Time and space in the Wild East of Sri Lanka

When we first came to Sri Lanka I wondered, since the weather is so much the same from day to day, since changes in light are not extreme the way we experience them at home, how do people here really perceive time? More to the point, do they perceive times of year? It was a naive question, maybe even a stupid one, but it got me searching for clues about time and the way people treat it. Of course, the quick answer is that time is deeply perceived in Sri Lanka. Especially here in the rural East we have come into contact with lots of examples of how people mark time. 

We got to Batticaloa just before Thai Pongol, the mid-January Tamil holiday that celebrates the strength of the sun. Immediately after the holiday the garden here was planted. Tomatoes seedlings no bigger than your pinkie, protected under leafy branches, are three-foot high plants now, bearing fruit. Same for the bitter gourd and pumpkin. The first few days their leaves burst out succulent and simple, beautifully defined, but who could have imagined how fast they'd vine up along their stick fence and bear fruit? 

It was naive to assume that in this close-knit, conservative society, so deeply embedded in soil and sea, so strongly aligned with moon and stars above, that time would be irrelevant. To the contrary I think now time is tightly metered. One week fishermen crowd lagoon by the northwest side of the bridge. The prawns are in full burst. Another week they are gone. These are seasonal events and they play out in the mosaic of the water-and sand landscape of Batticaloa. Yesterday was the first cloudy day we've experienced in months. This morning the ground was wet with dew, another first. The forecast says rain next week. 

Yesterday as I floated on my bicycle down the lagoon road strangely labeled "Munich-Vittoria Road," cows grazing at the side, fishermen up to their chests in the lagoon water, I saw one gent pulling wet brown coconut fronds out of the water. They were bigger than him and heavy, stained with tannins and slightly floppy. The question of why or what for barely entered my head. We take for granted so many sights that would seem profoundly exotic had we not been here six months. Later in the afternoon I was wandering around the grounds at my guesthouse. The farmer and his wife (responsible for the post-Thai Pongol plantings) were busying themselves with the same kind of wet fronds over here on this side of the lagoon. More accurately, he was sitting on his haunches watching her do a magnificent job of weaving. Her work was so efficient that by this morning several mats had been created. But the thing that amazed me was that somehow, this seemed to be the appointed day for pulling those fronds out of the water and working with them. If this is true it suggests there was also an appointed time for harvesting the fronds and for starting the soaking process. A tight schedule indeed! 

Today is the full moon, Poya, which is marked by the Buddhist community in celebration, parades, chanting, and no alcohol. Here in Tamil Batticaloa the main ponsala is in town, right next to the police station. A strange outpost of the majority Buddhist regime "over there" and just maybe a symbol of oppression. Or maybe I'm reading into things. Janet was there yesterday with Kim when a bus load of people, all Buddhists from Gampaha, came in. They told Janet and Kim that they were there to make sure Poya was celebrated correctly. How much merit they must have garnered for the long trip to the Wild East. How much might they have accomplished if this were a visit to build friendship and understanding between the people of these disparate communities?

Servility, brutality, Kattankudy

A visit with Sukhee and her mom Renu who came all the way from Colombo to spend the weekend here in far off Batticaloa. Kim came too and we spent the day mostly around the table, but with the women taking a trip into town (driven by good Alongo who was Lili's special tuktuk driver) to look at markets, fabrics and such. 

Spent the day in good conversation with the thing that stuck with me the most the issue of ragging in universities here. It happened to Renu 30 years ago and through the lens of subsequent emigration to North America and a lifetime she reflects that she took it in her stride as a well-bred young woman with a strong Buddhist background. "You tell me to crawl, fine, I will. Until I get sick of it. Then I'll tell you to drop dead." I still wonder how and why she remembers it so poignantly. Maybe it was a bigger deal to her at the time than she lets herself remember. 

Walking across in the shady grounds here she reflects that she can understand my view of things (among which she includes what she thinks she has picked up about my feelings about the Tamil East in relation to the rest of this country). She repeats her story but then puts it in a different lens. "They were trying to bring down the upper classes a notch or two. Wonder why they felt they had to do that or what good it would have done anyone. If they wanted to make people equal why not try to bring up the lower ones?" And "I was a city girl so I hadn't considered how first year students from rural areas might be affected by this. Never realized they might be brutalized by this kind of thing."

Renu and her husband left Sri Lanka in the early 1980s for graduate school. What was happening in this country then that gave them that extra push? What about brutality and its twin, servility, that were shaping the next 30 years of Sri Lankan life? I wonder if I can discuss that with her more today. 

