In January, I promised a visiting Reservist mate that we’d climb Adam’s Peak. That plan was scotched when, days before he landed, I went down with dengue fever. But I’d done Adam’s Peak before (the first time, Christmas ’04, probably saved my life when the tsunami struck…), and there would always be another chance to do it, right?

Things change – and, like much of Colombo, I was already bored and irritable from the first week of our lockdown (no shops, no walks, no going out at all) when I saw a burst of British news items on COVID nixing Everest expeditions, pensioners trying to keep fit indoors, and some chap called David Sharp figuring out how many stairs would ‘top’ the various mountains of the British Isles.

Well… Challenge accepted!

At 2243m, Adam’s Peak – or Sri Pada (‘sacred footprint’) in Sinhala – is not the highest mountain in Sri Lanka (it’s fifth). But it is certainly the most iconic: visible on clear days from the Western sea routes; mentioned in the Mahavamsa and in the writings of Fa-Hsien, Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta; and sacred to Buddhists, Hindus, and even some Christians and Muslims, for a range of fun reasons you should all feel free to Google. Under normal circumstances, peak (as it were) pilgrimage season would be about now – approaching Sinhala/Tamil New Year – so this seemed an apt time for another crack at it.

The standard route takes an unforgiving two or three hours to climb (including a lot of uneven stone and concrete steps, plus handrails), and then an hour or so to come back down, if your legs still work. Folk mainly set off in the small hours so’s to be at the top when sunrise casts the mountain’s distinctive (i)conical shadow across the plain. It’s not the Matterhorn, obviously; but it’s not comfy either. And it isn’t part of anybody‘s fitness schedule – except, perhaps, a few monks, incidentally.

But I had made up my mind. I recce’d the route from ground to roof, making it 72 steps. Yer man Sharp had said that six steps was about one meter, which comes to 12 metres or so in each direction. And, having done precisely zero exercise these past few months, I thought I’d try for half an hour a day (one mustn’t overdo these things), and see how I got on.

So, sticking a fresh apple and a hunk of cheddar in my virtual knapsack, I girded what my regular Army brother calls my ‘River Kwai physique’, and set out for my remote and quite invisible objective.

Day 1 8pm A good start. At the end of my first 30-minute stint, I’ve notched up 23 full circuits – three floors each way – for a grand total of 552m. Gear: bright orange shorts, and trainers (both Adidas: model’s own). I could pretend the shorts (more an electro-salmon, really) are some concession to the Buddhist thing; but it’s a safety measure, in case someone has to retrieve me from the darkened stairwell.

Day 2 6am Up and at ’em! Another 23 laps. Running (non sic) total of 1104m; but toe already starting to go through my right trainer. I’ve seen a monk skip down the real thing in flipflops… while playing the tambourine! But now is not the time to get competitive.

In the cold (ha!) light of day, I twig I ought not to be counting down stairs. Damnit. Back to 552m, cumulative. That said, ‘base camp’ for Adam’s Peak’s already at 1250m, so, y’know…

Just saw my neighbour on his roof, doing some mere horizontal wandering. Candy-ass.

Day 3 8:30pm Torrential thunderstorm. Some cooler air, at least; but then our staircase turns out not to be watertight. The stairs themselves, what’s more, aren’t straight… on any axis. I feel like Davie Balfour going up there in the pitch black. I suppose I should be thankful there’s no booze with dinner these days (I ran out long since). But then if there were booze, I wouldn’t be doing this tomfoolery, would I?

I take the stairs two at a time, for a more natural stride, but the ankles of my shoes have started to rub. Nonetheless, 23 laps/276m again (my ‘pace’ is nothing if not steady). 828m total.

Day 4 2:30pm Our staircase also is encased in heavy glass, turning it into some sort of Biblical blast-furnace by early afternoon. Inspired architecture, that (against some local competition). My phone’s weather app includes a RealFeel® feature (and even RealFeel Shade™), based, I guess, on extra factors like humidity, a lack of wind, and so forth. Max temperatures all this week, e.g., are 32°; but today is RealFeel® 36°, and I reckon you can stick a couple more on that, in here. My pores are gasping!

Like all other form of abstract exercise, this is extremely boring – so I am listening to the 154-episode West Wing Weekly podcast (in lieu of access to the actual West Wing). Almost halfway there already, though: 1104m.

Day 5 9pm My legs hurt. I clip the newel post with my hip, and hit the concrete wall where there’s a weird outcrop at shoulder height. More brilliant design. Apropos of nothing, my phone starts playing ‘Spem in alium’, and as I try to turn it off I lose all night-vision and nearly plunge to almost-certain death. See also: trying to kill mosquitoes.

