Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

Most of the fighting was in northern and north-central Sri Lanka and along the upper part of the east coast. I was on the southwestern coast; Hambantota was in a safe place, at the southern tip of the island. It was the last post of Leonard Woolf, who was a British colonial agent in the town and who was the subject of an unusual in-the-footsteps-of book, Woolf in Ceylon (2005), by Christopher Ondaatje. On my first trip I had read Woolf's somber masterpiece, The Village in the Jungle, and assuming it had been set somewhere down there, I had wanted to see that part of the island. Ondaatje, also an admirer of Woolf's, had the same idea. But he had better credentials. The older brother of the novelist Michael Ondaatje, he'd been born in Ceylon of a burgher family. His ancestors were among the earliest settlers of the island, many of them eminent. His father was a tea planter, and like many men isolated on tea estates, peculiar and bibulous. In his footsteps book, Ondaatje revisited the scenes of his own early life as well as the key places in Woolf's colonial career. Along the way he answered all the questions that had arisen in my mind about Woolf's knowledge of Sinhalese life, his seven years as an officer, and the background of his writing. The book is a leisurely ramble around Sri Lanka, literary, archeological, political, and autobiographical. He spared me from having to find the settings of Woolf's underrated novel and of many of the short stories.

Heading to Hambantota, I took the train from Galle to Matara, another line along the coast, so close to the shoreline that the spray flung by the heavy rollers from Africa reached the broken windows of the battered carriages. The tsunami aftermath, large-scale destruction and small-scale rebuilding, was visible all the way. The footprints of houses, the cement slab or a row of boulders, were all that remained of many buildings on the shore—nothing else left except the coconut palms that had fed the vanished family.

We came to Weligama, a cove with—just offshore—a small green island piled with sculpted rocks and feathery trees and an alluring villa with a white plaster veranda. I first heard the name Weligama from Paul Bowles, who told me that in the 1950s he had sailed from Tangier to Colombo, to live on that offshore island, named Taprobane.

"Taprobane was the ancient Greek and Roman name for Ceylon, but this modern Taprobane is an island once owned by Count de Mauny, a somewhat louche Frenchman who claimed that he had inherited his title from his grandmother, though many thought it bogus." This is from Ondaatje, who described the fraudulent count as a scandal-plagued pederast who'd found a happy refuge here in the 1920s.

But who wouldn't want to stay? The bay at Weligama is as lovely as any in the South Pacific and has the same limpid beauty, the blue sea and a white sand beach enclosed by groves of palms, clusters of bamboo huts, and a sense that the world is elsewhere. "The opportunities for happy living are greater in Ceylon than anywhere else I've been so far," Bowles wrote in a letter to Gore Vidal in 1950. And a month later he pronounced it "the best country to settle in, from all points of view." He praised the courtesy of the people, their cleanliness, their hospitality, and their skill as servants. He loved "the ever present triumphant vegetation of the coast." And he was bewitched by the notion of living on an island.

Bowles had glimpsed Taprobane first from this same train in 1949 and managed to buy it a few years later. He wrote his Tangier novel, The Spider's House, there, but not much else. And after an unhappy stay on the island in 1954, accompanied by his wife, Jane, and his Moroccan lover, he decided to sell it. Jane had hated it: large bats hung on the trees and flapped around, beating their wings, which were a yard wide. And Bowles needed the money.

About fifteen miles farther down the coast was the town of Matara, an old railway station and the end of the line. I got out and walked to the bus terminal for the bus to Hambantota.

"This is the bus. Leaving sometime soon," a man explained to me.

He was also going to Hambantota.

He said, "This is the worst time of the year to be traveling. Everyone's going home for the Avurudu festival."

It did seem that the train had been full, and this bus was filling up. I bought a bus ticket from the conductor—the fare was about 25 cents for the fifty-mile trip.

"You speak English," I said. "Not many people do."

"They don't teach English in schools anymore. But I studied it—older people speak it."