Evertything has its Time

I am over the Black Sea and I can't sleep. I have no idea how long I have been traveling anymore, and my timepieces' estimates are so far from agreeing with each other that I may as well be on the moon. I still have 7 more hours of flying till i get to Columbo and I have been in the air for 5. (P.S. how cool is it that the Sri Lankans named their commercial capital after Peter Faulk?) Fingers crossed that AT received my last message and has furnished a driver with instructions to take me 3 hours south to his parents', where I can commiserate with him and Barnaby over a drink with mango in it. Hopefully I will get to pass through the village of Matlock on the way and spot a glimpse of the fabled Perry Mason atolls.

Music: Robin Guthrie & Harold Budd: Neils Theme

Flirting with consciousness for the final stretch of my long flight, we finally touch down and taxi into the humid grip of Colombo. Visa is endorsed, money is changed, and I am greeted with a personalized placard by a kind faced driver with whom I set out to the southern tip of the country.

A muted palette of hand painted advertisements, dusty concrete and sun worn pastels of once bright clothing blur past. The city is tense with the ongoing threat of civil violence, and military security is high, the slung weight of automatic weaponry commonplace. Streets are clotted with wide trucks hauling wood and brightly personalized 3 wheel tuk tuks. We push forward through the traffic in a continuous series of "holy shit is this a good idea?" and "we almost nailed that goat" overtakings. I see a family of four on a motorcycle. Fresh mango, pineapple and branches heavy with banana are everywhere, and the products of a tropical landscape are stacked roadside. Stray dogs trot unhurriedly past welders and weavers, and nests of dried coconut husks are ubiquitous. The air is full of the dopplering whines of engines and a staccato automotive language of honks and beeps. I think of my mom, who suffers from a fairly high "sensitivity to traffic" and am convinced that her head would have fallen off twice in terror by now. There is an unrelenting amount of signage here. Billboards, banners and shop facades all jockey for face time. Cows! Lizards! Shingles, flowers, iron, wood, engines, rakes, tires, sodas, meat, batteries, and, for a brief moment, ocean appears; a rising wind smashes high grey waves onto the rocks. Half way into the trip I close my eyes and drift off into active dreams, the first drops of a coming storm dot the windshield.

Waking up to a serious downpour and palm-bending winds, the driver tells me we are in the city of Galle, and the last 15 minutes of the ride plunge further and further off road into a voltage-green jungle. Finding the family house hidden down a maze of etch-a-sketchy roads swollen with pelting monsoon rainwater, a large gate swings open and we stop at the base of a gentle hill, a majestic, ceramic-shingled house sits airily on top. AT and I share a quick and excited reunion, my bag is taken by a beaming Tamil boy named Shiva, and I am given a large umbrella, which the tropical wind promptly tears apart. I pass the inspection of two giant marmadukes at the house's entrance and am floored by the dimensions and design of the space. A project of AT's parents for the last 4 years, it is a marvel, referencing japanese, middle eastern and modern european architecture in equal measure. My tired brain is uncharacteristically short on hyperbole, so Ill elaborate tomorrow with pictures, but it is incredible.

After a brief tour where I am shown my quarters, dinner is served in a vaulted dining room. We eat warm olive foccacia from the house pastry chef, a cold avocado veloutte with chili, raw and baked oysters hand-harvested by AT and Barnaby hours before from the lagoon outside, and a salad of garden frisée and black sesame, toasting a dry German Riesling. Dessert is a transportive housemade passion fruit preserve in cream, easily one of the top 5 foods I have ever put in my mouth. The night edges in around candlelit conversation with a cooling breeze blowing in mist from outside, toothpicks fragrant with cinnamon oil from an island 500 meters away and my first taste of king coconut juice, drunk straight from the fruit. Fireflies pulse in the dim kitchen.

AT's mom Renate recounts that during her tenure as Karl Lagerfeld's interior designer, he once chose a Latin phrase from his mother's gravestone to be engraved above his front door: "Everything has its time." Later, drifting off under mosquito netting to the static of distant waves and million croaks of invisible frogs, I can't imagine a better aphorism for the trip.

Music: Cocteau Twins: Lazy Calm