Chapter Three of The Thousand Faces of the Smiling Buddha
Lafir's aggressively trimmed mustache, disturbingly Hitler-esque in its brevity, is the center of gravity of his compact features. A half-smile serves to lighten, by a delicate degree, the stern impression created by his comportment, and yet it is hard to imagine him ever surrendering to the recklessness of a belly laugh. His spotless silk shirt, wrinkle-free pants, and polished black dress shoes, suggest a commitment to personal hygiene that borders on the obsessive.
My stubble-studded face, Holi-stained Dandi March t-shirt, sun-bleached shorts, and decomposing flip flops, present me as the visual antithesis to Lafir's fastidiousness. With the better part of a foot differentiating us in height, we make an odd couple.
We collect my luggage from the guest house where I had stayed briefly in the wee hours of the morning and then Lafir proceeds to his home in the outskirts of Colombo to assemble his wardrobe for our road trip. While I wait in Lafir's impeccably-maintained Ford Taurus station wagon, I become transfixed on a mangy dog that cannot stop scratching her shoulder with her hind leg. Scratch, scratch, scratch. Scratch, scratch, scratch. There is almost nothing left of her skinless, infected shoulder and yet she cannot resist the urge to continue scratching. Scratch, scratch, scratch. Scratch, scratch, scratch. I scan my person for any food items I can offer the haggard canine, but come up empty. I coo sympathetically from the car window and the dog looks up at me, momentarily freed from her self-destructive imperative. Do dog smiles count? I open the door to approach the miserable creature, but she has been too conditioned by ill-intentioned humans to stick around and scrambles desperately to her feet before limping pathetically down the road and out of sight. (Perverse poetasters note: the itchy bitch had a glitch in her hitch.) Three mischievous schoolboys round the corner and for the dog's sake I am thankful she has vacated the scene. The eldest of the boys, upon seeing me, makes a face and mockingly starts blathering with a faux accent to the delight of his mates. I smile at him and he responds with a sneer, but his companions smile. Two outta three ain't bad, I figure.
The smile project is little more than an hour old and I have already had my first epiphany. My drive to elicit smiles is short circuiting the judgmental mind to some degree. Under normal circumstances I probably would have returned fire at the trio's ringleader – jabbered back at him with an equally ridiculous accent or feigned getting out of the car to give chase. But the imperative to smile has created a distance from my reactive self. Once a smile has been issued it's too difficult to return to an inimical or defensive posture. The brief gap created by smiling has withdrawn power from my emotional computer. In the flash flood precipitated by conscious volition, weedy passions are are swept away before they are able to find purchase. I actually am able (or so I imagine) to sense the fearful burden of the boy's pantomime and realize it is blocking him from truly carefree interaction with others. Where I might normally have felt indignation, I am discovering fledgling pangs of compassion.
Lafir returns to the car with one large suitcase in tow and anxiously taking drags from the cigarette suspended at the corner of his mouth.
"I not smoke in car," Lafir assures me, smiting the half-spent John Player Gold Leaf underfoot. "Make bad air and hard to breathe."
"It's really hard to give up though, isn't it?"
"Not possible," he smiles. "She is bad love, but not possible for leaving alone."
As Sri Lanka is Lafir's gig, I leave our destination and itinerary in his hands with the caveat that he take me to well-peopled places. He decides quickly on Sigiriya, which I misunderstand to be another comment on his smoking, but he ensures me is a destination of "too many people." En route, I am soon disheartened to discover that he is only minimally under my direction. The first time I see a large gathering of people at a roadside stand (a perfect opportunity for more smiles) I ask Lafir to pull over, but he drives on with nary a hint of hesitation on the accelerator.
"Nothing to see there," Lafir explains, "This kind of people will just make trouble for you. You know, you strange guy so crowd will come. Just asking too many questions and you are not liking it. Not clean people."
"But I like meeting people like this. I am liking it."
Lafir, with an implacable grimace commanding the lower half of his facial anatomy, ignores my feeble protest and continues apace. Daylight is fast giving way to the murky tones of evening and I have become a hostage in the car I hired. I smile frantically at intersections hoping to make eye contact with pedestrians, but the few that notice me just assume I have a screw loose and quickly divert their gaze. On and on we drive – past sharply inclined embankments with oddly-bent palm trees, past cloud-shrouded super hills, past rail-thin, long-skirted women, past boys fecklessly careening on ancient bicycles – ever deeper into Tarzanesque jungle.
