Now that the war between north and south has stopped, Sri Lanka is finding that peace is good for business—specifically the tourist business. Suketu Mehta discovers that the island of Serendib is once again the pearl of the Indian Ocean

I am writing this overlooking a plain full of coconut palms and a range of low hills beyond them. Behind me is the soft blue sea; all around are mango trees and bougainvillea. I am in the Cinnamon Suite, which consists of the entire top floor of an old colonial bungalow in Galle, Sri Lanka. It comes with a library in the front, a bedroom in the middle, and a bathroom at the far end, separated not by doors but by light curtains. It is a room open from end to end, up on a hill, open to the sea and the sky, to the broad-leaved trees and the breezes. I slept last night in a four-poster covered with a fine white canopy, my dreams scented by the yellow and white champac flowers left floating in bowls all around the room. The challenge of architecture in the tropics is to live with the minimum amount of shelter; for if you wanted to, you could sleep on the beach, under a tree. A house, a roof, is almost superfluous.

I didn't think I'd like sleeping without air-conditioning. But it took me back to my childhood. (If you've grown up in a tropical country, as I did in India, you'll know why the whirling ceiling fan is such a staple of novels set in this part of the world. Its phat-phat-phat is a continuous sonic wash for our lives.) The sounds of the night were allowed in; the nightingales, the rustling of the wind through the trees. I was awakened by the muezzin's call at about 4 a.m., and then by gunshots soon after (to chase away the monkeys, I was told), but I didn't mind, because I wanted to greet the day.

In places of such beauty, we slowly shed our city skins; we soften, mellow with pleasure. We come to rooms like this and think: What am I doing wrong with my life? Why can't I live here forever? Buy a house like this, furnish it with colonial antiques, run a little bed-and-breakfast, or just live on my savings. You begin to fantasize about the life you could have: Get up in the sun-washed morning and work for three or four hours, then walk down to the harbor to buy fish fresh off the boats, give it to your cook, who grills it with the simplest of spices, eat a large lunch in the small garden, in the shade of the frangipani, and then go upstairs and nap for a couple of hours under the ceiling fan. Wake up and go to the beach for a swim, walk along it for a bit and sit on a rock to watch the last green flash of the sunset. In the evening, eat a light supper in the company of the same two or three people you have gotten to know in town—the larcenous mayor, the autodidact bookseller, and the alcoholic police chief—and then walk back up the hill to your quiet bedroom, filled with books that you can read until 2 a.m., nobody will tell you otherwise. In the morning, you find a check waiting from your grandfather in the Midwest or your agent in New York—not a large check by American standards but enough to allow you to live six more months of this life. Do it, the demon whispers in your ear. Chuck it all up, tell your boss at the insurance company where he can put his evaluation; stay here. Live a little.