Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

The passengers nearby looked at me for confirmation. I smiled. Apart from the insulting suggestion that I might be a lawyer, he was right on most counts.

I had gotten used to the tsunami damage on the coast, the ruins and the rebuilding. But inland, up these hills, the houses were whole and the villages intact, shining in the gentle rain, the dense green leaves of the foliage going greener in the drizzle.

"This is Peradeniya," Mr. Kumara said, getting up and unfastening the strap on his umbrella. He gave me his card—his name and address. "When you come back to Sri Lanka, please call me. You can meet my family. My wife is an excellent cook."

"And when I come back you'll be able to verify your predictions. 'Unexpected wealth.' "

"I tell only what I see," he said. And stepping out of the coach he said, "Lovely gardens here. You must see them."

I planned to, by going from Kandy, which was only a few miles away. I felt it would be harder to get a taxi at the gardens.

At Kandy I walked from the station with a growing crowd of pilgrims to the Dalada Maligawa, the Temple of the Tooth, thinking about Mr. Kumara's prophecies and palmistry. I had assumed that this Buddhist population of Sinhalese would be rational and compassionate. In some forms, Buddhism is like a vapor, an odor of sanctity, the minimalism of self-denial, not a religion at all but a philosophy of generosity and forgiveness.

Odd, then, to see Sri Lankans closely observing the bizarre Avurudu strictures ("Lighting the hearth should be done wearing colorful clothes and facing the south ... juice of nuga leaves on the head at 7:39 A.M....Set off facing the north..."); or being drawn to Mr. Kumara's numerology—his addition and subtraction and his confident soothsaying. And now in Kandy the panoply of this thickly decorated temple, the gilded pillars, the ribbons and semi-precious stones, the shrouded statues and heavy-lidded gaze of a hundred gesturing Buddhas—and flowers, candles, fruit and flags, relics and flaming tapers, all the paraphernalia I associated with the blood and gold and organ pipes that epitomize the interior decoration of South American cathedrals and the wilder excesses of Catholicism, complete with a swirling fog of warm incense: "That vast moth-eaten musical brocade / Created to pretend we never die."*

* Philip Larkin, "Aubade."

I kicked off my shoes and joined the line of people eager to see the Buddha's tooth, which in this temple, in its gold casket, was like a saint's relic, Saint Francis's skull, a mummy in a catacomb, a splinter from the True Cross. The story of the Buddha's tooth dates from the fourth century A.D., and there is some question as to whether this is a real canine or a replacement for the tooth (a fake one, said the Sinhalese) that the pious Portuguese burned in Goa as being wicked and idolatrous. The Portuguese who venerated splinters of the True Cross and the skulls of saints, who had all but destroyed Kandy in their time; and what remained of it when the Dutch conquered them, in the sixteenth century, the Dutch had pulled down, leaving very little for the British when they showed up in 1815.

The inner rooms of the temple were crowded and stifling, mobbed with Buddhists propitiating the impassive statues, prostrating themselves, waving lighted tapers, and making passes with their outstretched arms—as though practicing to be Christians.

I walked outside and along the lake, liking this pleasant air at 1,600 feet, and then found a curry house (plate of rice covered with highly seasoned sauce, 75 cents), and sat reading the paper, about recent Tamil Tiger actions. In the place where I'd planned to cross from India to Sri Lanka, an armada of heavily armed Tiger watercraft, camouflaged as fishing boats, had attacked some Sri Lankan navy vessels. Eleven Sri Lankan sailors were either dead or missing, and in the retaliatory action, eight rebel boats were sunk, thirty Tigers dead. And in Colombo three Tiger commandos in diving gear, setting mines, had been captured; two of them committed suicide by swallowing cyanide capsules they kept handy for that purpose.

A Sri Lankan sitting near me struck up a conversation. Seeing the article I was reading, he said, "Sixty-seven people killed in the last two weeks. And this is during a cease-fire!"

His name was Kaduwella. He had come to Kandy to see the sacred tooth. He said that the Tamil Tigers had attacked the temple.