"Jungle," Lafir comments, with irregular application of the accelerator lest I entertain any foolish mission-interrupting notions of escape from my mobile prison. Pleas to purchase bottled water and relieve myself go unheeded. His response is undeviating. "You are not liking it here. Too dirty. Waiting until hotel come. Almost here." I threaten to wet myself in the car, but it only elicits a barely-audible chortle from Lafir, and he drives on. The sadistic tease is to last another ninety minutes.
The hotel where I am finally allowed to disembark caters to newlyweds, but as it is off-season the proprietors are only too happy to host a motley-attired single with bursting bladder. I'm checked into a gaudy suite of varnished browns and intense pinks. I immediately make a beeline for the toilet where I cast my gaze skyward and sigh with relief as evacuation is initiated. My joy is short lived as the urine stream bifurcates and is redirected from the bowl to my leg and the tiled floor. A frantic attempt at realignment only exacerbates my pathetic condition such that my shorts and dry leg are amply watered.
After washing, changing clothes, and mopping my ill-aimed effluent from the bathroom floor, I return to the bedroom and cautiously lift the pink mosquito net of the canopied bed to collapse on an even pinker blanket and rest my head on the pinkest-of-pink heart-shaped pillows. I look around at the walls which are adorned with vaguely sexual renderings of Buddhist demigoddesses and feel like an involuntary Liberace in a giant gut of Pepto Bismol-medicated indigestion. With the smile project in shambles and imagining myself to be a captive of hard-driving Lafir, I am tempted to curl up in a sickly pink swirl of forgetfulness. But I have smiles to go before I sleep. Smiles to go before I sleep.
I summon the will power to pull myself from the bed and to make the rounds of the hotel grounds in the hopes of chalking up a few more grin wins. The smiles I offer up belie my anti-social and exhausted state. Between the handful of guests and staff, I harvest another 14 smiles and finish the day with 39 unique hits. The modest victory momentarily spells my flagging spirit, but only a half day into the project and I'm woefully off the required pace to reach one thousand. One thousand? What was I thinking?
Wednesday, November 22, 2006
Friday, November 17, 2006
Friday: Don't Fear the Grin Reaper
Chapter Two of The Thousand Faces of the Smiling Buddha
An accountant at heart, I immediately start to crunch numbers. Seven into one thousand. Take seven times one hundred... leaves three hundred... seven times forty... leaves twenty... seven times almost three. So a nearly 143 smiles-per-day average will be required to reach one thousand smiles in a weeks time. Assuming ten-plus hours a day lost to sleep, daily ablutions, and meditation, it works out to just over 10 smiles-per-hour. Ten smiles-per-hour! Quite suddenly I am engulfed by a wave of doubt. I may not even encounter 143 people in a day and there's no way I'm going to induce a smile in every person I meet. Maybe I should shoot for a more reasonable figure. Mother Teresa had encouraged her fan base to attempt to offer smiles to five strangers per day. Maybe I could take that number times five; twenty five smiles-per-day. One hundred seventy five smiles total over my seven day stay. Not too shabby a figure at all. My meandering mind is brought to a halt by a clear, yet unsounded injunction. It's one thousand smiles or bust. It's not 175, 250, or even 500 - it's the 1,000 faces of the smiling Buddha you're after. Time is slip sliding away and you need to start creasing some cheeks.
My pondering is cut short when a towering man built like an offensive-end proceeds to the head of the queue at the Indian consulate and brazenly pushes through the crush of people. He presents his snout at the mouse hole cut in the service window and snorts some unintelligible inquiry. I feel my indignation swell at his temerity. I have witnessed this behavior too many times before in India: some business-suited bigwig won't be bothered with peon protocol and is going to demand immediate satisfaction.
