Category: Sri Lanka

Posted on

The magnificent Seven Moons

 

© Sort Of Books

 

I’ve just realised that over the past year or so I’ve coincidentally read five novels that were winners of Britain’s most prestigious literary award, the Booker Prize.  The first four I read are as follows, ranked in descending order of greatness:

 

  • Very good: Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart, which won the Booker in 2020.  Inevitably, being about alcoholism, betrayal and homophobia in economically-ravaged, 1980s Glasgow, it’s a tough read.  One thing I found oddly depressing about it is how it reminded me of a time, not so long ago, when everyone from 15 years upwards seemed to have dentures.

 

  • Good: The Testaments by Margaret Atwood, joint-winner in 2019. Atwood is always decent value, but this follow-up to 1985’s The Handmaid’s Tale doesn’t quite have the same punch.  Partly this is because, as a sequel, it’s less ideas-driven than the original.  Partly it’s because The Testaments dares to have a happy ending.  But it’s certainly interesting to see Aunt Lydia get a redemptive arc.

 

  • Okay: The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton, winner in 2013.  Parts of this 19th-century, New Zealand-set murder mystery were engrossing, but with 832 pages and what felt like a cast of thousands – well, dozens – my interest was inevitably going to flag in places.  Still, kudos to Catton for constructing a novel that’s positively Dickensian in its size and ambition.

 

  • Tedious bollocks: The Old Devils by Kingsley Amis, winner in 1986.  Geriatric, right-wing Welsh windbags make fools of themselves in a gentrified version of 1980s Wales that I suspect only ever existed in Kingsley Amis’s imagination.

 

But for me the best of the lot was The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Sri Lankan writer Shehan Karunatilaka, which netted the Booker in 2022 and which I finished reading the other day.  No doubt I’m biased and have an advantage when it comes to this novel.  It’s set in Colombo and I lived in that city for eight years myself, which makes me familiar with much of the book’s geography, cultural references and historical context, to say nothing of the cynical and self-deprecating Sri Lankan humour that pervades its pages.  That sense of humour, by the way, is one of the  things I now miss most about the place.

 

But even if you’re not acquainted with Sri Lanka when you open the book, I suspect you’ll be impressed by Seven Moons – at least, if you give it a chance to draw you in.  Karunatilaka’s work veers from the exuberantly fantastical to the grimly realistic, from the hilarious to the horrific, from the vauntingly highbrow to the cheerfully lowbrow, from the sublime to the ridiculous, sometimes within the space of one page.

 

The novel takes place in the late 1980s and begins with titular character Maali Almeida experiencing the end of his physical existence, as a human, and the start of his ephemeral existence, as a ghost.  He finds himself in a weird, netherworld version of Colombo, where he can see, but not interact with, the living, but where ghosts and other supernatural beings mill about too – the more adept of them have mastered the neat trick of travelling around on the winds.  The spectral bureaucracy that processes the newly deceased urges him to continue onto the proper afterlife, which is only open to him for the next seven nights, or seven moons, of his passing.

 

But Maali is more concerned with hanging around and finding out the details of his death. Suffering from a sort of Post-Death Stress Disorder, he can’t remember how it happened.  As he was a war photographer when he was alive – 1980s Sri Lanka being in the throes of civil war – it’s likely he was murdered.  And the reason for his murder was likely some sensitive photographs he took that could have serious consequences for one of the country’s top politicians.

 

Half-murder-mystery, half-phantasmagorical-adventure, the story rattles along with Maali trying to overcome his limitations as a ghost and find a way of communicating with the two people he was closest to when he was alive, his ‘official’ girlfriend Jaki and his ‘unofficial’ boyfriend DD – Maali was a gay man in a time and place where it was probably safer to stay closeted – with the ultimate aim of solving the mystery of his death and securing the important photographs.

