Colombo, Sri Lanka
03 September 2009

My blue tube of Nivea chapstick kept my lips soft, smooth and supple. Chapped lips and dry skin are two of my pet peeves. I love a good tube of lip balm and body lotion. Even though I love the luxurious and scented products, I don’t mind Vaseline because it does the trick. The end is much more important than the means. When I started traveling on September 16, I was probably halfway through the Nivea tube, but by October 9 or so I lost it.

I remember wandering around the vast aisles of the Wal-Mart in Newton, Kansas and wondering what kind of chapstick to buy before being somewhat overwhelmed by the choices and deciding not to get anything at all. Instead I had a short chat with God about it. I think it went something along the lines of, “God, I need some lip balm, can you do something about it?” The next day or the day after that Cari gave me a goody bag full of presents for being her bridesmaid. In it was a Soft Lips package with two tubes of vanilla-flavoured lip balm. It was probably the first miracle on my trip, a moment when I knew that the divine entered my world and transformed it. I remember the flush of love that warmed me; I couldn’t believe that God cared about lip balm.

Fast forward to Geneva in February 2009. I’m down to the second tube of vanilla Soft Lips, and then I lost it. Winter is not the time to be without mosturizer of any kind, and my lips needed some lip balm lovin’. I thought about buying another tube, but as is the case with most of my purchases of the past year no matter how big or small, I had a bit of banter with God about it first, and it went something like this: “God, it would be great if you could give me some chapstick again like last time. Would you do that again? Is that how it goes with you?”

That week I was taking a nap one evening in the youth hostel when my roomates woke me up, insisting we go out for a round of drinks. I was exhausted and deep in a REM cycle. I couldn’t believe someone who knew me for less than 48 hours felt comfortable waking me up, but that’s what my life looked like those weeks in Geneva. After seriously considering going back to bed, Victoria, Liz and Viktoriya convinced me to go out. We walked to Les Scandale – I think that’s what it was called – and ordered drinks. I had a cider, Viktoriya had a creme de menth, Victoria had two glasses of wine, and I can’t remember what Liz had. After we paid for our bill, the waiter came back to the table with four tubes of chapstick.

It was beautifully flavoured in a sleek white tube with the red Les Scandale branding. I sat at the table staring at it in disbelief. Nothing during those days in Geneva felt like they were working out for me, and I was tightly wrapped in a cocoon of self pity obsessing over my needs. I prayed a lot of “God can you please do ________ for me?” prayers and saw very few of my kind of answers. He cut through my cocoon with a tube of lip balm. I can’t remember now what I felt then; I wonder if I wanted to cry or laugh or probably both. Unbelief overwhelmed me; I couldn’t believe He did it again. I couldn’t believe I was that important. It was another miracle. So clear. So obvious.

That tube of lip balm lasted me through the tail end of the Ukrainian winter and spring and even up to Sri Lanka. The humidity is thick here in the tropics, and my skin generally does not need moisturizing and my lips don’t chap. It’s a good thing, too, because the Les Scandale tube is almost out. I was down to the final layers down in the base of the tube, the point when you have to dig out with your finger and apply. I’ve been teasing God about it for the last few months, wondering when the next tube of lip balm is going to show up, if it’s going to show up or if I’m actually going to have to break down and buy one before Australia’s chill.

I had forgotten about it for the past few weeks, and two days ago my aunty came up to me and said that one of our relatives from the UK had left a gift for Nirmali and I.

Two pots of lip balm.

To say that I have mixed feelings about returning to Melbourne would be an understatement. Most days I don’t even understand what I am feeling, and I certainly don’t right now looking at my suitcases, packed and ready to be lugged around for one last leg of this journey. I left Melbourne last year not knowing how the following 12 months were going to turn out. Nothing went the way I thought it would because truly I have seen God do exceedingly and abundantly more than I could ask, think or imagine. But I still feel like I am back to square one again, looking at a chasm of unknown and wondering how my legs will be able to leap so far.

