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ottarappu Chattu Kuttan has died. I don't recognize him by name, but by the photo published in an English newspaper. Dressed in white, with his chest laden with insignia and a thick mustache, sunken eyes and an aquiline nose, he waited on the steps with palms together for guests of the Galle Face, in Sri Lanka, the oldest colonial hotel in Asia. The Galle Face is one of the thousand places you should see before you die, according to a book and the website that encouraged us to make the reservation —and on which the horrible buildings behind it had been conveniently erased with Photoshop—.
I remember the airport windows fogged by humidity. Everyone wanted to sell something: excursions, rupees, washing machines, refrigerators. We let ourselves be convinced by a man with shiny shoes, who put us in his taxi. On the road without shoulders, vehicles crowded together in any way and students ran in immaculate uniforms among the tuk-tuks. Soldiers armed with Kalashnikov rifles stood guard under the coconut trees next to fruit vendors and, on the buses, people hung from the doors. No one braked, they honked at each other. There were giant saint figures in display cases, buddhas, blue gods or with a trunk, houses about to collapse under the weight of colorful advertisements, skinny dogs, smoke and bicycles, motorcycles, merely decorative traffic signs. There, they drive on the left. And on the right. And against traffic. In the north of the island, the Tamil Tigers war continued.
The jet lag slowed down the hustle and bustle of landscapes you've never seen. Colombo, the capital, to the west, is the ugliest city we would visit; it stinks of engine, rotten garbage and fried oil, but we didn't know it yet. Why Sri Lanka? We spun a globe, stopped it with our finger and my index landed on Tissamaharama, Yala National Park, where five years earlier, in 2004, the tsunami swallowed two hundred and fifty people. In total, more than 30,000 lost their lives in an area that has also been called Ceylon and Serendib and Taprobane, and Tear of India, and the island of a thousand names. We would see extensive fields of crosses in their memory next to the paradisiacal beaches.
But the great wave had mercy on the Galle Face, which still stands elegant, old luxury, barely a few meters from the Indian Ocean, separated by a promenade where children fly their kites. An orderly construction in the chaos; or at least, a describable building. A rest for the eyes, saturated with stimuli. The hotel was built in 1864. And since he started working there seventy-two years ago—first as a bellboy and then as an institution—Kottarappu Chattu Kuttan welcomed tourists, almost always British, as well as Princess Alexandra of Denmark, or Nixon, Gandhi, Arthur C. Clarke, a regular guest, who finished his last novel, 3001, The Final Odyssey, at the hotel. They dragged our suitcases across marble floors and Indian carpets towards a varnished wooden elevator that creaked as it ascended. The room was enormous, and the patchouli did not hide the smell of pipes and sea. A fan spun lazily on the ceiling. At eight in the morning, the heat was sticky.
I read that they have renovated the classic wing of the hotel, which architect Thomas Skinner completed in 1894, and whose facade is still preserved. I read that Kottarappu Chattu Kuttan died a few months after the renovation. When we went, the classic wing still retained that decadent air of times that refuse to pass, the beautiful charm of what no longer works, just as one of the lamps didn't work either. We didn't care. After a deep sleep, we went down to eat. Sitting on the column-supported porch, we were explorers in an adventure film classic, or extras in a Tintin comic. In fact, although it takes place in Thailand, The Bridge on the River Kwai, a film by David Lean based on Pierre Boulle's book, was shot in the Sri Lankan jungle, near Kitulgala.
We looked at the extensive chessboard-shaped terrace in front of the ocean. The remains of a wedding were left; flags waved, and garlands swayed in the breeze as the sun beat down on the empty chairs. From that terrace, spectacular sunsets can be seen over the Indian Ocean, and people sometimes put down their cocktails and applaud. Crows approached the porch menacingly, hopping, and as soon as a German tried to take a club sandwich to his mouth, one of the crows snatched it from his hands with its claws and flew away. Someone shot at it with a slingshot.