 

Along the way, he encounters all manner of eccentrics, misfits and miscreants.  In the living world, there are crooked politicians, crooked policemen, dodgy NGO workers, dodgy journalists, arms dealers, torturers, ‘garbage collectors’ (the goons who dispose of the bodies of those eliminated during the government’s dirty war against real and imagined dissent) and an unhelpful clairvoyant called the Crow Man.  In the ethereal world, there are ghosts, ghouls and yakas (demons from Sri Lankan mythology), including one embittered spirit, a murdered Marxist called Sena, who’s assembling an army of the dead whilst trying to figure out a way, intangible though he is, of violently striking back at his still-living tormentors and executioners.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Deshan Tennekoon

 

Seven Moons‘s allegory about the victim of a senseless war trying to make sense of it on the other side, as a ghost, could come across as heavy-handed.  But Karunatilaka invests the fantastical elements of his narrative with the exactly the right amounts of absurdity and bemusement.  It’s no surprise that he lists Douglas Adams and Kurt Vonnegut in the book’s acknowledgements.  Again, the humour has a distinctly local flavour.  For example, the celestial sorting office where Maali, deceased, finds himself at the beginning is conceptually like something from Michael Powell and Emric Pressburger’s classic movie A Matter of Life and Death (1945), but its chaotic nature feels pretty Sri Lankan.  Anyone who’s ever tried to get their EPF (Employees’ Provident Fund) from the Department of Labour off Kirula Road will understand.

 

Meanwhile, a famous quote by legendary science-fiction author and long-term Sri Lankan resident Arthur C. Clarke could be the blueprint for Karunatilaka’s vision of Colombo, overrun with the souls of the dead: “Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living.”  In the midst of the spectral mayhem, Maali refers to Clarke’s quote and adds, “You look around you and fear the great man’s estimate might have been conservative.”

 

At the same time, the fantasy in no way diminishes the book’s accounts of the horrors perpetrated during the Sri Lankan Civil War.  This was when the government wasn’t locked in a struggle just with the LTTE, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, who wanted a separate Tamil state but were “prepared to slaughter Tamil civilians and moderates to achieve this”, but also with the JVP, the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna, who wanted “to overthrow the capitalist state” but were “willing to murder the working class while they liberate them.”  These organisations and others – including the STF, the Special Task Force, the government’s abduction, torture and execution squad – are listed and described in a passage near the beginning, for the benefit of readers unfamiliar with the country back then.  It comes with the advice: “Don’t try and look for the good guys ‘cause there ain’t none.”

 

In one interview, Karunatilaka observed that bleak though things have been in Sri Lanka during its recent economic crisis, brought about by the corrupt and idiotic mismanagement of the Rajapaksa regime, the situation doesn’t come close to how it was in the war-torn 1980s.  “I’ve no doubt many novels will be penned against Sri Lanka’s protests, petrol queues and fleeing Presidents.  But even though there have been scattered incidents of violence, today’s economic hardship cannot be compared to the terror of 1989 or the horror of the 1983 anti-Tamil pogroms.  We all pray it stays that way.”

 

One other thing I enjoyed about Seven Moons is how it captures the odd, hybrid culture that young people in 1980s Colombo must have inhabited – at least, the more affluent, English-speaking ones, of whom Maali is an example.  Mixed in with the Sri Lankan cultural references are the expected ones from America – Elvis Presley is prominent and Maali seems to have a hankering for Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982).  Of course, looming over the whole novel is the shadow of that most 1980s-feeling of Hollywood movies, the Demi Moore / Patrick Swayze schmaltz-a-thon Ghost.  (Though I’ve just checked and discovered it wasn’t a 1980s movie.  It came out in 1990.)

 

British culture – due no doubt to the colonial connection – gets a look-in too, with mentions of Yorkshire Television’s durable lunchtime legal-drama show Crown Court (1972-84), the BBC’s rickety but impressively downbeat space opera Blake’s Seven (1977-81) and cheesy but popular Welsh retro-rocker Shakin’ Stevens.

 

But most amusing is Maali’s love of bombastic British rock-pop band Queen and their flamboyant singer, the late Freddie Mercury.  I found it hilarious that – watch out, spoilers approaching! – one of the plot’s main MacGuffins turns out to have been concealed inside the sleeve of Queen’s universally derided 1982 album Hot Space.  It’s the perfect hiding place.  Because no one in their right mind would ever dream of opening the sleeve of Hot Space.

 

© EMI / Elektra

Posted on

Jim Mountfield hunts for cryptids

 

© Sirens Call Publications

 

My short story The Watchers in the Forest, which is attributed to the pseudonym Jim Mountfield, can now be read in issue 62 – the summer 2023 edition – of the fiction and poetry magazine The Sirens Call.

