A Hair Of The Elephant's Tail

Sheena Blackhall

2004

Around ten years ago I was interviewing an old lady of 99 about her life in the North East of Scotland. 'Is there anything you've regretted?' I asked. 'Ay' she replied. 'I wis gaen the chaunce tae see ma brither's war grave in Flanders, an I didna gyang. I've ay regrettit thon. I wad hae liked tae thon in ma memory.'

I suddenly realised the clock was ticking and that there's quite a lot that I didn't have in my memory.

When I was wee, if it rained, I used to hide under my granny's bed and take her ornaments there to play with, elephants and monkeys of ivory and brass she'd been sent from her uncles in Ceylon, where they'd owned tea plantations. As I grew older, I progressed from playing with the elephants to reading about their land. When I was sixteen, I graduated from reading to thinking, and decided that the life philosophy that suited me best was Buddhism. As it happened, this coincided with the arrival of our family minister to administer Communion to my granny, who was by then bed-ridden. He decided it was opportune time to talk to me formally about joining the kirk.

'Do Catholics and Hindus go to Heaven?' I asked him, with the malign perversity of youth.

'Only those who follow the true Protestant path are saved,' came his mortified reply.

My mother quickly intervened and shoved the coal skuttle into my hands.

'Ging ootside tae the coal shed. An dinna show her face back here till the minister's awa. I'm black affrontit o ye.'

Unperturbed, I went on to make a large carving of Buddha. It went straight out into the garden, behind a huge clump of thistles.

'An it's bidin there,' my mother announced darkly.

Typhoid struck Aberdeen. I was one of its many victims.

'Any particular symptoms?' the G.P. inquired, attempting a preliminary diagnosis.

'Ay,' said my mother. 'She's been studying Buddhism,' as if this was the obvious origin of all ills.

In Sri Lanka, 70% of the people are Buddhist, in Britain, according to a recent census, 0.3% profess to be Buddhist. Every year if I can, I go on retreat to Dhanakosa in Balquidder, Rob Roy country, to immerse myself in a week of chanting, puja, and meditation. But this is like spraying your body with fake tan. For a week or so you look and feel like the genuine article, but the world quickly washes off the effects. So, in October 2004, I went to Sri Lanka. I went as a baby-boomer of 1947, spending my children's inheritance. I wanted to visit the sacred sites around the Temple of the Tooth in Kandy, with people raised as Buddhists.

Six years previously, the Tamil Tigers had driven a truck into the temple and killed twenty people, but when I visited, the region was relatively calm. I hired a local taxi driver and guide, Ajith Perere. He was intrigued to meet a Scottish Buddhist. He asked me to chant the Buddhist triple refuge in Pali. This tickled him greatly. He agreed to take me to the Tooth Temple to receive the blessing of the monks who guard the shrine. The temple stands on the north shore of a lake, encircled by a parapet of white. It is built on a base of granite but it is also composed of limestone, marble, beautifully carved wood and ivory. Fruit bats and monkeys watched from surrounding trees as we arrived. We approached a bridge over a moat in the white heat, along stairs carved by elephants. At the temple's main entrance, after security checking we passed under a dragon arch and shuffled along behind hundreds of other pilgrims to the Drumming Hall. Everywhere the eye rested on magnificent carvings and paintings of beasts and flowers. I followed my guide upstairs to the library-museum, where he introduced me to one of the scholar-monks. This saffron-robed priest knotted a thread around my wrist, and marked my forehead with ash from his thumb. When I stood before the shrine, I was confronted by a large table heaped with flower offerings of frangipani, lotus blossom, orchid and jasmine, the air heavy with incense. The Tooth itself was within a large gold stupa. Sri Lankans believe that a monk snatched the tooth from the Buddha's funeral pyre, and that subsequently a princess smuggled it into their country in her perfumed hair.

Dark falls quickly in Sri Lanka. Lightning unzipped the sky, and the hot wet rain fell in sheets. On the way to the taxi, we passed a beggar, his legs hideously mutilated by elephantiasis.

'Busy day, yes?' remarked the taxi driver, gazing at my cherry-red dripping face in his mirror. 'You like to cool down? I know a place. Very cheap. Honest. Give you Ayuravedic head massage like you never have.'

After the exotic wonders of the day, it was an immense relief to step into a small, dark hut, just off a road with a shrine to Ganesh the elephant God at its top, His small pink feet buried by fruit and flower offerings. The masseuse was a gentle, elderly woman who spoke no English, but intimated by gesture that I was to strip to the waist and lie on a wooden table, where she covered me with a towel.

For the next hour, she sat at my head and gently swayed a brass pot suspended on a tripod overhead. From a small hole at its base, she directed a thin thread of scented oil onto my temples. I felt the true meaning of the word anointed; think it is the closest thing to ecstasy I've ever experienced. Occasionally, with an elephant's tail switch, she flicked flies away from me in the darkened room. Later, driving back to my lodgings, I saw a young mahout bathing his elephant in the muddy river. As he stroked its wrinkled skin, it looked unutterable peaceful. I reached up to pick a long coarse hair from my forehead.

'A hair of the elephant's tail,' I thought. A fitting end to the day.