I'm about to abandon my place in line to educate the uncouth interloper in the finer points of linemanship, when he whirls about and we make eye contact. He smiles and I am immediately disarmed. Instead of reproaching him, I reluctantly find myself returning his smile. Thirty seconds into my grand smilethon and I've been preempted by my adversarial archetype. Remarkably, I discover my righteous indignation is nowhere to be found having been eviscerated in the exchange of smiles. I am annoyed, however, that I cannot tally the stranger's smile as he smiled first. The thousand smiles I intend to collect are going to have to be initiated by me and not the other way around. Continuing to beam, the stranger marches over to my position and thrusts his hand into mine to shake.
"I'm Sanjay," he announces with vigor. I look around as if for hidden cameras, dumbfounded by his inscrutable focus on myself. Sanjay leans in to confide in me that no one need be standing in line.
"The consulate staff will only see people in the order of the numbers handed out by the door," he explains, "These guys with higher numbers, or no numbers at all, are simply slowing up the process by crowding at the windows."
I remain baffled by my new acquaintance even as we work in concert to educate the others as to how the system, at least in theory, is supposed to work. The majority of those who were congregating in the unruly lines are convinced to return to their seats or retrieve a number. The congestion at the windows is considerably reduced, and for a while I imagine with smarmy self-satisfaction that the lines are dissipating at an improved clip.
Afterward I chat more with the broad-shouldered and baby-faced Sanjay and learn he is a pilot for Singapore Airlines and a competitive hot-air balloonist. He is in the process of porting his balloon to Delhi for a major international event. "You have to go with the flow," he explains of his pastime, "The only way to control the speed and direction of the balloon is by making altitudinal adjustments to catch differently moving currents of air." His explanation seems imbued with greater meaning as I embark on the smile project. And yet his parting grin only serves to remind me that I have yet to claim my first smilee.
I make the rounds of the waiting room, but have difficulty making eye contact, as the majority of those gathered stare vacantly at the ground or are engrossed in forms to be completed. A group of monks glance briefly at my nascent smile, but are unmoved and return to murmuring amongst themselves. My fledgling efforts do manage to make a painfully shy infant cry and elicit a nasty glare from her parents - but that's another project for another day.
Peering out a consulate window I spy army sharpshooters stationed on the rooftops of neighboring office buildings. Tomorrow will be Sri Lanka's Independence Day and the capital, always wary of bomb attacks from separatist rebels, is even more on edge in anticipation of the annual military parade. Although distant, I smile and wave to a serviceman scrutinizing the consulate with his binoculars. He hesitates on my position, as if weighing the propriety of responding to my childlike gesture, and then waves back. Though I am certain he is smiling – in the way that you know when someone is watching you even when you don't see them – I decide I cannot advance my smile counter with a clean conscience. I remain stuck at diddly-squat in my smile-pumping aspirations.
Once my number is called, the transaction of submitting my visa form and passport takes less than thirty seconds.
"I don't get to keep my passport?"
"No, you come back in six days." The consulate staffer responds without looking up from a cumbrous pile of passports that he thumbs through with dull precision. The jumble proves too unwieldy for even his seasoned, nimble fingers and a small avalanche of deep blue and maroon jacketed passports finds its way to the floor. I note with some chagrin that my passport is among the casualties. After the debacle of having my last passport lost by the consulate in San Francisco and then stolen in Ahmedabad, I have become keenly sensitized to the whereabouts of its hard-earned replacement.
"You'll have it ready next Thursday?"
"You come back in six days," the staffer answers from beneath his desk where he sets about retrieving the fallen passports. He is clearly disappointed to find me still at his window when he rights himself and my smile cannot penetrate his stolid facade. I scan the passports and with some relief recognize mine among the scatter.
"Thursday?"
"Six days. Next!"
"But there is a sign in the stairwell that says the consulate will be closed on Thursday and I have to fly out on Friday in the early afternoon."
"Sign is old. Six days."
"So the sign is incorrect?"
"Old. Six days. Next!"
Only partially reassured I make my way for the exit. On the stairs to the foyer I come upon an elderly cleaning woman using a hand rag to wipe down the stone steps. Her muscles appear taut under darkly wrinkled skin and her high cheek bones hint at a former pulchritude. I slow my pace and she looks up from her thankless task just long enough to make eye contact. I smile warmly. She returns to her work, but after a moment's deliberation looks up again and smiles back at me. My spirits soar. The campaign's inaugural smile. I'm finally on my way to one thousand. Only nine hundred ninety nine to go. I fairly skip down the remaining steps.