 

Much of the writing in this issue is on the theme of cryptids – a ‘cryptid’ being defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary as “an animal (such as Sasquatch or the Loch Ness Monster) that has been claimed to exist but never proven to exist.”  Accordingly, the young hero of The Watchers in the Forest one day notices something strange in the woodland that rises at the end of his grandparents’ garden, woodland in which there have been reports of mysterious ape-like creatures, and unwisely goes to investigate…

 

As usual with The Sirens Call, issue 62 is the sort of bargain that’s rare nowadays.  It contains 274 pages and features 169 stories and poems, yet is available free of charge.  It can be downloaded here.

 

Incidentally, while we’re on the subject of ape-like cryptids, here are my five favourite examples of them from the real world.  Well, I don’t think any of them are real, but there have certainly been real reports about them.

 

The Big Grey Man of Ben Macdui

This is Scotland’s number-one simian-cryptid.  The Big Grey Man of Ben Macdui (Am Fear Liath Mòr in Gaelic) is a huge, hairy creature that’s supposed to follow and loom up terrifyingly behind lone hikers and climbers on the country’s second-highest peak, the often-misty Ben Macdui in the Cairngorm Mountains.  Alas, nice though the idea of ape creatures lurking in Cairngorms is, I’m inclined to attribute the sightings of the Big Grey Man to the creepy optical effect known as the Brocken Spectre.  This involves the sun casting your shadow from a high position onto mist, fog or cloud and making it look monstrous.

 

The Bukit Timah Monkey Man

Fabulously, an ape-like cryptid is rumoured to stalk my current abode, Singapore, the island city-state that has an area of just over 700 square kilometres and is the third most densely populated nation in the world.  If cryptids can escape detection here, they can do it anywhere.  It’s said the Bukit Timah Monkey Man was originally sighted in 1805 and most recently in 2020.  In the intervening two centuries, those who claim to have seen the beast include Japanese soldiers during their country’s occupation of Singapore in World War II.

 

The Monkey Man’s sightings have centred around the Singaporean district of Bukit Timah where, on the slopes of Bukit Timah Hill (Singapore’s highest peak at 164 metres) there’s a nature reserve with a population of crab-eating macaque monkeys.  It’s assumed that people have seen the real monkeys in poor visibility and distorting light conditions and mistaken them for the cryptid.  Though as the crab-eating macaques are at most a half-metre long, and the Monkey Man is supposed to walk upright at a height of 1.75 metres, it seems an odd mistake to make.

 

A fixture in Singaporean popular culture, the Bukit Timah Monkey Man is sometimes known by the abbreviation BTM, which makes him sound like a Korean-Pop boy-band.

 

The Monkey Man of Delhi

Delhi is no stranger to monkeys.  The last time I was in the city, in 2014, I couldn’t believe the size of the monkey-gangs that were roaming the streets in the neighbourhood of the Indian parliament.  They swaggered about as if they owned the place.  Predictably, I heard jokes from local people about the parliament being full of monkeys in more way than one.

 

 

However, in 2001, the city’s monkey phenomenon took a sinister turn with reports about the Monkey Man of Delhi.  According to eyewitnesses, this apparition was a simian-type creature that ranged from four feet to eight feet in height.  It was seen about 350 times and supposedly attacked and injured some 60 people, even causing a couple of deaths.  The Monkey Man of Delhi’s reign of terror has been attributed to mass hysteria, not unlike the Spring-Heeled Jack panic that gripped Britain nearly two centuries earlier.  Thus, the creature is probably more of an urban myth than a ‘real’ cryptid.

 

The Monkey Man of Delhi had some surprisingly human tastes in accessories.  His Wikipedia entry mentions how eyewitness accounts had him not only “covered in thick black hair” but also endowed with “a metal helmet, metal claws, glowing red eyes and three buttons” on his chest.  “Some reports also claim that the Monkey Man wore roller-skates.”

 

The Nittaewo

Sri Lanka, the country where I lived from 2014 to 2022, is also home to tales of anthropoid cryptids.  The Nittaewo were said to be a species of bipedal, tailless primates dwelling in the nation’s forests, with talon-like fingers and a strange language that resembled the twittering of birds.  According to the traditions of the Vedda people – who are believed to be Sri Lanka’s oldest human inhabitants – the Vedda fought against and finally destroyed the Nittaewo in the 18th century.  All the same, there have been alleged sightings of the Nittaewo since then, indeed, as late as 1984.

