The Kelani River

  So I will now tell the story of how I got the idea to travel around the island. Once I lived in a place called Peliyagoda, which is a suburb of the capital Colombo. The trouble with Peliyagoda was this – despite being the closest suburb of Colombo, it was not very developed. Many other suburbs like Wattala or Kiribathgoda had much better buildings and facilities. The biggest landmark there seemed to be the police station, which I think says a lot. And before the police station, its most famous landmark was enormous rubbish dumb that could be seen from miles away, which I think says even more. 

However, it was an exciting place for me because the great Kelani River flowed through it, and I wanted to paint it. I am only an amateur artist, but I have a great passion for painting and drawing. But unlike most artists who draw rivers, I wanted to draw it at night. And so, many years ago, I did one of the weirdest things I have ever done; I decided to stay in the garden at night and paint till morning. The night was infinitely dark and strange; it seemed that everyone had gone to bed and switched off all the lights. The road was deserted except for a lone cow which seemed half asleep. A blue-green firefly, very rare for this part of Sri Lanka, flew and disappeared behind a leaf. Flowers that bloom at night are usually white, and most have a fragrance.

In the foreground, I could see the great river flowing. It moved slowly in the night like destiny itself. It was silent, mysterious, and fatal. Above the river shone many strange stars. There was a particularly bright reddish star that didn't twinkle. Could it be Mars, the one they called the red planet? Unfortunately, I could not be certain. Then there was another bright star which, for some reason, I felt was Venus. Unfortunately, my knowledge of astronomy, like so much else, was incomplete. All these thoughts made me tired that I sat down in the garden and couldn't remember anything after that except the ground felt hard on my head, an annoying cricket made an annoying noise, the smell of grass and marigold flowers and once I imagined that the cow was in the garden.

 

The hoot of an alarm made me jump, and for a moment, I was horrified to find that I was not in bed but outside at night. I went to the gate to see what made that noise but could not locate it.  Then I looked up, god how things had changed. Now it was around two in the morning, and the stars were brighter than ever. I couldn't see the Great Bear, the only constellation I knew apart from Orion, but I could see a group of prominent stars which curled down and formed what looked exactly like a tail. I wondered whether this was the Scorpion constellation, and I still do. I looked down again, and the river was still flowing endlessly, and at that moment, I felt a great energy come over me, and I decided to explore my country even if it was the last thing I do. 

 

George Orwell once wrote, "By retaining one's childhood love of such things as trees, fishes, butterflies, and toads, one makes a peaceful and decent future a little more probable." I always believed that this was so. People who grow up and forget these things altogether either become dictators or, worse, become depressed. My way of celebrating these things is through art and traveling. I am giving below the watercolor painting I did of the Kelani River that night.

Tales from the Sea

 

If the world is dull for you

And waking up is hard to do

Walk along a lonely road

In the darkest hour that comes before dawn

If wild yellow flowers now seem brown

And the tallest trees seem short

Visit the ocean just once more

And throw a stone at those wild wild crows

 

If the ship you sailed on sails no more

And time now moves just too slow

Reach deep sea in a fisherman's boat

Or chase downhill a mountain goat

 

If dark thoughts brood your mind

And the world now seems unkind

Nothing in you is very very wrong

Dive from the beach and catch a prawn

 

If seawater tastes too bitter

And the ocean makes you jitter

Re-enter the sea from an eastern beach

Or catch a crab with your feet

Fall of Light

 

Tales from the Sea

If you make a friend of time

It wouldn't matter that you have no dime
For waves that break in the mangrove beach
Will pull your ship from that sinking reef

If the lighthouse is afar
And a misty fog blocks the north star
Follow the seagulls to the left
Or north or south whichever is best

A starfish that floats near the beach

May swim away beyond your reach

But in the sand it will tell a tale

That will be understood by a blue whale

An oyster that pricks your feet

Could have a pearl on some distant beach
A boat that is blown to sea
Will reach home in Trinco beach

