Maiden Voyage (34 page)

Driving along the coast, we passed giant coconut palms, strung one to another with sets of lines that climbers used to traverse the treetops and shake down the fruit. All along the seashore were what looked like crucifixes standing sentinel in the surf, where lone fishermen climbed up and cast their lines for hours. We strolled the bazaar of Hikkaduwa and, from a smiling raisin of an old man sitting at an ancient foot-pump sewing machine, I bought a custom-made pair of satin harem pants before heading back to Galle.

That night, the anticipation of seeing my father for the first time since eighteen months earlier in Bermuda kept sleep at bay. My relationship with Oliver aside, so much had happened in that time span that I didn't know what to expect when I saw him. I was sure that he would recognize the many changes in me, and was curious to see if he would be at all different. Eager to catch up on all that was happening on the home front, I couldn't have wished for a better gossip and storyteller to fill me in, and now there was an album full of my own tales to serve up in return.

Meeting my father wasn't the only reason for a visit to the urban alleyways of Colombo; I needed to get some traveler's checks, the baksheesh in Bali and provisioning in Christmas Island having pretty much wiped me out. We awoke early and at 6:00
A.M
. met Don Windsor and his son Leonard, who drove us and another sailing couple, Dean and Faye, in his Volkswagen bus on a hair-raising ride to the capital.

Leonard handled that bus as if it were a hot Lamborghini, speeding in and out past the jalopies, buses, bicycles and cow-drawn carts, only once screeching to a halt along with most of the other passing traffic, at an enormous Buddha waypoint. Sri Lanka is considered the cradle of Buddhism, and every 300 feet there was one symbol of worship or another—miniature emerald likenesses, immense sculptures carved out of the sides of cliffs, and Dagobas, the domed prayer sites, some as large as the Egyptian pyramids. Everywhere were pictures, relics and statues of the Enlightened One in postures of meditation, calling to mind the Buddha's years of teaching and his passing to Nirvana.

While Leonard threw a couple of rupees into a collection box, Don jumped out of the car and put his hands together for a moment of contemplation, and we curiously watched the proceedings at a Sri Lankan-style tollbooth of veneration.

In Colombo, after attending to our business, Don Windsor and Leonard, Dean and Faye, and Olivier and I all sat in a state of infectious nervousness waiting at the Galle Face Hotel for my father, who was late. We sat inside on the cool stone terrace overlooking the Indian Ocean, imagining from the ambiance of the manicured garden, the swishing white-pajama-clad waiters and wood-paneled walls that we were characters in an Agatha Christie mystery and that Hercule Poirot himself might just show up any minute.

When my father finally arrived, I didn't even have to see his entrance to know he was there, his energy so charged the room. People turned their heads as he swooped like a dynamo through the lobby and onto the terrace. I had to blink twice to make sure that I knew him. He looked funny, a little chubbier, New York pale and sporting a longish haircut with his jeans and Banana Republic safari vest. I was not the only one surprised.

“My God,” he bellowed, simultaneously summoning a waiter over to order a drink, “you look like an Ethiopian refugee. We have to get some meat on those bones. Let's have some lunch right now.”

“You feel like the Michelin man,” I said, hugging and pinching his waist. “What's this, a coupla spare tires?”

I sneaked a peep at the others; Faye was straightening out her dress, Dean watched our reunion with a pleased grin and Don Windsor was getting up to meet the man that everybody had heard so much about. I knew what they were thinking: “What kind of person would send his daughter off around the world alone so young?” Well, they would soon find out.

“Very funny, Ding-a-ling.” He looked over my shoulder at Olivier, who had also gotten up and was standing behind me with a foolish grin.

“Oh yeah. Daddy, Olivier. Olivier, Daddy.”

“Bonjour
, Olivier,” my father smiled, extending his hand. The tension could have been cut with a knife as I waited for Olivier to say something smart and witty.

“Bonjour
, Ernst,” he answered. “How was your trip?” Clearly, it was time to introduce Don, Leonard, Dean and Faye, and we sat down for lunch to an excited babble of conversation that could only be conjured up by envisioning six people trying to talk louder than my father.