 

But if you go down to the Sri Lankan woods today and hear strange rustlings and twittering sounds coming from the undergrowth, you needn’t be too alarmed.  The Nittaewo were said to be three feet tall at most.  So if they did exist, they shouldn’t have looked any more threatening than a Hobbit.

 

The Yeti

Obviously, the Yeti, the Abominable Snowmen of the Himalayas, vie with Bigfoot as being the world’s most famous ape-like cryptids.  I like them for two reasons.  Firstly, they inspired the haunting, wistful song Wild Man by Kate Bush, released in 2011.  (“Lying in my tent, I can hear your cry echoing round the mountainside / You sound lonely…”)

 

Secondly, I used to see a yeti regularly in Colombo, the Sri Lankan capital.  The venerable street-side walkway on York Street in the city’s downtown area had a huge fibreglass yeti hulking behind, and glowering out through, one of its shop windows.  The thing had been created as an eye-catching advertising gimmick for a product called Yeti Isotonic Energy.  This was a rehydrating sports drink “developed in collaboration by Austrian and Sri Lankan scientists”, and bottles of it were on display in the same window.

 

I wonder if he’s still there today?

 

Posted on

Lanka metal

 

 

One recurrent thought I’ve had during Sri Lanka’s recent slide into economic and political calamity is: “Christ, I hope all the heavy metal guys are okay.”  Here’s an updated version of some material I put on this blog in the past about the Sri Lankan heavy metal scene, which helped keep me musically sane during my eight years in the country.

 

When I arrived in Sri Lanka in 2014, I accepted there’d be certain things I’d gain from the move and certain things I’d lose from it.  Among the gains would be the following: sunshine, warmth, delicious spicy food, lots of interesting Buddhist and Hindu temples to explore, access to gorgeous beaches, access to the equally gorgeous Hill Country of the island’s interior, and a chance to see an occasional elephant.  Among the losses…  Well, I assumed one thing absent from my new life in Sri Lanka would be the opportunity to hear my favourite musical genre played live.  No, I definitely didn’t expect to attend any heavy metal gigs there.

 

Indeed, I imagined the only live music I’d come across would be (1) traditional Sri Lankan music – absolutely nothing wrong with that, of course; and (2) cover versions of the Eagles, Bryan Adams and Lionel Ritchie played by hotel bands to audiences of sweaty middle-aged Western tourists and local would-be hipsters in the country’s holiday resorts – absolutely everything wrong with that.

 

But one of the pleasantest surprises of my years in Sri Lanka was the discovery that the country has actually a thriving heavy metal scene.  Lanka metal is really a thing.  Here’s a quick round-up of my favourite headbangers on the island.

 

 

Let’s start with probably my favourite Sri Lankan band, Paranoid Earthling.  Their Wikipedia entry describes them as a ‘grunge, experimental, psychedelic, stoner rock, heavy metal’ band from Kandy.  They started life in 2001 and one of their assets is their spandex-wrapped vocalist Mirshad Buckman, who has the enviable double-advantage of looking a bit like the late, great Ronnie James Dio and sounding a bit like the equally late, great Bon Scott.  Well, to me, anyway – admittedly after I’d downed a few pints.

 

I saw Paranoid Earthling several times and Buckman’s attitude was always entertaining. My first experience of them was in a Colombo pub called the Keg in 2017, when Buckman led the band onstage with a welcoming cry of “How ya motherfuckas doin’ tonight?” Whereas the last time I saw them was at a concert called Colombo Open Air 2019, held just before Christmas on the premises of the quaintly named Otter Aquatic Club (actually a private club with swimming and other sports facilities, just off Bauddhaloka Mawatha in Colombo 7).  During Open Air 2019, Buckman was in a memorably grumpy mood and railed between songs against the Sri Lankan media and the low standards of its journalists.  I’m glad he didn’t glance behind him.  Otherwise, he’d have seen a flashing screen at the back of the stage, advertising the concert’s sponsors, who included the Ceylon Today newspaper.

