Love on the fairway

Aditha DISSANAYAKE

I fall in love with the club in my hand, with the wooden peg called a tee, the ball itself which looks as though it has goose pimps all over it and with the spirits of veteran golf players like Tiger Woods that seem to be hovering over me more acutely than the cold and the mist, when my club finally comes in contact with the ball.

Swoosh. I watch the white dot rise towards the sky and fall, to my dismay, on the carpet of green grass called the fairway, an uncountable number of meters away from the destination I had wanted it to be. "Hmp not bad" says my caddie and guru, sixty eight year old Subasinghe. "Very good" I congratulate myself recalling the two occasions when my strokes had made the tee fly towards the sky leaving the ball at my feet.

"Practise some more and you will be fine" encourages Subasinghe. I rub my aching shoulders and shake my head. "Not today. Next time".

After all, I am in love and the best thing about being in love is that it lifts your spirits and makes you feel you are on the edge of infinite possibilities.

Perhaps after the next time, and the next time and the next I would be covering all eighteen holes of a golf course and be familiar not only with the different shapes of the golf clubs (most of them still look like giant spoons to me) but also with the jargon of veteran

The land of infinite possibilities

golfers; birdies, bogeys, bump-and-runs, aprons, (the list is endless).

I feel lucky to have had my first lesson in golf from Subasinghe, who has been playing the game since 1969. Time's chariot wheels seem to have forgotten him altogether, for even at the age of sixty eight he still finds it an easy walk through all the eighteen holes of the Nuwara Eliya golf club.

As I step onto the front portico of the clubhouse I feel as if I had stepped on a time machine and traveled back in time to E.M Forster's fictional club in the fictional city of Chandrapore in "A Passage to India". For a moment, I feel I am looking at the figure of Mrs. Turton, seated at the far corner of the veranda, leaning back in her chair and "saving herself up as she called it, not for anything that would happen that afternoon or even that week, but for some vague occasion when a high official might come along and tax her social strength". This sense of the past being more real than the present intensifies when I read a sign board which specifically describes what one should and should not wear inside the clubhouse; sleeveless t shirts, slippers and sandals are strictly prohibited.

Footsteps on the tiled floor. Could that be Mr. Turton coming to nudge his wife on her shoulder and tell her to move over to the other side of the club and start talking with the Indians so that the Bridge Party could properly begin? No way. I see the smiling face of R.M Rajaratna standing behind me. "The library is open" he tells me bending his head towards his right and pressing a set of keys to his palms as if in prayer. I follow him, feeling like a six year old who has been offered unlimited access to a jar of candy. The small room at the back of the clubhouse, next to the kitchen where I catch a glimpse of a chef clad in white, hovering over a massive cauldron, has four massive bookshelves stretching from the ceiling to the floor all filled with novels, neatly arranged in alphabetical order. "When the clubhouse was being renovated in the 1980s I managed to remove the huge refrigerators in this room and convert it into a library" Rajaratna explains. Himself an avid reader he recalls how he had borrowed a book every evening from the Nuwara Eliya Public Library on his way home from work, read it during the night and returned it the next day. But not anymore. "Not since I got married" he gives me a tired but happy smile. "After the birth of my son and daughter I started to spend all my spare time with them."

Having worked as a waiter at the Nuwara Eliya Golf Club for over thirty years he is proud that he saved enough to build a house in Palmerston, Talawakelle from his monthly income. His day at the club begins at eight and ends at five. Every morning he and his wife who works at the tea factory of the Tea Research Institute, prepare lunch for the family and wraps two packets for themselves before they leave for work.

Though he is fifty one now, he says he has as yet not thought of retiring from his post. "I don't think the management will want me to leave" he says with confidence. "No one knows how things should be done here the way I and the few other older waiters do".

As I listen, I collect five books from the shelves. Can I borrow all five? "No problem" laughs Rajaratna. "If you can read them in two days, I don't mind". I leave with only one book in my bag; Kiran Desai's "Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard", because there are other things that would command my time, for, as I remind myself, I am in love.

In love with golf. In love with practising my swing. As the experts say "turning my hips to make them end up directly over my left foot so that at the finish my belt buckle should face my target".

Next stop; the Nuwara Eliya market to find a belt with a large buckle.

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