Sri Lanka

I do not remember how I arrived in Sri Lanka. There was no plane, no airport, no passport control. I do not remember travelling, either. I simply found myself in Sri Lanka all at once.
I was carrying a bag. I did not know where I was going, but somehow I knew there was a house near a tea garden. I asked a few people. They dropped me somewhere. The house had one storey.
Inside were a large room, a spacious kitchen and an entrance hall. It was like a village house. I walked in and said to people I had never met:
‘I am here.’
‘Welcome,’ they said.
No one was surprised.
No one asked who I was.
No one wondered where I had come from, why I was there or how long I would stay.
It was as if they had been expecting me.
The house was busy. There were children and women, people coming and going. They showed me somewhere to put my bag.
‘You can lie down here for a while,’ they said.
So I did.
In a foreign country, in the home of people I did not know, as if I had lived there for years.
After a while, I thought of the sea.
‘How do I get to the sea?’ I asked.
One of the women said, ‘Let me get ready and we can go together.’
She wore a scarf as a headband.
We left the house together.
Then she disappeared.
I walked alone for a while. I asked where the minibus stop was, went to the place I was told and got on.
A few minutes later, the woman from the house sat beside me.
But this time, she seemed like someone else.
She was dressed more smartly. Her child was with her.
As if nothing had happened, she pointed out the sea.
‘There it is.’
The minibus was descending from somewhere very high.
The sea was below.
So far below that, after a while, it felt as if we were moving not along the road, but into the sea itself.
The road became a bridge.
And then I saw the sea.
It was not simply blue.
It was another kind of blue.
A blue I had never seen anywhere in the world.
So clear that looking into it, you almost thought you could see your own thoughts.
But there was no one on the shore.
No sun loungers, no towels, no children's voices.
No one was swimming.
No one was sunbathing.
Suddenly I thought:
‘Could there be sharks here?’
The sea was magnificent.
But I was frightened.
Then they showed me something.
A transparent holographic screen appeared against the sky. There was no physical screen; the images seemed to hang in the air. When someone beside me moved a finger across them, another image opened; when they touched a point, a different part of the world appeared. Maps, countries, seas and continents shifted before my eyes. It was as if the whole world were opening in layers in the air. With each new image, we moved further north. Further north. After a while, the images began to change. Greens and blues disappeared. There was more and more white.
‘Greenland,’ they said.
I do not know who said it.
Then another image opened.
‘This is the northernmost point in the world.’
We went a little further.
‘There are no more countries beyond here.’
I looked at the people around me. No one was surprised or excited. Reaching the end of the world seemed entirely ordinary to them.
But suddenly I felt deeply uneasy.
I wanted to travel the world, but not like this.
I did not know how I had arrived. I had left my bag in strangers' home. I did not know the people beside me. Now I could not quite understand where in the world I was.
I wanted to travel differently.
I wanted to visit a country, know where I would stay, walk its streets, see its historic places, swim in the sea and sit in a café with a coffee. I wanted to get to know somewhere without rushing, spend a few days there, absorb what I had seen and then move on by my own choice.
Here, I seemed to be swept from one place to another.
Then I remembered my bag.
It was still in that house.
I thought I needed to get back there as soon as possible.
But I did not know how to return.
For the first time, I was truly afraid.
Just then, I woke up.
My heart was beating very fast.
I sat in bed for a while, trying to understand where I was. Then I looked around my room.
I was in my own home.
My bag was beside me.
There was nowhere I needed to go.
I took a deep breath.
‘What an exhausting dream,’ I muttered.
But when I closed my eyes, the same image was still there.
That sea.
It was the most beautiful blue I had ever seen.
And somehow, of all the things I had seen in the dream, only that colour remained.

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