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Magazine
Paradox in paradise
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Everyday life seems to belie the blood spots on Colombo's common memory. The people are friendly, polite, and helpful and the streets are still streets. The traumas have not surfaced, although this is Sri Lanka, a country racked by decades of civil war. Beauty and horror co-exist and there is a constant exchange between violence and normality. An essay by ILIJA TROJANOW.
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Anuradhapura ... the old capital with its sprawling temples, monasteries, pools and gardens.
A FEW days are enough to recognise the central metaphors of this country: barbed wire and palm trees. Roadblocks abound. In the middle of the city, barbed-wired fences besiege the President; in front of the gates, green sandbags have entrenched security and the guards are frightening in their stillness. Just turn your head and you will see the palm trees swaying, like they do in one of the glossy catalogues that lure the tourists to the beaches of Negombo, for example, just north of the capital Colombo, where worn-out dreams are sold at a bargain. Mechanics from Yorkshire sleep late, before they clink the ice in their gin-and-tonics. The more enthusiastic among them play bowls with coconuts. The sea, empty because of its evil reputation, has reduced the brown beach to a small lungi, which can hardly cover the shame of the hotel. The recent cosmetic operation is already peeling off. There is a limit to investment when you are stuck with the worst kind of international tourism: package tourism.
An unusual country calls for unusual guides. I rely on two books by Michael Ondaatje: Running in the Family and Anil's Ghost. Both bear witness to the wounds and destruction on this island, both sing of its mystical charm. "But here it was a more complicated world morally. The streets were still streets, the citizens remained citizens. They shopped, changed jobs, laughed. Yet the darkest Greek tragedies were innocent compared with what was happening here." At every corner the visitor encounters this paradox. A constant exchange between violence and normality. The centre of Colombo contains many dark memories: a mark on the asphalt, where a former President was blown up by a suicide bomber; the Reserve Bank, in front of which 200 kg of dynamite was detonated; the villa of a successful newspaper publisher whose aeroplane exploded in mid-air. But everyday life seems to belie the blood spots on the common memory. People are friendly, polite, and helpful. There is no aggression to be felt. The traumas have not risen to the surface, although the civil war has lasted two decades and has killed around 60,000 people, displacing a further million.
The countryside is green, but also cramped and confined, divided into small portions of rice and grass. Punctuated by massive boulders. Distances are small. It takes a few hours to reach the old capital Anuradhapura, a sprawling monument consisting of holy trees, temples, monasteries, wells, pools and gardens. Shortly after we arrive, it starts to rain, hesitantly at first, then with a punch. Like a child, which works itself up into a frenzy beyond any comfort. After dark we have a full-blown storm on our hands, the rain blowing in through every opening, across the verandah of the charmingly old-fashioned Tissawewa Hotel, flooding the ears of the guests. A retired punkah staggers from one pulley to the other. A filigreed lamp throws wire-meshed shadows on the wooden ceiling. Everything trembles as though on the high seas. A sofa with a baldachin is forced onto its stilted knees. The old waiter, who calls his colleagues "boys", serves one round of tea after the other, finding refuge in routine. Later on, after tea has given way to beer, a centenarian tree crashes, missing the roof by a few feet. We thank our stars for the lucky escape.
Next morning the tree lies next to the old house like a beached whale. The storm has killed a few people, it has cut off electricity lines and blocked roads. The uprooted trees underline the dilapidated character of the park. Next to the wall of a refectory stands one legible signpost: Dr. Weicherding. A Dutch planter comes to mind, with knee-high boots and a monocle. Elsewhere the yellow letters have peeled off.
Unfortunately the Dagobas, those massive domes, which from far away resemble volcanoes that have not yet erupted, offer no shelter from the rain. They are without inner space. Surely ranking among the most mysterious religious buildings of mankind, they cater to few needs except the thirst for powerful symbolism. Initially they represented a cone of rice, before they gradually grew alongside the self-confidence of the Buddhist rulers, rising to peaks of power. The Jetavanarana Dagoba (Third Century), built solely of bricks, was at its time the third largest construction in the world, just a few hands smaller than the pyramid of Cheops. Five thousand monks used to circle clockwise around the Abhayagiri Dagoba, another giant more than 100 metres high. But otherwise little is left of the courtly splendour, since most buildings then were constructed of wood, using stone only for the base. The remains — amidst feverish overgrowth — allow only a foggy dream of the lost and hidden. Here it is easy to understand the archaeologist Palipana, one of Ondaatje's memorable characters: "Every historical pillar he came to in a field he stood beside and embraced as if it were a person he had known in the past."
Anuradhapura ... the old capital with its sprawling temples, monasteries, pools and gardens.
