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.