Yesterday's Lunch, impromptu and at the tail end of an extremely busy lunch service the boys had to put on. For all I could see Ravi was the only server:

Red spicy brinjol

Mixed Salad

Plain rice

String hoppers (had to be substituted by red rice. String hoppers not available. Too many guests!)

Soya curry

Spicy pumpkin curry

But they only brought one portion of salad (with onion) when I asked for two (without onion). After that we took a boat ride, jolly and looking fatter than usual in our bright orange vests. The water was beguiling, slightly salty, a degree cooler than the air. It was a perfect way to kill an hour and ten minutes or if you fell off the side, kill yourself. 

Speaking of self preservation,

I think we should not go to Kattankudy for lunch tomorrow. Kim invited us with Sukhee and Renu and for awhile I thought it would be OK. The five of us could eat separated from the family, which is the way it would work out. So maybe contact with hosts would be minimal. But wait. I don't need a free lunch that badly! 

There is some real hating going on there. The hate is against me and my people. Sorry. We're Jews. The hate is not imagined. The hate is based on a deep and long lasting educational system that tells them, somehow, Israel and Jews are the worst thing that can happen. So if something goes wrong in town it's known that this is because of Israel. This is what Kim told us and it's incredible to hear. That's not a joke. Kattankudy is a Muslim town thousands of miles and oceans from Tel Aviv convinced that people from Tel Aviv are its worst enemies, bent on its destruction. 

I rode a bicycle to the middle of that place once. Should I do it again? Would you? They know who I am. Who I am is beyond suspicion. I told my host to his face. Who I am dictates that I should not leave alive. They know the harm I can cause. In this case I think it's prudent not to go to Kattankudy. I can barely understand this myself. How do I expect you to understand this predicament? So forgive me please if I forego Kattankudy and stay instead in the quiet of shadows here at Dutch Bar Road. I may not talk to anyone all afternoon. There's a good chance no one here will fear or hate me so I can act in a modulated way, behave like I have a social contract with the rest of the crew, and go about my business. I may spin words or spin tales or just spin a few thoughts around in my head but I'll do this in peace and with no threat to my human body. 

Do I mind what they think of me in Kattankudy? That I'm not man enough to pay them a visit? That I'm afraid of something? Does it make me sad that Kim might think me closed minded!? That I made this up? Think again. I'd rather sit here peacefully on the lagoon than engage with or even sniff at a twenty first century disputation. If I thought we could discuss things it might be interesting to go. For one thing I'd like to ask my host's take on his people offering me hotel rooms with young girls or boys for sex. At least those offers are something I've experienced firsthand. They were put to me like gentle business deals. Not calumny that I read in some religious rag. Maybe I'll write more when I stop feeling sick about this. 

How to heal a society?

A society that's been broken for more than thirty years. That's the Sri Lanka I find myself in. A deadly civil war, insurrections from various quarters, and an inept government run by avarice and the raw will to power dominate this society. In fact we may look as far back as 1956 in the newly post-independence years when the vicious Sinhala-only language act was passed. That act excluded large parts of the country and effectively disenfranchised Tamil-speaking minorities as well as Burgher, Tamil, and Sinhalese elite whose primary language was English. But we can go farther back than that. In researching the 1983 "Black July" pogroms against Tamils in Matale I came across an older series of riots against the Muslim residents of that town that occurred in the early 20th. What's wrong with this place? 

Blessed with transcendent physical beauty, fertile soil, ample rainfall and a mild climate, you'd think Sri Lanka had everything going for it. But it seems like the past century has seen growing misrepresentation and poor governance, ever sharper interethnic mistrust and hatred, and the perhaps the ugliest trend, the physical parsing of real estate as belonging to one ethnic group or another, one religion pitted against the next. It's an ugly state of affairs that's at once insulting and dangerous. We see it in practically every town and village. Where will it end?

Only this week I heard from two Fulbright scholars who are embedded in elite university campuses here that these trends are reflected in the current practice of "ragging," a power-language- and arguably ethnically-based student movement that may be loosely related to habits of fraternity hazing on US campuses. Thing is, ragging affects the whole campus. It may take many forms, for example forbidding students to attend classes given in English (university instruction here is nominally in English medium). It also dictates what students may wear. To me its ugliest incarnation is the parsing of campus real estate. Raggers to one side. Non-raggers to the other. This affects everything from the use of classrooms to the side of the street people can stand on. It is, in effect, a ghettoization that reflects trends in the larger society here. And it is harrowing. 

