Colombo, Sri Lanka

Shehan Karunatilaka on a capital that straddles the beautiful and the banal.

If a visitor is planning a trip to Sri Lanka, I usually advise that they skip Colombo. Not being harsh, but on the island’s buffet table of scenic delights, the city is very much a side dish.

On first glimpse, it’s just another Asian metropolis, trying to peddle that East-meets-West thing. Not as berserk as Mumbai, not as sober as Singapore. Most travelers will drive straight through, en route to the beaches down south, the hilltops out east, or the fallen kingdoms up north.

If you’re in Sri Lanka to upload pics, there may be some boxes for you to tick. The sun setting over the kites on Galle Face Green. The city ablaze with light and color during Vesak. Elephants by Beira Lake in full-moon fancy dress.

But cities aren’t just for tourists. Dismount from your air-conditioned car into the heat and the dust, and you’ll find that there’s plenty below the surface if you’re only willing to scratch.

The Greeks, Romans, and Persians used Colombo’s harbor as a trading port. The Portuguese built their fort here and commanded the coast. The Dutch seized the city in the bloody siege of 1656, before ceding it to the British a century and a half later. Every colonizer left his paw prints. You see it in the clock towers, the schools, and the grand hotels. In the railway line that snakes between Galle Road and the coast and in the cricket games that fill every street. Colombo’s the only city in the world with four test-match venues, a place where the game is practiced as a religion and celebrated as a carnival. Cricket binds this city, as it does a nation not short of divisions.

Foreign empires have colonized Colombo, from the Greeks and Persians onward. Now, the city is seeking to reinvent itself, Alfredo Caliz / Panos

Colombo houses many worlds. From the malls of Bambalapitiya to the palaces of Cinnamon Gardens; from the dives of Slave Island to the balconies of Havelock Town. Pathways decorated with lush trees and colorful kovils run by rickety billboards and smelly canals. Roads crowded with buses, trishaws, and trucks make way for motorcades of Pajeros and Lamborghinis. Gaudy casinos rub shoulders with churches.

It’s a city that doesn’t know where it’s going but is determined to get there. Today Colombo seeks to reinvent itself. Where once there were checkpoints, high structures are rising. Walls will be knocked down, highways extended, and slums replaced with greenery. While the sun shines without pause and the monsoon comes and goes as it pleases, everyone pretends to forget about the slaughters of the past. The burnings of 1983, the explosions of ’87, the abductions of ’89. The electoral bloodbaths, the prolonged power failures, and the parade of assassinations that punctuated the 1990s.

Today, we prefer to remember the victories. The cups won, the guns silenced, the bigotry overcome. We ignore the ghosts of the unresolved, the unconsoled, and the unforgiven that haunt our present. We try to celebrate our many communities and remind ourselves that we have no more excuses. No more war to hold us back, no more scapegoats to blame.

Because the city no longer belongs to the rulers who deface it, the thugs who defile it, or the bureaucrats who slow it down. It belongs to street vendors who serve up glorious kottu. To the trishaws adorned with misspelled slogans. To the bloggers who share secrets and the lovers who hide under umbrellas. It belongs to the girls with their straightened hair, the workers crammed into wobbly buses, and the strays that prowl its streets. To those who appear in Colombo’s gossip mags and those who pretend not to read them.

Colombo is both big city and small town. And, like the nation it belongs to, it is on the cusp of something. Something that could be wonderful or malign. It is poised on a precipice, about to plummet or to soar.

For those who live here, who’ve seen it morph from city by the sea to garrison town to this shiny emblem of our unseen future, Colombo offers its own buffet table of delights. It may not be a city that you instantly fall in love with, but it is one that you grow to adore.

SRI LANKAN MYSTERIES

Three striking differences with India

Alaka M. Basu

I am writing this on the road from Colombo to Kandy. And again (I have been doing this repeatedly for the last four days) I thank the gods for having allowed this break from the bitter cold of Delhi into such a lush paradise of warmth and water and throat-searing food.