•   •   •

“Tania, I want you to know that I only brought two pairs of underpants, two pairs of socks, a pair of shorts and a T-shirt with me in order to have enough room for all the things you asked for,” he said later, on our way back to the boats. I grabbed his black duffel bag and tore through the sack of Italian nougat bars, Hershey's chocolate, charts, pictures, spare parts and presents.

The next afternoon, he and Olivier hung out on top of my engine compartment and ran around together looking for spare parts, trying to get chummy, while I tried to form on paper the words of my sixth article and squeeze the experiences of almost 5,300 miles, four con-tries and five months into thirty-five hand-written pages.

A couple of days later, we took a break and my father hired a local driver, Siri, procured by Don Windsor, and set off for three days to see the island and Yala National Park for an elephant safari. At first, my father's philosophy of seeing a little of a lot, instead of a lot of a little, didn't sit well with Olivier, who was inclined toward a more casual pace in getting to know a place.

“But then you will have seen everything at once,” insisted my father, incredulous at the notion of dilly-dallying, “and you can leave afterward.” I had to try and convince Olivier, who preferred to visit by hitchhiking, buses and trains, that this could be fun also, and so our tour began.

On the eve of the elephant safari, Olivier and I went to sit on the
rocks in a nearby marsh to watch the sunset when one of the enormous pachyderms sauntered out of nowhere and relieved himself 25 feet away from us. We were agape. This biological function has got to be the eighth wonder of the world. Besides certain features of noteworthy size, the beast carried at least a ton of water. We counted ourselves lucky to have witnessed this display because the next day's early morning safari only revealed a couple of dozing peacocks, several monkeys, some water buffaloes in a mud bath and the hindquarters of an elephant heading over the horizon.

The route from Yala National Park took us to Nuwara Eliya, a village of houses and buildings topped with red-tiled roofs nestled in a wooded basin at the foot of Sri Lanka's highest peak. Siri drove over the steep winding roads and through the primeval jungles hung with wild orchids, and we climbed steadily into the hill country, around waterfalls, past colonial mansions and thatch-roofed bungalows, over streaming rivers, through the lush green steps of terraced tea plantations.

Occasionally, monkey families preening themselves on the roadside would leap across the thoroughfare and disappear into the forests of rubber trees. The steaming hot coastal climate gradually gave way to more temperate conditions, and finally, as we were drawn into the overwhelming mountain scenery of the interior, we were actually cold.

Our hotel in Nuwara Eliya, with its antiques, wood paneling and hunting trophies adorning the wood-paneled walls, was again a reminder of the British occupation of the island they had called Ceylon, only forty years earlier. We were propped on a hill overlooking a patchwork quilt of greens, field after field of tea bushes outlined by hedges of blooming flowers. We could see the colorful wraps of women with baskets strapped to their backs as they walked up and down the rows, examining and picking the plants.

A mist rolled down from the vista of tropical alps, enshrouding the Tudor and Victorian homes in the village, leftovers from a small British colony that had thrived in the 1800s. By evening, a damp chill permeated the air, seeping into our clothes, and we could vaguely see our breath as we talked.

My father and Olivier seemed to be getting on just fine after dinner. Together, they wiped out an entire night-capping bottle of brandy while talking about the fate of the universe. It usually took a nip or three to lubricate Olivier's vocal cords when he was not completely at ease. Ordinarily, he was a rather silent person and often, I
found myself setting the stage with one of his stories so that he could carry on and finish telling them to my father.

Early the next morning, we found Siri trying to start his 1955 relic of an engine in the frosty air, remarkable considering that we were only six degrees of latitude above the equator. Siri reminded me of my mother when on icy mornings in Vernon she would be out with the hair dryer blowing on our Volkswagen's engine to heat it up in order to get us to school on time, while we squealed that we were late.

•   •   •

It was funny how little things could trigger a long-forgotten memory and, at any time of the day or night, something would happen to make me feel that I was back with my family and I'd be swept with a longing to see Tony, Nina, Jade and Jeri. For eighteen months I had been living on daydreams of home and memories that seemed to have had happened to another girl in another lifetime.

