and smiled curiously. It felt strange to be pale skinned in a village of Sri Lankans. Almost everyone I encountered was friendly and polite. I quietly hoped Sri Lankans felt equally welcome when they visited our part of the world.

The senior nun led us into a supermarket to buy jelly for her ailing mother. Apparently, two weeks before, the eighty-three-year-old had felt dizzy. Sitting on her bed, she’d fallen sideways on to the covers and had been lying there ever since. Jelly was all she could eat.

Searching the shelves, I was surprised to see a range of skin-whitening creams, potions and even pills. Once again, priorities were the opposite to those back home, where young women dedicated much of their lives to making their skin darker, if not orange.

When Lydia found the jelly section, the senior nun asked her to check the best-before dates. Satisfied the product was in good condition, the nun made her purchase and led us out of the supermarket to a T-shirt shop.

Contrary to my assumptions about nuns, this one proved a wily shopper with a keen eye. She had no doubt the purple top with paisley glitter would be perfect to take home for Katharine – and her taste was spot on. The shopkeepers were surprised when Lydia joked and laughed with them in fluent Sinhalese. I took a step backwards and pretended I knew exactly what they were talking about.

On the way back up the hill, the tuk-tuk lurched to a halt outside a modest house half hidden in the trees. A group of people stood outside smiling and waving. Lydia explained they were members of the nun’s family.

‘Would you like to meet my mother?’ asked the senior nun. ‘She is very weak.’

Moving through the front door, I recognised a house close to mourning. Women sat talking quietly together. Men stood about hoping to appear useful. Children played upstairs. No matter what culture they’re from, the warmth and tenderness of people at such a time is profound. To be in a household in the presence of death is to see the human heart at its most sombre and loving.

Family members welcomed us warmly and the nun beckoned us to a room toward the back of the house. The space was small and darkened. Even though the window was open it felt hot and airless.

Lying on the bed was an elderly woman so wasted she was barely a shell. Bending tenderly over her mother, the nun adjusted a cotton blanket to cover her sticks of legs. A primitive drip was attached to her mother’s thin, leathery arm. Her lips were drawn back from her toothless mouth as though in a state of permanent thirst.

Yet her eyes blazed as if she was living with greater intensity now than she had all her life. Her smile was so luminous it filled the room with light. With a withered hand, she reached for Lydia’s sleeve and spoke to her in Sinhalese.

‘She says she’s very pleased to meet you,’ said Lydia. ‘And she wishes you a long life.’

I took the old woman’s hand and stroked her corrugated skin, which was surprisingly soft and warm. To receive a blessing for long life from someone so close to the spirit world was a great privilege.

The closeness I felt to her reminded me of the circle of women who’d helped me through cancer and of the immense capacity we have to give strength and light to one another. I hoped some day I’d be able to pass the blessing the nun’s mother had given me on to other women, young and old – to wish each one of them a long life brimming with love.

After we thanked the nun’s family and started walking away from the house, I was unable to speak. I’d dreaded coming to this country yet, in the short time I’d been here, Sri Lanka had showered me with unexpected riches. The fluffy-towel addicted, fear-obsessed person I thought I’d become had given way to the life-loving adventurer I used to be.

To be embraced so warmly by the nun and her family had been a gift beyond price. Receiving a blessing from her dying mother made the circle of women seem more powerful than ever. No matter how old we are or what country we’re from, women have great strength and compassion to offer each other.

Not only that, I’d found a place where old people weren’t despised but regarded as a source of blessings.

Most important of all, I’d grown closer to the daughter I’d thought I’d lost.

No wonder the island had been called Serendipity, land of happy accidents.