We walk through the deafening room into another, where tea leaves either are spread out to ferment or skip this stage altogether (as it happens, green tea isn’t fermented at all; it’s this process that turns the same leaves into our black tea), then onto another room where women guide even more whirring and buzzing machines. The whole tea-making process takes about seven steps, and in its finale, the sorted leaves are shipped off to the government, who inspects the batch to ensure it qualifies as official Ceylon tea. There’s a reason it’s the best in the world.
Our guide leads us to the final tea room/gift shop where we’re allowed a complimentary cup of tea and it’s assumed we’ll buy much more. Reed and Finn take one sip, then return to the windows to watch more moving mechanical parts, so we invite Rishi to join Kyle, Tate, and me. He doesn’t speak English, but we raise our glasses and he does likewise; we nod our heads, and sip. There’s an understanding with tea. Tate is not quite ten but has already long consumed tea; having lived her early years in Turkey, she was drinking it as a two-year-old toddler. The taste, the ritual with sugar cubes and miniature spoons, is home for her. I grew to love its taste in Turkey too. She smiles at me, and I wink back. This field trip feels personal, comforting, hospitable. Tea drinking is a liturgy of comfort, and we partake of it everywhere in the world. It’s a ceremony of simplicity, nourishment for both the nomads in foreign teahouses and homebodies in their beds. We buy more than we can fit in our packs, and plan to mail some back to one of the kids’ tea-obsessed grandmas.
In the evening, Rishi suggests checking out the left canine tooth of the Buddha; it is Kandy’s claim to fame, displayed in the town center for all to admire. This isn’t exactly on our agenda, but this is the closest we’ve been to any of the Buddha’s teeth, and our itinerary isn’t exactly jam-packed. We jiggle our heads side to side. Sure—why not?
Kyle wraps himself in Rishi’s tablecloth-like sarong because he is wearing shorts, verboten in sacred temples. The five of us walk up the steps to the Buddhist temple where inside awaits Gautama Buddha’s tooth. Rishi waits for us outside. I have no clue what to expect. As a Christian, I can appreciate the devotion of the faithful Buddhists, but I’ve never been big on relic veneration. I’m especially not a fan of sensory overload, particularly in swarming crowds where I’m deluged with musty incense, thunderous chanting in a language I don’t know for an observance I don’t understand, dim lighting, and no obvious exit sign. We gingerly step through the temple doors. This is the wrong place for us to be, I think immediately. I look at Kyle, and the crowd behind us pushes us through. We’re stuck.
I hold the boys’ hands and we begin pushing our way through. Monks pound rhythmically on drums and the beat rattles between my ears like a tuning fork. Mobs of worshippers and tourists move through like cattle in a stockade, and we have no choice but to join. We inch our way upstairs with everyone.
A shrine of candles in front of a gilded door waits at the back of a large stone room, and the multitudes stare in anticipation. I can only assume that the Buddha’s tooth is behind the doors. We stand and wait.
There is no ventilation inside these thousand-year-old walls, and there are only six square inches of space for our bodies. The heat is sweltering. We wait for a glimpse of this tooth. And wait. And wait. And wait. Nothing happens. I stare at the gold-plated doors and my mind wanders about what’s behind the doors. I imagine a dining room set, like on The Price Is Right. The beat of the drums grows louder as the orchestra of monks marches closer to us. Tate covers her ears and stands on her tiptoes; she can’t see anything. The boys can only stare at other peoples’ backs centimeters from their noses. There isn’t enough room for me to pick them up.
“What’s going on?” Reed yells from below. I shrug my shoulders.
“I want to go home!” screams Finn, and he starts to cry. I’m desperate for an exit, but there is no way out of this crushing crowd, the walls closing in. There is nothing to do but wait and watch this door, and endure the continual boom boom boom of the drums. I struggle to breathe, pray that I don’t faint.
We wait for thirty more minutes as the surrounding devotees mumble their chants. Several tourists hold up their phones to record what they’re unable to see. Finn leans his head into one of my sides; Reed leans into the other. The boys try to sleep standing. Tate pushes her way to the front of the crowd so she can better see.
Finally, the gilded doors open. The crowd’s chanting grows faster, louder, eager with veneration. A monk emerges holding a golden dome atop a red velvet pillow, and he sets it on an altar. People inch slowly into a queue for a chance to pass by the tooth that was presumably under this gleaming dome and that we would not, it would seem, technically see.
Kyle and I nod, hold tight the kids’ hands, call for Tate to come back, and we force our way against the crowd. We zigzag down the stairs and through the halls, collapse out of the temple and into fresh air, and speed-walk to our van waiting for us on the street. We beg Rishi to take us home.
The next morning, the five of us go on a walk through the country’s national botanical gardens, not far from our house. Monkeys follow our steps; diminutive brown toque macaques scampering across suspension bridges and hiking paths. They stop when we stop, then start again when we continue walking, like a comical classic movie. Finn takes a hundred photos of them, finds them hilarious.
This morning is our calmest so far on the island, and it is a relief to let the kids run through grass. Locals stare. The boys inch close to a termite hill, and I holler for them to move away.
“Not termite hills,” says Rishi. “Cobra houses.”
We move to a forest grove, and are surrounded by vanilla vines, cocoa, nutmeg, cinnamon, and coffee trees. It smells like Christmas morning.
Sri Lanka is best known for, aside from Ceylon tea, its enormously high concentration of spices—some of the world’s most significant spices hail from this unassuming island. Its rare blend of acidic soil, humid air near the equator, and relative protection from other environmental threats make for ideal growing conditions for beloved staples like vanilla, nutmeg, curry, and cinnamon.
I pluck fallen nutmeg pods from the ground, slide them in my pocket. Their dark seeds are covered in a waxy red coating, like European cheese. They smell like comfort, pie, a fireplace. I’m hit with a pang of homesickness.
Our flight out of Colombo is in the middle of the night, so on our second-to-last day in Sri Lanka, we gallop back on the train, first-class to the capital city, and watch the same American teen movie. We plan to hole up and catch up on work and school before boarding the plane because we’ll soon hit African soil running, and we won’t have much Internet access there. We book a guesthouse with a backyard pool two miles from the airport.
At the train station, Kyle negotiates a price with a driver, but he forgets to ask about his type of vehicle. We strap on our backpacks and find our driver waiting for us with his three-wheeled motorized rickshaw with a backseat bench sized for two adults.