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A vacation from my past in Lanka
By Shyam Selvadurai
TORONTO - In June every year, my partner, Andrew, and I go to northern Ontario to open his family cottage. But until last year, this annual rite was inevitably bittersweet, for the trip always served as a reminder of another holiday home - the safari lodge that my father had built in the jungles of Sri Lanka, and where I spent my childhood vacations.

On the way to the cottage last year, as we drove past fields of tall grass that rippled silver in the wind, I gazed out, lost in the memory of travelling to the lodge in my father's open jeep, past green paddies in which women wearing white blouses and colorful sarongs stood ankle-deep in the mud, tending their crop. As our car entered a copse of aspen and birch, the wind turned into a soft, ocean-like roar - and I was back in that jeep, passing miles and miles of white sand and turquoise ocean. When Andrew and I crossed a dry, scrubby landscape, I thought of the Dry Zone of Sri Lanka, with its arid fields, hot winds and stunted trees flowered orange and red. And when we turned off the two-lane highway and onto the rutted cottage road I couldn't help but think of the turn onto the jungle path that led to the lodge, the thorny undergrowth so dense that the branches banged and rattled and scraped against the jeep.

After we had arrived at the cottage and I had helped Andrew unload our provisions, I walked down to the lake and stood there looking across at the palatial houses that had sprung up on the other side. I remembered sitting on the deck of the lodge, gazing at the far shore of the lake where flamingos, painted storks, peacocks, buffaloes, deer and even an occasional elephant could be seen drinking, bathing or searching for fish.

What marvellous holidays my brother, my two sisters and I had there as children. Despite the crocodiles, we bathed in the lake, making sure to stay in the shallows, one of us keeping an eye out for the deceptive logs. In the dry season, we played cricket or tag or ran races on the lake's parched floor. At times we would venture into the jungle, pretending to be game hunters, my brother leading the way with his air rifle, but the moment we saw elephant dung or leopard paw prints we would run back to the lodge shrieking half in terror and half in delight.

Nothing quite symbolized the end of our life in Sri Lanka as the destruction of that holiday home. The lodge was in the deep south, an area that had the same implications for us minority Tamils as the American South once had for African-Americans. The Sinhalese community was at its most racist there. Yet my father loved the landscape of the south and so, against the advice of his friends, he built his lodge in the early 70s. In 1977, the lodge was burned by a Sinhalese mob. My father went back and rebuilt it. For the next few years, the sign marking the entrance to the lodge was frequently covered with racist graffiti or torn down. In 1981, the lodge was burned again. This time, my father accepted defeat.

Eventually the growing violence between the Sinhalese and Tamils consumed our country and my family was forced to immigrate to Canada. Four years after we left Sri Lanka, I returned to look at the site. The jungle had taken over and the only thing that remained was the tower that used to house the water tank.

From the cottage garden, I could see Andrew going about the holiday home he had known since childhood, tidying up, taking down the curtains, cleaning the windows. The injustice of it all rose up in my chest. His history had continued; mine had not. He spent every Christmas in the house of his childhood, every summer at this cottage. His ancestors were buried in the same cemetery that now held his father's grave.

When I went into the bedroom above the boathouse, I saw that the shelves were filled with the things of his past - magazines for teenagers, a tattered Scrabble game, yellowed paperback Daphne du Maurier novels, a Mennonite quilt. As I gazed at the shelves, however, my eyes alighted on a small spiral notebook. It was mine. I took it down and began to go through the pages.

Over the years I had been coming to this cottage, I had noted in the book the details of the landscape on our trip north. Passing the village of Lemonville, (where Andrew's great-grandfather once lived) I had written that first year, "Pretty purple flowers, in ditch"; the next year: "Purple loosestrife abundant in ditches"; then "Loosestrife too abundant. Hope they don't choke day lilies that make Lemonville so lovely in July" and finally: "P.L. worse than ever."

With each year, I saw the progress of my entries from unfamiliar to familiar to taken-for-granted; a growing knowledge of my landscape. As I looked around the room, I found other evidence of my presence: a pair of fire-engine, red slippers, bought in Chinatown for $1; my "fried egg" sweater, thus called because Andrew pointed out that the pattern on the front looked like eggs done sunny side up; acid-washed jeans from my club days, turned into cutoffs, and then just abandoned.

Taking down the du Maurier novels, I saw that I had bookmarked each of them with memorabilia from summers past. One book held a photograph of me in my old favourite swimming trunks; on the back, a friend had written "f.y.i., Speedos went out in the 80's." Another had a piece of paper with the phone number of a close friend who had moved to Australia; in a third was a card my niece had made when she came to visit. I had been so caught up in the past, I had not realized that this Canadian holiday home held my history too.

The task I had taken on that day was to clean out the tool shed that had belonged to Andrew's late father. It was so jammed with stuff that I could barely push the door wide enough to squeeze inside. After I cleared a little room, I began to fling things out into a pile to be taken away; cans of rusted bolts and nails and hinges, battered metal boxes filled with the ghosts of tools past, packages of mildewed linoleum tiles, moth-eaten fishing vests and jackets, corroded gutter pipes and rakes, fishing tackle that had come unwound from its spool and lay in a great webbing on the floor.

As I waded through these layers of the past, I thought how hard it must have been for Andrew's father, a child of the Depression, to throw anything away. And then, a passage from the Tirukkural, an ancient work of Tamil philosophy, rose into my mind; "As one by one we give up, we get freer and freer of pain."

The sun had climbed high in the sky and its rays stretched in great bars across the lawn. A loon was calling on the lake, a motorboat had started up in the distance, children were playing on swings in the neighboring garden. It was time to go swimming.

(Shyam Selvadurai is the author of "Funny Boy" and "Cinnamon Gardens”.) - The New York Times

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