The tale of Paranoid Man

When you spend a lot of time in one location the people around you become part of the tapestry of the place. The permanent characters are like the threads that are integral to the design, whilst the visitors are merely shadows passing over the surface. The presence of some is so fleeting that they barely attract your attention, but others linger long enough to draw you into observing them. I think it is a lingering effect of my time in the police that makes me study and observe people. From my under my tree on the beach in Unawatuna I have observed such diversity in human behaviour that I realise now how much I had sheltered myself in the years between leaving the police and vacating England.

This is the curious case of ‘Paranoid Man’.

He arrived on the beach around the end of July and beginning of August and stayed long enough to pique my curiosity. Like most people he had chosen his favourite place to hang out, this being Hard Rock on the beach, but he didn’t appear to mingle much. When people stay a while they are usually befriended by at least one of the beach boys, who will become their best friend for the duration of their stay in exchange for a beer or two and gradually they will be drawn into the social circle that exists on the beach. This didn’t happen with ‘Paranoid Man’; he didn’t appear to attract any ‘friends’. He always remained on the periphery and in fact, now I think of it, the boys seemed wary of him. Such was his reticence that it was difficult to distinguish what nationality he was.

After a few weeks he left as most people do eventually and the shadow passed from the tapestry. It’s a little like having a mouth ulcer; you notice its arrival and continuing presence, but rarely do you remember the day it left.

But then he came back and again my curiosity was piqued.

I was sitting at the beach at Hard Rock for a change late one afternoon when he decided to take up a table behind me. At the same time there was a rather pitiful mangy dog with a crater on its ear that had chosen the same table under which to lie. It was then that I noticed a powerful and unpleasant pungent odour coming from the direction of the table. So I informed the guy that he had an extremely smelly dog under his table and the dog was encouraged to vacate.

This opened up the opportunity to engage in conversation, but now how I wish it hadn’t. I was left stunned and astonished after only 5 minutes.

I commented that he had been away, nothing like stating the obvious, but I noticed that he looked briefly alarmed.

When I asked if he’d been on a tour he told me he had been in Colombo. Normally people that are here for any length of time begrudgingly go to Colombo for only a day; a period of weeks is unheard of. So I progressed the conversation and asked if he had been working there; maybe he was an NGO. His reply surprised me; he told me that he had been engaged in surveillance.

I endeavoured to conceal my surprise and suspicion and asked if he was in the police. I’ve heard that sometimes former police officers can find positions out here that would perhaps engage them in such activities, but he said no and became a bit evasive especially when I informed him that I had been a bobby for 14 years. Apparently he had been watching many people in Colombo, but by this point I wanted to put my fingers in both ears and sing ‘La la la la’. In this climate it is better to be ignorant of these things.

Something else also bothered me and it has to do with the film ‘Fight Club’. The first rule of Fight Club is that you don’t talk about Fight Club. I also know this of people who are legitimately involved in undercover and surveillance operations – they don’t talk about it.

But it got better and I really struggled to keep a straight face as he told me that he had friends within a Chinese gambling ring and that he had a Chinese/Korean girlfriend in Colombo who was extremely jealous and had him followed everywhere. He told me that there were surveillance teams on his tail all the time and that they hid on the surrounding hillsides monitoring his every move with binoculars. Now I understood his look of alarm when I made it known that I had observed his absence. He must have thought I was part of that team.

We conversed a little bit more and he expounded some alarming conspiracy theories that involved collusion between nurses and the police in England to give people drugs to keep them under control. And I don’t mean on a Friday night in a busy cell block. Righto!

I realised amidst all this startling revelations that the dog had departed, but the odour hadn’t, which meant that it was him all along. Eeuuw!! Even after he eventually left the odour lingered. It was as though it had embedded itself in my nostrils as did the smell of dead bodies on a Sunday morning years ago in the police. No matter how much you snort it’s nearly impossible to expel and you think that only inserting a cake of soap up your nose will eradicate the smell.

It was such an interesting 5 minutes and not what I had expected at all when I first opened my mouth to engage in conversation. Eventually I managed to share the experience with my friend Emily who found it equally entertaining and we were both reduced to giggles.

That brief encounter was not the end of the matter, however and ‘Paranoid Man’ as we had now named him began to exhibit some extraordinary behaviour. He was constantly watching us and must have convinced himself that both me and Emily were part of a surveillance operation, so he appeared to be taking countermeasures. Whenever he thought we weren’t looking he would be watching us and then he started to try to observe Emily, (she was spending more time at the beach than I was), through the clothes racks at the little beach shop.