Tonight, I will rest in this truth: He who provides my lips with constant moisture will be faithful to complete what he started in me.

Love,
Devi

Colombo, Sri Lanka

Dear Dharshi and Niro,

The post-office crowd packed Bus 155 last night. During rush hour, people cram into the buses, spilling out of the doors, getting on and off while it is moving, pushing and shoving once inside. I take the bus everywhere in Colombo, but have managed to avoid peak times until last night. It was also dark, past 7pm, and apparently not the time when young women should be out alone.

I don’t blink an eye at these scenarios. I don’t know if it’s that I am so different, so secure or if I just don’t care. The last time I was in Colombo, I whined to Appa and Amma every time we boarded a bus,Can we please take a trishaw? Pleeeeeeease? When I first arrived here six weeks ago, I relished every moment I spent on the bus; it was a sign of my growth and maturity. I don’t congratulate myself anymore because I don’t even notice its significance.

Non-dramatic bus travel is now a part of who I am, another I-could-never that introduces me to a the latest incarnation of myself, Devi Abraham Version 07.09.

A few days ago I got off a moving bus only to almost get hit by a car only to cross the road and almost get hit by a bus. All within the span of a minute. This is my reality. So last night as sweat dripped behind my neck and down my back and I tried not to fall in any of four directions into the people pressed tightly against me while the bus jerked backward and forward, I didn’t think about how strange it was that I wasn’t bothered by any of it. I held on to my bag and thought about life, how it seems to be speeding forward at a rate I cannot comprehend, how I am most overwhelmed by the extent and frequency of my evolution, and for how thankful I am for the home in my heart.

Love,
Devi

Colombo, Sri Lanka

Dear Friends,

The trafficking of women and children is an issue close to my heart. This despicable practice has been in the world for hundreds of years, a means by which individual lives have been destroyed while communities and nations decay as a result of wrecked familial and social structures that are one of its many results. I am reminded of it daily here in Sri Lanka, which is supposedly one of the largest suppliers of child pornography for the western world and supplies thousands of children (including a reported 30,000 “beach boys”) into the sex trade.

I don’t know how we can even put the words sex, trade and children together, and it makes my skin crawl to think of people and even countries that prosper financially at the cost of robbing children of their innocence. But this is the reality of our world, a reality we must face as individuals and as communities.

Two of my friends from university work with an organisation that is doing something about the trafficking in India. In India, millions of women and girls work as prostitutes. Many have been trafficked, kidnapped, lured with promises of jobs, or sold by their own families into sexual slavery. Some as young as six years old have become sex workers (the actual term used in India) due to poverty or lack of opportunities. Within the huge, cosmopolitan city of Mumbai, lies the largest red-light district in the world, which is home to a myriad of injustice, abuse, and horrors.

One million children are trafficked into the sex trade each year, taken from their families and forced to work as prostitutes. In Mumbai alone, ninety cases of HIV are reported every hour. Once in the sex trade, women and girls may be forced to have intercourse with up to twenty clients per day.

You can help bring hope to women who have been rescued or escaped from forced prostitution and human trafficking. By purchasing pajamas these women have made, you help empower them to restore their lives. While living in a safe, holistic recovery home, the women learn to sew PUNJAMMIES™. PUNJAMMIES™ help the women support themselves with skill and dignity, heal in body and spirit, and live lives of freedom.

A woman cuts fabric to make one of the punjammies

If everyone takes a small piece of responsibility in the fight against human trafficking and forced prostitution, we can overcome the dark reality these women have lived and prevent others from experiencing the same. Please purchase PUNJAMMIES™ online at www.punjammies.com. Every sale contributes to restoring hope and dignity to another life. You can also find out more about the organisation at their website.