How do you heal such a society? It seems to me it must be much more comprehensive than "brick by brick." My Sri Lankan friends have reflected that it requires a comprehensive initiative by all parts of society, including individuals, religious groups, the government, the judiciary, and educational sectors. It requires an opening up of the truth in an atmosphere of trust and open reconciliation. It occurs to me that this kind of repair might best "mimic" cell or tissue repair, a coordinated mobilization of resources that functions in concert to get the job done--for the benefit of the whole organism. 

In living organisms DNA directs this kind of repair work by sending out messages that contain instructions for the whole operation. In a society we might look to academia to provide an intellectual framework for such an endeavor. But here in Sri Lanka the academic DNA is sick, damaged. Like human DNA that has been mutated, academia here is sending out messages that code for and perpetuate societal poisons. Academia at its highest levels here is sunk in a system of cronyism and government patronage. Modes of teaching and learning are dominated by rote memorization. The farthest thing from any academic's mind who I've spoken with is expanding their students' horizons or encouraging any kind of inquiry or critical thinking. The academics I've met are more concerned with the easing of excise taxes on automobiles and other perks they consider "sacred," in exchange for their "sacrifice" of having to come into work to deal with students. 

It's no wonder that the places of higher education, and I'm including Sri Lanka's premier institution here, Peridiniya University, where one percent(!) of applicants is admitted, are hotbeds of racism, militarism, and social inequality. In my own experience the academe has been employed to perpetuate lies about Sri Lankan history, which hearkens back to the 1983 Matale riots. I heard a student presentation, heavily supervised by his professor, a prestigious architect and urban planner, in which the anti-Tamil riots were ignored in a discussion of Matale's devastation. No need to worry about "planning" there anymore. The shiny new buildings on every corner are evidence enough for the destruction that took place there. 

Meanwhile my colleagues in higher education turn a blind eye to ragging as they "cover" curriculum their "batches" of students need to be fed. Might as well be covering up the truth as these "batches" are baked. Exactly the opposite of what we expect from a healthy university system where inquiry, experimental thinking, and creativity are celebrated. Sri Lanka will have to look beyond its universities for a healing presence. 

Ecosystem, society, and poverty collide in Sri Lanka

I recently visited an unusual place in Sri Lanka in which poverty, nature, and the built environment collide in a national project with long-range implications. I spent five days in Dehiattakandiya, a planned town built as part of “Section C” of the Mahaweli Accelerated Project, a place where environmental, social, and political perturbation continue to affect the Sri Lankan landscape. 

 

I came to Sri Lanka in September, 2015 as a Fulbright Scholar. My research goal as a cultural landscape ecologist was tostudy ancient irrigation systems focusing on village tanks. The so-called “tanks,” a name derived from 16th century Portuguese cartographers who labeled them as “tanques,” are sustainable human-built ecosystems. These gorgeous lakes are concentrated in parts of the country at one per km2. They fulfill a variety of human uses, including irrigating rice fields, providing fish and other edibles, bathing places, and a source of flowers for religious offerings. They are integral as a natural resource, supporting wildlife, ameliorating a hot, seasonally dry climate, and enhancing the water table. I hoped to glean intangible data from the tanks to learn their cultural significance in the broader scope of Sri Lankan society. I wanted to understand “what makes them tick.”

 

As I explored dozens of the 30,000-odd ancient tanks, some of which are over 2500 years old, a serendipitous turn of events took me to a “perfect” looking tank not far from Polonowurra that was built in the 1970s. I realized I was not the first person to set out on a quest for tank intangibles. Engineers, designers, and rural planners were looking at these problems decades ago. The focus of my inquiry changed as I started looking for more contemporary tanks, and this landed me in Dehiattakandiya. 

 

Dehiattakandiya (and the rest of “Section C”) was hewn out of virgin jungle in the mid-1980s, a time when scientists and the general public were well informed about the consequences of forest degradation. In a sense it’s a surprise that the project went through to completion, as it involved perturbation of a major chunk of the Sri Lankan landscape. Equally disarming is that the project was undertaken with major input by a Canadian engineering firm, usingsignificant funding from the World Bank. We are used to criticizing the recent involvement of Chinese developers in rapacious projects in Sri Lanka. Section C epitomizes this kind of destructive development. It is considered by some to have been an exercise in “nation building,” but ecological factors aside, the consequences of the project left a deep scar on the social fabric and national psyche of Sri Lanka.