There is a mouldering smell all up the stairs. I’m fairly sure it isn’t me. But electric skies without rain just means even more sweat. I introduce a sort of idle pirouette upon the rooftop, in an attempt to force a little air into proceedings. I spy the small red dot of a distant cigarette. My neighbour’s watching me. Weird.

23 laps again. 1380m.

Day 6 10am An unexpected surge to 25 laps. That’s 300m in a session (= 1680m).

I’ve scaled back caffeine intake on the grounds of shortages (or v.v.). But actually, I just can’t take the heat. RealFeel Shade™ says it’s 35°. Given that the chimney – I mean ‘staircase’ – faces due East, any time between about 6 and 11 is most emphatically not in the shade. Surprised I don’t have saltcicles in my beard. And it’s not like I can switch locations!

While I’m here, grizzing it out like an absolute hero, my wife is in the bedroom, doing a Zumba class – with the a/c on.

Day 7 7pm There is a dead fly on the floor beside my trainers. My wife is now insisting that I use the dog towels. If anything goes wrong – with laundry system, not me – I shall be doing laps in a sarong.

One of my legs, I swear, is longer than the other. There must be long-term side effects to always turning left on the way up stairs, and right on the way down. (Perhaps I’ll ask nextdoor if I can use their sister set.) I try to change my angles, but the steps are only so deep, and a size 10 shoe… well, it’s a size 10, isn’t it.

Still, steady improvements. 26 laps. Total: 1992m.

Day 8 7:30pm Two neighbours watching me, now. Oi, oi. They’re prob’ly thinking, “What a completely pointless exercise.” They’d not be wrong. (28 laps/336m, mind!). Pouring again. Good for the ‘warm down’ (LOL).

Day 9 7:15pm Set off… and realise I already ‘summited’, last night. Just didn’t notice: too busy getting in the shower and not doing maths. But there you have it: all done in eight half-hour sessions. I think I’ll celebrate with a cigar – which I’m not sure you’re allowed to do on the real Adam’s Peak.

For now, though, much like Forrest Gump, I might as well just keep on going. Not like there’s that much else to do, is there?

—
For The Spectator and The Spectator USA, in (two) different edits

Well, a decade on, that situation’s only got worse. Karunatilaka and I are now related. Wife’s cousin’s cousins… we are fairly confident.

Betweentimes, Chinaman has gone from strength to strength. It won a raft of prizes (Gratiaen, Commonwealth, DSC South Asia), has been or is being translated into several languages (including Sinhala), and last year a Wisden panel voted it – a quite absurd achievement, this – the greatest novel and second-greatest cricket book of any kind of all time. The umpteenth printing is now out, via Penguin India, in a new ’10^th Anniversary’ special edition: hardly standard practice for even the most successful novels.

Nor has Karunatilaka been resting on his laurels. All jokes aside about the difficult second album/novel (he’d be quite happy with either, I suspect), he has already published one children’s book (Please Don’t Put That in Your Mouth) and written the follow-up; there is open talk of a short-story collection; and there is the somewhat unexpected matter of a forthcoming cookery book – a co-project with his wife.

–

Chats with the Dead is the story of Maali Almeida, a 34-year-old photographer who ‘s good at ‘winning at blackjack, seducing young peasants, and photographing scary places.’ Or rather was – because he’s dead now.

It’s Sri Lanka, 1989, and Maali had been in bed, photographically-speaking, with a lot of the conflicting parties, not to mention their agendas. The JVP, the government, the BBC, a Tamil-rights group; he has been to the frontlines for all of them. To say he was ‘promiscuous’ would strike, well… exactly the right tone. And in a box he keeps of his disturbing/unpublishable outtakes, he even has a photo of his killer – ‘the chances of liberating [which] are as likely as Lanka winning a World Cup.’ He just can’t remember who it was yet: whereby, our detective story. ‘It is funny and unfunny what your brain chooses to retain.’

He had also been in bed, non-photographically-speaking, with, among others, his girlfriend Jaki and his boyfriend DD – a love triangle whose sides don’t meet (based loosely on the life of Richard de Zoysa). These two are also cousins, because, y’know, Colombo.

He now finds himself in some aspect of the afterlife – though quite which he is yet to fathom. It is a busy place (as Nietzsche once put it, the living are only a very small subset of the dead), and by and by he crosses paths with a dead lawyer, a dead bodyguard, two dead lovers… some helpful, others vengeful, a few competing for his soul, and most of them frustratedly trying to chat back with the living. So now he has to learn ‘the rules’, as well as solve the mystery of his murder.

It is the Mahavamsa meets The Matrix… in a Sri Lankan government department.