Near the exit I collect smiles from two security officers and a second cleaning woman. Score four for the proletariat. Outside I am set upon by a trio of competing tour guides. With the new project in mind, I am torn as to whether I should stay in Colombo to maximize the number of people with which I will be interacting, or head out to explore the island at large. The smallest and eldest of the three guides begrudgingly returns my smile and introduces himself as Lafir. I take his name to be a wink from the great beyond and agree to enlist his services after he asserts that a road trip will be slightly more economical than staying in the city. A wider arena to spread the good cheer, I reason. Go with the flow.
PDSC Previous Day's Smile Count
SPH Smiles Per Hour (calculations based on a fourteen hour work day or seven hour half day; reflects the previous day's tally)
STG Smiles To Go (smiles remaining to reach 1,000)
RSR Required Smile Rate (SPH needed over remaining day(s) to reach 1,000)
| PDSC | SPH | STG | RSR |
| 0 | 0 | 1000 | 10.20 |
All the statistics in the world can't measure the warmth of a smile. -- Chris Hart | |||
An accountant at heart, I immediately start to crunch numbers. Seven into one thousand. Take seven times one hundred... leaves three hundred... seven times forty... leaves twenty... seven times almost three. So a nearly 143 smiles-per-day average will be required to reach one thousand smiles in a weeks time. Assuming ten-plus hours a day lost to sleep, daily ablutions, and meditation, it works out to just over 10 smiles-per-hour. Ten smiles-per-hour! Quite suddenly I am engulfed by a wave of doubt. I may not even encounter 143 people in a day and there's no way I'm going to induce a smile in every person I meet. Maybe I should shoot for a more reasonable figure. Mother Teresa had encouraged her fan base to attempt to offer smiles to five strangers per day. Maybe I could take that number times five; twenty five smiles-per-day. One hundred seventy five smiles total over my seven day stay. Not too shabby a figure at all. My meandering mind is brought to a halt by a clear, yet unsounded injunction. It's one thousand smiles or bust. It's not 175, 250, or even 500 - it's the 1,000 faces of the smiling Buddha you're after. Time is slip sliding away and you need to start creasing some cheeks.
My pondering is cut short when a towering man built like an offensive-end proceeds to the head of the queue at the Indian consulate and brazenly pushes through the crush of people. He presents his snout at the mouse hole cut in the service window and snorts some unintelligible inquiry. I feel my indignation swell at his temerity. I have witnessed this behavior too many times before in India: some business-suited bigwig won't be bothered with peon protocol and is going to demand immediate satisfaction.
I'm about to abandon my place in line to educate the uncouth interloper in the finer points of linemanship, when he whirls about and we make eye contact. He smiles and I am immediately disarmed. Instead of reproaching him, I reluctantly find myself returning his smile. Thirty seconds into my grand smilethon and I've been preempted by my adversarial archetype. Remarkably, I discover my righteous indignation is nowhere to be found having been eviscerated in the exchange of smiles. I am annoyed, however, that I cannot tally the stranger's smile as he smiled first. The thousand smiles I intend to collect are going to have to be initiated by me and not the other way around. Continuing to beam, the stranger marches over to my position and thrusts his hand into mine to shake.
"I'm Sanjay," he announces with vigor. I look around as if for hidden cameras, dumbfounded by his inscrutable focus on myself. Sanjay leans in to confide in me that no one need be standing in line.
"The consulate staff will only see people in the order of the numbers handed out by the door," he explains, "These guys with higher numbers, or no numbers at all, are simply slowing up the process by crowding at the windows."
I remain baffled by my new acquaintance even as we work in concert to educate the others as to how the system, at least in theory, is supposed to work. The majority of those who were congregating in the unruly lines are convinced to return to their seats or retrieve a number. The congestion at the windows is considerably reduced, and for a while I imagine with smarmy self-satisfaction that the lines are dissipating at an improved clip.