 

Dehiattakandiya looks like planned towns anywhere in the world where major water developments such as hydroelectric dams and irrigationschemes are built. Broad avenues, spacious roundabouts, and divided roads, most of which are hideously rutted and mostly empty, characterize the town. A planner’s dream of a bus station was muddy and dingy when we arrived, crowded with students just finishing Saturday tuition classes. The “traditional-style” market places, well laid out with broad tile overhangs looked equally incongruous. Subsequent to our visit I read working papers describing the need to make Dehiattakandiya“pretty” and “coherent” as an urban space. The plans for Dehiattakandiyaaccentuated an idealized urban form as the goal, underplaying social problems that might ensue from the imposition of a “new town” in the middle of the rainforest. 

 

The real problem in Section C is the rural areas just outside town. The agricultural landscape was engineered to reference Rajarata, the ancient Dry Zone region around the imperial capital of Anuradhapura. Contemporary tanks with invented names like “Nagaswewa,” most of which are only partially operational, dot the landscape. Canals that resemble ancient Sri Lankan waterworks supply distant rice fields, in contradistinction to the traditional practice of the village tank in relation to its local paddies. Section C is a manufactured landscape that makes a political statement about place and power.

 

In the 1980s some 70,000 dirt-poor,landless settlers were brought to Section C, a place in which they have achieved a modicum of success. Our exploration of the countryside showed us village communities with neat cottages, well-tended gardens, and the requisite dogs, and motorbikes. There is substantial economic inequality--theseveral humongous SUVs belonging to our guesthouse host suggested that. But more to the point, the poor settlers brought here were pawns in a dangerous, incendiary demographic game. To the east of Section C lie areas in which significant populations of the Tamil and Muslim minorities live.Dehiattakandia, like Ampara to the south and the new town of Welikanda to the north, became (and arguably wereplanned as) a Sinhalese majoritybulwark against the Tamil-speaking East. 

 

In the relationship between poverty and the built environment there are three points to consider. Environment, social fabric, and immediate stakeholders form a kind of triad of interdependence. In Section C it seems that the stakeholders (the Sinhalese settlers) scored the best. Through their hard work in an unforgiving landscape they established agricultural communities that provided them with a viable (though perhaps only marginally sustainable) living. Their presence came at the enormous cost of the devastated ecosystem in Section C, which is now primarily a monoculture rice-growing region dependent on agrochemicals and a semi-functional irrigation scheme. Along with the environmental impact, the social impact of these settlements served to increase the disequilibrium among ethnic sectors of the Eastern Province. Section C isemblematic of a Sinhalese-dominated central government that continues to oppress its Tamil-speaking minorities. It remains an instructive question in a country that faces challenges of poverty, environmental degradation, and an inequitable distribution of resources and political power.

I try to fade out

Just putting some thoughts on paper now mate no time for your natter and chatter. You liked the surfing? Great. The food you ate was abundant and you never got sick? Surprise. Great. Check. Now can you please go away?

Buddhist chanting is happening in the ponsala on the island. Thank you they are reminding us they're still here. Sounds like a mosque. Yes they are still here. The ponsala is attached to the police station God bless them for their peacekeeping and they are attached to a long line of former checkpoints and confiscated homes and barbed wire and military installations where you're still pulled over from traffic so just watch out and carry some bills with you for a "little something" for the men in brown. 

The humid air of morning is lightly scented. A rooster in the village and a rhythmic insect set a tone in contradistinction to the noise from the ponsala. Some leaves or small fruits drop. There are Areca nuts ripening and every day the accelerated heavy plop of a coconut somewhere reminds you there is gravity. Maybe even danger as well looked after as you are. 

But all is not gravity. The bus from Kadurawela was raucous with old Tamil movie music and the dancing eyes of passengers, all turned to see an elephant just off the road. They must be starting to be maddened by thirst. There has been no rain for weeks so they are on the move and searching for the things elephants need. We will see more. A fish was bought from a lone seller in front of a mosque. There was so much good natured yelling and pointing. A bevy of boys got on all in one piece like a loose ball laughing and entwining and laughing and entwining and high fiving and playing with the conductor and telling secrets with eyes as wide and energetic as a fourteen year old. 

There is a far off motor on the Kallady  Bridge and now the kovil music picks up quietly at first an unusual tune today. 5:20 is the start time today. Sometimes it's earlier. The sky is just one shade lighter than black and this music helps lighten it with a presence of dawnish consciousness. Clouds lighten and stars fade. The ponsala keeps going a bat flickers home the first bus blares its horn. The bat skittles nearby, behind?