Love,
Devi

Colombo, Sri Lanka

Dear Dharshi and Niro,

When I was in Mr. Kuka’s 7th grade Bible class, the school counsellor, Mrs. Shellrude, taught us about different personalities based on the Myers-Briggs indicators. She told us that highly intuitive types have an ability to make sense out of any situation by – this is my paraphrase – making up stuff. I didn’t get it then, but it is the only explanation I have for why I got in the car of a stranger and let him take me to the office on Friday.

To get to Ekwatte Road, I take Bus 183 from Mt. Lavinia to Nugegoda Junction, and from there I walk down Hospital Road until I reach the office. My guess is that it’s a little over a kilometre. The walk is wonderful in good weather, but in last Friday’s pouring rain, it got a little tricky. Sri Lanka is in the middle of monsoon season, which means spontaneous, almost-daily showers. I am no good at predicting when one will start, so my umbrella came out when it started bucketing down halfway through my walk.

The thing about an umbrella is that while it keeps your head dry, it doesn’t protect the rest of your body or your bags. So I was getting progressively drenched as I sloshed along; my footwear choice of cream, faux leather slip ons were quickly slipping off my feet with every step. Finally momentary surrender was due – I hid under a shop awning along the side of the road (by now I was about five minutes away from the office and running late for a 10am meeting).

A small, black hatchback with a male driver, whom I DID NOT recognise, pulled over on the side of the road, stopped and – I think – gestured to me. To make this storier easier to understand I’m just going to recount what happened in the following moments.

1. I think, Oh this is SO WONDERFUL. It’s someone from the office. I don’t have to walk in the rain anymore. THANK GOD!!!!

2. Then I ran over to the car. Opened the door. Got in the car. Put all my stuff in it. Closed the door while saying to the man, Thank you so much!!! I SO appreciate this!!! You work for (organisation’s name) right?

3. The man sitting in the driver’s seat says something along the lines of, No I do not.

4.  I think – rapidly – to myself, I just got into an unknown man’s car. I JUST GOT INTO AN UNKNOWN MAN’S CAR. SINCE WHEN IN THE WORLD HAVE I EVER DONE THIS EVER IN MY WHOLE ENTIRE LIFE?

5. So I say to the man, while opening the car door again, Ohhhh I am sorry, I didn’t realise that I didn’t know you, I will go now.

6. He says to me, No, no, I can take you somewhere, to Nugegoda?

7. I honestly don’t know what happened to my brain at this point, but I think it must have been something along the lines of, He really seems sincere, nice and non-creepy, it’s only a two minute drive away if that. Oh why not. All while still thinking, ARE YOU REALLY GOING SOMEWHERE IN THE CAR OF SOMEONE YOU DON’T KNOW? ISTHISREALLYHAPPENING?

8. He tried to talk to me, but his English wasn’t great.

Speak Sinhalese?

Ohhh, no. Just English.

Are you Sinhalese?

No, I’m a Tamil. (Thinking: OH GREAT. IS THIS GOING TO TURN INTO A RACIALLY AWKWARD SITUATION?)

Ohhh, a Tamil.  Do you live here or is it office?

It’s office.

9. When we got to the gate, he asked me for my number, which I politely declined to give him. I did thank him and ran off to ponder if I had LOST MY MIND.

Love,
Devi

Dear Anderson Cooper,

My 90-year-old grandma knew that Michael Jackson died before I did (and she knows who he is), and today she told me that she wanted to watch CNN to find out what else was happening in Iran but “All they were showing was Michael Jackson, Michael Jackson, Michael Jackson.”

So it got me thinking – I wonder if the Iranian government had something to do with his death as a way of diverting media attention away from what is happening in Tehran?

Just thought I’d pass the tip along.

Love,
Devi

Colombo, Sri Lanka

Dear Dharshi and Niro,

My sistahs. How I miss you so.

