Conjectures on Sri Lankan irrigation tank ecosystems and a tentative conclusion

The elucidation of the tank cascade system is a post-colonial phenomenon that allowed Sri Lankans to regain ownership of their vernacular landscape. 

Now that this has been accomplished the science of tank form and function needs to be advanced. How do these complex but seemingly simple structures work?

Part of the "science" of tanks has to consider the ethnic, spiritual, and religious outlook of the tank builders. Were tanks modeled on the human body as perceived by the ancients? Were tanks conceived in the context of a vasthu scheme adopted from Indian connections?

A tentative conclusion. 

The tanks, though still in use, are a relic of past civilizations. Neglect, agrochemicals, and silting over have transformed the tank environment. Changes in population dynamics (fewer people farming), cultivation methods (for example mechanized farming), and lifestyle, as well as benign interference by local and provincial government agencies translate to the conclusion that tank systems will not be returned to their former status. 

Sri Lankan Journey: Landscape of Composure

The most composed hour here in Colombo is early morning. After that the heat, the noise, the smoke, and the humidity conspire to unravel you. During this most composed hour of the day the nicest thing is to lie still and think. I guess it's the same way at home. But here if you don't get up and get something started everything may fall to wrack and ruin. Which might explain the way Colombo looks, at least at first glance. How much can you accomplish before the day is too thick to move through?

At yesterday's Fulbright session, one of three days we're plucking out of our Sri Lanka experience to get "oriented" after two months here, the most meaningful discussion was about safety and well being for expats here in Sri Lanka. Too bad it was the only session where we discussed anything personal about this experience. To me Sri Lanka appears so intensely social, personal, and beneath the roar, such a tender place. 

One presenter, a former Fulbrighter herself, mentioned that she had never experienced the harassment every American woman complains about here. "How is it possible?" I asked Janet. It didn't take long for her to reply. "She's from New York. She ignores all of it." An amazing response from an amazing New Yorker. "Composure is how she does it," Janet added. And that started us thinking about composure and what that means. 

Travel on a noisy bus or dusty street here in Colombo. Ladies are going about their daily business wearing perfectly clean saris. Not a wrinkle, not a tear. They are composed. They seem to float through the hubbub in a bubble of cleanliness and calm. 

Travel through the burgeoning traffic. You have horns. You have clouds of smoke. You have every kind of engine noise. I have heard that drivers get angry but I have never seen it. People are composed. 

Composure keeps you to yourself and keeps you in a smoothly lubricated interaction with your surroundings. You don't lose your cool. No one else loses their cool. You see something you don't like, you look the other way. You stay cool. Literally here, it's rare to see a person break a sweat. 

Our friend in Batticaloa, Alice Kern, thought she saw a man expose himself on the bridge to Kallady. This doesn't happen. Maybe she saw him pulling up his sarong the way all the men do in the countryside to cool themselves off. It looks lascivious. It has no sexual connotation. I've seen it done hundred times in my presence. 

Thinking about composure led me to examine another "strange" behavior I've seen here. Young men between, say, the ages of 20 and 40, when they get together, giggle. I first became aware of this last May when I was staying in the visitors quarters at Rajarata University. I was taking an afternoon nap and a group of 20 or so Junior lecturers were getting together for lunch and a little horse play. The high pitched giggling lasted for a good hour. I didn't get in my nap but I did start to build and insight. 

Giggling could be a way to maintain composure. It might be a way that social misunderstandings are lubricated to become social workings. It might be a way to deflect or dilute some of the nasty side effects of testosterone. We want to remain composed, we all give a little giggle. 

My friend and colleague Janaka Wijesundara has composed students. He challenges them. He grills them. He questions them. They stand before him unprepared. Except in their composure. Are they ignoring him? They should listen.

Composure means not making too many large movements. A dab of a gent's hankie to the forehead should do. Flagging down a bus seems to be done with the raise of an eyebrow. Faces remain calm. Impassive. Smiling. No loud voices. No big movements. No apologies and no thank-yous. No big deal. 

Stay composed. Keep all your parts together. Enjoy the day. At least on the outside. TV shows give me a glimpse of inner lives that are less composed than what we see on the street. There's shouting and there are tears. There's laughter and flapping about. Maybe that's why these shows are funny. Maybe composure is about appearances to the outside world. Maybe this is why, when I was a little kid, my mom would get me dressed "nicely" before we went downtown. Is the public composure we see in Colombo or other cities in Sri Lanka something we lost in America?

I mentioned before about Colombo "at first glance." Actually many glances later it looks pretty messy. Then yesterday riding the 100 bus into Kolupitiya I was thinking about landscapes of composure. And then I saw it. Taken as a composite, at least along the Galle Road, Colombo appears to be a place that lacks composure. My architect friends might say it lacks urban "coherence," whatever that means. 

