Ben Waterman

Wandering Print

Reflections On Sri Lanka

Here you would never know the strict pleasure of fire as it would only be heat piled thick onto heat--there is nothing besides the inferno. To burn the garbage with the palm leaves, to collapse the growing pile of coconut hulls and the bones of fish simply maintenance. Sitting with the white crabs in the sand mid-day, them coming and going from the depths--its coolness lush, a world of feeling from the beyond-- as if to say your heart can contain this grand difference.

We both turned from the sea and said, "yes." The largest of the four walked up to the man standing behind the pink hammock with a relaxed stride and hit him square across the jaw, throwing him into the sand by his neck, and drug him into the dark of the mangroves where the dull thuds were swallowed by the sound of crashing waves and the silence of the stars.
"It's better this way," another man said placing his hand on my shoulder as I stepped forward after the first hit.
"This is better than the police. He is part of our village and must learn. The man punishing him is not someone he doesn't know." The old man's eyes never leaving the dark where the two disappeared.
"He's a young fisherman with no family. He makes a little money then drinks then does these things. He has caused problems before with visitors, with guests."
--In the early morning, going back, trying to understand through the prints in the sand but finding everything covered by the delicate blooms of the Hoetambil tree. Their white flowers, delicate filaments of fragrance, opening up in the dark, high up in the tree, and dropping before dawn.

Most dogs here have a broken leg or have signs of having had them--limbs at odd angles and a 3 legged hobble. After a month of traveling through India and another in Sri Lanka I felt almost nothing but, "this is part of it," when we hit the young dog on the way to the lighthouse in the tuk tuk. After 3 days of back and forth from various surf spots, Whiskey point, Crocodile point, our driver told us how glad he was the 30 year war was over. How he had lost his father at age 7 to the "Tigers" (revolutionary group). He had been in Colombo for business and they just slit his throat in the street and how this happened to his wife's father as well. I wonder if the people who slit their throats thought simply, "it's just part of it," feeling almost nothing.