Afterward I chat more with the broad-shouldered and baby-faced Sanjay and learn he is a pilot for Singapore Airlines and a competitive hot-air balloonist. He is in the process of porting his balloon to Delhi for a major international event. "You have to go with the flow," he explains of his pastime, "The only way to control the speed and direction of the balloon is by making altitudinal adjustments to catch differently moving currents of air." His explanation seems imbued with greater meaning as I embark on the smile project. And yet his parting grin only serves to remind me that I have yet to claim my first smilee.
I make the rounds of the waiting room, but have difficulty making eye contact, as the majority of those gathered stare vacantly at the ground or are engrossed in forms to be completed. A group of monks glance briefly at my nascent smile, but are unmoved and return to murmuring amongst themselves. My fledgling efforts do manage to make a painfully shy infant cry and elicit a nasty glare from her parents - but that's another project for another day.
Peering out a consulate window I spy army sharpshooters stationed on the rooftops of neighboring office buildings. Tomorrow will be Sri Lanka's Independence Day and the capital, always wary of bomb attacks from separatist rebels, is even more on edge in anticipation of the annual military parade. Although distant, I smile and wave to a serviceman scrutinizing the consulate with his binoculars. He hesitates on my position, as if weighing the propriety of responding to my childlike gesture, and then waves back. Though I am certain he is smiling – in the way that you know when someone is watching you even when you don't see them – I decide I cannot advance my smile counter with a clean conscience. I remain stuck at diddly-squat in my smile-pumping aspirations.
Once my number is called, the transaction of submitting my visa form and passport takes less than thirty seconds.
"I don't get to keep my passport?"
"No, you come back in six days." The consulate staffer responds without looking up from a cumbrous pile of passports that he thumbs through with dull precision. The jumble proves too unwieldy for even his seasoned, nimble fingers and a small avalanche of deep blue and maroon jacketed passports finds its way to the floor. I note with some chagrin that my passport is among the casualties. After the debacle of having my last passport lost by the consulate in San Francisco and then stolen in Ahmedabad, I have become keenly sensitized to the whereabouts of its hard-earned replacement.
"You'll have it ready next Thursday?"
"You come back in six days," the staffer answers from beneath his desk where he sets about retrieving the fallen passports. He is clearly disappointed to find me still at his window when he rights himself and my smile cannot penetrate his stolid facade. I scan the passports and with some relief recognize mine among the scatter.
"Thursday?"
"Six days. Next!"
"But there is a sign in the stairwell that says the consulate will be closed on Thursday and I have to fly out on Friday in the early afternoon."
"Sign is old. Six days."
"So the sign is incorrect?"
"Old. Six days. Next!"
Only partially reassured I make my way for the exit. On the stairs to the foyer I come upon an elderly cleaning woman using a hand rag to wipe down the stone steps. Her muscles appear taut under darkly wrinkled skin and her high cheek bones hint at a former pulchritude. I slow my pace and she looks up from her thankless task just long enough to make eye contact. I smile warmly. She returns to her work, but after a moment's deliberation looks up again and smiles back at me. My spirits soar. The campaign's inaugural smile. I'm finally on my way to one thousand. Only nine hundred ninety nine to go. I fairly skip down the remaining steps.
Near the exit I collect smiles from two security officers and a second cleaning woman. Score four for the proletariat. Outside I am set upon by a trio of competing tour guides. With the new project in mind, I am torn as to whether I should stay in Colombo to maximize the number of people with which I will be interacting, or head out to explore the island at large. The smallest and eldest of the three guides begrudgingly returns my smile and introduces himself as Lafir. I take his name to be a wink from the great beyond and agree to enlist his services after he asserts that a road trip will be slightly more economical than staying in the city. A wider arena to spread the good cheer, I reason. Go with the flow.
PDSC Previous Day's Smile Count
SPH Smiles Per Hour (calculations based on a fourteen hour work day or seven hour half day; reflects the previous day's tally)
STG Smiles To Go (smiles remaining to reach 1,000)
RSR Required Smile Rate (SPH needed over remaining day(s) to reach 1,000)
Thursday, November 16, 2006
The Thousand Faces of the Smiling Buddha
The idea is born in the confluence of three streams of thought flowing more or less simultaneously in the stagnant queue at the Indian Consulate in Columbo, Sri Lanka.