But look closer. The micro-environment of every shop and stoop, the intimate place where people sit or lie down or stand or shop, is almost inevitably, at least early in the day, clean and neat. Composure comes from within. It's maintained in the personal space. Many composed spaces and the composed people they host add up to something unexpected. A landscape of composure. 

Shaping a "brave new" Colombo

Just a few days back into Colombo I thought we'd get a break from the intensity of Batticaloa. In a way we have, but we've picked up new intensities and uncovered new things to think about. My Fulbright theme of "landscapes in transition" is taking a focus on "human landscapes" these days, which makes sense. The first thing I teach my landscape students is that it's not a "landscape" without humans. 

Last night we were asked out to dinner by our wonderful host Buwankeka Abeysuriya and his lovely wife. Not huge on going out to eat, this was my second evening out in a row but as Janet says, while in Colombo let's act like city people. We almost never go out at home in Boston and to get dinner and a glass of wine just about anywhere decent is $150. Literally last night we dined for pennies on the dollar. But no wine. 

But I'm not writing about the cost or quality of going out in Colombo. Much more interesting was our ride home. On the Galle Road called      "Main Road" here) almost simultaneously, and in a nearly perfect syncopated rhythm, our hosts started recalling the horrors of war. Terrorism, bus bombings, explosions, fear, and more or less how they lived through it. 

Janet reminded me this morning after (I admit it) I complained about having to go out--what a big deal Bu made about how the restaurant we were at makes hoppers, how as we left he read and showed me each poster announcing each event around town. "A whole lot of nothing," I kvetched. And then she reminded me of when we first came here.

I'd invited my friend and colleague Janaka Wijesundara, his wife Jeeva, and our mutual colleague Koen deWandeler to our overpriced guest house for dinner--partly to inaugurate our time here and partly to plan for the student workshop run by Koen that was scheduled to run  in conjunction with the International Conference on People, Places, and Cities. Over dinner Janaka mentioned that during the conflict people never went out at night. That was thirty years of sitting inside with your parents and grandparents. 

Janaka and Jeeva went on to discuss how a whole generation of young people stayed inside. Didn't even know you could go out. Pretty amazing when you think (again) of our young peoples' paradise in Cambridge and Boston, where as we enjoy the $150 dinners "kids" roam the streets for miles from Union Square pretty much straight through to the Berkeley School of Music on Boylston Street. Imagine a world like that. And imagine what this world was. 

So it's a new world here now and I guess even though the civil war ended six years ago it's never far from the surface. We had suspected this but just as in Batticaloa, it's a surprise to come in touch with the intensity of it. 

Speaking of intensity...and my friend Janaka, yesterday I sat in on his review of student projects. They've spent four months on them and next week is hand-in. After that the final crit is November 28. 

Not to embarrass Janaka any more than he was embarrassed I'll say that his students were  "unprepared." They were a lot like my Boston University students who hand in execrable "capstone" projects they work on for weeks that totally lack critical analysis. I hate that experience. The massive waste of time as we "examine" group after group of poorly prepared students in their last glorious days before summer break, their combination of boredom and excitement. The way they "defend" their awful writing and their poorly thought out ideas by not answering our questions but jamming their "ideas" down our throats. 

Janaka kept saying, "answer the question !" The same as we should insist when we probe for an explanation. "We aren't idiots," he insisted, as he looked at yet another set of woefully incomplete architectural "plans." We could and should say the same thing to our students though through our cultural lens they would take their complaint, as they've done many times before, to the dean or even the president of the university. "They insulted us," or "they didn't show respect," when we criticized papers that didn't deserve respect. Work that didn't merit a passing grade. 

Yet everyone passes. And yesterday, despite his repeated question, "would you like to try again next year?" students insisted that they wanted to submit next week and defend on the 28th. 

It was Janaka who was insulted. As I am each year during the vaunted capstone "process." Janaka is no slouch. In addition to holding a PhD he runs a busy architectural firm of his own that's produced projects from residential properties to major civil projects. I guess I'm no slouch either. And neither are my colleagues. But we repeat the process each grinding year. Reading capstones that are worse, meeting with groups that are less respectful, less engaged, and lately for me, very much against my judgement, meeting over dozens of hours with students who are not even mine. 

But this is about my brave Colombo friends. Janaka looked at 36 "projects" yesterday. Most of the discourse was in Singhala though some was in English (all university instruction here is supposed to be in English). When he got particularly impatient with a student Janaka would point to me and insist, "English! He doesn't understand Singhala!" Actually the exercise for me was fun. At least getting to hear lots of Singhala connected to visuals, to get the rhythm of discourse, was instructive. 

