surnames. As Lisa and I glanced toward them, all thirty-six cards went up, like thirty-six chicks begging for a meal. On our left, behind another barrier, were 250 people awaiting the arrival of friends and family. The scene was very orderly, particularly for four thirty on a hot and sticky morning. In Colombo, waiting had become a spectator sport.
There was no sign of Charu and Chaminda, so we took the opportunity to have a little look around. There was a sprinkling of Christmas decorations, including what can only be described as multicoloured disco balls. We found a very liberal air-conditioning unit to stand under. Time passed without any evidence of our friends. We had slept just a few hours in the past forty-eight, and the heat and humidity were washing over us like an incoming tide. The grind of endless bodies was starting to make me dizzy. What does this country look like after it has woken up?
And then our hosts arrived, their faces full of joy and welcome. They reclaimed their cab, and we headed from the airport, through Colombo, and south toward our hotel in the community of Mount Lavinia. We got little more than impressions in the predawn light, but those exotic scenes made my eyes dance. Even at that ungodly hour on a Monday morning, buses were disgorging workers at garment factories. It was raining and some people had umbrellas; the remainder didn’t seem to care about getting wet. Traffic was crushingly heavy, with an equal mixture of buses, minivans, commercial trucks, three-wheeled taxis, motorcycles, and bicycles. Few of these vehicles had headlights. Pedestrians were shown no mercy. Stray dogs showed no mercy. I felt swelling motion sickness for the last thirty minutes of our seventy-minute journey. I needed a cup of tea.
T HE ISLAND NATION of Sri Lanka was not always renowned for its tea. In the mid-1700s, Dutch interests were making a good return on the harvest of cinnamon growing wild in the forests around the city of Kandy. Following a decline in cinnamon revenue, investorsturned to coffee, whose cultivation peaked at about 15,000 hectares in 1845.
But in 1869, a plantation superintendent named Donald Reid noted that things were going awry for the coffee plants near the community of Gallola. Coffee rust, a type of fungal parasite, was damaging the crop. Under the right conditions, some fungi can wipe out a crop in a matter of weeks. Destruction of the coffee industry by the rust was less rapid. Even so, within five years of its appearance, every coffee-growing district in Ceylon was infected, and within ten years the yield had declined from 4.5 hundredweight per acre to 2 hundredweight. The industry went into a spiral, and dead coffee trees were exported to Great Britain for use in furniture.
But when British capitalists arrived in Sri Lanka to make their fortunes from the cultivation of tea, they found that Sinhalese labourers interested in the new endeavour were hard to come by. Locals had their own interests. Investors didn’t have to look far to find workers. Just next door on the Indian subcontinent were millions of Tamil agricultural workers who could earn far more in Sri Lanka than they could at home. As the competition for the services of labourers in southern India rose, so too did local wages.
And it has been all about tea ever since. In 1967, D. M. Forrest described tea as the lifeblood of Sri Lanka. At the time, tea represented two-thirds of the country’s export revenue, and, directly and indirectly, was responsible for a massive portion of the country’s wealth. Sri Lanka was, said Forrest, the only country in the world whose economy relied on the harvest of tea.
A FTER A BATH, a nap, and a posh lunch that included a gin and tonic but no tea, Lisa and I were gathered up by Chaminda and Charu. Their wedding was to be at our hotel, the most popular spot for luxurious weddings in Sri Lanka, six days hence. I got the impression that not every detail was going exactly according to
There was no sign of Charu and Chaminda, so we took the opportunity to have a little look around. There was a sprinkling of Christmas decorations, including what can only be described as multicoloured disco balls. We found a very liberal air-conditioning unit to stand under. Time passed without any evidence of our friends. We had slept just a few hours in the past forty-eight, and the heat and humidity were washing over us like an incoming tide. The grind of endless bodies was starting to make me dizzy. What does this country look like after it has woken up?
And then our hosts arrived, their faces full of joy and welcome. They reclaimed their cab, and we headed from the airport, through Colombo, and south toward our hotel in the community of Mount Lavinia. We got little more than impressions in the predawn light, but those exotic scenes made my eyes dance. Even at that ungodly hour on a Monday morning, buses were disgorging workers at garment factories. It was raining and some people had umbrellas; the remainder didn’t seem to care about getting wet. Traffic was crushingly heavy, with an equal mixture of buses, minivans, commercial trucks, three-wheeled taxis, motorcycles, and bicycles. Few of these vehicles had headlights. Pedestrians were shown no mercy. Stray dogs showed no mercy. I felt swelling motion sickness for the last thirty minutes of our seventy-minute journey. I needed a cup of tea.
T HE ISLAND NATION of Sri Lanka was not always renowned for its tea. In the mid-1700s, Dutch interests were making a good return on the harvest of cinnamon growing wild in the forests around the city of Kandy. Following a decline in cinnamon revenue, investorsturned to coffee, whose cultivation peaked at about 15,000 hectares in 1845.
But in 1869, a plantation superintendent named Donald Reid noted that things were going awry for the coffee plants near the community of Gallola. Coffee rust, a type of fungal parasite, was damaging the crop. Under the right conditions, some fungi can wipe out a crop in a matter of weeks. Destruction of the coffee industry by the rust was less rapid. Even so, within five years of its appearance, every coffee-growing district in Ceylon was infected, and within ten years the yield had declined from 4.5 hundredweight per acre to 2 hundredweight. The industry went into a spiral, and dead coffee trees were exported to Great Britain for use in furniture.
But when British capitalists arrived in Sri Lanka to make their fortunes from the cultivation of tea, they found that Sinhalese labourers interested in the new endeavour were hard to come by. Locals had their own interests. Investors didn’t have to look far to find workers. Just next door on the Indian subcontinent were millions of Tamil agricultural workers who could earn far more in Sri Lanka than they could at home. As the competition for the services of labourers in southern India rose, so too did local wages.
And it has been all about tea ever since. In 1967, D. M. Forrest described tea as the lifeblood of Sri Lanka. At the time, tea represented two-thirds of the country’s export revenue, and, directly and indirectly, was responsible for a massive portion of the country’s wealth. Sri Lanka was, said Forrest, the only country in the world whose economy relied on the harvest of tea.
A FTER A BATH, a nap, and a posh lunch that included a gin and tonic but no tea, Lisa and I were gathered up by Chaminda and Charu. Their wedding was to be at our hotel, the most popular spot for luxurious weddings in Sri Lanka, six days hence. I got the impression that not every detail was going exactly according to
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