 

Among Paranoid Earthling’s best songs are Open up the Gates with its twiddly, thumping guitar sound; the punky, foot-tapping Rock n’ Roll is my Anarchy; and Deaf Blind Dumb, which borrows its stompy bits from Marilyn Manson’s The Beautiful People but is still a blast played live.

 

 

Slightly older than Paranoid Earthling are Stigmata, on the go since 1998.  I saw them perform a couple of small-scale gigs at the Floor by O bar, next to the grounds of Colombo Cricket Club, and at the 2017 Lanka Comic Con.  (In these much-changed times, I wonder if Comic Con will ever happen again.)  Stigmata are responsible for an impressive sound that, to me at least, combines the best of Iron Maiden and Sepultura, and their frontman Suresh de Silva is an intelligent, well-read and amusing chap – check out his twitter feed.  Other current Stigmata members include the splendidly named Tennyson Napoleon.

 

That said, I should point out that at Stigmata gigs you may have to wait a while between songs – because the garrulous de Silva does like to talk.  And talk, and talk…  Well, Sri Lankans generally seem to enjoy a good blether.  Totally unlike the Irish, of course.

 

 

For a heavier sound – death and black metal – check out the Genocide Shrines, whose ‘lyrical themes’ according the Metal Archives website include ‘tantra / spiritual warfare’, ‘death’ and, er, ‘arrack’.  I suppose after you’ve spent all day waging tantra and spiritual warfare, and staring death in the face, you need to relax with a glass of arrack.  Aside from their juggernaut sound, their most memorable feature is their fondness for wearing scary masks onstage, Slipknot-style.  Though I have to say I was a bit disappointed when I saw them live one time and at their set’s end they ‘rewarded’ their fans by taking their masks off and revealing themselves to be ordinary-looking blokes.  That spoiled the mystique somewhat.

 

Real old timers of the Lanka metal scene are Whirlwind, established in 1995.  I own a copy of their 2003 album Pain, though in my opinion their recorded material doesn’t prepare you for the impressively intense, immersive, even hypnotic sound they conjure up live.  I’ve seen them perform twice, at Shalika Hall – more on which in a moment – and at the afore-mentioned Colombo Open Air 2019.  Due to scheduling issues at the latter event, they hadn’t had time to do a proper soundcheck beforehand and were forced to give ongoing instructions to the audio engineer between songs.  They were understandably peeved, though I didn’t think this affected the quality of their music at all.

 

 

The other metal bands I saw during my time in Sri Lanka were Neurocracy, Mass Damnation, Abyss and a couple of young up-and-coming outfits who equally impressed and amused me with their boundless Sri Lankan politeness and gratitude to the audience for turning up to see them.  In between their songs they kept saying, “Thank you, thank you very much, thank you for coming, thank you so very much…”  And then a minute later they were emitting blood-curdling throaty black / death metal gurgles and screaming “F**k!  F**k!  F**k!”

 

Much of what I saw live was at the Shalika Hall on Park Road in Colombo 5, which wasn’t my favourite venue.  For one thing, it didn’t really have sidewalls.  Both sides of the auditorium opened onto small outside compounds with dilapidated toilets at their ends.  This meant the acoustics weren’t great because a lot of the sound seeped out into the night.  Conversely, and especially if you turned up at the wrong part of the evening, a great many mosquitoes got in.  There were also surreal moments when big bats flapped in from one side, crossed above the heads of the audience and flapped out of the other side – sights that’d be more appropriate for a goth concert than a metal one.  Needless to say, the place didn’t have a bar, though you could pop across the road and buy something at the liquor section of the local Food City supermarket.

 

 

The Otter Aquatic Club, which hosted the Colombo Open Air 2019 festival, my final experience of Sri Lankan metal, was a much better venue.  It provided a pleasant open courtyard with a covered stage for the bands and some other roofed-over spaces (including a makeshift bar) where the audience could shelter if it started to rain.  Meanwhile, the Club evidently made efforts to keep its premises mosquito-free because I didn’t see (or feel) one of the bitey wee bastards all night.

 

I was hoping more heavy metal events would be staged at the club but, of course, fate intervened a couple of months later with the arrival of Covid-19, which put the country’s live music scene into hibernation for two years…  And after that came the Rajapaksa-engineered economic and political collapse of 2022, which nearly left the country comatose.  Still, I’m seeing flickers of heavy metal life re-emerging now, with upcoming gigs advertised on a few of the above-mentioned bands’ Facebook pages.  Fingers crossed.

