Culture Shock

Culture Shock

Not an experienced traveler at the time, even I could tell that PANAM Airlines was in trouble. The old aircraft shuddered like a dilapidated bus, the seats cushion was lumpy, and a dead fly came with my lunch. The year was 1984, and, Fulbright scholarship in hand, I was on my way to Washington DC to begin graduate studies.  

We arrived at what I later learned was Dulles airport. After clearing immigration and customs, I asked a bystander for the bus to the American University, and he pointed to a vehicle idling nearby. Two heavy suitcases in hand, I boarded and inquired from the Black, female driver if the bus was going to the university. Unable to make head or tale of her response, I repeated the question and again did not comprehend her reply. Confused and embarrassed - how could I not understand the language I had spoken most of my life - I took a chance and boarded the bus.

It took me to National airport, not far from downtown DC. Not wanting to take another risk, I took a taxi. The driver was talkative and I quickly got the gist of his life story. He was from Afghanistan and had fled home when the Soviets invaded. Having held a high position in Afghanistan’s central bank, and now reduced to driving a taxi, he complained about the roaches that infested his cramped apartment and the high cost of healthcare in America, which he couldn’t afford.

The American University was deserted when we got there. The new semester had begun a few days back, but it was Labor Day, a public holiday. Tired, confused and demoralized, I was in despair; I didn’t expect my first day in the USA to be like this. The driver understood my plight - another stranger in a strange land - told me not to worry, and drove me to a motel, promising to return the next morning. I did not expect to see him again.

But, to my relief, he was there the next morning. The empty campus of the previous day was now a hive of activity, students greeting friends and rushing to lectures. I eventually found the director in charge of international students, who helped me with the paperwork, but what I needed most was a place to stay, to unpack and rest.

All campus dorms had filled up, except for a large room to be shared with five others. Each floor had corridor-style rooms with shared bathrooms, a small kitchen, and a lounge. I saw some female students around, and was told it was a co-ed dorm, where male and female students lived on the same floor. Coming from a country where campus dorms were strictly segregated according to gender, I found this arrangement astonishing.

Except for one, my roommates were freshmen (first year undergraduates), perhaps away from home and parental eyes for the first time, and out to make the most of that freedom. About half my age, they were energetic and fun loving, fascinated to have a foreigner among them.

Being perhaps the largest room on the floor, ours became the place where students hung out, where the lights burned all night, the only phone rang round the clock, and visitors dropped in at all hours of the day and night. Down the hallway, the sound of doors swinging open and banging shut, the pitter-patter of running feet, and the giggles and high pitched shrieks of young women, pervaded the night.

One roommate turned out to be the president of the university’s gay and lesbian students’ association. He perhaps had the busiest social life, greeting a stream of visitors, and making or receiving endless phone calls. Strangely, he slept on a mattress on the floor, his clothes, books, and other items strewn around. Some mornings, two or three young women would be asleep on the floor around him. Another roommate told me they were lesbians, who felt safer with him than having to walk back to their dorms after partying late.

Growing up in Ceylon in the 1960s, I had been up to my ears in American culture, lifestyles, and politics. My father had bought me a subscription to the Readers' Digest when I was 12, and I was also reading Free World, a magazine distributed by the US Information Agency. I listened to the Voice of America regularly, and American pop and country music were popular on Radio Ceylon. I took courses in American literature for my first degree. I thought I knew America.

But, nothing had prepared me for this. I couldn't sleep for ten days. The jet lag may have played a part, but the constant noise and the lights burning all night turned my life into a nightmare. I began to fall asleep at lectures and feared a physical and nervous breakdown. So I returned to the director in charge of international students, asking for help.

Within a few days, he found me an apartment at an off campus location, on Wisconsin Avenue, a 15-minute walk from campus. It was in an affluent, leafy neighborhood. I couldn’t afford the rent but managed to find a roommate. We shopped for the basic furniture -  two beds, a table, and two chairs - at a nearby Salvation Army thrift store. That first night in the apartment, I had the best sleep since arriving in the USA.

Americans were a minority in my courses, and the international students came from Bangladesh, Colombia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Syria, Togo, and Zimbabwe. Some were Fulbrighters. My best friend, not a classmate, was from the Ivory Coast.

