Return to Sri Lanka

It was to breezy fine weather that I returned, slightly more than one year later, partly to retrace the steps of my earlier journey and also to discover whether, as one journalist put it, the tsunami had brought together the island's population or driven it apart. Hotel operators, of course, were quick to reassert the belief that Sri Lanka was back in business. Nature colluded in this hope by blanketing the more grotesque public scars of the disaster with a deceiving mantle of green. As before, I found myself seduced by the island, and this time I was not alone. The Kandalama was now packed with honeymooners and British tour groups, those indomitable members of international travel's flying wedge. Although the coastal resorts were back in business, the upscale clientele they were built for seemed to be biding its time.

This was partly a result of the political situation, which was and remains, at this writing, more tenuous than ever. A great effort was being made, it seemed to me, to suppress the horrors of the recent past and get on with life, but the ghosts of the tsunami still made themselves felt, drifting into daily life and conversation as palpably as if ambling bodily into a room.

This became clear to me one afternoon when Walter Malgudi, the man I'd hired to drive me, earnestly shared with me his explanation for why it was that some had died in the tsunami and others had not.

It was karma, said Mr. Malgudi, a Buddhist, like most Sri Lankans. He himself had narrowly avoided becoming a victim, when the tourists who had hired him for a drive along the coast changed their plans on a whim. Mr. Malgudi drove down to the ocean anyway that afternoon, after the waters had begun to recede. He had seen the stranded and already bloating bodies of islanders who, as he claimed, ran out onto the sand flats when the ocean first drew back and staked the land that was newly exposed. "For 20 minutes, they were rich," he said flatly. "Then they were dead."

It was honey-gathering season when I returned to Sri Lanka. Bottles drained of arak, or country liquor, were now filled with mahogany-colored liquid robbed from wild hives and set out for sale on roadside tables. The honey gatherers, an aboriginal people known as the Veddahs, live deep in the northeastern forests. Or they did, Mr. Malgudi explained, until the rebels began mining these forests and appropriating large tracts to construct training camps.

The honey was strong and pungent; it tasted of wildness. As we bumped along back roads, I indulged myself in the hope that the coast would be rebuilt, the great sea turtles would return, and the cease-fire would hold, and that Sri Lanka would again become the peaceful paradise that was so obviously the Creator's intention. A fierce sun shower erupted then, pelting the car with rat-a-tat percussion and drenching the fields. As quickly as it started, it was gone. A rainbow formed across the hills nearby, as some government soldiers with bored expressions and machine guns waved us down at a checkpoint. Glancing indifferently at Mr. Malgudi's license, they sent us on our way.

To reach the Kandalama Hotel, one leaves the paved main road and cuts down a dirt track to bump along for several miles through agrarian scenes that cannot have changed much for centuries. Bucketing through cane fields, we made our way past small clusters of dwellings where blue smoke plumed from cooking fires, a farmer in a plaid sarong clucked at his bullock, and a clutch of cattle egrets, white as starched cloths, flapped up suddenly.

It was the time of day when banks of cool air drift down from the hills to ease the heat's tight grip. The setting sun struck and made mirror shards of the still paddy water, reflecting fragments of sky and cloud in a way that caused the world suddenly to seem more miraculous than ever; also more precious and fleeting.