Today I woke up at 6:40am and walked down College Avenue to the beach at 7am. I love the Mt. Lavinia beach in the morning, and I have to pinch myself sometimes that it is only a three minute walk away. Even scavenging black crows attacking the fetid pile of trash leaning precariously against the railroad tracks don’t ruin it for me.

The cool breeze coming off the Indian Ocean is good for my soul as is sitting close to the water and watching the waves race toward me while I read, write and sing. I enjoy being near enough for it to touch me without getting drenched. The ocean is a rough animal, brown the closer it gets to the shore because of the sand that churns in its belly. It spits foaming white froth on the beach, and drags everything within reach back out to sea.

I don’t tangle with it, but my feet do enjoy a sporadic dalliance with the warm, bubbling water.

Mt. Lavinia Beach with the Mt Lavinia Hotel in the background

This is our beach, the place where our family frolicked since the 1960s. Grandpa probably walked here early in the morning when they first bought the property. The Anketell and Watson cousins probably played cricket and rugby by the surf.  I saw two girls in their white-dress-with-green-tie Methodist College uniforms walking on the beach a few evenings ago. It made me wonder if Amma ever did the same thing in her Metho uniform when she lived on College Avenue.

Do you think Appa and Amma walked on the beach to Mt Lavinia Hotel on their first date or did they take Hotel Road? Knowing Appa I bet they walked on the beach. Did he ask her if he could hold her hand and did she say no here? Did I crawl my way to the ocean as a 1-year-old?

Mt. Lavinia beach holds so much of our history, yet a few sand castles is all we have here from our brief holidays.  The older I get the less I care about what culture, mine or anyone else’s, has to say about my life, but I find that I long more and more for a sense of connection, memory, place. Perhaps that’s why I head to this beach in the mornings and evenings when I need to reflect, think and write. I want a part of my life to remain in the Mt. Lavinia sand.

Wish you were here to do it with me.

Love,
Devi

Colombo, Sri Lanka

Dear Amy,

Singing in a karaoke competition was on my wish list for my year of travel. I don’t know why it had to be a competition instead of a regular old evening of karaoke; the most thrilling dreams often do not make sense.

I pictured myself wandering around a Western European back alley possibly with a slight drizzle in the air, my stomach cramping from hunger. The seedy pub with a flickering neon sign to my right would have a flyer on the door – Karoake Competition (Prize of 20 Euros). Does the machine have kitschy 80s power ballads, 90s pop or Leona Lewis? If so, sign me up. I would walk in, lose control for five minutes and walk out, hopefully with the Euros in my wallet.

It would be my secret, shared only with people who probably couldn’t speak English.

I looked everywhere I traveled and found nothing until the quarter page ad for Radio 1 smiled at me when I opened one of Colombo’s English papers last Sunday. Retro Idol, a karaoke competition, is being held in Colombo in the following weeks. Preliminary rounds start at the end of June, the finals are in August in a hotel in Colombo.

And my heart went, I Think I Can Do This But I Don’t Think I Can. That taunt rung in my ears for most of my life, but the second part of it has grown softer and softer during the past nine months as I have done things in all corners of the world that I never thought I could. The registration form was easy enough to fill out, Retro here means any song between 1960 and 1992 and I received my confirmation email a few days ago.

Last night I went for a practice round at Sopranos, the bar where the prelims are being held. I knew no one in the room (I have only been in Sri Lanka for a week). After about an hour the place was full of people of all ages, apparently old people go to posh pubs in Colombo, and the Radio 1 guy started passing the microphone around to contestants.

I was third, and my rendition of Whitney Houston’s “I Have Nothing” was complete with diva hand waves, vocal trills and the inability to fully hit high notes. An ambitious song choice perhaps, but taking a risk is only fun when the stakes are high.