So. Two brave Colombo friends. Bu and Janaka. Both of them have built a life in spite of the hardships of war. Both put up with circumstances not entirely of their liking as they soldier forward. I'm lucky to get to know them as they work to shape the new Sri Lanka. 

Sri Lankan Journey: On a lighter note

If you've been looking at my recent posts you may have noted they are a bit serious. I apologize. Sometimes the world looks like a serious place and you need to share it with other people. Sometimes the world is more of a joke. 

Over the past few years I developed some cool teaching and learning experiences with a wonderful but expensive construction toy called zometools. I mention expensive because I was unable to get my department head at Boston University to pay for them because he told me they didn't "smell of science." OK. A little shortsighted but that's why we have the word "workaround."

By way of workaround I got a small grant from the Boston University Arts Initiative with a proposal to combine art and science, which is exactly what I've done with the zometools. So I have my second-year undergraduates sculpting everything from enzymes to cell membranes with zometools. They have a blast and they engage with content and as they build their sculpture-models they build scientific narrative. I've had the pleasure of documenting this through the social media (mainly twitter) they send me during class in many posts here. 

Last year the Arts Initiative people contacted me and asked if I'd represent BU at the Cambridge Science Festival, a week-long event that hosts about 50,000 people. Happy to do it, I asked them to buy me some more zometools and we set up shop in the front window of the Cambridge Public Library. It was a fun event but not exactly what I had envisioned. Instead of the young adults who I thought would come, mostly parents and grandparents with young children used the room (and the zometools) as a kind of refuge from the intensity of the science festival.

With many of the kids minimally supervised (hard to believe people could have been this disrespectful of the work my students and I had put into organizing the activity) it was a bit of a mob-scene where I was pretty much a babysitter. Lots of pieces ended up broken. But as a kind of consolation prize I was able to separate out a few boxes of intact pieces to being to Sri Lanka for my Fulbright. 

Here in Sri Lanka I'm connected with the Department of Architecture. And while I won't do the molecular-oriented work I do with my BU students there's another set of exercises I developed for my design masters' students at the Boston Architectural College that focus on space, materiality, and design conceptualization.    

I pulled the zometools out of the box this morning, sent here to Sri Lanka through the generosity of the US Diplomatic Pouch, and showed them to my generous and expansive guesthouse host, Mr. Buwankeka Abeysuriya. 

Let me take a quick moment to digress about staying in Sri Lanka. If you want luxury accommodations, family-run guesthouses are probably not for you. However....

If you want to get a taste of how people are in Sri Lanka, if you want unpretentious food and company, if you want to meet a wide range of people while you sit and have your morning coffee...and perhaps most important...if you'd like to see your "travel dollar" equably distributed right within the community, so that useful employment can be offered to a range of people with a range of abilities...a great social boon that you can participate in meaningfully and even generously---a family-run guesthouse is the best way to stay in Sri Lanka. 

Bu took to the zometools immediately. The first thing he envisioned was making lamps for the Vesak Poya day that's celebrated in May. Right away he invited some of his workers to grab a table a a start assembling. They set to the building tools and methodically, carefully, and quickly conceptualized the lamps with their six squares and eight triangles. 

All the while spirits were high and discussion was rife. No one tried to speak in English. The Singhala flowed. I followed some conversations, "this is how you insert this piece," and others. "Where can I get some of these? Bu called his sister in Maryland where it was almost midnight. Everyone participated. 

Like I've seen among my students, people took naturally to the sets and worked on their own, though the conversation was merry and shared among everyone. And everyone jumped in. The pool man. One of the servers. The general maintenance guy. The receptionist. A Singhala-speaking guest who happens to be an engineer. Everyone went in their own direction except for the two guys who started assembling lamps. 

The receptionist built lovely symmetrical structures that got more complicated as she went along. The engineer started by criticizing my free-form sculpture in favor of his more organized style. "People have to live somewhere" was his ever-so-slightly too serious response to my playfulness. Hello? These are building blocks we're talking about here folks. But he caught the big and modeled a sea-urchin for himself. 

So we had a nice array of objects, what ended up to be a symmetric basket, several Vesak lamp skeletons (a light is lit inside and paper covers the lamp along with streamers), my globular creation and a rainy morning full of fun.

How cool will it be tomorrow when I introduce the zometools to my architecture students at Moratuwa?

