To celebrate my documentary film ‘The Veddas’ being made available online for the first time, I have decided to re-post a short story I wrote for High Contrast Review.
THE VEDDAS
by Daniel Emmerson
The young boy grappled patiently with the hem of my trouser leg. The sweltering heat was forever present as my milky shins greeted the light of day behind their mask of rugged denim. It was then that I realised what all the shouting had been about.
I was sitting on a rock in the middle of the Mahayangana jungle, Sri Lanka, surrounded by tribesmen as a brave young boy peeled land leeches from my skin. His head bobbed up and down as to inspect the condition of my ravaged limbs before he went to pluck the insidious annelids head first with his fingernails. Spiked leech tongues disgorged into my thighs and calves as they sucked incalculable amounts of blood from my legs. I felt a surge of weakness. It wasn’t until we had started walking through the long grass that I began to feel a tingling beneath my trouser legs. I imagined it to be sweat as we were no longer wading through the protective shade provided by the plentiful Ceylon Ironwoods and Indian Rose Chestnuts. The tribesmen started to shout and ushered me to a large rock once they realised we were trekking in leech territory. The young boy tugged, ripping the jagged tongue of the first leech from just below my knee cap, blood trickled afterward.
I pulled my video camera from the bag strapped to my shoulder and hit record in time to capture the second and third leeches as they were pulled from my flesh. This was by no means the tone of my documentary film but I thought it might prove interesting footage later on. My bag was worn and stuffed with mini DV tapes, cables and sound recording gear. This was my first solo documentary film adventure and an attempt to gain insight into the lives of the Vedda tribe in Sri Lanka. Thus far it was proving extremely successful and I planned on acquiring as much footage as possible, with or without invertebrate parasites.
Once the final bloodsucker had been disposed of, I was advised to remove my shoes and socks, or at least that is how I interpreted the Sinhalese syllables and abrupt pointing. One of the tribesmen rolled up my trouser legs to the knee and coated my skin in a sticky sweet sepia paste. It smelt of rich tobacco. I tied my shoelaces together and onto my bag as we made our way deeper into the jungle. The tribe spoke a dialect of Sinhalese, so in order to communicate my feelings, ideas and gratitude to the tribesmen, I required the use of two translators; one from the tribal dialect to Sinhalese, the second from Sinhalese to English. Both translators had decided to skip this particular escapade into the deep jungle as we needed to be few in number, we were looking for wild elephants and needed to be as quiet as possible.
- (to be continued)