Shadeesh sits at home. His accident more than a month ago broke his leg in three places. Five pieces. He was in the Batticaloa teaching hospital, ward 14 bed 2 and they kept him there for the weeks first consulting and then deciding to put in the two plates. He would have to pay for the plates but the surgery, like the hospital bed and the kovil music in the morning, is free. The leg is splayed to the right as he sits in bed and proper pain meds are on board. His wife and son bedside and occasional visitors who would stick a packet under his leg with some cash. Then the day of surgery was planned, Tuesday is orthopedics, he was to be the second surgery of the day, and the three-day countrywide power blackout came. Surgery delayed again and his surgeon friend had a scheduled holiday so Shadeesh was sent home and ordered to report back March 27 for a new surgery date on the 29th. I was out of town for the one day so I don't know how he reacted but I watched his forced positive smile the days before when I visited. I feel for his disappointment and maybe fear. He wants to be back at work or says he does. 

How did I visit? I visited by bike. How did I park? I parked in the parking area, next to the bikes. How were the bikes arranged? Perpendicular to a wall with a running ditch of swill parallel to the wall just behind the front wheel so, steady there with the lock and key. If they go into the swill they are a goners. How much did I pay? Five rupees a day. How far was the hospital? 100 meters from the bicycle parking. Was I the only foreigner? Yes! How to get to ward 14? Follow the signs. Go up some stairs. Stay in the shade. Ward 14 is men's non-emergency orthopedics. It is sponsored by an electronics store in Kattankudy so on the wall is a faded framed photo of Mecca. There are about ten beds. The windows are open and the fans are going. There is always a breeze. There is no discernible odor. No medicine smell and no body smell and no filth smell not covered up by anything. The beds are from Australia Shadeesh tells me. They are adjustable but the bed is half the bulk of an American hospital bed. There is a triangular ring for him to pull himself up. Shadeesh is unshaven but he looks good, like he's had a good rest and though he reports pain he doesn't wince or show pain in any way. The room is much cooler than outside with the fans going and there is a sense of openness that we can't possibly have in our sealed up hospital rooms in America. Food is brought in large metal tins but his wife brings him food and clean sheets. There are a couple of two-liter bottles of Sprite by his bed. In the ward there are two or three other people the first couple of days I visit. A couple of beds to his left there's a tuktuk driver from Ampara, arm in a cast. Younger than Shadeesh and flabbier around the stomach as you would expect of a tuktuk driver from Ampara. His enormous black eye tells you he was in some kind of accident. When he leaves in s couple of days with his wife and mother and baby girls Shadeesh wishes him well as heartily as he can all smiles and sparkle, that's Shadeesh. In a bed across from him there's a very thin very dark man whose wife has been in. He's silent and everyone is pretty quiet, except for the next ward where Shadeesh says there are "bad people," later one of them or one of their family members is fighting in the hall outside. There's really no inside or outside. Halls are separated by half or three-quarter tiled walls. There is breeze everywhere. I want to stay but I don't want to tax shaders to have to speak English for the better part of an hour. So I try to fade out and let the family speak and discuss and not take the visitor's seat of honor, just fade out just let things roll along. 

(The noise from the ponsala goes on. The kovil music is louder with percussion and flute and vocals. The rooster keeps it up and new birds join. The sky is not yet luminous, the last star just faded out. It's been 25 minutes.)

The two men in the Ward with him are from Sinhalese parts of Sri Lanka, Ampara and Polonowurra. How does it feel for them to be here with a different language? Maybe like it feels to me? Or am I more comfortable? 

In one corner there's an older bearded gent from Kattankudy. Family visits him and surrounds him. Later I am told the Muslims need their own hospitals in addition to the government hospitals. They're sick more often. I never thought of this. What is sickness here? You go to the hospital. To check for fever you put your hand to someone's throat. Maybe that works better than a forehead. You can detect breathing and obstructions and moisture. But it's more intimate than a palm to the forehead. 

(The Areca palms and coconuts make a black silhouette now against the sky. The kovil is the only music but there are a dozen species of birds. There are trucks to be heard on the bridge. It's been half an hour now. The instrumentals and pace of the kovil pick up. It's tunes I don't know. This wakeup music is the number one top thing I'll miss here when I go away in exactly three months). 

