The Kandyan dancers—with their elaborate, ritualistic movements, their ancient incantatory chanting, accompanied by the resonant throbbing of their drums—mingling with trapeze artistes, bare-backed lady riders in frou-frou skirts, clowns and animal trainers. Ukkuwa, one of the old dancers who still wore his white hair in a knot at the nape of his neck and trained young novices in a Roman Catholic school, used to say how cigarettes and money were tossed onto the stage by the audience in the German music hall and circus tents. The dancers, exhibited like wild, exotic other-world beings, rushed onto the stage to collect coins that were flung at them by the audience. Those drums had beaten out rhythms to create a thrilling sense of excitement in the breasts of the Aryans wrapped in their fur-lined winter coats, thick woollen scarves and mufflers, leather gloves, and Homburg hats set firmly on their heads. The smoke from their cigars and pipes hung in thick blue-grey spirals in the fuggy air. This was entertainment for them, wild beasts tamed under the whip and wild men leaping up and whirling in their convoluted movements.

The dancers had been sick to the gills on those ocean liners, staggering about on deck, their skins damp with sea-spray. Then disembarking at some foreign port, Hamburg, perhaps, their ears ringing with sounds of an unfamiliar patois, they were taken along those grey streets with the huge crates of animals and circus paraphernalia, the tamed beasts already docile with years of training, sedated and half suffocated by their own foetid droppings, soggy straw and remnants of bone.

The men had returned to this village with their memories. They had survived. The drums were heard once more and their sounds travelled through the still air of quiet nights when the rituals of dance and exorcism continued until daybreak and early cockcrow. Their arms stretched like antlers, curved upwards and swung like elephant trunks in that ritual forest as they danced the vannams. The miraculous blood awakened, swirled with their rhythms, reviving them, giving them back their ancient dignity. To me, passing by those tranquil fields, time was a suspended image, devoid of all animation, static against the violence and turbulence of my imaginings.

The threshing floor, the kamatha, stood like a small island beyond the sea of green paddy fields. It was here that the buffaloes treaded the grain; where the unhusked paddy was winnowed, its chaff flying in the wind, where the straw bales, rounded and piled with their fresh, wild natural fragrance of sun, wind and air, stood monolithic and everlasting in their endless and continuing cycles of creation. A deserted kamatha wrapped in an unnatural silence. I remembered those nights when the harvest had been gathered in and the grain was being threshed, the strong, nasal halloos of the farmers impelling their circling buffaloes tied to their yokes. Year in year out those cries had comforted me at nightfall.