The Buddha Stream
I'm marveling at how little I actually know of this country that, at least geographically, is fated to be a mere adjunct to India - a disjointed full stop off the tapered exclamation mark formed by the Indian sub-continent. For many of the foreigners here, Sri Lanka is significant only in that it represents the most convenient midpoint on a visa run back to India. If you're in the northern part of India you go to Nepal; in the south you fly to Sri Lanka. Even the titular hero of the Hindu epic Ramayana deigned to visit the island just long enough to slay the ten-headed Ravana and grab Sita, before booking the first available swan-powered aerial car back to Bharat.
In my earliest memories of Sri Lanka, it is still Ceylon, and, for me, one of the top three islands of exotic intrigue, along with Madagascar and the Galapagos. Certainly it played a role in inspiring a seven-year-old's wanderlust as I studied the Rand McNally Mercator Projection Map of the World fastened to the wall alongside my bed. The intervening years had added bits of incongruous trivia to my sparse knowledge of Sri Lanka: Tamil Tigers somewhere the north, Arthur C. Clarke in Colombo, and a majority Buddhist population.
It's this last bit of trivia that sparks a distant memory of a lamp spotted amongst the ancient waffle irons and gewgaws I had coveted in one of the few remaining antique shops off of Gilbert Street in Iowa City. Entitled "The Thousand Faces of the Buddha," it had, evidently, exactly that number of hand-painted buddhas on its lacquered base. This memory, in turn, precipitates my wondering about the significance of the pot-bellied, mirthful Buddha so popular in Chinese depictions of the sage. How did that all get started?
The Service Stream
What kind of service project can I initiate in the few short days I will be on the island nation? Being on the lean side of my planned stay in South Asia, I'm given over to an increasingly reflective mood regarding the unfolding of events over the past year. Nipun comes to mind as one of the prime forces impelling me to return to the beloved region. I decide that whatever project I ultimately undertake, I will, in appropriately Buddhist fashion, dedicate any merit accrued to his side of the karmic ledger.
One idea for a service project that arises almost immediately is to act as a tour guide for a tour guide – a number of whom are staking out the consulate doors with the intention of ensnaring hapless foreigners. My thinking is that I could enlist one of them to take me to the poorest of the poor areas on the island, and then, through osmosis rather than proselytization, link the guide up with the spirit of service by administering to various families and individuals in need. We could visit a hospital, orphanage, and school in this whirlwind tour of goodwill. It would be an on-the-road, buddy film with an ulterior 'do-unto-others' motive. The idea, while a good start I reckon, borders on the presumptive. Nothing would be more humiliating than to have the notoriously imperious Nipun pooh-pooh my endeavor as deficient in personal sacrifice or lacking mythic import.
The Flat Liners Stream
As I scan the hundreds of people crowded in front of the eight service windows at the consulate I get the overwhelming impression of a conference of zombies. Dull, worn out, irritable expressions dominate. Nobody likes waiting, and many here have been waiting for hours in lines that seem frozen in place. A few Europeans fold themselves into meditative postures, while orange-robed Buddhist monks gather in conspiratorial twos and threes to discuss the best way to extract the stone-faced bureaucrats from their fish bowl of bullet-proof glass. This, I muse, is why people, or at least the vast majority of South Asians, are so fond of musicals. The melodic interludes offer the hope of escape from the crushing monotony of daily existence. When the music starts people are pulled from a milieu of the mundane into a spontaneous community of song and dance. But there is no song here, no dance, no Alpine hills to tumble down while locked in an embrace with a buxom sari-clad lover.
So these are the three thoughts (along with the omnipresent, "where, when, and what am I going to eat next") being juggled: Buddha, service, flat liners. Buddha, service, flat liners. Then, whoop, there it is. The three streams of consciousness cascade together, and like an expectant salmon leaping from the resultant froth, the "Thousand Faces of the Smiling Buddha" service project cuts a wet arch into the grizzly maw of my noetic body. My mission is clear. I will endeavor to make one thousand people smile in the seven days I have remaining in Sri Lanka. No, scratch endeavor. Let it be writ: I will make one thousand people smile during my stay. And my time starts now.
