The Foreign Service Journal, December 2003

D E C E M B E R 2 0 0 3 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 69 y first American experience took place in Colombo when I was 5. It involved a girl and drinking then-unknown and sweet powdered concoctions — Tang, Kool-Aid — in the alley behind her house. That house stood down the graveled path our Hillman took every morning, smart with the starched white shirt and incan- descent tie of my father as he rode back and forth to the office and home for lunch. The girl was naturally blond, sunny-eyed and freckled, and accompanied by an older sister, almost her twin. They belonged, I found out years later, to a consular officer at the American embassy in Colombo and his spouse. I remember feeling slightly per- turbed by the invitation to drink the American potion furtively in the cul-de-sac. Perhaps this was just a dare — what children do to bring their kind into conscious- ness, how they teach each other away from the counsel and occasional rod of their parents. Perhaps I was simply terrified of girls. Since that tast- ing in the street, growing up has meant acquisition of fur- ther American experience, from foods to civics to girls to driving for the first time down a Honolulu highway. Yet, how daring it must have been for my first teachers to invite the neighborhood boys, the local skins, home for a quick sip of the rare liqueur sent by post on a ship across Atlantic and Indian oceans. On the Island My first American encounter took place, then, by invi- tation, and its fruit was an indelible memory, a sniff and taste of a world beyond cricket bat and pebbled street, beggars, hot and swooping crows, man- gosteens. Of course, the island offered plenty to keep the sens- es swollen and sweat pouring out. And for a boy, wont to play imaginary cricket in his spare time, the sun would have done well to stay up in the sky a bit longer every day. But the sun and rain did not listen to the prayers of boys. Meanwhile, England visited the house on shortwave radio, and our father and mother read to us from Enid Blyton and Dickens. We were properly terrified and fascinated by the horrors of poorhouse and pickpockets, and the mysteries of the Five Findouters. But the refined pleasure of unhatching an Agatha Christie, or following the calm and firm voice of John Arlott over the radio, could not compete with my boy- hood mania for the large screen and its cowboys and Indran Amirthanayagam is public affairs officer at the American Consulate General in Monterrey, Mexico. His previous postings include Chennai, Mexico City, Abidjan, Brussels and Buenos Aires. B Y I NDRAN A MIRTHANAYAGAM O N A MERICAN E XPERIENCE A S RI L ANKAN -A MERICAN MAPS THE CONTOURS OF THE A MERICAN D REAM FROM THE TASTE OF T ANG AS A CHILD , TO W ALT W HITMAN ’ S CELEBRATION OF THE A MERICAN MELT - ING POT , TO THE DANCE OF DEMOCRACY THAT KEEPS THE DREAM ALIVE . M Our first trip toward the country of Kool-Aid and Tang led us by way of London, and a scarved existence by the resplendent black railings of Gloucester Place.