The Sea Inside

diving,’ Rasika observes pithily, as the navy boat steams ahead. Later, we learn that one of the passengers on board its first voyage was Vladimir Putin, who some months before had been photographed in the Barents Sea, darting a whale with a crossbow in order to tag it.
    No sooner have I plunged into the water than the whale has gone. I hang there, alone, suddenly aware of how vulnerable I am, open to anything that might approach, from any direction. My rising fear is hardly calmed by the knowledge that the ocean’s bottom lies a mile beneath me.
    As I look down through the windscreen of my mask, I see a snake-like animal curling and writhing. Its spine seems luminous, repellent, as it twists about in the water column. Powering with my fins, I return to the side of the boat, turning my back to it as I bob just below the surface, as if its flimsy hull might shelter me from the unknown. After a few more minutes scanning the darkness below, I’m glad to give up and haul myself back into the
Kushan Putha
.

    The ancient name for Sri Lanka is Serendip, from which came our serendipity, coined in 1754 by Horace Walpole after reading a translation of the sixteenth-century Italian fairy tale
The Three Princes of Serendip
, whose characters ‘were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of’.
    ‘What is your name? Where do you come from?’ say the boys on the beach. After a while, I invent my own story. I’m married, with five children; I’m a French soldier; I don’t understand. Men here stand with their arms around each other, almost more beautiful than the women; everything is about display. Giant blue-and-red kingfishers skim over the river. Peacocks perch in trees like outrageous, overgrown pigeons.
    At Weligama, a tiny island lies a few hundred feet offshore, little more than a palm-topped rock. To reach it, there’s no need to take a boat: the water that separates it from the land is seldom more than a few feet deep. Clustered on its summit is an eccentrically shaped villa, barely visible through the trees. Invited there one evening, we waded through the warm water, flaming torches spiked in the sand to guide us across. Reaching the white-painted jetty on the far side, we passed up a ferny path and into the house. Off an octagonal hall lay eight doors; each room might have opened on eight others. Around the whole building ran a wide verandah. Entertainment appeared to be the entire function of the place; it was a fantastical confection, not unlike Walpole’s own gothic villa, Strawberry Hill, on the banks of the Thames.
    The house was built in 1927 by the self-styled Count de Mauny-Talvande. Son of a banker, rather than an aristocrat, he was born Maurice Maria Talvande in 1866 and was educated by Jesuits at St Mary’s College in Canterbury, Kent, where he met George Byng, the son of the Earl of Strafford. In 1898, Maurice married George’s sister, Lady Mary. It was a splendid occasion, attended by the Princess of Wales, to whom Mary was lady-in-waiting, along with other European royalty whose houses were to fall in the coming decades.
    The marriage was not a happy one. Having established what he called a university in a château on the Loire in France, teaching the sons of the British aristocracy, Maurice was accused of making advances to Oliver Brett, the son of Viscount Esher. His hasty departure was seen as an indication of his guilt; it was said that his wife would send out remittances to her estranged husband, effectively paying him to stay away. Lured to Ceylon by the sight of a flame lily growing in a Bournemouth garden, de Mauny looked for ‘the one spot which, by its sublime beauty, would fulfil my dreams and hold me there for life’. In 1925, at Weligama, he found it: ‘a red granite rock, covered with palms and jungle shrub, rising from the Indian Ocean – an emerald in a setting of pink coral’.
    Having bought the island for two hundred and fifty rupees, de Mauny named it after the Greek name for Ceylon, Taprobane, meaning ‘garden of delights’. It was a suitable retreat for a self-invented man. But it also had a darker reputation, as a dumping ground for cobras, put there by Buddhist monks forbidden from killing them. If Sri Lanka was the original Eden, then Taprobane was its estranged scion.
    The house de Mauny built on this two-and-a-half acre site was extraordinary, even for this extraordinary place. Hanging gardens tipped over its