At 6 am it's light but there are no shadows. The kovil music keeps on. Soon sweepers will begin collecting the night's leaves from the sandy grounds. Did Thavaraja get home from Trinco last night? Maybe after we went to sleep? Did he want to go? He said no. Was it an important meeting? More about tourism to the East. He was president. He's secretary now so it's less work. But maybe it's still trouble. Or maybe not. Maybe he likes going. My friends the East, or parts of it anyway, are the last lovely place of this island. Where they are undeveloped or underdeveloped they are the last undeveloped or underdeveloped places. They are sad reminders of war and thanks to their being cut off for those decades they are more or less preserved in their plainness. Their attractive slim plainness. They will not be that way for long as more cars are added to the roads and people can afford to move less and buy more of the convenience foods we love as a species. This has to happen. 

Such a cool breeze sweeps up from the lagoon! A few days ago crossing the Kallady Bridge I saw a cloud bank just over the ocean. The ocean water is very warm but cooler than the hot hot land. Fishermen haven't been going out the past week or so. At least I haven't seen them in the regular places, just north of the bridge. Now this morning some are heading into the lagoon. One of them coughed. The kovil on this side of the village plays a different music than the other. They are not in harmony any more than the motors chirping across the bridge. The speed of those buses becomes remarkable and their horn blowing, when you're on them is an encouragement plain and simple. We will get you home! Soon maybe!

But where home is is another question. Will I be happy to leave here? No. Will I be happy to get back to work? No. Will I be happy to be home? Sure. But it's not like I'm missing home. Janet's more fed up and would like to count how many days she has to go to fulfill her "80%" of the Fulbright quota. Go I say if it will make you happy. 

We went to the Shanti Cinema a short walk away for yesterday's 2:30 movie. Last day of a zombie movie I saw a couple of weeks ago. The gate was part open and the guys were, what else? lying on the floor just inside the door. "No fillem today! No power! You only ones! Tomorrow new movie. Come better 6:30." The Tamil movies are utterly enjoyable. I think they're catalogued as "Bollywood" back home and I'll have to check that with the librarian. Their subtitles are flawless, their song lyrics are poetic, their love stories are uncomplicated, their settings are real, their conundrums thoughtworthy. These are professional movies that balance action and dialogue and color and bromance and romance. They are sparing in special effects and they celebrate the human. They are so different from our movies and so positively happy to watch. So the guys yesterday were positively happy to see us and we were positively happy to see them and then walk home in the dead heat of the hottest part of afternoon and just the walk was some entertainment and provided a real lift. Didn't need to buy anything or see anything or try anything. Here we were and here we are. 

In Matale and to and from Matale

1) Meaningless piles of bricks clothed with dead eyes shielded by barbed wire. The bricks are ancient and their city was glorious. This is an important tourist stop. This is a Must See tourist place. Here you will be accosted to buy post cards, puzzles, key chains, maps, hats, buttons, carved objects, plastic molded injection objects made in China, drinks, trinkets and toys. When you get out past the barbed wire and the sellers and the other tourists you may buy carved wood objects made in this island and true to life elephants and wind chimes and olded-up pictures of parades and perehanas. This stuff is for you. You. It's been commodified for you and you can stuff it in your suitcase and take it back to your dead continent to put in your flat in your dead city that is there only for tourists itself or in your dead suburb that is accessible only by vehicle so your roads are choked and your city is dead and drowned in the puke of early morning drinkers that have been drinking now for far too many hours, far too many weeks, too many decades now to mention, and sure, your place is dead. Under water. If you dare to look in the mirror and you see your stupid tattoos commodified for your moment of manhood or womanhood or whatever they consider a coming of age in that dead place of yours, a place they squeezed all the life out of sometime between say 1815 and 1945, now look at yourself and convince yourself if you can that you are not dead. 

2) More love for animals than for humans and warriors not peacemakers are the sung heros. Why sing the praises of peace are you crazy? Warriors are the strong ones. Sing about them! They are like kings!

3) Rice rice rice stuff it in your mouth

Wrong wrong wrong I wish that I was wrong. More rice and more rice and more rice and more fields of rice let us not be stung by snakes as we harvest that rice. Let us move gingerly through those hot fields in a hot sun in a hot day endless hours shimmering with heat but let's not be bitten by snakes medical care is so far away and snake bites are super fast-acting. But finish today and you may stuff rice into your face and down your gullet like the richest among you. 

4) Don't want to be right about pogroms that no one will talk about. Why not be wrong and also not talk? Why waste the breath?

5) Choke on your own bloat. Choke on your own fat. Choke on your bloat. Choke on the cigarette smoke and exhaust you've created for yourself. Choke on your ruined beaches and your stripped mountainsides. Choke on your incense and your baskets of flowers. Choke on your hyacinth choked waterways and your green waterways and your strangely bluish waterways and your lies. 

