THE TEARDROP ISLAND
I had come to the Pettah to catch a bus to Galle, a fortified harbour town in the south of Sri Lanka that overlooks the Indian Ocean from the island’s west coast. In 1845 Galle was the point of arrival for most Europeans and Tennent was one of the many colonial visitors who started their tours of the island from its harbour. In the bottom of my rucksack I had a cheap edition of James Emerson Tennent’s Ceylon that I had found in one of the bookshops in Colombo. Unlike the leatherbound copy, lovingly pressed and embossed in London, the pages of my paperback looked as if they had been hurriedly photocopied in a back room somewhere in the city, and were bound carelessly together with so much glue that the paper spine was lumpy and wrinkled. The buses that ply the Sri Lankan roads have old, battered, steel frames and small, smeared windows, which are permanently wedged open to allow the breeze to cool their dark interiors. Most of the seats on the Galle bus were already taken, so I was forced to take the front seat ‘reserved for the clergy’ and hoped that I wouldn’t be evicted by one of the island’s many orange-robed Buddhist monks. The driver lit an incense stick, which he wedged into a small hole in the centre of the steering wheel, before he jumped down from the bus and disappeared into one of the dark stalls that lined the bus stand. Whereas the dashboard and windscreen of the public buses in Europe are usually littered with various stickers and documents certifying the safety of the bus and the legitimacy of the driver, there are no such pretentions in Sri Lanka. Instead, the drivers and the passengers freely acknowledge a bus ride is a potentially lethal experience and appeal to the gods for protection. The driver of this particular bus had decided to 22