 

In the meantime, guys, thanks for leaving me with some fond, Sri Lankan live-music memories… and with an agreeable metallic buzz in my ears.

 

Posted on

The brothers grim

 

From efe.com

 

The second half of my tuppence-worth about the current, dire situation in Sri Lanka and the shower responsible for it.  

 

The feel-good factor generated in 2015 by the election to the Sri Lankan presidency of Maithripala Sirisena, and the expulsion from that presidency of Mahinda Rajapaksa, didn’t last for long.  As I mentioned in my previous post, inflation got worse under Sirisena, and he soon faced criticisms that in Sri Lankan politics sounded depressingly familiar – about nepotism, corruption and bullying the media.  He even managed to make the world’s headlines, and make a dick of himself, regarding Enrique Iglesias of all people.  The Latin heartthrob held a concert in Colombo and some excited local ladies threw their knickers at him and ran onstage to kiss him.  Such women were ‘highly uncivilised,’ declared the unimpressed president, and he called for the concert’s organisers to be ‘beaten with toxic stingray tails.’

 

My Sri Lankan colleagues were soon grumbling to me that the new president was as bad as the old one and that the country’s politicians, whatever their supposed political hue, were “all the same.”  Their cynicism was spectacularly validated in 2018 when Sirisena tried to remove his Prime Minister, Ranil Wickremesinghe.  A constitutional crisis erupted because Wickremesinghe refused to leave office.  And who did Sirisena want to replace Wickremesinghe with as PM?  Why, Mahinda Rajapaksa, the man whom he’d ousted in 2015.

 

Sirisena’s attempt to usurp Wickremesinghe failed, but the resulting governmental dysfunction surely contributed to intelligence failures that enabled the Easter Bombings in Sri Lanka the following year.  Indian Intelligence had warned that the National Thowheeth Jama’ath (NTJ) were going to carry out a terrorist attack, but no action was taken.  269 men, women and children died as a result. Sirisena’s government later had to apologise for its ineptitude.  This was surely the last nail in its coffin – and the beginning of the return of the old dynasty.  I remember looking at Twitter on the day of the bombings, just before social media was suspended in an effort to stop the spread of misinformation, and seeing calls for the reinstatement of ‘Iron-man Rajapaksa’ to clean up the mess.

 

Thus, the election later that year, 2019, was a foregone conclusion.  Not that we were spared the usual dodgy campaigning.  I was running another training course, this time in the northern, predominantly Tamil city of Jaffna, when the Rajapaksa roadshow rolled into town and a rally was held beside the training building.  Sri Lankan politicians like their rallies, although often there’s not much correspondence between the people attending the rally and the location where the rally takes place.  Accordingly, I doubt if you’d find many Rajapaksa supporters living in Jaffna, but a great crowd of people still turned up, which possibly had something to do with the dozens of buses parked along the sides of the neighbourhood’s streets.  Soon, amplified voices were blasting through the walls of the training building, speechifying in praise of the House of Rajapaksa.  I remember the face of one of my trainees, a Tamil Catholic priest, contorting in disgust and rage at them.  (Priests had not been spared during the end-of-war massacres in northern Sri Lanka.)

 

From twitter.com

 

However, this time, it wasn’t Mahinda Rajapaksa who bagged the presidency.  Getting the job instead was his brother Gotabaya, former Secretary of the Ministry of Defence and former Lieutenant Colonel in the Sri Lankan army, less flamboyant than Mahinda but no less mired in allegations of human rights abuses, media intimidation and corruption.  Mahinda settled for the post of Prime Minister.  Let’s not say those Rajapaksa boys are undemocratic.  Meanwhile, youngest brother Basil got the post of Minister of Finance and oldest brother Chamal got the unwieldy-sounding portfolio of ‘Minister of Internal Trade, Food Security and Consumer Welfare, Mahaweli, Agriculture, Irrigation and Rural Development’.  In addition, there was now a brood of younger Rajapaksas to accommodate.  Chamal’s son Shasheendra became Advanced Agriculture Minister in 2021.  Mahinda’s sons Yoshitha and Namal became, respectively, PM’s Chief of Staff and Sports Minister in 2020.

