Colombo, a place of chatty encounters
Dropping me off in front of the Lionel Wendt auditorium in time for a late afternoon rehearsal a couple of months ago, my Uber driver Jehan declared, “I play the keyboard, but I always wanted to marry a violinist.” I offered to buy him tickets for the next day’s concert, but told him the violinist was married. Jehan said he was married too.
Sri Lanka for me is the country of the chatty encounter and the comic non sequitur. People also sometimes appear to mistake me for a human confessional booth. I had spent an hour driving around Colombo with Jehan, stopping to buy cheese and chocolate for the rehearsal while he talked. He was about to take a job in Kuwait. On a previous trip, a Colombo friend looked astonished as the distressed front office manager at a southern beachfront hotel walked me to the car. He was speaking in Hindi, learned watching Bollywood, about his Indian girlfriend being forced to break up with him.
Jan Morris, the great travel writer, often used what she called a smile test in the cities she wrote about. She would smile at people just to gauge the state of mind of the city’s residents. Sri Lanka, even in remarkably difficult times, would score highly. On my first visit in 2002, a young woman, selling cashew nuts on the road to Kandy, laughed as she caressed my mother’s short hair. She was applauding an older woman’s breaking of convention.
Fast forward 20 years when I found myself talking to Sonali Deraniyagala, the author of The Wave, a book about losing her parents, her husband and her sons in the 2004 tsunami. Ahead of that dinner in January, I obsessed about what to say to an author whose memoir I did not have the courage to read. I needn’t have; she was full of funny anecdotes.
It has been that kind of year. Appalled by the hobbling of the economy by the debt-laden egotism of the Rajapaksa regime, I decided that I would return to Sri Lanka frequently to do my bit to boost tourism receipts. From December 2022, I have been travelling to Colombo every month or two. This is the very opposite of travel in an age of lists of the 50 places to visit before you die. In a twist, I am an agnostic who has sometimes wished to be buried in the movie-setting that is Borella cemetery — and this was before I discovered that I had a great grandfather buried there. Not much I do in Colombo merits being posted on Instagram. But, my friendships grow deeper, the conversations continuing when I return to Bangalore.
In Colombo, I am the outsider who can pretend he lives there. I am invited to rehearsals of classical music concerts well before the actual event. Staying at an Air bnb on Rajakeeya Mawatha, I was opposite the Royal College tennis courts. Watching one afternoon, I was spotted by the coach, a friend. He insisted I join the afternoon’s coaching camp. The politeness of the youngsters towards an inept interloper made me volunteer to edit college admission essays for the older ones.
During Vesak in May, I gasped at the long lines of people waiting for food in a posher part of Colombo. Being an economic journalist, I concluded the queues were a sign of the economic distress of a country where many people are going without a meal to make ends meet. When I looked closely, however, these seemed well-off people who were enjoying the camaraderie of the festival. “This is an island that has seen better days, and has lately been depressed by …false finance,” Morris wrote in the 1970s in an uncanny echo. “(Yet) whatever the excesses of its politicians, (the island) leaves an impression of balanced serenity.”
Three decades ago, Robert Putnam famously wrote an essay entitled ‘Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital’, lamenting the decline in bowling groups, clubs and the other forms of in-person social interaction. Watching the good-natured queuing at Vesak or the large numbers saying brave goodbyes at the airport to those leaving the country for jobs abroad as the brain drain continues, it is hard not to admire how Sri Lanka’s social bonds endure.
A parasympathetic kinship among strangers was a characteristic of the 2022 Aragalaya. There is no historic parallel for the storming of a presidential mansion that became instead a festive visit to a theme park. The opening pages of Marquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch described a more fearful citizenry entering the palace of a regime so decadent and decrepit that vultures went in first, pecking their way through the window screens: “The main door seemed to open itself with just the push of a voice.” That the new prime minister has a PhD in social anthropology and speaks so thoughtfully is magical realism that Marquez could not have scripted.
I have heard tourists marvel that small hotels, which struggled to survive the economic crisis, have owners and staff who retain a sense of humour and gracious hospitality. A year ago, I stayed at a homestay in the clouds above Kandy owned by a friend of a friend. We had never met before, but he insisted on waiting till 9.30 p.m. so I would have company at dinner. We now speak regularly.
Among the Balinese there is a common belief that a reasonable request from a stranger cannot be denied. This applies in Colombo; certainly, no opportunity for banter is passed up. One tuk tuk driver dropped me to an exercise class in Independence Square, saying that “you don’t need this if you spend enough time getting jolted about in a tuk tuk.” Another assured me his Bajaj was easy to spot. “Mine is the Bentley,” he said, waving at the seat with Bentley emblazoned on it.
On a recent flight from India used by many Sri Lankans taking back cartons of new home linen and clothing, one told me he made the trip thrice a week, his profit on sales in Pettah and up country and that he usually carried three times his baggage allowance. In Colombo, even a smuggler includes you in the conversation.
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