The beach: revisited

aaron scott

sinhala-english dictionary

My hedonistic weekend ended at sunset on the veranda of a colonial mansion; it started with a promise of 20 yogic Dutch girls at a party on the beach. The party was the brainchild of an oversized Danish, Leonardo Dicaprio look-alike named Alex, who insisted my friend, Moriah, and I come. Moriah called the number he had inscribed on the vodka bottle she won in a limbo contest the night we met him and within hours, we found ourselves cramped with a bunch of Belgians and one Sri Lankan in the tall stranger’s SUV without seatbelts or any real idea of where we were going.

The sky unleashed a monsoon and the road flooded with water and drained of traffic as we neared eastern Colombo, where there was a curfew in place due to ethnic rioting. Suge, the Sri Lankan, pointed to our skin and said the curfew didn’t apply to us. Alex, ignoring the rain and the brown rivers of mud, raced through the deserted streets, by the gated shops and past the army trucks crowded with waving soldiers.

As we left the curfew zone and the rains ceased, a different sort of monsoon broke to flood the streets with rivers of people. The entire population of Colombo seemed to be on our avenue of stop-and-go traffic, smiling at the larger than life Europeans now sprawled on cushions in the bed of the truck, calmly passing a joint without a thought to their public surroundings. After all, they were white.

Escaping Colombo, we continued southeast along the coast. The sun set magnificently as we were circling the lazy half moon of a large bay. As we drove by dinnertime without stopping, the promised 20 Dutch girls grew into the mythic 50 flying yogic Dutch girls. Alex and Suge stopped in Galle for Red Bull and condoms, chivalrously asking Moriah if she wanted some.

Arriving in Unawatuna, we threaded through the sandy lanes to our guesthouse. Moriah and I threw our bags in a room that cost the equivalent of three dollars a night and walked the ten feet to the Happy Tuna, the half-covered deck on the beach that was both a restaurant and Alex’s Unawatuna base of operations, which is to say he never once deviated from the 20-foot swath between the guest house, the restaurant and the beach, except to buy more smokes. It was nine o’clock. The 70 time-traveling, flying yogic Dutch girls turned out to be six middle-aged Belgians evidently new to yogic exercise. I consoled myself with a bunch of Brits who were drinking a ‘traveler’s cocktail’ of their invention. I went to the disco next door until three, trying to lose myself in the ludicrous mix of techno, Bob Marley and the Police, while ignoring the messy dance of flirtation in which drunken Europeans tried to pick up drunken local surfers who, in turn, tried to pick up them. I’m not sure who was exploiting whom, but I think everyone went home happy.

The next morning was mango juice, papaya and toast on the beach. I talked with Mewan, the waiter, who had slept one hour the night before after waiting for Alex and his friends to stumble to bed and before waking to serve other tourists breakfast. He works like this seven days a week without regular holidays. And all for 250 rupies a day. Two bucks and fifty cents. A jar of peanut butter costs three dollars.

Moriah and I felt a twinge of satisfaction that the condoms went unopened. Yogic Dutch girls just aren’t as enlightened as they used to be. Alex and the rest spent the day drinking and smoking; the present joint barely finished before the next was being rolled. The Brits had a similar agenda. One, Edward, had impaled his leg on a branch the night before and now wore bandages and walked with a limp, which didn’t in any way impede his trips to the bar.

After a duplicate night of disco and debauchery, we settled the bill—9500 rupies. The equivalent of 38 working Mewan days.

Back in Kandy, we sat on the veranda of Alex’s house (45,000 rubies a month, he told us—the salary of a middle class Sri Lankan family) and listened to his parents tell stories about the wild parties they threw in Columbo back in the ‘80s, during the rolling two-day blackouts and the ethnic war with its disappearing people reappearing as bodies.

Without seatbelts, Moriah and I entered a world I naively assumed ceased to exist when the last Brit packed his bag and sailed off the island in 1948. A world of ex-pats and foreign money. Alex constantly questioned why we wanted to learn about ‘their’ culture and language. After all, his 16-year-old Dutch friend who had lived here since she was three got by fine without it. As charming as Alex and his ‘do what you want’ flair could be, Moriah and I continually caught ourselves looking at each other in utter shock at some of his comments and actions. Indeed a different life, drenched as it is in cocktail parties and duty free importing and exporting.