A Writer's World (27 page)

Not every Ceylonese discovery is happy, for this is an island that has seen better days, and has lately been depressed by addled politics and false finance. Unexpected, though, Ceylon certainly is – a fascinating anomaly of the Indian Ocean, a humped oval island not far north of the equator, with some of the most exquisite scenery in the world and a mountain so holy, to devotees of several religions, that even the agnostic butterflies hazily meander there, when they feel the death-urge coming on. A gently festive air seems to linger over the island, whatever the excesses of its politicians, and leaves in almost every visitor’s mind an impression of balanced serenity.

In fact its history has been distinctly rumpled. The Hindu epics peopled Ceylon ferociously with demon-kings and monkey-armies, and in recorded times Indians, Portuguese, Dutchmen and Britons have all invaded the island, with varying degrees of penetration – until the British deposed it by force in 1815 there was still an independent dynasty of kings in the valleys of the interior. Hundreds of thousands of Indian Tamils have crossed the narrow strait to settle in Ceylon, and the island races have been so piquantly compounded that when I looked up the directors of a Ceylonese firm called Tuckers Ltd, I discovered that their names included Kotswala, Aloysius, Fernando and Mrs Mavis Tucker herself. Catholicism has been strong since the first European conquests, Hinduism thrives among the Tamils, and the clash and flare of the devil-dancers still enlivens the street corners of the island, and comforts its timorous villagers.

It is Buddhism, though, that sets the calm tone of Ceylon, and so differentiates it from the frenzied peninsula to the north. The sweet legends of the faith infuse the place and its gentleness still makes the start of a Ceylonese day, whatever the newspaper headlines are screaming, a pleasant prod to one’s serendipity. The waiter put down my breakfast that morning, and said he hoped I would have an enjoyable day. I told him I was going to make a pilgrimage to the grave of my father-in-law, a planter who had died in Ceylon during the war.

‘By God’, he said at once, ‘that’s good, that’s very good – parents is a bigger thing than the Lord Buddha himself,’ and picking up my shoes, to clean them for the occasion, he bowed gracefully and withdrew.

The landscapes of Ceylon are overpoweringly varied – landscapes cruel, seductive, grand or intimate in turn, so intricately jammed together that in
a morning’s journey you can pass from jungle to alp to classic tropical foreshore. Bumpy pot-holed roads link these astonishingly disparate parts with one another. Slow rattly trains labour over impossible gradients. Doomed buses trundle from coast to coast. The package tour has scarcely reached Ceylon yet, the philosophies of tourism are not yet dominant, and the island still feels properly organic. (‘Bank Closed’ said a chalked blackboard notice when I went to cash a cheque one morning, ‘On a/c Full Moon Day’.)

Sometimes the transitions are so abrupt that the colours clash, as though an interior decorator has botched the job, and the emotions of the island, too, are often fierce. The murder rate is among the highest on earth, though crime is nearly always un-premeditated, and is often fired by love or family feud. The clash of dry mountain air and equatorial humidity seems to make for inner resentments. The original Sinhalese resent the immigrant Tamils, the Buddhists resent the Hindus, each wing of every political party conspiratorially resents the other, and there are two Afro-Asian Solidarity Leagues.

The primitive streak is strong: drum beats on the night air, devil worship, queer straggled bands of forest aborigines still eking out, in a few hidden recesses of the island, their last years of the Dark Ages. Ceylon is so dense a country, so dovetailed, so ripe, that it will be generations before the technical civilization of the West finally swamps the place, and I know of nowhere comparably safe or comfortable where you may still feel so close to the gnarled roots of nature. If you have never seen monkeys outside a zoo, their presence along the highways of Ceylon is one of the most delightful experiences of modern travel: so exuberantly, divinely free do they look, as they leap the main road in a couple of bounds, or whisk their babies with merry elegance up a tree-trunk. If an elephant chiefly means to you only a sixpenny ride for the children, or a comic character in an animated cartoon, wait till you see one nobly manipulating logs in a Ceylonese teak forest, or best of all striding in wild grandeur, lordly and untamed, from one forest beat to another.