The lies you learned so well in school. The lies your parents and teachers taught. The lies you shared with your friends. The lies you read in the paper. The lies you wrote in papers. The lies you thought up while kissing the ground in front of your elders. The lies they remembered while touching your head. The lies you perpetuated through servility. The lies you whispered in another language or the lies you knew by heart in your own language. The lies you ate on the bus. The lies you looked out on as the train roared by. The lies that came with cut wood to use in the kitchen cooking more rice more rice more rice more rice more rice more rice and just as many curries to go with them. The lies that forced their way out. The lies you kept close or the lies that glued themselves onto you. The lies you never tried to hide. They were just so much a part of you they showed dull in your glum muddy face. What was going through that mind of yours behind the eyes as you aimed and spit? What about the snake you hit on the head over and over to daze it but not kill it so you could brush it out of your store into the street without murdering the animal what would that do to your karma?

What about the lies you said when you said you'd be back and you never came? What about the lies you used to cheer your friend but you never paid him the money you borrowed? What about the lies you found in a piece of notebook paper balled up next to the trash bin in Kadurawela? 

What about Kadurawela? What about its inner precincts and its outskirts? What about the way to Mahaweli and once you reach it? What about the lies contained in dust and the lies contained in names, engineered names and names that travel on a breeze or names that are shouted or whispered or sold?

What about the selling and the deceiving and the offering of bribes and the falling coconuts and the cawing crows and the weirdly whining eagles?

What about the lies that go up in smoke or travel on a leaf or smell of dried fish or come in a plastic bag (pink) like so many pieces of cut pineapple? 

What about lies you studied in school? Geographical facts that look like chairs or the chairlike arrangement of river valleys in your country waiting for despoilment and rapacious engineering and more buying and selling and spitting and looking at your watch and pulling on your abaya and swerving up your sarong just so to catch the breeze or retie it?

What about the lies on the hills on roads so steep and houses so aloof and children in gated areas riding round and round on bicycles and watched by their grandfather not dignified but not not dignified either, just past expiration date but still awake and without the haze of fungal spores?

What about the lies in cigarette smoke and wide screen televisions and receipts from Cargill's you collect like so many chits that may ensue a winning number? What about the concrete pavers and the too-wide spaces between them that you have to put your hanky to your mouth and nose because what's down there you don't want to smell but you don't have to smell because you never put a hanky to your face because you are driving in a nice SUV with a nice Buddha on the dashboard and a nice Chinese doohickey hanging from the mirror because luck is with you and you'd like to keep it that way?

What about the lies among the cashews and the brocades, the lies among the plastic kitchen implements and the plastic Christmas decorations? The lies in greeting cards you send with an Rs 1000 rupee folded inside, "best wishes!" you proclaim or the card proclaims it for you or your wishes are not "best" but good enough or your wishes are really "go to hell" that's why I regift an old box of tea. It's sealed so how would anyone, especially a foreigner, read the bad or sad intentions of the tea leaves inside?

What about the lies you show your boss in a pail full of crabs you just got from the lagoon or the quarter full pail of prawns in their gray jackets waiting to be traded or cooked or stewed in a curry with curry leaves?

What about the lies you feel when a price is doubled or change is forgotten to be given or the seller slips off the bus with your too-big bill? Are you to blame because you, a foreigner, should never have come here and never have handled this money or is the blame with the blameworthy bastard who walked away with your rupees?

Is there a lie in the border a child shows you in a map or is there a truth? Is there a lie in the street map or only in the bright glimmer of registration when your child-informant "sees" when you show him the satellite map? Is a three year old a better conversationalist than a thirty year old? Where is the truth in that and can there be "truth" or "falseness" in a question or is the question just a probe to delve into the tissue of lies or truth or the fabric of being?

Can the question itself be a lie or set up for a lie or become prelude to a lie through the words you choose or the inflection with which you deliver or the raising of an eyebrow when there is an eyebrow to raise? What if the eyebrows were burnt off in a pogrom?