Sri Lankan journey: Big needs, small needs, chickpeas, and the heart

I'm exhausted from my night trip to Colombo from Batticaloa but I have to start at least to write about our experiences in the East our last day. It's incumbent upon me I feel to communicate the depth of experience, and to reflect on the true nature of Sri Lanka and Sri Lankan friendship that I encountered in Batticaloa. 

But before I write I have to tell you about the chickpeas on the train. It was early on our trip to Batticaloa but far enough into the train ride that we were already feeling pretty grubby. The hands especially. They feel sticky, gummy, much too dirty to use for eating. 

Along comes a vendor with small packets of chickpeas. They are Rs 20 for a small pack. I see people are buying them so I take the dive, filthy hands or not. The chickpeas are perfectly cooked. They are packed with one or two curry leaves. There is clove. There are other aromatics I don't know. In fact they are so unusual in this mixture I can't read them-- only detect their presence. It is a perfect morning wake up breakfast someplace past Gampaha.  

Last night I am at a loud and lively cricket club in the poshest corner of Colombo, cheering on a friend who had a singing gig there. There is smoke and booze and the open building plan exposed to the beautiful night breeze is not enough to waft away the smell of fun. Large plates of chickpeas are served, the same "recipe" as from the train. The chickpeas are canned and mealy. Onion and peppers have been chopped in. Heaps of the bland starch are served with plastic spoons. 

The equation is not as simple as posh is bland and poor is spicy. It is about care and caring, what we used to call "curating" before the term was taken by advertisers. 

At our Batticaloa guest house we are greeted by pleasant staff whose English is good. They are our handlers for the first few days, taking care of meals and this and that, whatever we perceive we need. Behind the scenes, just a few meters from all the activity, right on the guesthouse "campus," the owners stay behind the scene. It is several days before they emerge, longer until they introduce themselves. 

First Mr. Thavarjah takes less than five minutes with us. The next time is is still a test, barely longer. On ensuing days the visits are a bit longer and finally our two field trips, the first one short and bland, to the kovil and experimental farm, the second longer, spicier, more dramatic--to Kattankudy and the Sufi mosque. 

It is our last afternoon, just several hours until our train. I mention to Thavarajah about my son in law Jose, who will be visiting Sri Lanka to see some of the YMCA people. I was told the day before that Thavarajah's work in the Methodist church was connected to the Y, and that he was a past president of the Batticaloa YMCA. I ask Mr. Thavarajah a few questions about what the Y in Batticaloa does, especially their work with hearing impaired children. Micro loans, community development, child safety are several of their concerns. And as I probe I listen. Carefully. How do they provide aid to families? What is the structure of their work? How are families identified, assessed, followed during the process? It occurs to me that the process is what we'd call "granular," finely tuned, well thought out, and carefully undertaken, details attended to. Something like Thavarah's large garden. Something like the small bag of chickpeas. Something curated. Small steps. 

Comes to mind our New Zealand friends at the guesthouse here to check up on the aid activities of a large international childrens' fund. They are popping into communities, doing activities with children, meeting with local "partners" who siphon the money. It is a large endeavor full of photographs and fuss. They are driven everywhere and nowhere. They are fed large portions. Their footstep is large and their impact is ambiguous. Computers, sports equipment, school uniforms are generously given by well-meaning clueless donors. These field visitors are as clueless; "we're teaching them to cook," "we're teaching them hygiene," "we're helping them take better care of their children." The cheek is immense and shocking. Partly because it comes out of the mouths of educated well-intentioned and well-mannered people. With a pile of money behind them.  

I mention this to Thavarajah. He knows. 

He asks if we'd like to visit the Y. We only have one small bag each and the train station, which he's taking us to anyway, is just a few minutes away. Why not take one last tour? A small tour which for me had large impact. 

The YMCA is large and new. It is cared for and an event that just ended has left chairs and a bit of a mess around the place. We are shown the assembly hall, the offices, a meeting room, a classroom. What about the deaf school?

Thavarajah thinks for a moment and decides to take us. The school is right next door. A teacher greets us. It's Saturday so there are no lessons. Children are brought in by van during the week but there are maybe 20 children in residence. First we don't see them. 

We see classrooms. Activity rooms. Walls and stairs. Visible signs of the learning environment. Sign language charts in Tamil, Singhala, and English. The rooms are much, much darker than classrooms in America. They are dim, like many interiors we've seen here. What does this mean culturally? Are these classes dim on purpose?

We have heard from Mr. Thavarjah that many children lost their ability to speak or hear when they saw their parents murdered by LTTE terrorists in front of their eyes. Are these dim classrooms designed for children who have experienced the horrors of terrorism? Are they PTSD-related? Or is it a cultural norm? I've never been in a classroom here. But these rooms are small. Intimate. Close. Almost suffocating in their near-darkness. 

