From Christmas Day to New Year’s Day, Shandy chauffeured Jennell and me around the southern half of Sri Lanka in a white van big enough for two banks of seats behind the driver. Shandy was one of two drivers working for Eddy--the German expat who took Jennell on a diving trip during our stay at Mirissa. Eddy ultimately presented the best bid after learning from Jennell that we were in the market for a driver for the remainder of our trip. Shandy, although always a consummate gentlemen and quite soft-spoken (despite residing his entire life in what could be a rather high-volume society), was a surprisingly aggressive driver and certainly skilled in Sri Lankan style driving.
Sri Lanka can be driven largely without the aid of stop lights or traffic circles; in fact, I observed stop lights only in Colombo and its environs. Since in Sri Lanka one drives on the left-hand side of the road, right turns are the more challenging ones, and I never fully understood how drivers determined whose turn came next: Even with no stop lights and a steady flow of traffic in both directions on a main drag, right turns could be made both into and off the main drag. I fully believe size and horse power played persuasively into the mix of prioritizing turns and spaces in the traffic flow. And Shandy understood always what should and could be enacted in any driving situation: when to jump a queue or when to submit; length, volume, and repetition appropriate for any occasion in the language of car horns; and how to circumvent all manner of road damage and/or traffic and still maintain optimum progress towards a desired destination.
Whereas Shandy’s English proved to be more limited than we would have preferred—especially when a situation of culture, religion, or politics piqued our curiosity—we managed to communicate quite effectively on a basic level. In the hill country outside of Nuwara Eliya, Shandy found a tea factory/plantation for us to visit, and we all sat down together for complimentary tea and chocolate cake after the Jennell and I completed the official tour. I told Jennell to prepare my cup of tea just how she liked it—milk and lots of sugar—and then she got to drink both of ours. (Mind you, I ate all of my own chocolate cake.) Shandy and Jennell bonded early in the trip over tea, stopping at at a myriad of roadside shops and stands for a cup during our days on the road...devotees of tea drinking, both of them.
After leaving the tea factory area, Jennell and I spotted “pickers” and asked Shandy to pull over for a photo opt. He thought it rather funny that we wanted pictures of them. He smiled, shrugged his shoulders, and said with some wonderment, “They working.”
One evening right after we first started our road trip with Shandy, I was jotting down some notes about the day and I asked Jennell how she thought Shandy spelled his name—with a “y” at the end, since it rhymed with the city name Kandy, or with an “i” or “ie.” She pondered a moment and then pointed out that he probably just spelled it with a lot of loops and curlicues!
The top line is Sinhala and the middle line is Tamil.
3 comments:
what were they picking?
Tea leaves.
That was my guess.
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