Pyramids In the Sea

I woke that first morning in Arugam Bay to a light unfamiliar: a maple, sugared sunshine. Through the little purple gate hitched from bamboo of the Point View hotel, I trudged along the sea shore, littered with brightly coloured fishing boats. A faint bleating came from one upturned boat, where a mop of puppies were crying, crawling in circles, mouths coated with sand.
I walked some way towards Crocodile Rock but the water stretched further than I could go on foot so I sat on a wooden beach chair, beside a coiled heap of aqua fishing net, and watched a dog play. Behind the mutt in the ocean, a surfer spun and sailed across a frothing crest; some local men washed guts off themselves close to shore; a gaggle of school girls walked by me, waist-length hair plaited down their backs, to bathe fully clothed. Further towards the point a bunch of boys stripped down to cotton undies were building lissom, shuddering human pyramids in the shimmering aqua sea.
Instead of continuing around the headland, I made for the roti stand and bought half a dozen fat triangles filled with the sweet, peppery, yellow-spiced potato for less than twenty cents apiece. I ate them as I started off along Main Road, towards Pottuvil, where the road became dotted with jackfruit carcasses engorged with flies. Like festering wounds they lay about the road bleeding, a pale pink juice into the dust. There were orange dogs with fleas as big as pumpkin seeds, sleeping curled up in the middle of the street. Even as the town began to stir, those dogs slept on.
Men in long tubes of fabric, coloured and rolled tight at the hips, called to one another in that lilting, sugary song as they opened wooden tables beneath their twig-roofed huts. Mounds of spiked, crimson rambutan were hauled from wheelbarrows; strings of bright green sugar bananas hung from roof to dust; mangosteins were handled with delicate hands, arranged behind a barricade of king coconuts. I’d never tried coconut, and as the vendor hacked off the head of one with his machete, a small barefoot boy beside me clutched at the torn pocket of his father, then shoved a small lime, into his mouth, skin and all.
I went back to the beach to drink the fruit. The boys were still there, making pyramids in the sea. I watched as one lithe thing scrambled fast up a staircase of shoulders, biceps and open palms, gleaming with salt and sweat. When he fell it was into a hailstorm of laughter, of flashing white teeth, of bright blue sea.