My Serious Faux Pas in Sri Lanka
This incident happened in the summer of 1962, when Sri Lanka was still Ceylon. I was on an around-the-world trip and at this point was going from Europe to Hong Kong in steerage class of a French passenger liner. I had gone in a taxi with several French people from the port at Colombo up to a charming mountain town called Kandy. This is a selection from a memoir I am writing about that trip. This roadside image was near where I committed my "crime," but I have no photo of that, mercifully!
On the way back down the road to Colombo, I was so tired I could hardly keep my eyes open. I did take a look when the driver slowed for us to see three elephants bathing in a river. Late in the afternoon we stopped at a government rest house for strong hot tea served with English-type cookies. As we continued, I felt revived enough by the tea to realize how overwhelmed I was by the poverty everywhere. We’d seen a lot of kids begging. There were small homes along the road here, and in one I noticed a woman resting on a mat on the floor. People were walking everywhere.
Suddenly I needed a bathroom urgently. I’d had intermittent problems with traveler’s diarrhea for weeks but not lately. Well, it was back. I leaned forward and told the driver. He said we would be at the ship in half an hour, speeding up to make his point. I said I had to go sooner. He didn’t slow down. I held my guts in for a few more minutes. Then I said—loudly, so he could hear me over the traffic noise— “If you don’t stop so I can go to the bathroom, the back seat of your taxi is going to be very hard to clean.”
At that he hit the brakes and barely pulled off the road. There were at least a dozen people standing at a bus stop on the other side of the road, but I was beyond caring. I wasn’t even embarrassed... I was too busy concentrating on my task. I got out, climbed up a little embankment to the kind of tall grass he had warned us to stay out of. Without a moment’s hesitation, I walked a couple of steps through the grass. Turning my back on the road gave anyone near the road a direct view. Tant pis. At least I was wearing a full skirt. I pulled it up, got my undies down, and splattered. Then I cleaned up with the tissues I luckily had in my pockets and did the best I could to bury it all.
As I turned to go back to the taxi, I saw several Ceylonese by the side of the road grinning and giggling. I got back in the taxi, where nobody was amused, and the driver accelerated into traffic before I even had the door fully shut.
The French people ignored me. I leaned back into the seat and noticed that I felt a lot better. I looked out the window. Evening was often my favorite time of day, and here the sun coming through the trees was making patterns that entranced me. I thought with surprise that this moment was the nicest one of my day.