A change of scenery, a change of pace
Aditha Dissanayake goes to a place where squirrels confer and clouds drift aimlessly by

I pinch myself to see if I am awake. I am. But I feel as if I have just landed on another planet. “No signal,” says the screen on my mobile phone. I have no way of checking e-mail or accessing the Internet. There are no supermarkets, no English newspapers and no take-away food...

I am in Thawalan-thanna, a hamlet in the district of Nuwara Eliya. “Where can I buy the newspaper?” I ask my aunt. “At the Hilton.” “A pair of slippers and a tooth-brush?” “At the Hilton, of course. And while you are about it bring me some sugar and vegetables,” she hands me her marketing-bag.

On my way to the junction where the ‘Hilton’ is, I fall in step with Nai Mahaththaya. Everyone calls him this because he boasts about his doctor-son and daughter-married-to-an-engineer. Nai Mahaththaya just manages to tell me about his son’s recent trip to Singapore, before he gets into the huge, yellow bus, which stops for him in the middle of the road.

The driver gives me a warm smile. From what my aunt told me I know he is called Kalagedi-sami, because he runs over the clay pots of the women standing by the roadside. I grin and wave, realizing that even though we have never met before, out here everybody knows everybody.

The Hilton has everything - from bicycle tyres to plastic chairs, sugar buns to T-shirts with pictures of the two lovers of the Titanic printed on them. But no Daily Mirror. “No one around here reads the English papers. So, we don’t order them,” says the Mudalali. “Did Baby come yesterday?” I succumb to being addressed as ‘Baby’ because previous encounters had proven the futility of trying to correct him. Then he fires a long line of questions at me. “Why did I come on my own? Why didn’t my parents come?

Back at home when I complain to my aunt about being interrogated, she pacifies me by saying that the Mudalali is an innocent soul, and would have asked the questions because he cared about me. “You must get used to the difference between minding your own business as you do in the city and caring about people the way we do out here,” she tells me. I feel ashamed of my initial anger and resolve to tell the Mudalali everything he wants to know about my life.

Buying provisions turns out to be a new experience. There is no man dressed like someone who has stepped out of colonial days, to open doors and wish you a ‘good morning/evening’. No cart or basket to grab. No shelves filled with all the goods I might or might not need, with the price and the date of manufacture and expiry written on them.

There is no way of taking them into my hands to ponder over their nutritious values or wonder if they are anti-weight-gain or not. No way of paying with a credit card or walking out clutching a dozen ‘siri-siri’ bags feeling guilty about the harm they might do to the environment. And above all, no way of avoiding verbal communication. Unlike in a supermarket where I can do all my shopping and exit without uttering a word to anyone, I have to ask, listen, ask again... “Can I have a kilo of sugar? How much are those? Five rupees a kilo?”

Time moves on in slow motion. Tomorrow I won’t be here seated under the mango tree, day-dreaming of all the crazy things I could do if I had... Tomorrow I would have moved on to pick up my life from where I had left off, before striking out to experience rustic life. Tomorrow I will be in Colombo, where I can see the air I breathe, where I become an unwilling food source to mosquitoes, where the best method of relaxation is to watch TV advertisements, where no one dares slow down, where in order to survive one has to be a Type A person (an uptight, compulsive, competitive, over-achiever)...

The two squirrels on the mango tree go on arguing over whatever disputes that arise in their squirrel world, the flock of house sparrows continue the conference they have been having everyday at this time on the electricity wire, the clouds continue to move in the blue sky... heading, who knows where?

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