But it is also a bit disorienting to be in this country. It feels like home country (the landscape is especially so reminiscent of Kerala) and yet there is something that is distinctly different. One does not get this kind of disorientation in a patently different land — Japan or Sweden for example; there everything is new and different and so one is clearly an outsider. And within India, even in places far away from one’s “usual place of residence” (as the census calls it), there are reminders of the larger country one claims citizenship of — Hindi film music wafting out of narrow lanes, life-sized posters of unphotogenic politicians wishing someone or being wished by someone or the other “haardik kamnayein” for a birthday or festival, familiar brand names of soaps and spices in roadside grocery stores.

This is what I think at first is the cause of the feeling of disorientation in Colombo. Until I notice that I recognize the Hindi film melodies of the Sinhala songs playing on taxi radios and notice that Sri Lankan politicians are as unphotogenic and as poster-hungry as ours, and discover that the Tata and Airtel and Reliance (as well as Ariel and Colgate and Lux) brands are as visibly ubiquitous as in India.

So what is it that makes me feel out of place? The drive to Kandy is long and my moving pen gradually reaches a conclusion. There is something culturally amiss here. I am not seeing some important things that I expect to see when the people around look so much like me that they even come and ask me for road directions. Culture is a big word, I know, and it implies things that are long-standing and stable and difficult to change. If I believed this lay definition of culture I would be very depressed indeed, because what is missing in Sri Lankan culture should be missing from India too, and the thought of culture being an immutable thing should make one hopelessly sad in this particular case. Luckily, the more academic current definition of culture is all about it being dynamic and changeable and negotiable, so maybe reflecting on the positive culture of Sri Lanka will help us to change and negotiate our own negative one as well.

So how are Sri Lankans different from us? I know of course all the text book stuff that was rammed down our throats in classes on development in college — the remarkable literacy rates (virtually universal), the excellent health (infant mortality, maternal mortality and life expectancy levels that rival Western Europe’s), the fantastic public services for health and education that persist in the face of a neo-liberal economy. I also know that this country has seen more than two decades of brutal violence, which seems to have finally ended or at least paused (thanks to a period of even more brutal violence, some say). But these are not things that one notes visually and anecdotally enough to account for one’s feeling of disorientation.

Then what are these more obviously visible unique features of life in Sri Lanka? I think that three startling differences make up the root cause of my disorientation. Maybe they are related, but maybe they are not — they are quite distinct and don’t automatically accompany economic growth (they certainly have not accompanied our own long period of 8-9 per cent gross domestic product growth); that is why I call them cultural rather than socio-economic.

First of all (and dearest to my own heart) is the ease and joy with which women traverse public spaces. In the densest crowds, such as in the packed public buses we ride in Colombo and (as I am still to discover) in the heaving masses paying their new year’s respects in the Tooth temple in Kandy, if this had been India (and especially if this had been Delhi), there would have been few women daring enough to actually be present as well as to smile pleasantly at strangers — even male strangers, as my husband happily discovers. Instead they would be fearful of being groped and mauled if young (or even middle-aged) and pushed roughly aside if old and weak. But I am not ‘eve-teased’ and nor do I break any bones; so I wonder what age category I should slot myself in. Instead, there is a miraculous one inch of free space that surrounds me from top to bottom and back to front right in the middle of these superficially shoving crowds. I cannot stop rubbing my eyes in amazement at this.

My second reason for feeling out of place is that public spaces are unreasonably clean. Neither in Colombo nor on the road to Kandy did I see the mounds of filth-encrusted plastic bags and other forms of smelly or environment-contaminating waste that even the most expensive parts of our own cities and towns revel in. Nor were public buildings and roadsides ungrudging receptacles for fiery red spit. Sri Lankans may not eat paan, but they do use plastic bags alas, and they must be having household garbage too; where they dispose of these things remains a mystery to me.

