Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

After the clusters of palm trees and mangroves, Galle appeared suddenly, a town on a big blue bay, an old Dutch fort, and just outside the station, the market square. There were more people now, but the rest was as I'd remembered it: the bazaar, the ramparts, the scooter rickshaws, the hawkers' stalls selling cloth and kitchenware. In 1973 I bought an old dagger from one of these market traders, a nine-inch blade and an Asiatic lion's head carved on the bone handle. I carried it in my bag for the next two months, through Southeast Asia and Japan and onward through the Soviet Union. No one questioned it. I still have it. Over the years it became rusty and dull, but while working on this book I bought a whetstone and sharpened it, cleaned it, restored it, until it has become once again a glittering thing, good as new, a souvenir of another time.

"This was all underwater," one of the market women told me. I could see some damaged houses, but the seventeenth-century fort was untouched. Children were playing on the walls of the fort.

I had been told the name of an inexpensive guesthouse in Galle. A man on a scooter rickshaw took me to the top of a winding road on the tallest hill in town.

That evening I sat on the rooftop veranda of the small, quiet Lady Hill Hotel, writing about my visit with Sir Arthur, my melancholy at seeing him so frail, so vague, his mind drifting. The town's lights twinkled through the trees, the sky was full of stars; from this vantage I could see the lamps of the fishing boats in the harbor. The air was fragrant with night-blooming flowers.

I considered this one of the best evenings of my trip: the muted buzz of the small seaside town at night, the soft air, the perfume of the blossoms. No event, no drama, just contentment, as though I had set off from London and traveled for months to be here, at this moment, sitting under the full moon of the Sinhalese lunar New Year.

***

ALL THE TALK THE NEXT morning was of five more casualties of Tamil Tiger ambushes, and another land mine, and an assault on a Sri Lankan army position. For the previous three years, there had been a cease-fire, negotiated by the Norwegian government, but this agreement was clearly falling apart, as Tigers claimed more lives. The deaths were shocking, violent, and unnecessary. It was obvious that the Tamils would eventually possess part of the north of Sri Lanka. Already they had a de facto state, with their own Tamil schools and hospitals. And their army was notoriously full of child soldiers, kids between the ages of thirteen and seventeen (UNICEF put the figure at almost sixteen thousand), who had been forcibly recruited or abducted from Tamil villages. After the tsunami hit, many children, orphans of the storm, were given guns and press-ganged into the Tamil Tigers.

There had been a famine in Sri Lanka when I'd last been in Galle. The harvest had been disappointing, and food was scarce. I wrote then: "They had driven out the Tamils, who had done all the planting." I had also written: "But Galle was a beautiful place, garlanded with red hibiscus and smelling of the palm-scented ocean, possessing cool Dutch interiors and ringed by forests of bamboo. The sunset's luminous curtains patterned the sky in rufous gold for an hour and a half every evening, and all night the waves crashed on the ramparts of the fort." That part was still true.

Walking around Galle in the morning sunshine, I remembered that, when I was last here, I had wanted to go to Hambantota. I hadn't done it, but I could do it now.