I ask about behavior, especially of boys. I've seen the girls now, some of whom are eager to make contact with us. They are expressive and we see it on their faces. The boys not so much. They are in the shadows and come out slowly. Some stay behind in the dark. The boys, I'm told, do act out. They are frustrated. They show anger. "Boys" I say and Thavarajah relates that three of his employees are hearing impaired, one with other learning-developmental disabilities. These boys, Thavarajah says, get very angry sometimes, especially at meal time when they're hungry and they think they are getting smaller portions or are being treated unfairly. 

How is it to teach these boys in a small classroom? The teachers must be incredibly devoted. I feel their energy all around. I sense the professionalism. And I sense the support they get from the community. One person has just come in to make a donation on her birthday and she is swamped by the girls who are hugging her, touching her, signing to her. 

We are shown "handwork" by the children. A paper flower, a birthday card. Children have appliquéd fabric onto pillowcases and these are sold for Rs 200. We buy a few though we were not brought here to buy. 

We are served tea in the lobby of the school and the children gather around us. Some are shy and some are more aggressive. I struggle to make eye contact with each child and to smile. 

South Asia has the highest rate of child deafness in the world and Sri Lanka is among the countries where it is most prevalent. Here in Batticaloa the YMCA has taken great efforts with the leadership of a few people Mr. Thavurajah mentions, to meet this challenge. They are caring for their own people. They are going beyond treating and teaching deaf children. They are intervening in a social catastrophe that occurred with the conflict and the tsunami. 

They were intervening then during the social catastrophe. And they are anticipating the next social catastrophe that may come from places like Kattankudy and one by one they are strengthening children, families, and the community for now and for the future. 

Thavarajah mentions now he used to live just across the road from this neighborhood. He lives on the grounds of the resort now. He doesn't say why he moved. He does tell us that on this street people were burned alive during what he calls "the terror." He could hear their screams. I wonder. How could you not go crazy hearing this? I think of the bodies on the street. I think of drowned bodies from the tsunami. 

Thavarajah's story is like the aromatic presence in the chickpeas. I knew it was there but I couldn't read it. It took him two weeks to unravel it for us. 

"Is this too hard for you?" he asks. This is the first time on this trip something here has hit me so personally, so viscerally. I was open but I was unprepared. I forgot from my last visit how deeply personal relationships become here once you are trusted. You become trusted by being around long enough and speaking gently. Go fast and loud and you will not make contact. Stay close and still and a world opens to you as deeply as a cavernous cave. 

I was affected more than I thought by what Thavarajah told me. Not least because it came so quietly and after so many days of (limited) discourse with him. I hadn't considered that he would read my feelings. 

We drove up to another place, close to the street he showed us, "St. Theresa's retreat." We got out of the car and stepped into a quiet front area that looked deserted. Inside, a large hall with two sewing tables set up. Two young women doing close embroidery at a high table in what looked like very dim light. They were sewing vestments for an initiation ceremony coming up in Colombo a few days into the future. 

We were met by the head sister, who spoke good English but mostly spoke Tamil with Thavarajah. She had spent 20 years in Paraguay so she must have been speaking Spanish when she heard on Christmas Day her family had been washed to sea. She came back here and though she is not connected with the Y she has been teaching young girls to do fine handwork. The enterprise, more than 40 girls, is supported by sales of the work, which are mostly marketed in high-end hotels in Colombo. If I saw these in Colombo I'd think "nice" but I'd never buy them. Here they are not for sale and we were not here to buy but we have bought. 

Three hand towels for Jose's parents with gorgeous embroidered native birds of Sri Lanka. 

Most of the girls leave after they're trained, we're told, before they start making things that are saleable. It takes two or three years for a girl to be trained to do useful work but most of the girls leave for factories for fast money. The sole support for keeping the girls during training comes from sales. Some few girls go  back to the villages, sometimes they are set up with a sewing machine. Sometimes two or three women in a village get a sewing machine from the YMCA as a micro loan. These loans may be Rs 10,000 or so. Always paid back, I am told. 

In the West we are accustomed to big needs. Here it may be the needs are small because so many people have so little. In the West we do things Big. Big finance, big building, big agriculture. Big people. Here still most things seem to be small. Micro finance, small buildings, small projects. In the West we have big targets. The World Trade Center. Bataclan Theater in Paris. Here the targets are smaller but more powerful. Human hearts and hands. 

Here we feel each others' hearts. They beat in the dark in still places. Thavurajah's heart touched ours as he kissed us both goodbye in front of the night train.  