Love,
Devi

The Irish Sea at the Giant's Causeway

Antrim, Northern Ireland, United Kingdom
Tuesday 09 June 2009

Dear God,

Even the grass tells me you love me in Ireland. There is abundance of it here. Lush, wild and thick, it is watered by the rain that falls in drops and buckets on the Irish hills, meadows and plains. I visited the Giant’s Causeway today, and on the walk back to the visitor’s centre, your grass waylaid me. I took a small detour.

My shoes came off as  I padded around on the hillside. The grass is tall and unmanicured; in some ways it looks like weeds with smatterings of purple, white and yellow wildflowers. My feet sank into its thick and soft blades, the most luxurious, elegant carpet imaginable.  I found a crevice in the hillside facing the Irish Sea, hidden from the people walking up and down the path, and I folded myself into it. A perfect fit, like a custom made bed that was slightly raised for a perfect view of the sea.

The water rolled against the black volcanic rock, gently coming in and out of it’s small harbour. It was a cool day, but with a strong sun blazing in the sky I was warmed to my core. This kind of treatment makes me melt inside. It thaws out the Eastern European ice, cuts through fear, disables knowledge and leaves room only for love.

God, I needed this. I needed this so badly.

On Tuesday February 17 I read Hosea 6:1-3 on the train to Busingen, Germany. You had torn me, broken me, removed something from me that I desired so badly I stopped seeing you. But you promised that day, somewhere between Geneva and Bern, that your going out was as sure as the dawn. You promised to come to me as the showers, as the spring rains that water the earth. I was just going to have to wait as I pressed on to know you, the one I love.

You always do what you say. Today you came to me in the post-spring-rain-watered Irish grass and healed me just a little bit more.

Love,
Devi

Lounging by the Giant's Causeway in my bed of grass

Colombo, Sri Lanka

Dear Amy,

Irene Regina Samadanam Anketell was born on 11 December 1918. She is my grandmother, and I am seeing her now for the first time in eight years. I can’t even remember what she looked like then, probably some variation of old.  She is 90-and-a-half now, with a keen mind and a disintegrating though still-functioning body.

My grandmother was the baby of the family, the youngest daughter of nine siblings, born to David and Eunice Anketell of Jaffna, at the tippy tippy top of the Tamil class totempole. Ammamma (what I call her, it is Tamil for grandma) used to tell me when I was younger about the horse-drawn carriages that drove them around the town. Their ancestral home in Uduville, which is still standing after 30 years of war, was made by laborers from India.

Adored by everyone and a real knockout, my grandmother sounds like the belle of the ball character out of a southern American novel. Just today she was telling me (while we looked at the photo below) about how she used to wear her saree Colombo style, to emphasise her small waist and sumptuous figure, and that she heard a guy at her university say she had “luscious curves.” Ammamma went to to university for two years, studying English, Latin, mathematics and logic at the University of Colombo, probably sometime in the 1930s. People I have met around the world during the past years often remark about her charm, wit and vivaciousness. Apparently she had a personality that endeared her to all.

Dolly, Ruby and Irene Anketell (no idea what their ages are at this time, my guess is that my Ammamma is around 21 or 22)

It is amazing what 90 years, being widowed at 56, five children and 11 grandchildren in four countries, and life in general will do to a person.

Today when Ammamma walks, it is a slow shuffle forward, she rocks back and forth like an unsteady reed, each step requiring leverage from the rocking motion of her fragile hips. She is a wisp of a woman now. Her body’s brittle bones look like they could snap at any minute, penetrating her sagging, translucent skin and rupturing the bulging green veins. The curves are gone, robbed by time and a mastectomy.

We were sitting on the couch yesterday and talking; the sofa looked like it would eat her small frame in its folds as she rested her neck against it, face turned upward to look at me.

What was your favourite decade of your life, Ammamma?

What?

Decade…you know, your favourite 10 years, or just years of your life?

She paused.

When grandpa saw me, and, you know…when that all happened. He thought I was so beautiful.