The third striking absence was of the kind of degrading poverty one sees in such abundance in any place in India. I don’t think their poor and homeless get hidden from view as ours reportedly were in Delhi during the Commonwealth Games and, yet, even the one apparent beggar I saw on the street, and tried to give some change to, turned out to have a sheaf of lottery tickets she pressed upon me in return. This absence of broken-hearted (and frequently broken-limbed) poverty was so in your face that I forgave myself for wondering which planet I was on. The explanation probably lies in the equally implausible absence of evidence of roaring wealth of the kind that hurts one’s eyes and ears in the shopping malls of Delhi and Mumbai and Calcutta (my anthropological expedition to the mall in Colombo — Majestic City — that the local people proudly urged me to visit was such a damp squib after Ambience Mall in Delhi and South City in Calcutta) as well as in the fancy car dealerships in Kolhapur and Coimbatore. In other words, in spite of having a per capita income close to twice ours, if crazy consumerism is a bit reined in in Sri Lanka, there must be greater income equality than we have here and that might explain the relative absence of stark poverty.

PS: When I started writing this piece, I meant to include a fourth Sri Lankan virtue — the absence of petty cheating. But this had to be dropped after our experience at the Elephant Orphanage in Pinnawala. As we neared the bathing baby elephants in this spot of popular tourist attraction, a scrupulously innocent looking man in a lungi persuaded us to give him Rs 100 for a bag of bananas to feed the elephants. Excited about this feeding adventure we rushed to the water only to be stopped by a guard who pointed us to a sign saying that feeding the animals was prohibited and that we had to leave the bananas on the ground. Needless to say, given our Indian expectations, when we turned around within seconds before admiring the elephants, there was no sign of the fruit seller or the guard. Or the packet of bananas.

The author is professor, department of Development Sociology, Cornell University

Sri Lanka: saved by the bell

Lynda Gill

In Jaffna, you don't go to the supermarket. Vendors cycle to you, and they all have their own ring tones

Stop me and buy one ... a Sri Lankan fruit vendor sells king coconuts from his bicycle

In a world of internet shopping, shopping in Jaffna comes as a pleasant surprise; they do things a little differently here. The first tinkle of a bicycle bell can be heard at about 5.30am – the milkman on his bike, dispensing milk from an old metal churn into housewives' recycled bottles and jars. This discreet little tinkle is followed by the very much less discreet, irritating tune of the bread van. Dah da dah, dah da dah, dah da da dah. And again. And again. You wonder how much bread can possibly be needed on one small street.

A bit later, when you have just shaken off the tune of the bread van, a different, louder and even more persistent jingle: the ice-cream van. Competing with the bread van, the vendor has cranked up the volume and added bass. It's the Tom Jones of the van vendors: the funky beat promising sexy, irresistible ice-cream.

After all this aural stimulation, the apologetic tinkle of the fishmonger on his wiry old bike is a relief. The housewives swarm around, elbowing their neighbours out of the way to secure the best fish at the best price. The scales are brought out and the process of weighing and bargaining, adjusting and re-negotiating, begins. The fishmonger is followed by his friend the veg vendor, with his old wooden cart, selling fresh vegetables to accompany the fish, and papaya for dessert.

Throughout the day, a straggle of old men on old bikes pass by, offering services and goods – bicycle repairs, newspapers, soft drinks – each with a subtly different ring. My bell identification skills are elementary, but my neighbours are experts, scurrying out of the house only for specific rings. Then it's time to pick up the pace for the evening round. Bread, ice cream (again?), fish, vegetables, lottery tickets. Usually the vans stagger their visits, but sometimes they converge, resulting in competing tunes and frantic housewives.

In the brief lulls between musical retail activity the local temple starts up. There's always a festival: there are so many gods and all of them seem to demand noise. My sister phoned. What's all that noise, she said. Which one, I asked, the bread van, ice-cream van, fish man, temple, crows?

It's noisy, the tunes are irritating, but I wouldn't have it any other way. Internet shopping? No thanks, where's the fun in that?