Sri Lankan journey: how I became a human shield

Almost everything I write here is based on conjecture. If you want to read words that are based on empirical evidence please go elsewhere. There are no photos to accompany this post because the events here happened at night after dark. Even if I had brought my camera my (first) conjecture is that the people and places I saw were sensitive material. Photos might have been distinctly unwelcome. 

I was in the pool in the late afternoon when Janet came running. "Mr. Thavarajah has been looking everywhere for you. He wants to take you someplace!" Last time our amiable host took us on an outing was a few hours over the weekend. He asked me that day to be ready by 11. The tour yesterday came without warning. 

I jumped out of the pool, dried off, and quickly pulled on a tshirt and a pair of shorts. If this tour could be called at the spur of the moment so could my fashion presence. It was hot and humid, the precursor to a stupendous rainfall that was to come later in the middle of the night, as I flip-flopped to the main building where Thavarajah's car was waiting. He was out of sight so Janet ran into the office to find him. Simultaneously his wife and the main desk person came running out, "You're here! Has your wife found you? Mr. Thavurajah has been looking for you all afternoon!" What was brewing? My second conjecture had been to put a few small bills into my pocket. 

Last time Thavarajah had taken us to a large kovil north of town. The owner of this fairly elaborate temple, he told us, had brought with him money from abroad and developed the kovil and its ample grounds from that money. "He's also doing some kind of charity work," Mr. Thavarajah mentioned, "along with all this land he bought. I'm not sure what he's trying to accomplish," was all he offered. A rambling tour through the temple complex, a first-time experience for me, ended with Mr. Thavarajah depositing a bill into the donations box. He's a subtle guy, slight and short on words, and his movements and statements appear deliberate and well-chosen. But he did let it be seen that he was putting in a donation. I followed suit. 

Later he bought some large pumpkins and a few other vegetables at the attached shop, "it's for charity," he mentioned, and he took us next door to the all-veggie restaurant, very clean and very spicy. As we washed our hands he examined, felt, and took a few notes on the metal washup sink. "Isn't it nice," Janet suggested, "he's always looking for ideas for how to improve his place." True, Mr. Thavarajah's slow movements, barely a bit of energy expended or wasted, drew your attention. They drew you in. As I write now I recall them clearly, as insignificant as they seemed at the time. 

After our snack he asked If we minded seeing a small garden his friend was developing down the road. Of course we looked forward to it. On the way down the long road east toward the ocean he noted a large fenced-in area. "Christians and Hindus have united here to build a community for destitute young couples," he explained, without offering details. 

Janet's better than me about pushing for details, saying things I wouldn't think of proffering, things that might be too complex for our interlocutors, too off the topic, or too opinionated. But she gets a response. By contrast I take a quiet ear with me and take what I get. Both approaches work in their own way I suppose. This time, unfortunately, she didn't ask for details. My third conjecture: why would Thavarajah mention the collaboration between Christians and Hindus on this project? What are they uniting for? What might they be uniting against? 

My fourth conjecture, as we moved literally from planting to planting on the new farm-garden, my host explaining, cutting a stem, pointing to a weed, caressing a leaf, all the time instructing, quietly, almost inaudibly, the caretaker for his absentee friend, was that Mr. Thavarajah is someone of consequence in this greater Batticaloa community. His presence means something. His words carry weight. Maybe this is why he can use them quietly, sparingly. 

Last night we found out how many local and national organizations he sits on, consults for, and heads. "You must be a very patient man," I ventured. His smile was subtle but broad. 

Last weekend we were brought back  to the guesthouse unceremoniously. The few words we exchanged over the next few days were friendly. But they said nothing, hinted at nothing we were to encounter yesterday afternoon. 

Into the car we packed ourselves. Me in front at Janet's insistence. The AC was turned way up and I began to question my sartorial choice. 

We drove straight to Kattankudy, the community we had ridden our bikes through the other day. Kattankudy sits about 5 km south of Kallady, the beach community where our guesthouse is located. Thavarajah built and planted this place from scratch in 1979 ("botany was my favorite topic") he once explained, and again after the tsunami in 2004. He had hoped to plant an arboretum. The guesthouse came, he reports, as an afterthought. 

"Kattankudy," he told us, "may be the most densely populated place on Earth. There are 25,000 people here in one square mile." 

"We noticed the big houses on our bike ride here," I added. 

The subtle smile, "they build them large."

"Have you ever been on this road?" he asked as he swung down a wide, mostly unpaved road to the left, motorbikes swooping like swallows. He asked in the same tone of voice he had used during our weekend foray when he asked if we'd ever been inside a Hindu kovil. It was a road we had actually avoided. The intensity of the main road in Kattankudy was more than enough. Following an unpaved road with that much traffic was less than inviting. 