The Buddha Stream
I'm marveling at how little I actually know of this country that, at least geographically, is fated to be a mere adjunct to India - a disjointed full stop off the tapered exclamation mark formed by the Indian sub-continent. For many of the foreigners here, Sri Lanka is significant only in that it represents the most convenient midpoint on a visa run back to India. If you're in the northern part of India you go to Nepal; in the south you fly to Sri Lanka. Even the titular hero of the Hindu epic Ramayana deigned to visit the island just long enough to slay the ten-headed Ravana and grab Sita, before booking the first available swan-powered aerial car back to Bharat.
In my earliest memories of Sri Lanka, it is still Ceylon, and, for me, one of the top three islands of exotic intrigue, along with Madagascar and the Galapagos. Certainly it played a role in inspiring a seven-year-old's wanderlust as I studied the Rand McNally Mercator Projection Map of the World fastened to the wall alongside my bed. The intervening years had added bits of incongruous trivia to my sparse knowledge of Sri Lanka: Tamil Tigers somewhere the north, Arthur C. Clarke in Colombo, and a majority Buddhist population.
It's this last bit of trivia that sparks a distant memory of a lamp spotted amongst the ancient waffle irons and gewgaws I had coveted in one of the few remaining antique shops off of Gilbert Street in Iowa City. Entitled "The Thousand Faces of the Buddha," it had, evidently, exactly that number of hand-painted buddhas on its lacquered base. This memory, in turn, precipitates my wondering about the significance of the pot-bellied, mirthful Buddha so popular in Chinese depictions of the sage. How did that all get started?
The Service Stream
What kind of service project can I initiate in the few short days I will be on the island nation? Being on the lean side of my planned stay in South Asia, I'm given over to an increasingly reflective mood regarding the unfolding of events over the past year. Nipun comes to mind as one of the prime forces impelling me to return to the beloved region. I decide that whatever project I ultimately undertake, I will, in appropriately Buddhist fashion, dedicate any merit accrued to his side of the karmic ledger.
One idea for a service project that arises almost immediately is to act as a tour guide for a tour guide – a number of whom are staking out the consulate doors with the intention of ensnaring hapless foreigners. My thinking is that I could enlist one of them to take me to the poorest of the poor areas on the island, and then, through osmosis rather than proselytization, link the guide up with the spirit of service by administering to various families and individuals in need. We could visit a hospital, orphanage, and school in this whirlwind tour of goodwill. It would be an on-the-road, buddy film with an ulterior 'do-unto-others' motive. The idea, while a good start I reckon, borders on the presumptive. Nothing would be more humiliating than to have the notoriously imperious Nipun pooh-pooh my endeavor as deficient in personal sacrifice or lacking mythic import.
The Flat Liners Stream
As I scan the hundreds of people crowded in front of the eight service windows at the consulate I get the overwhelming impression of a conference of zombies. Dull, worn out, irritable expressions dominate. Nobody likes waiting, and many here have been waiting for hours in lines that seem frozen in place. A few Europeans fold themselves into meditative postures, while orange-robed Buddhist monks gather in conspiratorial twos and threes to discuss the best way to extract the stone-faced bureaucrats from their fish bowl of bullet-proof glass. This, I muse, is why people, or at least the vast majority of South Asians, are so fond of musicals. The melodic interludes offer the hope of escape from the crushing monotony of daily existence. When the music starts people are pulled from a milieu of the mundane into a spontaneous community of song and dance. But there is no song here, no dance, no Alpine hills to tumble down while locked in an embrace with a buxom sari-clad lover.
So these are the three thoughts (along with the omnipresent, "where, when, and what am I going to eat next") being juggled: Buddha, service, flat liners. Buddha, service, flat liners. Then, whoop, there it is. The three streams of consciousness cascade together, and like an expectant salmon leaping from the resultant froth, the "Thousand Faces of the Smiling Buddha" service project cuts a wet arch into the grizzly maw of my noetic body. My mission is clear. I will endeavor to make one thousand people smile in the seven days I have remaining in Sri Lanka. No, scratch endeavor. Let it be writ: I will make one thousand people smile during my stay. And my time starts now.
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