The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards (21 page)
I stretch back. I peer through the glass walls of the café and out into the station. I have always done my best work in crowded transportation hubs. Airports, train stations—a bus stop, one time—these have been like my personal little cafés dotted along the Seine. I’d given up on being a writer, aside from the essays that I sold to my shadowy students around the globe. I’d become accustomed to a certain lifestyle—particularly when it came to traveling through these third-world countries. I’m trying to see the world and as many of its plenty-splendored wonders as I can. I’m trying to stay on the move. I’m not one of these typical Americans, mind you, trying to
find myself.
No, if anything, it’s just the opposite. I’m trying to get as far away from myself as at all possible.
Typically, my students are the children of the well-to-do; the heirs apparent of the world, who are too busy spending their parents’ money on the beaches of Ibiza and in the shops of Rodeo Drive to learn how to compose a thesis. And why should they? What possible use will it be to them to be able to deconstruct a Dickens novel when they’re merrily employed by some white-collar firm, overseeing the outsourcing of its customer service department to the east side of Bangladesh?
Actually, a lot, probably.
But I digress. Eight minutes left until my train leaves.
The Colombo Fort Railway Station has truly come alive while I’ve been working my way through the wee hours. I can smell cardamom coffee and
moong kavun
oil cakes being fried up in the shape of diamonds. Somewhere someone is mixing up some fragrant mutton rolls and I wonder if I’ll have time to grab one on my way over to the train. I still have seven minutes. Anxiously, I tap on the keys as if to summon Simon, so he can confirm receipt of his paper and I can enjoy a week off exploring the Buddhist temples of the Matale region.
As I wait, I watch the Sri Lankans lining up along the benches in the lobby. I try to make sense of what appears at first to be a single mass of dark hair and skin and eyes. I try to drown myself in the distilled noise of their chirping chitchat. What I realize quickly is that nearly all of them are
reading
. Reading
books.
An old man with a paisley necktie dangling beneath his trimmed white beard is absorbed in what looks like a detective thriller. A gaggle of boys in little purple school blazers and shorts are studying cloth-bound readers, their little heads hunched over and the odd golden epaulets on their uniformed shoulders jutting out. They look like a tiny, scholarly fighting force. An older boy with mini-dreadlocks and a tattered black
BAD TO THE BONE
T-shirt is flipping through an old Penguin paperback while he tries not to stare at a flock of peacock-patterned flight attendants who are picking out magazines at the newsstand nearby. While nearby India continues to slump behind the world literacy averages, the island-dwelling Sri Lankans read more than most anyone in Asia, though perhaps this is because their seventeen measly television channels are so thoroughly unentertaining. Or perhaps it is because now that—thanks to a tidy mass-slaughtering two years ago—the Sinhalese have finally ended their bloody twenty-six-year civil war with the LTTE, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, Sri Lanka has been rated one of the world’s most promising emerging markets by the Dow Jones and has just been named a 3G country by Citigroup, whatever that means. Looking out at the crowds, I can
feel
their excitement. They don’t know what it all means, either, just that venture capitalism is coming soon to a theater near them. Perhaps it is because of the promise of all this growth that they are reading—boning up for the return of the imperialists. It reminds me of a T-shirt I saw on a kid a year ago when I was weekending in Turkey.
GOD IS COMING
the front said in bold letters, while the back warned
LOOK BUSY
! This is what comes to mind: the Sri Lankans
look busy
. Soon, perhaps, they’ll all be rich as kings, with important-looking cell phones and Louis Vuitton purses clutching custom-sized chihuahuas. I wonder how much they’ll be reading by then.
Finally
, the computer blips at me.
simon/: this loks grt!!! Ooooooo shit! U gunna get me an A for sur
Wincing, I crack my fingers, check the time—only six minutes to go—and nimbly tap back a reply.
Outis/ΟΥΤΙΣ: My pleasure, Simon. Do take care now.
simon/
Outis/ΟΥΤΙΣ: Like I told you earlier, Simon, I will be gone all week.
Outis/ΟΥΤΙΣ: Good-bye, Simon.
simon/
Outis/ΟΥΤΙΣ: Double?
simon/
Outis/ΟΥΤΙΣ: You said “doble” which is neither an amount of money nor an adjective indicating twice the former quantity of something.
simon/
Outis/ΟΥΤΙΣ: Good-bye, Simon.
simon/
I’m about to click off the computer screen, satisfied that poor “simon/” more than deserves to fail his next assignment, when suddenly the sweet, high pitch of American English reaches my ear. I glance up and see two female backpackers arguing just outside the door to the Internet café. The first girl is beautiful and tall, with skin that has been methodically browned at the sides of a dozen crystal-clear swimming pools between here and—I’m going to guess—Philadelphia. There’s something self-assured and forlorn about her that reminds me of a Phillies fan. Her long, dark hair has clearly been carefully blow-dried and straightened that morning in one of Colombo’s finer hotels. The way she teeters a little on her cork-platform sandals makes me think that she also kicked back a few minibar items while she was preening.
Her friend is shorter and fairer-skinned—actually, she’s quite pale, white as blank paper—with hair as red as sweet vermouth and eyes so green that I suspect she is only a generation removed from the shores of Galway. While her friend’s clothing is so sheer and sleeveless as to verge on nonexistence, this girl is wearing a high-collared linen dress that looks like it walked off the set of
Citizen Kane
, and which falls down well past her knees. She must be about a thousand degrees, and she looks miserable and lost, in a hat so ridiculously broad-brimmed that all the flies in the train station seem to think it is a runway strip. They circle around her like landing planes, to her adorable annoyance.
simon/