Thoughts on a Bus

 Then a man with a small drum got onto the bus. He said unlike others who had come before him, he wouldn't pretend to be deaf, blind, or have an illness that needed urgent surgery. What he had, said he was “Born Talent". He had studied at one of the leading schools in Colombo, he had passed his Ordinary Level exam with "exceptional results", and at one point he had even worked in a prestigious organization. However jealous tongues had ruined his name. So he had thought of singing in buses which in fact he had done for the past twenty years. Then he started singing a kind of rhyming poem that was not altogether enjoyable as far as the melody was concerned but sounded profound as far as the message was concerned. According to him, he made up the poem as he was singing. It dealt with among other things, the futility of life…the way the body decomposes after death in detail…what kind of worms come…how loved ones now start calling you "the body"...and how after three days even your girlfriend wishes that you were buried soon…the heavy beat went on and on…this day wasn't going well...then I looked out and we had come to a town.

 

In this town, turning right from the main road is a place called ZZZ Park. I guess they tried to build a theme park but ended with this. In it just as you enter, separated by walls are really badly sculpted statues of world leaders. Abraham Lincoln looks like Charles Darwin. One world leader’s nose looks enormous. There is even a statue of Winston Churchill when he had depression. Incredibly they have a statue of Lenin who looks feeble-minded. They are the first items on display and I could see several people staring speechlessly. I don’t know whether it was intentional but it is hilarious. Then there is kind of a small zoo with restless animals culminating in a photograph with a large colorful Parrot if you pay 100 Rupees. They took three photos during which the Parrot, which looked fiercely intelligent, clutched my hand so hard that it drew blood and tried to peck me several times. Even this was unbelievably funny. You get exactly the same feeling when you come out of a cave called Jurassic Park with archaeopteryx that has red bulbs in their mouths and Tyrannosaurus Rexes that move but have Parkinson's disease. But the compound is enormous and you are led through many bewildering things until you enter the muddy artificial lake for a boat ride where you always get the feeling you are going to drown. Everything here is wrong and badly built, but you realize as you leave that you have had the greatest fun in your life. Here in ZZZ Park, in Sri Lanka they have built the world's funniest amusement park without even trying or even knowing. 

 

The Beach

 The road south from Colombo can be a bit confusing, somehow even if you scan the map for a long time it doesn’t register. From Colombo to Moratuwa is only about 19 Km. From there you expect Kalutara to come quickly but it takes longer than you think for it is about 26 Km further south. In Kalutara is the famous Buddhist temple. You expect Beruwela with its beautiful seascape to be very far from here but it comes surprisingly quickly being just 14 Km south. By this time the landscape has a very rural seaside feel. Happily, Bentota with its beautiful beaches, river, and hotels is just 8 Km South. Then here the distances seem to widen. From Bentota to Ambalangoda is 24 Km, somehow it seems longer than that. Hikkaduwa, a tourist destination known for coral reefs and sea turtles is 15 Km further south. By this time even without noticing we have come 114 Km from Colombo. Till Hikkaduwa, the coast that runs more or less south seems to curve a little more prominently till it reaches the Historic fort city of Galle. The coast continues to curve until it reaches the southernmost city in Sri Lanka – Matara. Then it moves upward reaching Tangalle and Hambantota, Kirinda, Kumana, Okanda and then almost vertically up to Potuvil, Tirrukkovil and Batticaloa. Very rarely if ever have I heard some of these place names in the news so I tried to find out. Kumana is a bird sanctuary, Okanda is a small hamlet in the eastern coast of Sri Lanka, within the Ampara district.

Somewhere between Beruwela and Hikkaduwa, I had an incredible experience, a kind of perfect moment that comes very rarely in life. I got off the bus shocked by the color of the sea. It was around midday, and the sun shone brightly overhead. The color of the sea was a shockingly bright turquoise blue and it was glistening and I was alone on an enormous beach. A song started playing in my mind: We’ll sing in the sunshine….We’ll laugh every day…..We’ll sing in the sunshine ……then I’ll be on my way. Some HAPPY-sounding songs are actually depressing….and some sad-sounding songs are Happy…..But this was a Happy sounding Happy song at least for me despite its silly lyrics. 