He had already claimed Hard Rock as his territory, but he started straying into the adjacent Rock View where we hang out. One evening he nonchalantly walked past Emily and her boyfriend and tried to sit down in a deck chair; unfortunately it hadn’t been erected correctly and promptly collapsed underneath him. He appeared to consider that this was part of the conspiracy against him because he increased his countermeasures and poor Emily got the brunt of it.

He would stalk past her, watching her intently and try unsuccessfully to engage her in conversation; when she was dining out with Rasika he would sit at the adjacent table, even though there were other empty ones, and watch them intently, listening to their chatter.

Maybe in his head he thought he was blowing the surveillance operation apart by identifying operatives and turning the tables on them. I don’t know, but it was very fascinating behaviour.

Eventually as his subtle tactics appeared to be failing and we remained at the beach, watching him he resorted to being more direct in his approach and one night when Emily was enjoying her beer on the beach he plonked himself down on the sand next to her and said “you’ve Emily aren’t you? I know you are Emily”. At which point said Emily completely freaked out, but somehow managed to retain her composure until Rasika arrived to rescue her.

The more bizarre his behaviour became the more we observed him, which I guess just escalated his paranoia. One of the guys who had made a brief attempt to befriend him told us that he was a ‘drugs man’, that explains everything! ‘Paranoid man’ had told him that he couldn’t go back to England because the police would be waiting for him as soon as he stepped through the airport.

An army of men in white coats bearing straitjackets I would have thought.

The things and people I see from under my tree!!!!!!

Don't take your cheese for granted

It was July the last time that I had decent cheese. I just don’t know they think they are doing when they make cheese here, but they just don’t get it. There is Ball Cheese, which is exactly what it says it is; a ball of cheese coated in red wax. It is unremarkable in taste; eating a candle would be equally satisfactory and in fact eating it raw is not recommended at all. It is reserved for cooking only, when at least it becomes a little more palatable. There is some other cheese that comes in huge blocks but again it is entirely devoid of flavour.

So imagine my overwhelming joy when I discovered Red Leicester and English Mature Cheddar in a supermarket in Colombo. The attendant on the counter was highly amused at my state of excitement. I think I spent over £12 on 400grams of cheese! I am going to make myself seriously sick on it for the next few days; my body has adjusted to a diet with little dairy in it, but do I care!! Nooooo! It will be February before my next fix.

So next time you pick up your cheese at the supermarket – think of me and enjoy every mouthful.

Becoming more Sri Lankan

I know I’ve been here a long time now, not just in the days marked off on a calendar, but because of changes in my attitude.

One of these is the adjustment to the climate. Don’t get me wrong it’s still bloody hot – to take a quote from Good Morning Vietnam “it’s hotter than a snakes ass in a wagon rut” – but I notice when the temperature drops below 30ºC. Whilst tourists are happy to dive in the sea I find myself shivering and considering putting on a jumper and thinking that they must be insane to take a dip in such conditions.

In the last couple of weeks there has been an influx of tourists, considerably more than this time last year and I am drawn to looking at them; it’s just so unusual to see so many white people walking around the village. Even more unusual is the sight of white people walking around Galle. But why oh why do they insist on wearing beach attire into town. It's just so wrong!! Perhaps I should be a bit more tolerant the next time some dork on a moped nearly drives into the back of a bus because he’s too busy looking at me on the back of my motorbike. It does grate a bit when you get stared at so much and it makes you want to snap “haven’t you seen a bloody white person before”. Especially in a country that was under colonial rule for so long!

The Sri Lankan’s actually have a lovely phrase for dealing with such intrusive behaviour and it translates into “have I got a parade going across my face”. I haven’t actually dared to use it yet because I get things mixed up and would probably end up telling them that my uncle’s goat fornicated with the dog! My mispronunciation of things is normal; I murder people’s names so it’s safer for me to stick to Malli – young brother.

Me and a friend went on a shopping trip to Colombo the other day and overdosed on junk food, but you know what – McDonald’s breakfast was great but give me fresh curry and fresh bread any day.

Garlic is another issue. I remember that before coming here buying maybe a bulb a month and using just one clove was acceptable, two was just insane! Now it’s bought by the kilo and one clove is considered a waste of time; half a bulb goes in to every meal and it’s quite normal. I do probably reek of the stuff, however and this was brought home to me after the Colombo trip. I didn’t eat any garlic all day, but when I came home I noticed it so much on Raja when normally I wouldn’t be able to detect it.

It is a fallacy that garlic keeps mosquitoes away. Given that every day I am consuming at least half a bulb I still get bitten every night.

I also recall being intimidated by fresh chillies and using them sparingly having made sure to remove the seeds whilst wearing rubber gloves. Not so now; unsheathed hands chop the whole lot in and whack it in. The chilli-con-carne that I prepared and considered to be quite mild in heat had Raja perspiring profusely and reaching for the coconut to tone it down.