A soldier on duty, who offers — ironically in front of the Ratnaprasada, the jewel palace — a small, dark red stone, disturbs such reflections. Ruby, he says. But it is glass, an old case of mistaken identity, "good Birmingham glass!" At the entrance to the holy Bo-Tree one has to undergo a full body check, several times. Around the tree the army has constructed a wall of intensive presence. Behind this wall is a pastoral scene: rice paddies, small channels full of excessive energy, herons and cranes like pieces in a game of patience. The beauty and the horror not only coexist, sometimes they even collaborate. The security closure of some roads to vehicles allows peaceful walks; the over-flooding makes fishermen out of bicycle-riders; a group of women wash with gusto near their storm-rattled village.
For a thousand years, Anuradhapura was the capital, then it was conquered by the South Indian dynasty of the Cholas. New masters — a new centre. In the late 10th Century, Polonnaruwa was founded in a strategic setting. Today, Polonnaruwa is a more accessible monument, sheltering, among others, the famous Stone Book (Gal Pota). The rain had filled up the letters, as if it wanted to take a watery cast. Words had become tiny channels, which converged into a praise of King Nissankamalla, on this nine-metre-long and one-metre-wide inscription. It is said that the king used to relax on this, the largest of granite books. If so, his legs must have dangled over the footnotes.
In a low dive nearby, bananas hang on the wall in clusters. A lonely guest, a truck driver, shares five curries and his thoughts with us, munching and whispering: "The army officers are making a fortune out of this war. They sell weapons to the enemy. The people in power could end this war tomorrow, but they have no interest in doing so. So many atrocities have been committed that, for most people, the only way out of the war is the war. But I will never allow my son to be drafted into the army."
We pay the bill, inclusive of a 7.5 per cent defence tax.
Brutal visions are not new to this island. Amid dramatic rocks lies the monastery of Aluvihara — it harbours a Buddhist cabinet of horrors. Goya and Blake united in medieval Lanka. Yamaha passes judgment on the sinners of this world. Several dozen frescos imagine their just punishment vividly. Crows gouge out the eyes of liars. Slanderers (and informers!) are set adrift in a sea of snakes. The thorns of a cactus spear adulterers. Some of the sensitivities are astoundingly modern. Whoever sets forests on fire, will be thrown into the fire. Spears will dismember whoever exploits his workers. A local high school teacher is angered by this baroque display of fantasy. After all, this is the holy place where the teachings of the Buddha were written down in Pali script for the very first time. But the people, he rages, have falsified Buddhism; they have degraded the pure philosophy to a crude superstition. He will not agree that the social and ecological awareness, which speaks out of this punitive catalogue, is impressive.
Kandy, just a few kilometres away, has succumbed to bad taste. The Lake Club celebrates its own eclecticism. At the entrance one is greeted by a ticket vendor and a Sri Lankan painting in the classical style. In the next room, a gigantic hall, some sort of card roulette is played at a forlorn table. Behind a glass wall, virtual horses rack up real bets. And in the theatre next door, a potpourri of local dances is presented, spiced with some acrobatics and exotic antics. After the show one is eager to agree with Paul Bowles (as quoted by Ondaatje): "The Singhalese are probably the most unmusical people in the world. It is positively impossible to show less feeling for pitch, melody or rhythm".
Like all colonial hill stations, Kandy is a victim of its attractive setting. In valleys, the pollution is effectively dammed up. Kandy offers a lot of congestion, noise, spoliation, and a tooth of the Buddha, heavily guarded after the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) attacked and bombed the temple several years ago. Most tourists rush on to the Pinnewale Elephant Orphanage. The elephant in Pinnewale is like Mozart in Salzburg: Elefant View Hotel and Hotel Elefant Park, wooden elephants and cloth elephants, carved, stamped and painted elephants. T-Shirts with happy, sweet, dancing elephants. At ten every morning, the stars of Pinnewale are led to the river, where they enjoy a Walt Disney splash in front of 500 amateur paparazzi. A small signboard warns that elephants are not tame animals, which at first sounds about as credible as if one were to read that the elephants from the movie "Jungle Book" are dangerous. But that impression is terribly wrong. The very next day, one of the pachyderms revolted, trampling his mahout to death and seriously injuring several visitors. Nature had reinstated itself, and horror had broken out again.
A temple in Colombo ... mystical charm and dark memories.
In the Paradise Club, a casino next to the airport, a few men are busy piling up chips on indifferent numbers. Two of them speak excellent German, but they will not confide in me, where and why they learnt it. Civil war is a great redistributor of wealth. Only one number wins, but it wins heavily.
The forces betting on this one number are keen to destroy diversity, a quality Sri Lanka is blessed with. They propagate a monoculture, which secures their wealth. For nationalism and fundamentalism are mainly instruments of greed and enrichment. In this sense, Sri Lanka has truly fallen among thieves.
Ilija Trojanow is the founder of Marino Verlag, a publishing company for African and East European fiction and non-fiction. He is currently based in Mumbai, working as a freelance journalist. The winner of numerous literary awards and prizes, he is now working on a collection of articles on India called Der Sadhu an der Teufelswand. Reportagen aus einem an deren Indien and his second novel dealing with the life of British historian and explorer Sir Richard Burton.
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