 

There are some places with beautiful scenery that ought to make you happy…but make you sad......similarly, there are some really ugly landscapes that fill you with joy…..Well, this was a Happy looking place that actually made you happy. I walked on the beach, I climbed the rocks, it was for me the most perfect spot on earth. After about an hour it was time to be on my way. I wondered whether if I came another day at the exact same time I would find the sea the same glistening turquoise blue and the beach deserted. I came again a few times but could not locate the beach again. As the actor, Leonard Nimoy (Mr. Spock in Star Trek) said in his last message “A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory.” But before going I had been so overwhelmed by this beach that I had tried to capture it with my oil pastel drawing which I am giving below.

The Worlds Largest Impressionist work

But it was ok for I could still go to “Little England” or Nuwara Eliya, the quaint little town right at top of the hills that according to many, resembled England during Victorian times. So I took the train on the “Main Line” to visit the hilly part of the country which had a climate completely different from other parts. The railway station in Fort, the biggest on the Island is said to be designed to look like the Victoria station in Manchester. The buildings really remind you of colonial times though I’ve never lived during Colonial times. The smell of the wooden sleepers and the diesel somehow adds to this feeling. Time seems to have stopped in the 1920s as far as railway stations were concerned in Sri Lanka. 

 

The hoot of the train’s horn shook me from my thoughts, and I stumbled into the train almost falling into the track. The seats aren’t uncomfortable in the second-class compartment. A group of people were enjoying themselves singing and they even had a guitar. It seemed that most of them were drunk and it was great, my only regret was I couldn’t join them. It must be a great feeling to climb a mountain by train while being drunk.

 

I looked out and I could see the incredible trees that Sri Lanka is blessed with. I am a person who pretends to be a botanist although I only have a passing knowledge of trees. There near a lake were the majestic Kumbuk trees that always seemed to enjoy the water. Then there were the very large beautiful Mara trees which bloomed full of pink flowers around March/April. The paddy fields were greener than the greenest green trees you have ever seen or ever going to see. Then we started ascending and the weird feeling of the train struggling through the hills. The picturesque mountains with perfectly trimmed tea bushes look more like fairy tale paintings in a book than actual mountains. 

 

 

George Orwell once wrote that the British were not an artistic people, which honor goes to the French and the Italians. The real talent of the British said he was in literature. Well, when you see some of the things they built in Sri Lanka like these strange tea mountains, you get a nagging feeling whether they had a strong artistic streak as well. 

 

For me the hill country represented an enormous, maybe the world's largest, impressionist work of art, long before the French thought they invented it. In the 19th century the British, replaced countless mountains of millions upon millions of trees not to mention animals, with perfectly trimmed tea bushes. It's weird when you think about it, they traveled thousands of miles in perilous seas, putting the locals to no end of trouble just to plant tea bushes? Of course, it was all for the money, but when you visit the hill country you get a strange feeling that there was an artistic motive as well.

 

And then I started seeing what some artists call “found objects” all over an ancient railway station. After the horrors of the First World War, artists, writers, and intellectuals thought deeply about it and formed an anti-war art movement called Dadaism. As one artist explained, “Dadaism wished to replace the logical nonsense of men of today with illogical nonsense.” The Dada movement led to the surrealist movement whose aim was to “free the unconscious to express itself.” If this seems odd it gets odder still when we view surrealist paintings. In “The persistence of Memory” by Salvador Dali withered clocks seem to be suffocating in a desert. The question that comes to any reasonable person's mind is “what in god’s name does it all mean.”

 

The upshot of all this was that when an Artist named Marcel Duchamp in 1917 purchased a standard urinal from a hardware shop, wrote R. Mutt in it, turned it sideways and displayed it on a pedestal, and called it “Fountain” it became one of the most recognizable artworks of the twentieth century. This particular kind of found object is called a “Ready-Made”.  Soon artists started making all kinds of found objects. It seemed that if you took a clock and fixed a broomstick, it would become a great “found object”. And this railway station seemed to be full of such found objects. My attention was particularly drawn to a kind of ring (tablet) that was passed through the elbow of the engine driver when the train passed through the station. Surely this was a “found object”.