A huge pile of mail had been awaiting me at Don Windsor's when I first arrived in Sri Lanka. The dog-eared envelopes and rumpled packages, manhandled around the world, contained the jolting revelation that my brother and sisters were growing up without me, discovering what they wanted out of life, in some cases screwing up, but generally getting on with it. I felt removed whenever I read and reread the letters.

Tony, seventeen, had written that he had his first girlfriend, Maggie, and even went so far as to say that he was in love, which he would never have admitted two years before. Jade, sixteen, had written a list of all the new slang words that were cool at the moment and informed me that my alienation from New York would definitely make me into a social klutz. My father said she was doing well in school and he approved of her friends.

“They're all
normal,”
he said, a pointed afterthought.

And Nina, nineteen, it seemed, was her same old radical self, her political views and future aspirations becoming more and more diffused after one and a half years of a Cornell education. It had always been close to impossible to read Nina's handwriting, which now seemed to have gotten worse.

“But it's OK, Tania,” she had written, “intellectuals don't write neatly. Look at Einstein.” Nina was busy burning her candle at both ends, my father was pleased to inform me, and doing well in school, and he mentioned a vague worry that she might even be expecting
too much of herself. I told him to send her on a vacation to me and I would teach her how to calm down.

“That's right,” he grinned. “If anyone has perfected the art of taking it easy, it's you.”

Tony, he said, had completely stopped his obsessive childish tantrums, which had plagued him long after the troubles with my mother and the divorce. His irrationality had disappeared into thin air after he met Maggie. Jade had even written, “Tania, you won't believe this. Our brother Tony has become
polite
. Tony, Maggie and I were heading uptown on the crowded subway, when all of a sudden two empty seats popped up in front of us. Maggie sat down and Tony turned and asked me if I
wanted the seat
. Yes. You're not seeing things. That was Tony, our brother. Let me tell you, I almost keeled over in shock. . . .”

In yet another attempt to draw out one of his children and instill a zest for life, as my father put it, during the summer of 1985, just after I left New York on
Varuna
, my father, Fritz and Tony had taken a trip to Baffin Island in the Arctic Circle. A helicopter dropped them off on an icy plateau and they were left to fend for themselves for two weeks.

“We wanted to go hiking for several days, but you know Tony,” my father said. “He kept whining to us to slow down, his feet hurt, he was freezing, he was tired, why couldn't we stop to rest for a while. Ach! Finally he started to cry that he couldn't go on. I lost my temper and told him that Fritz and I would continue alone without a crybaby and that we would come back in a couple of days.” The next day, with the thought of polar bears, he and Fritz got worried, so they turned around and hurried back.

“There was Tony,” he continued with pride. “He had set up his tent, a little fire and he was lying down, reading a book, totally calm and happy. So, for the rest of our time, we talked, laughed, caught and smoked many salmon and met some Eskimos.”

Immediacy with my family had been impossible until now and my father's presence brought color and animation into personalities that in the year since my mother died had only been words on paper. Throughout our troubled past, we children had only each other for stability in a family that had very little for so long, and now our paths were diverging. I began to worry that by the time I got home, so much would have changed that I wouldn't know them anymore. For the three days that Siri drove us around Sri Lanka, my father and I talked about everything, and I pumped him for description after description, story after story.

•   •   •

Back in Nuwara Eliya, when Siri's engine finally coughed to a start, we headed for the ancient sixteenth-century capital of Kandy, the home of Buddha's left eyetooth, a symbol of sovereignty preserved in its own temple. It is said that Buddha's tooth was brought to Sri Lanka during the fourth century, hidden in the hair of a princess whose father's throne (he being one of the Kalinga Kings of India), was being threatened by non-Buddhists.

As we strolled past Kandy Lake and into town, I looked into the faces of the thronging people. Although poverty was pervasive in the cities, there was a quiet pride and carriage in the people that I had never found in the metropolis of faces at home, and I wondered what was missing there that these people seemed to have. Not to do any evil, to cultivate good, to purify one's mind, this is the teaching of the Buddha, and it could have been as simple as that.