One can see such animals in greater numbers elsewhere, and in fiercer settings: the glory of Ceylon is that there they exist still in immediate neighbourhood to man himself, in an environment easily accessible and actually rather cramped. The fireflies that waver so haphazard through the shrubbery, as you drink your sundowner, are like friendly envoys from that other world beyond the suburbs, the world of the apes and the elephants: and I once drove five miles through a continuing wavering stream of yellow
moths, whose antic progress across Ceylon was a reminder that a right of way is not the exclusive privilege of humans.

And proving this point majestically is the most celebrated of Ceylon’s sights and surprises, the great ruined city of Sigiriya, which is frequented now, in its abandonment, by the wild creatures of the bush. In its hushed purlieus, alone and bee-infested in a desolate landscape of the north-east, the drama of Ceylon is enacted most excitingly of all.

Sigiriya, the Lion Rock, is a gaunt and immense column of granite, 400 feet high. It shows from many miles away, theatrically jutting out of a dun countryside, and at first sight seems only to be one of your geological freaks, like Ayers Rock in Australia, or the mushroom buttes of Arizona. But it is a historical freak as well. Fifteen centuries ago the young prince Kasyapa, coveting the throne of Ceylon, buried his father the king alive in a wall: but terrified of the revenge of his brother, who was in India, he set up his own usurping court on the rock at Sigiriya – literally on the rock, for living as he did in perpetual fear of his life, he built a fortress-palace on the very summit, approached by precipitous staircases up the granite, with an audience chamber up there, luxurious apartments, military quarters, water storage tanks and even elephant stables. There the parricide king, his courtiers and his courtesans, lived insulated high above in maniac asylum.

The rock may still be climbed, and in a gallery half-way are the celebrated Sigiriya frescoes, erotic portraits of half-nude women, full-bosomed and heavily jewelled, whom some authorities have assumed to be Buddhist vestals, and others women of royal pleasure. Up you go, clutching the iron railings erected in a less hell-for-leather age, and between the enormous sculpted lion’s feet which have given the place its name, up staircase after staircase, through gallery upon gallery, until at last you emerge upon the flat surface of the rock. It is about an acre square, terraced still with the remains of the madman’s palace, and at your feet the scrub-land of Ceylon lies empty and unchanged. The hostile world feels impotent indeed, seen from such an eastern Berchtesgaden, and Kasyapa survived up there for eighteen years: but in the end his brother came, and he killed himself while the going was good.

Serendipity! Not always happy, but never failing to surprise. You remember the waiter who brought my breakfast near the beginning of this essay? When he had left the room I hastened to fetch my notebook, to record his observations word for word: but while I was away from the
breakfast table, that damned crow flapped in through the window, and stole a slice of toast.

Darjeeling, the most celebrated of the Indian hill stations, is all smallness. It is small physically, of course – hard even to find upon the map of India, so tucked away is it like a trinket on the northern frontiers. But it is still smaller figuratively. It is the most deliberately diminutive town I know, as though it is always trying to make itself less substantial still. One crosses vast scorched plains to reach it from Calcutta, over colossally winding rivers, through a landscape that has no end: but at the foot of the hills Darjeeling sends a toy train to meet you, a gay little blue-painted trundle of a train which takes you indefatigably puffing and chugging up through the forests and the tea-gardens to the town.

Little people greet you at the top. Little ponies canter about little streets. Hundreds and thousands of merry little children tumble all around you. The town is perched upon a narrow ridge, about 7,000 feet up, with deep gorges falling away on either side, and when I arrived there for the first time I found it swirled all around by cloud. It felt curiously private and self-contained – like a childish fancy, I thought, a folly, a town magically reduced in scale and shut off from the world by vapour: but then as to a crash of drums in a
coup
de
théâtre
, a gap momentarily appeared in the ever-shifting clouds, and there standing tremendously in the background, their snows flushed pink with sunlight, attended by range upon range of foothills and serenely surveying the expanse of the world, stood the divine mass of the Himalayan mountains.