The windows of Thavarajah's vehicle steamed up as we made our way gingerly around puddles, zigzagging past kids on bicycles in the dark, past over-brightly lit take out places. "One thing about our Muslim communities," he said, "they eat outside a lot." Next conjecture: why had he brought us to the heart of Muslim Kattankudy on a rutted, crowded road? And of all the things he could discuss why was he talking about Muslim Sri Lankans and their eating habits?

It followed that we made our way slowly to the beach. About 100 girls in light green full body covering marched past on the muddy road. Thavarajah started talking about conservative Muslim practices, how they are relatively new to the island, partially the product of women working in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the Middle East as domestics. He spoke of internal conflict in the Muslim community over conservative vs. relatively less conservative religious values. He spoke of intra-community violence, of big money coming in from the Middle East, of mosques built and torn down. He hinted at coming strife, mentioning that "Muslims are a minority within a minority here in Sri Lanka. They're pampered even more than us Tamils." I had heard similar narratives in every corner of Sri Lanka from many people of different origins. Here I was hearing it from a man who grew up with Muslim schoolmates, who had a lifetime of perspective to go on--a perspective that included a generation-long internecine conflict and natural disaster--and who is active in shaping the communal future of this place. He was voicing concern for the future of Sri Lanka. 

Conjecture: was he voicing real concerns? Were his concerns based on evidence or conjecture? Are 100 people in fundamentalist uniforms (we had seen them last week when we rode down the main road of Kattankudy) a potential army of fundamentalists? Is intra-community violence a precursor of inter-community violence?

When we reached the beach road he seemed surprised that the place we were looking for wasn't there. We rode south a bit looking for a grand mosque he had described. Then he stopped, opened the steamy window, and asked people on two occasions where the mosque was he was looking for. I had the distinct feeling that Mr. Thavurajah was testing the waters. How would people respond when he asked for this place? 

When we reached our destination, the world headquarters of a Sufi sect founded here in Kattankudy we "stepped down" from the car to have a look around. It was about 6:30 but the night seemed much later. The mosque and meditation center, painted white, was strung with gaudy lights giving it an unreal look, something like the takeout places we had passed. In front was a gorgeous verticillate minaret-tower, gleaming white in the night. Right on the beach, the previous minaret had collapsed on the newly built mosque in the tsunami. 

We were greeted at the gate by a government military police guard. Conjecture: why was a military presence required in front of the entrance to what we later were told is the "most secular" of Muslim mosques in town?

Taken in by a sexton who willingly took us through the mosque, showing us which parts were for meditation, showing us the mens' section and the women's section. Taking us to the perfumed, domed room under which the founder, a local bodybuilder and wrestler, and his wife were entombed. The surface of their tombs bore a designed emblem with the kabbah on one side and the dome of the rock in Jerusalem on the other. 

Mr. Thavarajah touched door jambs and finishes just as he had done at the vegetarian restaurant with us. He translated little of the narrative of our loquacious host but let us discover on our own. After a warm handshake with a man and woman of distinction, whose role here was not explained to us, we were taken to the meditation center where a group of men sat. Here Mr. Thavurajah took a bill out of his top pocket and stuffed it down the charity box. I followed suit. 

In Tamil, which was the only language being used except for the recorded "Allah hu akhbar" chant that played for long minutes, Thavarajah was asked his religion. We heard him say Methodist and he heard him say we were from the UK. Conjecture: why not America?Conjecture: why did he not volunteer that our religion is Jewish? 

Conjecture: why did he encourage the sexton to show us the library, whose only contents are the 16 books published by the strongman-founder of this Sufi sect? 

There were multiple copies of the books for reading in the library or for sale. Three were translated into English. I took the opportunity to pick up one edition to read the founder's holy words on world peace, humanism, science, and evolution. His conjecture (or was this holy writ?) as expressed in the book I picked up is that there was only one path to world peace. This path lay far from the precincts of secular knowledge or scientific inquiry. 

To conjecture further might be unnecessary. The message was clear. Thavarajah, one of the leaders of Batticaloa's Christian community, was putting out feelers to the most "liberal" Muslim sect in town, the sect most vulnerable to reprise by its fundamentalist Islamic brethren. The weekend before he had take a foray to the other side of the bookend (or bulwark), Hindu religious charities.  On both occasions but especially this night we were his "human shields." Showing some "British" tourists around was the most innocuous way for him to penetrate Kattankudy's volatile social and religious scene. 

Who can conjecture where this society will go?

