Where Pelicans Go to Seek Shelter from the Rain

"When you were a kid, did you ever just not know?"

Clementine looked up at me from her pillow in the dark. 

"All the time."

She was tired. But even being tired this line of questioning was not normal, and maybe a little more inward looking than she usually was.

"I just don't have the words."

"When you get older, you'll have the words, then you'll know."

She rolled over and faced the wall. 

Days in Sri Lanka are long. The school is far from our house and traffic in Colombo is bad. Worse since the local schools are back in session; there is one on our road, a large all girl's school, and cars queue for blocks to drop their children off at the front doors guarded by dark-skinned boys in khaki uniforms with machine guns. 

Initial impressions of Colombo have been slow to form. It is a lot like India in many ways, but not all ways. Tuks-tuks sputter by on the street outside. Maimed dogs limp from gutter to gutter. Giant, ebony ravens perch on the corners of buildings, living gargoyles or sentinels watching over their purview. Clouds open and close, releasing rain, splattering it everywhere like a housekeeper throwing out the mop water.

Before schools opened, the city didn't seem as crowded and traffic seemed thinner. That notion has been dispelled by the opening of the schools.

Yet, there still doesn't seem to be the density of humanity you felt in India, with people all around you, pressing in. Though we live in the city, we feel there is space. Space to breathe, to move, to operate, to function, and live, and thrive. It is less constricting, not claustrophobic at all, as India could sometimes become. We have a big house which undoubtedly helps, a refuge from the bustling, busy city.

The multiethnicity of the country is more apparent here than in India. Though the majority of Sri Lankan are Buddhist, within a couple of blocks close to my office, a Hindu temple, mosque, and Catholic church all stand. Though Sinhalese ethnic pride is a force to be reckoned with, I can pick out words of Tamil hear and there, spoken almost surreptitiously, quietly, like a secret code. We have twice visited a South Indian breakfast spot for idly, sambar, and dosa, an early favorite in our short two weeks in Colombo, Salthan Palace, one of the only places I have been able to dust off my Tamil. 

In other ways, the city reminds me a lot of Brazil. The streets seem constantly wet with rain, steaming in beams of sunshine filtered through the trees. Enormous banyan trees like fortresses guard the roads and shade the city speckled with bougainvillea and other tropical flowers I don't know the names of that look more like living organisms than plants, sentient if not wholly conscious. 

The sky is high, if not wide for the tall buildings.  Towering cumulonimbus clouds, traveling miles into the stratosphere, piling up on top of one another, reflect the violet rays of the sunrise or sunset and become a source of light themselves. 

There is a large park near our house, Viharamahadevi Park. It is a mile in circumference and makes a good running path. It is less than a mile to the park or back. 

Closer to my office, sits Gangaramaya Park with a famous Buddhist temple in the middle of a lake in the shadow of Colombo City Centre, residential skyscrapers, and banyan trees where odd-shaped, off-color pelicans (though, unmistakeably, pelicans) roost, perhaps seeking shelter from the rain beneath the canopies of leaves in the sky.

Margaret, our new housekeeper, asked Elise if all the kids keep "clothes", their blankets. Elise replied, yes, explaining the those were the same blankets we wrapped them in when they were babies, to which Margaret told her, "That's okay, Madam. My son keeps a cloth, too. He is twenty."

Prem, our new driver, tells us he was a sailor on the Aegean Sea when he as a young man in the 70's. He painted the hulls of ships and now he is painting our living room.

Truth is, Clementine, I am older now and have more words, but, sometimes, I still don't know. You just go with it.