Mirror Magazine

Mirror Magazine

Shell-shocked
Being "local" and an adult, I have to pay six rupees to enter the National Museum on Marcus Fernando Mawatha, Colombo 7. At 12 noon the place is brimming with school children. White uniforms, red ribbons, badges, ties, shoes and socks... I gaze at them in wonder; my species in the process of evolution! They look so alien! "Is everybody here? There should be eighty-three of you. Where did those who came in the second bus go?" asks a teacher in a hoarse voice. "Now behave yourselves. Get in line. Remember where you are. Don't talk. Don't run..."

I stare at this phenomenon and almost forget my mission - the Rodney Jonklaas Seashells Display Room, which had been praised very highly in the newspapers sometime ago.

I track to the Natural History section. "Can I see the seashells collection?" I ask the portly officer at the entrance. "It's upstairs," he says, pointing a finger skywards. "But go through the exhibits on the ground floor first. Now that you are here, see everything there is to see".

I resent his patronizing tone, but obediently walk into a dark room on my left. Stuffed deer gaze at me from glass showcases. I feign an interest in them till, from the corner of my eye, I see the officer's back is turned. I sneak past him and go up the stairs.

My mind goes back to the beautiful seashells in a variety of shapes and colors that had fascinated me on the beaches of Galle when I was a kid.

But what greets me inside the showcases are an uncountable number of "aquatic crustaceans" in unfamiliar shapes. They have names like Haliotis Asinina and Babylonia Ambulacrun. Needless to say, I feel sad and let down.

But the disappointment seems to be only mine. The teenaged schoolgirls, who stand by me, are fascinated. "Shaa" "Shoke" they exclaim every passing second. (The boys stand behind them with their just-stepped-out-of-the-shower hairdos, and bell bottomed trousers, their minds elsewhere). A foreign lady in a silk dress, a coat hung over her shoulders, wearing stockings and high-heeled shoes, exclaims "Magnifique".

I try to see everything as 'Magnifique' too, by transforming in my mind, the small dark and blue Jonklaas room into the bottom of the ocean. I dream of mermaids and sea horses. I become a diver in a dark black suit... But the voice of one of the teachers in charge of the children drags me out of my reverie. "I think it would be nice to have a showcase like this in my sitting room." His fair-complexioned colleague shakes her head from side to side. It is hard to say whether it's in assent or dissent.

There is nothing romantic in the seashells on display as there rightly shouldn't be, for the collection is supposed to be a source of invaluable information for researchers and enthusiasts of crustaceans. And so I stare at the Schematic Drawing of a Generalized Gastropod Shell, and its varix, callus and umbilicus with as much interest as I can muster. But soon my mind, nurtured on unscientific lines, rebels. I step out of the room and almost collide with two lovers gazing into a display of "Pleistocene Rocks".

They do not speak to one another. I wish they would. I wish the boy would gaze into the girl's eyes, shake his head in awe and say something poetic and deeply philosophical about hearts and stones and the love he has for her (the way lovers in Hindi movies, do). But he simply stares at the "siltstones with fossil plant impressions" and asks her "have you finished? Shall we go?"

After an hour of rambling through the other collections - old jackets and necklaces worn by ancient kings and queens, minor export crops (cocoa, nutmeg, cinnamon) carvings of heads of state belonging to the Kandyan era, I decide to quit.

I leave the Katu Geya, wondering if I had visited a House of Bones or a House of Thorns.

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