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No Pause that Refreshes "I don't think I've ever spent such a special three hours in my life,” the woman before me said. Just special! The children! They were so sweet, and their little voices, they were just like chimes. Special little chimes!" We were at the end of the paved road. Below, the dirt access tracks to the tea plantation fanned out among the horizontal contours of the tea ranges, and vertically down the steep gullies to the tea pickers' barracks-like "line rooms". The woman was waiting for her driver. I had just arrived with Father V., a Tamil Jesuit priest wearing inconspicuous Western clothes and not a sarong. He was teaching me a few phrases in Tamil, comparing them with the words I knew in Sinhala. The woman turned to regard the deep-flowing hills molded with the glossy deep green of tea plants, curve after curve high above us and deep into the valleys below where the forests and paddies began. Oddly enough, for a birder's paradise like Sri Lanka, there was hardly a song to be heard, and most of those consisted of caws coming faintly uphill from the line rooms hidden from sight in the hollows and groves below. Later I learned that a tea plantation doesn't support a varied insect population. "Just special! The manager had them sing for us. Twenty little girls and ten little boys. Just dolls! Dressed in white shirts and little red ties—the girls, too!" It was nearing 6:00. The sun was low and Father V. and I were waiting for dusk. That was half an hour away, so we chatted while she waited for her driver to pick her up for the trip into Nuwara Eliya. I inquired, "What time was this?"
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