If the 'Podhi Maneke' ( little gem of a train ) hadn't its breakdown halfway between tiny Rosella and Hatton town, we would'nt have been four hours late arriving at Ella and we would would have missed the extraordinary conjunction of planets twinkling across the miles of dusky tea hills.
We were, literally by accident, in the right place at the right time to witness an extraordinary astronomical event. Astrologers call this the auspicious time. Westerners might call it 'serendipitous'. Early visitors to this pearl on the earlobe of India called the island 'Serendip' because they felt their accidental discovery of the place to be fortunate.
Amazing how a profound two minutes can transform a painfully crowded eighteen hour train journey into something precious.
More awards awaited us on the dawn verandah of our tiny hotel - perched another 500 feet above the Ella Railway Station - already 3000 feet above sea level.
I felt a sense of recognition and then I saw them both. High on the ridge that may have once been the fortified wooden palace of King Ravanna, the faces of two major actors in the Ramayana drama emerged from the rock. The giant face of the dark lord and the determined jaw-jutting profile if his brave opponent Hannuman.
"Where was the cave where Ravanna imprisoned the kidnapped Sita?" I asked the room-boy. I need hardly have followed his gaze and outstretched arm. I was not surprised to see its dark shape on the Monkey's jaw.
I needed no further reasons for my visit. All through my visit to Sri Lanka, I had felt the urge to find my way to Ella. Though no tourist class seats were available and suffocation was tinged with admiration as a train compartment for ten was filled with twentyfive, two things had driven me to undertake the journey.
First the name Ella made me feel I was on a pilgrimage that would bring me closer to my own grandmother Ella Lyons and secondly my secret fascination for my patron saint - my inner monkey self Hannuman - was bringing me to the very place where he fulfilled his destiny.
I was not alone in my conviction that I was at the centre of things - the fulcrum of the scales that see-saw as the opposing forces of good and evil clash and find resolution. Here was played out the great epic of every soul’s kidnap - of the painful separation of every self from the divine lover - of our imprisonment in the cave of the material world, out of sight of the breath-taking landscape of our union with the divine.
On the way to Ravanna Ella ( Ravanna’s Waterfall ) I questioned our van driver whether he believed that there had once been a real historical Ravanna living in these mountains, or whether he considered all this to be only a poetic myth. His reply left no doubts that he was convinced the epic was real. Out tumbled details, contradictions, anachronisms and embellishments that even the Ramayana never conjured.
Endless tunnels running from Sita’s cave; giant cobras blocking the path of pilgrims; broken hearted lads who jump to their death from the top of the waterfall - all confirming his certainty that Ella was the place where Mother Sita was separated from and reunited with her Lord.
A good Buddhist, without the contradictory fascination most Sri Lankans have for Hindu Gods, Prabhash knew nothing of the story that lay just below the surface of these anthropomorphic rocky outcrops, so I made it my business to spin him the Rama yarn from the reverse perspective - a tale that began here in the mountains of Ella.
“Once upon a time, a mighty King Ravanna lived in a great wooden palace on that very mountaintop.”
As the tale unfolded and Prabhash gave it more of his attention than I had expected, I suddenly sensed another presence. The light had faded and the rocky sculpture of Hannuman’s face had become a silhouette like the black paper portraits in Victorian scrapbooks in English bungalows on tea estates below. I remembered his millenniums old vow - “wherever the story of my Lord and his Lady is recounted, I will be in the audience.” I realised that the great stone monkey was alert and listening keenly.
I encountered him once before here in Sri Lanka. I was in a small bus packed with Commonwealth training course students bowling along a winding road fringed with coconut palms, bound for some model village or other, when suddenly a baby monkey, who’d not yet learnt to respect the metal beasts that charged along the black hot strips of tar near his mother’s tree-top, bounded in front of us. As our bumper-bar tossed him tumbling through the air, in my mind's eye, I saw a giant White Monkey bound across the palm trees and before the little victim had stopped rolling, scooped him up into his arms, leapt across the road, over another row of palm trees, and into the grey sky.
No comments:
Post a Comment