The British Garrison Cemetery, Kandy

Today, while taking a morning stroll along the lakeside in Kandy, Sue and I were approached by a German tourist.

“Excuse me. I have a recommendation for you. You must go and see the British Garrison Cemetery. It is not far and the light right now is fantastic.”

He seemed very moved and to have need to share what he had seen, so we thanked him and followed his directions. We took a path uphill, not far from the Temple of the Tooth and found the cemetery in a secluded spot behind a set of wrought iron gates. It comprises one or two acres and looks like an idealised version of an English country churchyard. The graves and paths are immaculately maintained and the only other people there were two workers armed with brooms and wheelbarrows.

Although near the centre of this crowded and noisy city it’s a peaceful spot on a hillside surrounded by woodland. On the slope above, the white dome of a Buddhist temple can be seen. From time to time the silence is broken by the cry of some exotic bird. Troops of monkeys patrol the general area and are probably the most frequent visitors.

The graves, of which I am told there are 163, are mainly of young men and women, children and babies, many carried away by disease or wild animals. The Attendant walked over and drew my attention to an anonymous looking plot. “This is the grave of the seventh and last Englishman to be killed by a wild elephant during the British era” he says in precise English.

The cemetery lay neglected for many years after the British pulled out of Ceylon in 1948 and was renovated about fifteen years ago and the Attendant has worked here ever since. As we were leaving he beckoned us into his little office, which also serves as a small museum containing photos, records and a plan of the cemetery. I suspect that for him the fact that British people visit the site from time to time helps give him a sense of purpose in preserving this small fragment of colonial history.

My feelings are mixed. There is a melancholy beauty to this little spot, commemorating as it does people who are largely forgotten and who served an Empire on which the Sun definitively set in 1948. At the same time I feel uncomfortable that so much effort has been put into preserving these corpses when countless thousands of their contemporary fellow islanders, people most of them would have seen as their inferiors, have no such memorial.

At the end of our visit I tightly rolled up a thousand rupee note and forced it with difficulty into the tiny hole in the donations box reserved for paper rather than coins and thanked the Attendant. Then Sue and I made our way back down into the tourist throng.

Something Special

This is a photo of Sue and Jenifer, one of the teachers she works with.  It's a great picture of her I think and quite special when you know the circumstances in which it was taken.

The photographer is a little lad with learning difficulties.  He's in a regular class where the other children look out for him, but where he doesn't make much conventional progress.  One day Sue gave him her camera and the affinity between him and the device was instinctual and immediate.  He took several photos of Sue and the teachers, each time waiting with intense concentration until the right moment to depress the button.

Most of the time, I guess, we try to take photos that are a window on the world, in which the subjects are not too self-conscious of the person with the lens.  But all too often we end up recording dull and stilted poses for posterity.  In this picture something quite different is going on.  The subjects are very aware that a photograph is being taken and the picture is essentially recording their response to the young photographer:  delight that he is doing something which is giving him a real and rare sense of achievement; encouragement, willing him to take a good photo and; there's no other word for it, love.

Looking at this picture gives me a warm glow inside, because it's about three people who were at that moment completely in their element.

The Same But Different

"They all look the same to me."  How many times have I heard that remark spoken by a racist or xenophobe?  So often it is used to imply that an ethnic group are somehow less individual, less important and somehow less human than the speaker and their chosen audience.  And yet, I have to admit to a practical cognitive difficulty.  When I first arrived in Sarawak I felt myself to be in a sea of Chinese and asian faces and I found it very hard to tell people apart.  To a degree people did "look the same to me".  When I started teaching I used name labels for the first three weeks even in classes of three or four students to be sure I didn't make a mistake.  After this initial period I was still paranoid about getting a name wrong and left little notes to myself in the files for some classes like "'X' has glasses" to make sure I didn't confuse her with 'Y'.

Then the strangest thing happened.  A phenomena familiar I'm sure to many teachers.  Teaching requires one to study students' faces very closely and after a few weeks it was as if the students' personalities started to leap out at me through the mask of their faces.  In quite a short space of time I began to see them as individuals rather than as Chinese people.  Now the idea that my students are Chinese rarely occurs to me at all.  "Thian" has become a determined and serious thirteen year old with strong views about life and English and is no longer the Chinese girl called "Thian".  Oddly, I've spent so much time among different ethnic groups that I've started to see myself as a foreigner.  Now I look in the mirror and sometimes I see this strange pink-skinned old man with a high forehead, a big nose and a long square chin.

I think the reason this happens is not because we are bad at reading faces, but because we are actually extremely good at it.  Our vision is not like a radar which sweeps the surroundings with a uniform frequency, it's more like a missile guidance system which rapidly scans the environment before "locking on" to the smallest detail.  We are so attuned to reading faces that we can see powerful feelings communicated in minute changes to our expressions lasting a fraction of a second. Naturally when we are surrounded by people who have small ethnic differences to their facial topography it takes us a while to "tune up" our highly sensitive equipment.

I guess travel really does "broaden the mind", but often in the most unexpected ways.