I saw Darjeeling’s point, and cut myself down to size.

Some visitors never see the snow-peaks at all, for they are often invisible for days at a time. Anyway there is no need to go on about them. It is enough to say that to see Kanchenjunga and its peers from Darjeeling, in
the cool of the morning, is one of the noblest experiences of travel. It is a kind of vision. It has moved generations of pilgrims to mysticism, and even more to over-writing.

Yet it is not the spectacle of the Himalayas that sets the style of Darjeeling. It is simply their presence. The town lives in the knowledge of them, and so acknowledges another scale of things. Its littleness is not inferiority complex, but self-awareness, and it gives the community a particular intensity and vivacity. Darjeeling is built in layers, neatly along its ridge like an exhibition town, from the posh hotels and the villas at the top to the jumbled bazaar quarter at the bottom: and all the way down this dense tiered mass of buildings life incessantly buzzes, hums and fizzes. Darjeeling’s energies seem to burn the brighter for their smallness, and not a corner of the town is still, or empty, or dull.

It is a place of astonishing cheerfulness. Everybody seems to be feeling simply splendid. Perhaps they all are, for the air is magnificently brilliant, the heat is seldom too hot and the cold not often icy. The nineteenth-century Welshman who first put Darjeeling on the map saw it from the start as a sanatorium, and the Rajah of Sikkim kindly handed it over to the British Governor-General of India ‘for the purpose of enabling the servants of his government suffering from sickness to avail themselves of its advantages’. Today Darjeeling’s high spirits never seem to flag. The children never stop playing, the youths never end their horse-play, the tourists never tire of clattering hilariously about the town on hired ponies. The cicadas sing all day long in the gardens, and ever and again from down the hill come the hoots and puffs of the little trains (which prefer to travel gregariously, and come merrily up from Siliguri two or three at a time).

To the stranger it all seems intenser, more concentrated than real life, and especially after dark, when the braziers are aglow in the alleys of the bazaar, and the hotel lights comfortably shine above. Then half Darjeeling turns out for a stroll at Chaurasta, a triangular piazza half-way along the ridge, and on my own first evening in Darjeeling I went and sat on a bench there, and watched the town go by. Beyond the square the ridge fell away abruptly into the night, and there were only the dark foothills out there, and a suggestion of the snowpeaks, and the stars that now and then appeared in unnatural brilliance through the shifting clouds.

To and fro against this celestial backdrop the people of Darjeeling loitered, strolled and gossiped like Spaniards on their evening promenade, or more exotic Venetians at St Mark’s. There were tall flashing girls in saris
and nose-clips. There were brown gnome-like men in fur caps. There were slant-eyed children of astonishing beauty, and boys with wild eager faces like Genghis Khan. There were monks, and priests, and soldiers, and grand Indian gentlemen in tweeds, and giggly Indian girls in cotton party frocks. There were mountain porters hastening back from work, carrying rucksacks and tent-poles. There were ancient men with plaited pigtails. There were two hippies, and a nun, and four French tourists, and me watching it all, as in hallucination, from a bench beside the bandstand.

It was like a microcosm of the world, assembled up there from the plains and mountains, ushered into that little square, reduced to a neater and more manageable size, and given double shots of adrenalin.

‘What is your country?’ a man peremptorily demanded, as we met face to face and unavoidably on a narrow hill track, and when I told him Wales, to the west of England, he asked further: ‘Is it a high pass to get there?’

Unimaginably high are the passes, indescribably remote the valleys, from which in the century since Captain Lloyd founded Darjeeling the population of the town has found its way to the ridge. This is a frontier settlement. Some of those snow-peaks are in India proper, some in Sikkim and Bhutan, some in the Kingdom of Nepal, some in the People’s Republic of Tibet. The town stands on the edge of mysteries, and its people have migrated from many parts of the eastern Himalaya, and from the plains below. The old sanatorium of the memsahibs is far more nowadays: not merely a celebrated resort, but an important bazaar, a centre of local government and a kind of ethnic demonstration.