My roommate, from Kerala, turned out to be a good cook, and our apartment soon became the meeting place for my classmates. We had parties and pot luck meals, and I got to taste cuisine from around the world.

As the fall season turned to winter, the leaves turned a myriad of colors - from yellow to red and to brown – and fluttered to the ground. Soon, the trees stood bare. One night, standing at the window of my seventh floor apartment, I saw a magical sight that remains imprinted in my memory: the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial, brightly lit, bathed in moonlight.

Danny's Revenge

Some years ago, I accepted the invitation to make a plenary presentation at the major English teachers conference in Taiwan. All expenses paid. The organizer had asked me to send my PowerPoint slides to him so that my presentation they could be set-up in advance. I did, but took the precaution of carrying copies slides with me on a USB device.

Almost the first person I saw at the conference was a friend from Singapore, who was looking distraught. She had sent her slides in advance, and, trusting the conference organizer, not carried copies with her. That morning, when she arrived for her presentation at the designated lecture hall, her PowerPoint slides were nowhere to be found. Her presentation was ruined.

I actually had two tasks at the conference, a seminar in addition to the plenary. When I arrived for the seminar, I found a hall filled with about 150 people. Although a laptop computer was available, the projector for the PowerPoint presentation was not. A Taiwanese friend, Aiden, made a few quick calls but no projector was forthcoming. Perhaps used to such glitches, Aiden had brought her own small portable projector to be used at her presentation later that day. So, while a member of the audience in the front row balanced the projector on his lap, I managed to conduct the seminar. Because the projector was close to the white board, the projection was small, not visible from the back of the rectangular shaped hall where the seats were at the same level.

I was furious. After the seminar, I made a beeline to the conference organizer Danny Tsoi and, in the presence of a few others, berated him for the poor arrangement. He replied that I should be “like Aristotle”, able to present from memory without any PowerPoints! I reminded him that I was conducting a seminar, not making a speech. In berating Danny in the presence of others, I had broken a cardinal principle of Chinese etiquette: never make others lose face.

My plenary talk was the next day, in a large auditorium seating about 300 people. After I arrived, the audience began drifting in, and soon most seats were taken. But, the laptop at the dais would not connect to the overhead projector. Once again, Aiden came to my help, calling various people responsible for these matters. Two technicians finally arrived, and demanded a cash payment from me for the use of the projector! Aiden made more calls and the technicians finally did their job. All these negotiations were in Mandarin, a language I did not speak. 

Meanwhile, a formally dressed man was standing nearby, seemingly indifferent to what was going on. Finally, 20 minutes after the scheduled start, I was introduced to the audience by the president of the English teachers association, who turned out to be the man who had stood by nonchalantly! By the time the plenary began, after the long delay, most of the audience had left the auditorium.

Danny got his revenge!

The Garden in the Jungle

The Garden in the Jungle

(with apologies to Leonard Woolf)

While the world is filled with fear and grief and I am inundated with news of the deadly coronavirus, my mind turns to a less troubled time when I lived in a garden in the middle of a jungle.

In the mid-1960s, my father was posted as the superintendent of the Isolated Seed Garden (ISG), about 15 miles from Chilaw off the Puttalam road. The ISG, owned by the Coconut Research Institute (CRI) and said to be the first of its kind in the world, had been inaugurated in 1955 by Mr. J.R. Jayawardena, who was the Minister of Agriculture. Its purpose was to carry out cross breeding of high quality coconut varieties.

For this purpose, the 200-acre seed garden, also known as Ambakelle, had been carved out of virgin jungle with a mile-thick band of reserved and protected jungle around it. The assumption was that bees could not fly that far carrying pollen from outside. Beyond the jungle were the “chena” (slash and burn) cultivations of the villagers. In the jungle lived wild boar, deer, sambhur, monkey, jungle fowl, rock squirrel, and numerous species of snakes, including huge pythons, and birds. Most staff members, “watchers’ (they would now be called security guards) and laborers lived within Ambakelle in housing provided by the CRI. Some labourers who lived in their own homes would walk to work through the jungle, risking their lives when the wild elephants were around.

