“It’s fine,” he says. “A little much, yes, but typical for white foreigners.”
We climb in, and the driver silently drives the narrow, shadowed streets to our home. Neon lights shimmer on the ground in the puddles where it has just rained. The kids are shells, hollow with exhaustion and whimpering with hunger. My head nods in sleep deprivation.
The van pulls into a driveway, and an old woman stands in the yard to greet us. For thirty dollars a day, it seems our guesthouse comes with a cook available for all our meals. She lives in the other end of the house, across the courtyard, along with her elderly husband, who handles the house repairs.
We remove our flip-flops and leave them outside, then walk inside. The dining table is set with plates and silverware, covered serving dishes, and a pitcher of water. It smells like Sundays at Grandma’s house. Maari, the cook, asks, “Is chicken and rice okay, ma’am?”
My eyes water and I nod; I can’t speak. We sit down and dish out food. Finn puts his head on the table and falls asleep before he’s able to take a bite. Reed cries as he chews, confused with his combination of ravenous stomach and somnolent body. Tate takes a few bites, excuses herself, and finds a bed. It has been thirty-six hours since we left the McAlarys’ house in Glenbrook.
Kyle carries the boys to their room, and I find the bathroom, my skin clammy and desperate for a shower. I dig through my pack for shampoo and soap, extract my pajamas, pull back the shower curtain, and scream.
I run out of the bathroom and Maari runs in, confused. She laughs, shakes her head as she heads back to the kitchen, then returns with an aerosol can and a sheet of paper. I hear the spray of the can, and in a few seconds, Maari escorts a colossal, bristly tarantula on the sheet of paper, then out the back door. She shakes him out on the lawn.
“You may take your shower now, ma’am.”
That’s what she thinks.
I want to follow the kids into desperate, deep sleep. We inspect the folds of the sheets inside and out, I check for bumps between them and the mattress, and Kyle investigates underneath the bed frame on the floor. I peer inside the pillowcases. Lying down feels sybaritic after our day and a half, and my muscles quiver with relief. I strap on my eye mask and pull the sheet over my head, lest a friend of the arachnid’s drops from the ceiling in the night and calls my face home.
The next morning coffee, orange juice, and omelets are waiting for us on the dining table.
After breakfast the kids are eager to play, but they’re scared of Maari’s husband. He’s harmless, but he’s wrinkled and toothless and smiles at them with affection. I am much more frightened of the yard. We’ve been warned that in Sri Lanka, cobras are as plentiful as Texas squirrels. Maari warns us of the monkeys; one must be careful of anything inadvertently left outside, because they’ll steal anything from oranges in the tree, to a pen dropped from your bag, to shoes left on the patio overnight.
I think of our flip-flops outside.
“Arrgh! Everybody’s are fine but mine,” Reed whines from the front porch. One of his is missing; the other is torn to shreds.
“Monkey.” Maari says, nodding. I pull out Reed’s socks and sneakers from the bottom of his pack. I can’t remember when he last wore them.
Maari schedules us a driver for the day. This is deemed safer and more affordable than testing out the ambiguous traffic laws as foreigners with a car rental, so an hour after breakfast, the five of us board a derelict Volkswagen van with no seat belts and springs in the seats jabbing through the fabric. The sliding door is bent, and it takes Kyle three tries to close it. I can still see the road through the bottom where it should connect with the rest of the van.
“Kids, if you so much as wiggle your bottoms in your seats, you’ll get extra math problems,” I say through clenched teeth.
“Where would you like to go?” Rishi, our driver, asks from the front seat.
“How about a tea factory? I hear there’s decent tea here,” Kyle jokes. Rishi jiggles his head side to side and reverses out the driveway. Here, nodding means no, and tilting your head side to side means “yes, okay,” and “sure, why not?” It also sometimes means the opposite, depending whether the person gives you the answer he thinks you want to hear.
The van turns left, and Finn falls out of his seat, toppling against the decaying sliding door. I briskly pull him off the floor and onto my lap, wrap my arms around him, which will do nothing if we crash. I squint my eyes closed and pray for mercy. A seat spring bores into my rear.
The first tea plantation in Ceylon, Sri Lanka’s original name, was opened in 1867 by a Scotsman named James Taylor. The alchemy of the island’s rain, sun, and soil boosted the drink from an exotic concoction from the Orient to a British mainstay, and it is now arguably the most popular drink in the world. Sri Lanka is currently the leading global exporter of tea; 23 percent of all tea leaves worldwide hail from this island. Almost any tea factory here will happily give free tours of their facilities, with the hope you’ll buy some leaves as a thank-you.
Rishi takes us to a nondescript factory housed in a metal warehouse. We walk through the front door and are greeted by a young woman in a pink sari, waiting as though she were expecting us.
“Would you like a tour?” she asks. She leads us upstairs to the top floor, where troughs of tea leaves are drying. Machines vibrate the troughs periodically to rotate the leaves, helping them dry evenly.
“This is called withering,” she explains.
“How long does it take?” I ask.
“It depends,” she says. “We wait until the leaves smell right.”
She leads us to the next room, where a cylindrical machine rolls across the leaves and ruptures the cell walls, releasing their juices. The room echoes with a mechanical roar as steel plates rotate in rhythm across round metal tables. Our guide speaks, but I can’t hear her. I look at our kids, whose wide eyes are entranced at being so close to factory-grade machinery.