She was referring to how she and my grandfather met, and their famed love story. Louis Richard Jayaratnam Watson was a young doctor who needed a place to stay for a few days, and through a family connection, stayed in the house of Ammamma’s oldest sister, Daisy, and her husband. My grandmother was also there at the time, he took one look at her and fell madly in love. She was around 18 or 19 at the time. He begged her not to return and finish university (for fear that she would get snatched up by someone else) and asked her to wait for him.

She did. She quit university and waited for seven years without seeing him, without hearing from him. They were married in 1942.

He wrote me a song before he left the first time…he didn’t write the song. It was a song at the time.

Somewhere the sun is shining, she warbled faintly
So honey don’t you cry
We’ll find the silver lining
The clouds will soon roll by
Each little tear and sorrow only brings you closer to me

Her voice was without the sound of loss, her eyes shone softly, and for a few moments, she was young, beautiful and adored once more.

Love,
Devi

Dear Amy,

I haven’t had a curry since February 13, which is probably the longest I’ve been without Sri Lankan food since I was in university. Ukrainian food is great, and but there is nothing like the taste of chicken curry eaten with my hands. My flatmates, who are both Ukrainian, wanted to taste Sri Lankan food at some point before I left, and yesterday was the appointed day.

Real curry powder can’t be found here, but there is cumin seed and coriander seed and powder (curry powder is a mixture of cumin and coriander powders, plus some other spices). I went to the outdoor market yesterday morning to buy the powders and some saffron, cardamoms, cloves and cinnamon sticks. The market is across the street from my flat, about a five minute walk away, and it’s one of my favourite haunts on a sunny 20 degree day.

There are lots of stalls of fresh vegetables and fruits. Strawberries were down to 35UAH a kilo ($4USD) yesterday. Dodgy cuts of meat, dead chickens but with their scrawny feet and legs sticking up, tubs of твораг (tvorag) – “milk cheese” and jars of honey line the pavements.

I prefer going when I don’t have an agenda and can meander through the stalls. I always pass the spice lady; she has at least 30 boxes of different spices on her table. It’s the only place I have seen cardamoms in Ukraine. I bought everything I needed from her yesterday except for the cinnamon sticks. For those I went to a different spice stand and had to play charades with the scrawny guy behind the table. He got it after my first attempt. Acting is a necessary skill when you live in a non-English speaking country.

The nut guys are my favourites, though. I don’t know their names, they don’t know mine, but we see each other almost weekly (nuts are my favourite snack). I suspect they enjoy our regular game of “guess how many grams of ____ the crazy foreign girl wants.”

Back to the curry. My mother told me in an email what I need to do – roast the powders, fry with some onion and garlic before adding the chicken, cover tightly so that it cooks in its own juices, etc. I have never made a full Sri Lankan meal, and it was the one cuisine I refused to make. I know how to cook and enjoy it, but preparing my country’s dishes is in a totally different category. Sri Lankan women don’t really teach their daughters how to cook. My mother’s generation got married not knowing how to make much of anything (my mom couldn’t make rice at 27). No one knows how my mother and all the aunties eventually learned how to make Sri Lankan food, but they did. I know because I live at home, and amma cooks for me.

Well, two hours in the kitchen and I had me a chicken curry, yellow rice, eggplant pahi (no idea what to call it other than that), tomato salad and yogurt. It looked like a real Sri Lankan meal, and it tasted like one. My hands were out of shape for eating, which explains the floor littered with morsels of food, but my taste buds were happy campers.

I was thinking later that evening that making a Sri Lankan meal felt like another milestone in my life. Another stepping stone toward becoming the more secure woman I want to be. Another barrier overcome. Every time I do something I thought I could never do, muscle gets added to my life.

Only six more days to go before I leave another place again. I must be turning into a real vagabond because my three-month stay in Kiev turned this city into a real home. Still, my feet are starting to itch for movement even as my heart deals with familiar nerves about the future. But thanks to a successful curry, I do feel stronger.

Love,
Devi