No. III · February · mmxxviGalle Fort
One Sundayin Galle.
5 min read
Galle Fort
The hour after the shutters close, the ramparts in low light, and a private supper that arrived in two clay pots and a covered basket.
Sunday evenings in Galle are the fort's quietest hour. The shops close at five, the day-trip buses leave at six, and from six-thirty until the call to prayer the ramparts belong to the people who live inside them. We try to put our guests on the wall in that hour.
On this particular Sunday the supper was carried up by Manel, who has cooked for one of our houses for nineteen years. Two clay pots, one covered basket, a folded cloth, and a candle wrapped in paper to keep it from the wind. The menu — coconut sambol, jackfruit cooked with cinnamon, a small fish curry — arrived at the wall in the order Manel decided was right.
We were three. We did not speak much. The lighthouse came on at the usual hour and the call to prayer reached us from the mosque inside the fort, and afterward, walking back through the lanes, we passed the tailor still sitting in his open doorway and the cricket boys finishing a long game in the dark.
There is no plate on the wall to mark this. The point is precisely that there is not.
“There is no plate on the wall to mark this. The point is precisely that there is not.”
Filed from Galle Fort, on .