What if the pogrom was like a tidal wave, a "tsunami" that rolled in like night and day? What if it seeped through the pavement like a hot day or a drunk in front of an empty lot? What if the empty lot was not always empty but was only empty for the past thirty years? Thirty three years? Could you find coins there if you dig, parts of dolls' bodies, sheets of music, dog food, wrappers or magazines from a bygone day before you were chased out and your house razed to the ground? But what if you were inside the house and all they'd find now might be a tooth of you or a toenail (if they looked hard enough). What about the songs you once sang? Were they good enough to grant you memory? And now, with prosperity, with the joy of making money, with the noise of the new city growing, its buses growling as they struggle uphill, its AC transport spewing fumes, its newly self-proclaimed "Arabs" trading (they must distance themselves from you as a Tamil. They must become "Arab" to make a beautiful new peace with the other peace lovers, the benevolent saintly Buddha believers) is there Room for you any more? The newly widened road, the magnificent A9 flowing downhill to the ever-more-magnificent, ever more prosperous, ever more crowded, ever more bloated Kandy. If all the buildings show portions of their former walls now because the road's been widened all up and down the avenue does everyone share in the disgust? Or is disgust just yours as they choke upon and choke up on their prosperity because the massive covering up, the massive throwing of blankets upon, the massive dousing and redousing and flooding again has smothered your "claim" to truth even if you had a claim or wanted a claim or feared that without a claim, some chit of evidence, some chat of truth telling, you just would not be any more. 

Your third eye plays a silent roulette against the evil eye that waits at the bus stop in a queue on a street corner neither shaded or cooled. The hot hornet of hate the hot blast of wicked silence clothed in a prosperity you never asked for blows down the collar of every gent in that stop, down his sleeve and down into his briefcase so important that he carries to a government job. And the hot air finds its way through every sari wearing office lady even if she's not an office lady but a teacher because that graceful composed clean teacher is telling her students this day, this very day! about the chair shaped river valleys and about the glories of Nuwara and the new engineered tanks that look and work just like the ancient ones. And this teacher, she glosses over the truth because even if she knew the truth she knows. The curriculum. The batches. The covering of information makes a covering of information. Cover the information like you have been covering the information and the curriculum and the few things you know and are not just reading. 

Cover them! Cover them in ash like Vesuvius! Cover them in coverlets like a sleeping baby or a sleeping giant! Cover them in a sauce until their flavor and savor are hidden and finally gone gone gone. Hide them in opioids. Hide them in daylight, that bright light that shines so hard and so steady it blinds, it binds, its grip tightens, it strangles and it smothers by its professing of truth, its "transparency," it's jungle leaf proofness of good better best intention. Very best intention you see by dint of its good manners and supple smile. It is a kind of branding. 

It is a kind of branding this lying because it makes all other brands look cheap and fake. It is a kind of branding this lying because it distinguishes itself from the other products. It is sui generis. It is unique and uniqueness like a beautiful gravy boat that spills and pours and loves to cover and down. 

Inside and outside in Borella

The coconut for tonight's dinner is being hacked open and the glare of a pre-thunderstorm sky is white with heat and loft. Roof tiles rough and hot and in some distance, maybe as far as Independence Square, a loudspeaker. 

The streets. Murky, muddy, dusty, noisy. Every horn beeping its greeting. Every umbrella opening to the rain or sun. Borella Junction, where once, confused, I walked up and down the block of its busiest street without a notion of direction, taking finally the wrong bus, the one that took me to my destination in two hours instead of twenty minutes. The one I'd been instructed to take, mistakenly, which I'd fought then finally panicked. A conductor with his rare boggle of deep disapproval when I asked to take this bus to Moratuwa. 

Borella Junction on a hill. Borella Junction the kernel of an old village. Borella Junction, its old streets stop at the hill bottom but not a full stop, where they become Ward Place or Borella Gardens or names the smell redolent of colony and gardening. Later nominated as Colombo 08, Borella Junction with its hidden markets, its upscale malls, its banks of commerce and banks of pedestrians. Its doorway caves to hide from rain with the crowd. Its shops with hair clips and bananas and phone repair and kotti. 

Outside most is hidden. Stands behind walls on lanes semi-locked. Outside, where the old village stood, commercial places are public. Places of procurement. Hidden in the alleyways and lanes, the private courtyards. The quiet curves. The gentle rises. The verges with subdued activity or sitting or snifting or serving. 

Hidden in the courtyards the softened wards, their public places borne of still hamlets, their dogs and children sleeping or stepping in shadows and sun. In courtyards where stones tumble in pale bright, where cooking noises presage aromas, where bodhis sprout and margosa trees start as shy saplings. 

Women working early grinding in their kitchens. Men climbing ladders early taking building tasks. Women later with their bags and skirts and hair. Men in midday in white sarongs and tops waiting for their lunch. 

Some music from some places. Intoxicating, clever, rhyming, maundered. In tune and time with waves of traffic and the wind, in streets with no horses or hoses but concrete and cobble and asphaltish aromas and kotti and corners and underground walkways. Borella where riots tore asunder a society.