‘When you fantasized about heaven you thought you’d be greeted by Elvis or Oscar Wilde. Not by a dead doctor. Or a deceased Marxist.’ But by page 16 he’s met both, and is now watching his own corpse being incompetently disposed of by paramilitary goons, at Beira Lake. And while he talks thus, retrospectively, to himself (the whole thing’s in the second person), there swirls around him an all-comers spirit realm of fanged ghouls, minor deities, baby-stealers, charms, seances, sorcery, urban legends, prayers, dreams and talking animals, an inventive theological mix of everything from Kuveni’s curse to the Kotahena Crow Man in his urban underpass.

There exists already a Karunatilaka style, and it is here in spades: dive bars, Colombo culture, books, art and (particularly) music, the things that are – and are not – talked about. His taunting games with names and places. A cheeky drop-in from the boys in Chinaman. A page-long parody of Anil’s Ghost? And then the storyteller’s signs deployed by every shifty author from Herodotus to Ondaatje – ‘All stories are recycled, and all stories are unfair’ – the whole lot strung together with the now-familiar mischievous logic, verbal levity and seamy humour that mark him out as the Sri Lankan counterpart to Marlon James.

As with James, this doesn’t always make for pleasant reading (consider Maali’s job); but then his thoughts on all those easier alternatives might well be coded in the line, ‘Monsoons and full moons make all creatures stupid.’

Chats with the Dead is considerably more direct in its satire than was its predecessor. Besides, the stakes are higher. The abject slavery of many lives; the rank iniquities of much religion; the dreadful suicide rate. And as he picks at these scabs of SL’s less-than-savoury history, Maali’s most unflattering (and generally unchallenged) remarks are reserved for the nature of the post-Independence nation: as a corrupted paradise, on its political class, and on its tendencies to violence. ‘Yakas are made, not born,’ someone admonishes. It’s not conciliatory, nor is it all that optimistic. Karunatilaka – I mean, Maali… – has a savagely critical reading of the self-conscious national lust for a rapacious origin.

Reflecting on the spurious léonine self-image of his countrymen, Maali reflects that ‘If we must have a national creature, if it must be on our flags, in our myths, and painted on our sports teams, why must it be the clichéd lion? If we must have an animal as a national symbol, let it be something original that we can own.’

‘Like many Sri Lankans,’ he goes on, ‘pangolins…’ – but I shan’t spoil it for you. Needless to say, the month or so since Chats‘s launch has seen you-couldn’t-make-it-up links form between the pangolin, Sri Lanka, and the realms of death and afterlife.

Chats is an entirely successful and perfectly mature novel, as good as – albeit much darker and less full of, well… life than – Chinaman. But it’s not perfect. Too many variants of ‘Maali’, ‘malli’, ‘Maal’, ‘Malin’, and so on for the untrained eye/ear; some minor characters who might be given clearer edges (or got rid of/merged); some textual messiness; an anachronism or two; a couple of vague inconsistencies, and one hell of what seemed like a twist (read literally) just pages from the end, but which turned out to be two sentences in need of much more careful separation. A lot, frankly, that ought to have been dealt with by professional wordsmiths at a world-bestriding publishing colossus.

But the bigger problem, I fear, will be one of international ‘accessibility’. In my review of Chinaman I noted that I thought the quite heavy preponderance of little-known Sri Lankan terms and Singlish might have the effect of denting saleability. The international success of that book would suggest that I was wrong – or that assiduous changes were made during the foreign publication process.

The same applies here. Minor matters of vocab or narrowly-regional reference (there is a sharp remark about the vulnerability of shop signs ‘that end in consonants’, e.g.) can of course be edited; but in the case of Chats, the hardwired very-Lankan-ness – the ’80s politics, the social concepts and the mytho-religious lexicon: the meat and bone of the matter (if one can use that term for ghosts) – is perhaps much more pervasive than the first-round local reader might imagine. Sri Lankans may enjoy the novel (doubtless the wrong word) for a certain grim nostalgia quotient; but all but very-interested foreign readers may find that there is rather a lot ‘going on’.

So much for second novels, difficult or otherwise. In literature, as in all else, people are ingrates – so it’s quite likely this will not be greeted with the fanfare that met Chinaman. For better or worse, Chats with the Dead is a novel by a multi-award-winning author, which will be judged on more than its own merits, and/or held to a higher standard.

More locally, the book may yet prove to have landed in a timely fashion. In these increasingly apocalyptic times, let us hope Maali Almeida is wrong when he warns: ‘Do not be afraid of ghosts, it is the living we should fear.’

—
For the Sri Lankan Sunday Times