As I finished up writing I just got this link from Janet. It may explain something more about our outings with Mr. Thavarajah and the people he's trying to establish some contact  and goodwill with for the future good of his community. This post of mine was based on guesswork. The following article is not conjecture. 

http://www.islamicpluralism.org/2071/the-wahhabi-invasion-of-sri-lanka

Penetration and Immersion-Different Ways to experiece Cultural Exchange

The first few weeks we were in Sri Lanka I took pride in how we had penetrated deeply into society here. Or so I thought. We had met and worked with colleagues and students, given lectures and taken interviews, discovered unexpected pathways and thought new thoughts. We had tasted and savored new foods. I had tasted (but not particularly savored) tank silt. We had laughed with people. We had gone deep, pushed ourselves, and bored through obstacles and strangenesses. 

Were these collective activities any different than whitewater rafting, kitesurfing, whale-watching or elephant petting? After all you have to "penetrate" pretty deeply into Sri Lanka to do those things. They aren't available in Colombo so you have to take the trouble to "go" somewhere to do them. 

Well yes, our academic and cultural exchange was of a much different character than those tourist activities. They did not include consumption. They weren't something we could have paid for.  But "penetration" has connotations I'm not that comfortable with now that we've been here longer and I've thought more deeply about it. 

To penetrate it seems, is a kind of unidirectional movement. The "penetrator" penetrates actively and the "penetrated" is passive. That's not my idea of exchange. Penetration, because of its directionality also connotes the potential for withdrawal, removal, or retreat. It somehow falls short of commitment, completeness. 

Imagine something falling into the water. Immersion happens from all directions in on the object (or person) being immersed. Immersion is complete. It happens up above your nostrils and eardrums and eyebrows. Once you are immersed you can re-emerge but there may be no predictable way this can happen. There may be no logical way of reversing the process of immersion. 

So. For a couple of examples. Our long bus ride yesterday to Maha Oya was in a sense, an immersion. We were surrounded by sound, movement, and the close bodies of our fellow passengers. We were experiencing the same things as they were and to the extent possible we were experiencing them in the same way. But our foray down the Polonowurra Road was a sort of unsuccessful "penetration." Not enough time to accomplish whatever intangible we had set out to discover, only the opportunity it seemed, to stick to schedule so we could get back to transportation home on time. Immersion was very much called for yesterday afternoon but we couldn't experience it because of tight time limitations. Immersion takes time. 

What about that immersive bus ride though? Was it thoroughly immersive? Perhaps even this experience fell short of immersion for the simple reason that we don't have language skills here in Sri Lanka. So we couldn't experience things the same way as the other people on the bus. Were we on a crowded bus or train back in Boston we would more likely be immersed in our surroundings, simply by dint of the fact that we would be inured to our surroundings. We would be part of them. The language around us would be, for the most part, our language. The route taken would be one we knew. The schedule and time expectations would be known to us. 

So, can we ever hope to immerse ourselves in Sri Lankan culture during this nine-month challenge of cultural exchange known as the Fulbright? I'm half optimistic. 

The other day during our bike ride down the Old Kalmunai Road we had the amazing experience of being part of the flow of traffic. Janet noted this actually, as we discussed our ride later that evening. The chorus of horns and bells, potholes and pavement, the ballet of several layers of traffic in each lane, was something we shared with everybody else using the road. The language of busy traffic was universal, something we could partake in as we flowed southward with the rest of the people on the road. Same thing happens when walking down the Galle Road in Colombo, crossing it, or stopping for traffic. And in a quieter sense, our beautiful and memorable bike ride to the scenic Unnichchai Tank was a kind of immersion in the landscape, albeit a temporary one. 

I'm half optimistic about immersion because we are slowly making Sri Lankan culture a part of us. Our abilities and comprehension, at least in Sinhala are bound to improve as we start language lessons next week. Opportunities for immersion may increase as we get to know more people more deeply. 

My half un-optimistic side says "yes, but you'll always be going back to your guesthouse" but at home too, our kitchen is a haven from the bustling day. Also, though we may never be thoroughly a part of this culture--so much so that we don't even sense what's going on--just live it, there's some comfort in the fact that there are many cultures happening around us here. At home it's the same case. So even a person fluent in one of the languages here, even if she knew the bus schedule and experienced the same sounds and faces on a given day, might not or probably would not experience the bus ride like everyone else on the vehicle. There are just too many dimensions for anyone to master them all. My Christian Tamil-speaking host might only guess at the emotions and thoughts of Tamil-speaking Muslims stepping on and off the bus. And his guesses might be as far off the mark as mine. 

Not that I'm beating myself up over this. The learning curve of this "cultural exchange" assignment is steep and we all have our limitations. Good thing I'm feeling ready for more challenge as we move forward. Or should I say...immerse ourselves more deeply over the next months.