The wild elephants, when they arrived, provided much excitement. Apparently, Ambakelle lay in the path of the jungle corridor that the famous Deduru Oya herd of elephants had been traversing for perhaps hundreds of years. In the dry season, as the waterholes in their natural habitat in the Wilpattu area dried-up, the elephants numbering in the hundreds had traveled south to the Deduru Oya river in search of water. By the 1960s, the jungles had been cleared for agriculture and human habitation and the elephants were largely confined to Wilpattu. Nevertheless, old instincts remained and a few stray elephants would do the annual trek to Deduru Oya river, taking their revenge on the human interlopers by destroying their makeshift huts and chena cultivations. These elephants would raid Ambakelle because they relished the young coconut seedlings. Years of painstaking research could be destroyed overnight.

Of course, shooting the elephants was out of the question. So an electric fence consisting of a thin wire connected to electric horns and 6-volt car batteries was erected right round the perimeter of Ambakelle. The wire would be activated in the evening and when it was tripped, usually by an elephant, the nearest horn would sound, thereby warning the patrolling “barrier” watchers. The watchers were the first line of defense and would attempt to scare the elephant off by lighting firecrackers. My father would soon be on the spot by jeep and with the help of the watchers, the loud jeep horn, firecrackers, yells and hoots, drive the elephants back into the jungle. We had little sleep at night when the elephant season was on.

Ambakelle was a “hardship station” and the CRI did its best to make life a little easier for its staff. The housing (“bungalows” for the staff officers) were new, and electricity as provided from 6 to 11pm by a large, diesel operated Lister generator. A central tank supplied running water. A circuit bungalow was available for visiting staff. The first superintendent, Bertie Rodrigo, a naturalist, had designed the layout well, preserving a few massive tress and a couple of ancient water holes. But, life in the middle of the jungle was boring: there was no TV those days, nor did Ambakelle have a telephone, and our only means of entertainment was a Grundig radio and an old, hand-cranked, gramophone. Every week, we looked forward to another episode of “Muwanpelessa”, a popular radio play, which ironically was based on a village in the jungle. The nearest town was Chilaw, a good 15 miles away. Occasionally, we would drive there to watch a movie but returning home through the jungle at night was risky, especially when a feared lone bull elephant (“Thaniya”) was around. So the tractor driver Thomas would wait just outside the jungle and drive the tractor ahead of our Peugeot 203, making as much noise as possible by accelerating the tractor engine.

 
Wild elephants were not the only threat. In fact, the surrounding jungle, being the only source of meat and timber for miles around, was under siege. Hunters would roam the jungle, poaching the deer and wild boar and sometimes setting deadly trap guns. These crude, illegal, home-made pipe guns, packed with gun powder and pieces of metal, were tied to tree trunks at ground level, and a camouflaged trip wire (“maruwela”) strung across animal trails. Occasionally, the victims were other hunters, who were severely injured (needing amputations) if not suffering an agonizing death. The villagers would also enter the jungle to cut down trees, so watchers had to be hired to patrol the jungle. Once, when I accompanied my father in the jeep, with an armed watcher riding at the back, we came across a bullock cart filled with illegally cut timber. My father ordered the thief to take the cart to Ambakelle and unload the timber himself. Another time, my father discovered found that another staff member had cut down a large number of valuable “burutha” (satinwood) and “palu” (Manilkara hexandra) trees and sawn the timber into planks. The planks were stored in his house waiting to be taken out of Ambakelle at a convenient time. The staff member was later dismissed from his job.

jungle fowl

I was schooling at Chilaw at this time and would bicycle through the jungle to catch a CTB bus. The gravel road was winding, and I never knew what to expect around the corner. It could be a stray deer, a wild boar, or, almost every morning, jungle fowl. When the wild elephants arrived - we could tell from the telltale broken branches and droppings - my father drove me to the bus. He sometimes brought his shotgun because the jungle fowl were good for the pot. Once, we didn’t know that the elephants had arrived, and as I bicycled past, I heard a loud, angry grunt from the jungle.

