The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards (22 page)

Outis/ΟΥΤΙΣ: I’m in Sri Lanka.

simon/
: whats that

Outis/ΟΥΤΙΣ: Look it up.

simon/
: ur funny. U going to helpme or not, what?

“Come on, Tina. Let up! I just want to get this DVD so I have something to
do
on the train!” barks the dark-haired girl, as her friend with the hat tries to wrench her out toward the main doors.

“Carsten, we have
four
minutes to get on the train!”

I check my watch quickly and verify that I, too, have only four minutes to get on my train, which means that their train is probably also my train. I wonder if they, too, are on their way north toward the ancient city of Sigiriya, the Buddhist mountain monastery known as the Fortress in the Sky.

“Just let me grab the DVD!” Carsten begs, snatching one of the cardboard-wrapped packages off the rack, which nearly tips over before the newsstand keeper manages to catch it. A barrel-bellied man with little hair left does not even dare to shout at the girls, though he does look around in astonishment toward the other natives.

Curious, I watch as Tina, the girl in the hat, apologetically hands the man a few hundred rupees more than necessary for the DVD—which I can see from the cover is
Surangani, Surangani
, currently the country’s most popular Bollywood love story. It’s about a Tamil boy who falls in love with a forbidden Sinhalese girl. There’ve been posters up for it nearly everywhere I’ve been for the past month.

“Jesus, fine. You’ve got the goddamn DVD. So let’s
go.
”

Tina stalks away as Carsten follows, clutching her prize to her fairly overexposed chest. With about three minutes left to go, I decide to give “simon/
” the second-best news of his morning.

Outis/ΟΥΤΙΣ: Send the money to the PayMeNow account. DOUBLE.

simon/
: yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyy thank you thank you

Outis/ΟΥΤΙΣ: Now, Simon, I’m in a hurry.

simon/
: ok ok

Outis/ΟΥΤΙΣ: What’s the assignment anyway?

simon/
: Papr for Modrn America Lit.

Outis/ΟΥΤΙΣ: On anything in particular, Simon? Hurry hurry.

simon/
: hold on, just chking the books name now I hve in my email smwhere

Outis/ΟΥΤΙΣ: You have one minute, Simon, and then I have to go.

These Simons are all alike. A few months ago, before heading to Sri Lanka from Chennai, I’d been doing some Internet research for one of them about the Tamil Tigers and came across a funny story that stuck with me. Allegedly, back in the late 1980s, some government wildlife official had given a televised interview explaining that, despite the name of the rebel group, the tiger was actually not indigenous to Sri Lanka— in fact there were no tigers there at all. Accidentally, the man misspoke and said that the “
,” which was actually the Sinhala word for “leopard,” was not native to the island.

But, of course there
are
leopards in Sri Lanka—the Sri Lankan leopard, or
Panthera pardus
,
has been a recognized subspecies since the 1950s. And so, the confused English media translated the word as “tiger” anyway. Somehow, some way, this misnomer had actually stuck. Slowly, the Sri Lankan people just began to use “
” to mean “tiger.” Nobody wanted to be wrong. They’d seen it on television; it had to be true. Eventually locals began to refer colloquially to the Tamil Tigers as “
koti
,” the plural of “
,” and, another word,
had to be reassigned to mean “leopard” in order to end the confusion.