Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

That had happened after I'd been here; the Tamil insurgency had also happened; and as I'd seen in Colombo, both had, in their way, stunted Sri Lanka, kept tourists and investors away, while giving the island the look and feel of bygone Ceylon. But the small population and the old-fangledness were a relief: because business was terrible, the country was spared foreign exploitation and kept its soul.

The bus driver tooted his horn. Everyone got on and the bus circled the Matara clock tower and headed south along the coast. The man I'd spoken to at the station had taken a seat beside me. His name was Takil; he asked me where I was from, and when I told him he said, "I've been to Miami."

"What doing?"

"I was working for a Saudi sheik," and he told me the sheik's name. The sheik was one of the thousand or so princes but was particularly well connected: his brother was a minister in the Saudi government.

This sheik had a $25 million mansion in Golden Beach, another estate in Los Angeles, and houses elsewhere. I had never heard of Golden Beach, but Takil assured me that it was a wealthy community at the northern edge of Miami and that only billionaires lived there. Bill Gates, for one.

"He lives in Seattle, surely?"

"He kept a house in Golden Beach, near my sheik."

I had to travel to Dikwella (which we were passing through) on an old Sri Lankan bus to find out these things about my country.

"He needed a big house," Takil said. "He had three wives and lots of children. He was only twenty-eight, though."

"What did you do for him?"

"I waited on him. I served him his food."

"You're a Muslim?"

"No. Buddhist. And I don't speak Arabic. Funny, eh? He spoke to me in English. This was back in the 1980s. I was only twenty myself. He trusted me, and I was good at my job. He kept me on for four years."

"Was he a playboy?"

"Not really. He had married an actress but divorced her. He was looking for another wife."

"In Florida?"

"Anywhere. He traveled a lot. He had lots of relatives living in America. He chartered a British Airways jet for his trips."

"Oil money?"

"Yes. Lots of it—lots. But no interests. He took his children to Disney World, he took them to Los Angeles, and sightseeing. He didn't work. He did nothing."

"Prayed, I suppose."

"No. He wasn't particularly religious."

I said, "People wonder why Osama bin Laden hates the Saudi royal family and wants to punish the United States for being its ally. That sheik and people like him are the reason, and we're all paying a horrible price for it."

We had passed Tangalla—its prison figures in Woolf's Village in the Jungle. We were coming to a river. Takil said it was the Ambalantota, and that we'd be in Hambantota pretty soon.

The land had flattened and become scrubbier and more thinly populated. It seemed to me that the tsunami had swept through and scoured it of its houses, but Takil said that we were looking at salt flats. For hundreds of years salt had been produced here by evaporation in the great flat enclosures and lagoons, called lewayas. Ondaatje explained that a century ago Leonard Woolf "revolutionized salt collection" here by introducing a payment scheme that was fair and regulated, and that was closely supervised by him.

We went down a road of overhanging trees, lined by small villages, and were soon in the town square of Hambantota. Takil headed home to celebrate Avuruda, and I looked for a place to stay. I found nothing, but it was still only the middle of the afternoon, so I looked at the boats in the harbor and strolled through the town, then got a scooter rickshaw to take me to Woolf's government bungalow that Ondaatje had found. Throughout his book, Ondaatje repeats that the country had changed very little in the nearly one hundred years that had passed since Woolf was a colonial officer, and he quotes a Sri Lankan who, in a 2002 newspaper article, discussing the grim events and the hardships of peasant life recounted in The Village in the Jungle, said, "It was an era when the jungle ruled the lives of the humble peasant as it does even now in remote villages scattered across the country."

What is unusual about the novel, what gives it a weird nobility, is that, written by a young Englishman and published in 1913, its main characters are Sinhalese peasants. Its plot hinges on village marriage customs, traditional rivalries, and peculiarly Sinhalese vindictiveness, passions, and satisfactions. Rape, multiple murder, and exploitation are central to the book, which stands out in my mind as having perhaps the most violent plot and depressing ending of any novel I've ever read. Just when you think that the last surviving character represents hope and possibility, she looks out of her hut one night and sees the glinting eyes of a pig—or demon—about to devour her.