My first task early in the morning was to clean my mother’s poultry and feed and water the chickens. I kept a sharp eye for the cobras (the rat snakes were harmless) who would come to steal eggs. Then, a quick shower and a bite of breakfast, and with my packed lunch in the school bag, a breezy ride to the bus in the cool morning. I recall the small FIAT Bus, imported from Italy, with fondness. The driver and the conductor were friendly and would even wait for me if I was a few minutes late. They proudly wore khaki jackets while on duty, kept the bus clean, and personally knew all their passengers. Most were the wives of chena cultivators taking their vegetables to market, and a sprinkling of schoolchildren.

Three incidents from that time are distinctly etched on my mind. First, a forest fire. The jungle barrier around Ambakelle included a teak plantation owned by the Forest Department. During a severe drought, it caught fire. All the fallen leaves and the dry bark of the trees burned like old newspaper, sending orange fireballs swirling into the sky. After the fire burned out in a few days, only blackened stumps of trees, with the ash covered ground underneath, could be seen. But, when the rains came the trees gave off new shoots, and the forest regenerated.

The second incident was the capture and taming of a wild elephant. Some villagers dug a deep pit where elephants roamed, and after a male elephant fell in, kept him there for about ten days, and, with the help of two tame elephants and some men trained in the task, “broke” (tamed) him. I passed this scene twice a day on the bus, and saw how it was done, and thought it was cruel.

The third incident was a classic tragedy of jealousy, revenge, and murder. Charles Peiris was a contractor who undertook minor works at Ambakelle. Of his three daughters, the first and second were married to CRI tractor drivers Thomas and Piyasena. They were both cheerful, hard working men, although Thomas was addicted to kassippu. The youngest, unmarried daughter was the prettiest, and both Thomas and Piyasena had been eyeing this girl. When she began to favor Piyasena with her affection, Thomas flew into a rage. One day, blind with jealousy, he shot Piyasena dead. Charles Peiris lost a son-in-law, and if the police arrested Thomas, his daughter (Thomas’ wife) would have to struggle alone with her five children. So Charles Peiris took the rap for the killing and was arrested by the police. But the villagers, who knew the truth, petitioned and Charles Peiris was later released. Thomas never went to jail but died a few years later, a broken man.

With dad at Ambakelle 2005

In 2005, I drove my father to Ambakelle, his first visit after 35 years. Much had changed, but old timers and their children who now worked there were delighted to see him again, and greeted him with warm affection. He had been a good boss and they remembered his generosity and kindness. A few months later, on Ambakelle’s 50^th anniversary, the CRI organized a felicitation for Dr. Liyanage, the botanist who had conducted a large number of research studies at Ambakelle, and all former superintendents,

including Bertie Rodrigo, the pioneer. They were all old men now, and it was a memorable reunion in familiar surroundings. My father passed away four years later.

A few years ago, my sister and I visited Ambakelle, for old time’s sake. When we arrived, I heard someone shout “Braine mahattaya avilla” (Mr. Braine has come), and again, a few people came running. But they must have been disappointed to see it was only me, the junior Braine, and not my father! The coconut seedlings planted during my father’s time had grown to tall palms, but the internal roads remained the same. Sadly, the superintendent’s bungalow was in sorry shape, and my father’s beautiful garden was neglected and overgrown with weeds. But the jungle surrounding Ambakelle appeared to be intact, although we were told that most of the wildlife was gone and elephants no longer visited.

While writing this narrative, I went to Google maps to see what Ambakelle looked like now, fearing the worst. In Sri Lanka, no jungle, even reserves and protected ones, escape destruction. So, I was both delighted and relived to see that the jungle was intact, withstanding the numerous assaults it has faced over 65 years. I thought of the superintendents and watchers who had risked their lives to protect the jungle and knew that their attempts have succeeded.

(Acknowledgement: For this narrative, I borrowed freely from an account written by my late father S.T. “Teddy” Braine.)

Ambakelle from Google maps (see the dark square)

close-up

Leonard Woolf, the husband of author Virginia, was a civil servant and judge in Ceylon (as Sri Lanka was then called) when it was a British colony, and wrote a much loved novel titled The Village in the Jungle about the rural poor in Ceylon.

J.R. Jayawardena later became the first Executive President of Sri Lanka, in 1977.

Wilpattu, a huge wildlife park, which still exists.

CTB (Ceylon Transport Board), owned by the government.