 

A word about Namal Rajapaksa, until recently seen as the family’s heir apparent, as the man who’d take the reins and ensure that Sri Lanka remained a loyal Rajapaksa fiefdom well into the 21st century.  Appropriately for a Sports Minister, he has some sporting achievements on his CV.  He’d been a keen rugby player, or as local sports journalists would term it, ‘a keen ruggerite’.  (I love Sri Lankan English, but I wish the word ‘ruggerite’ would be expunged from the language.)  He captained the national Sri Lankan rugby team from 2013 to 2014, an honour I’m sure he got on account of his playing ability and not who his dad was. In a portent of what his family would do to the country, his captaincy saw the team get demolished 132-10 by Japan.  A less funny and far darker rugby connection was, to quote his Wikipedia entry, the allegation of his ‘involvement in (the) murder and torture of Wasim Thajudeen’.  Thajudeen was a fellow rugby player whom he had a feud with.

 

In March this year, when Sri Lanka’s economy had dropped through the floor and the population was panicking about finding fuel and paying for food, Namal lit up the country’s social media with images of himself living it up and enjoying luxury water-sports facilities in the Maldives.  It doesn’t surprise me that a friend who got introduced to him at a reception described him as one the most insufferably entitled people he’d ever met.

 

Thus, the 2019 election resulted in the government being infested with more Rajapaksas than ever.. The great Rajapaksa kleptocracy was back on track.  To keep everyone happy, President Gotabaya – ‘Gota’ – initiated sweeping tax cuts, a move that with hindsight was a wee bit unwise.

 

So, what could go wrong?  Well, as we’ve just seen, everything.

 

Shortly after my departure from Sri Lanka, things got really bad.  There were massive, daily power cuts.  Photographs and film clips of seemingly endless lines of vehicles, queuing for hours or even days in the heat – heat in which, tragically, several people died – outside depleted petrol stations became familiar images on the world’s media.  Meanwhile, protests against the Rajapaksas gathered a head of steam.  The protestors, whose slogans included ‘Gota’s gotta go’, must have included many people who’d voted for the clan in 2019.  Given the damage inflicted by the fertiliser fiasco, I can’t imagine even the rural, conservative, Sinhalese heartlands feeling any love for them now.

 

© Lilith & Cupid Studios

 

Basil Rajapaksa resigned as Minister of Finance on April 8th.  Chamal Rajapaksa, now just ‘Minister of Irrigation’, quit five days earlier.  Mahinda clung on to the post of PM until May 9th.  Then, in an effort to escape resignation, he used the familiar ploy of bussing in supporters to stage a show of strength.  This backfired, to say the least.  He brought a mob of goons, stooges and thugs to the Prime Minister’s Residence of Temple Trees on Galle Road.  The mob assured him that everyone still loved him and didn’t want him to resign.  No doubt they got boozed up on free arrack as well.  Then they spilled out onto the street, proceeded to Galle Face Green and attacked the anti-government protestors who’d been camped there peacefully for weeks.  When the general populace saw what was happening on TV and social media, they reacted in fury and took to the streets themselves.  (A timeline of the shenanigans on May 9th is provided here by the excellent factchecking and investigatory group Watchdog, whose founders include the Sri Lankan data scientist and science fiction writer Yudhanjaya Wijeratne.)

 

It was lucky that the country didn’t tip over into violence and anarchy then. Afterwards, Mahinda Rajapaksa had no choice but to resign.  One consequence of the unrest provoked by his stunt was that the Rajapaksa Museum down in Hambantota, built with state funds and using the manpower of the Sri Lankan Navy, got trashed.  Talk about karma.

 

After that, it was just President Gota who, politically speaking, was the last Rajapaksa standing.  He didn’t depart until after a deluge of protestors invaded the presidential residence in Colombo’s Fort area on July 9th  which led to another glut of images on social media, this time of protestors enjoying the cool waters of the presidential swimming pool, lying on the presidential four-poster bed, watching news coverage of their own demonstration on the presidential TV, and so on.  Allegedly, the protestors also discovered bags containing 17.8 million rupees.  Even by presidential standards, that’s a lot of loose change to keep lying around the house.  Gotabaya didn’t agree to resign until a few days later – after he’d got out of the country.  His efforts, and his brother Basil’s efforts, to flee had a tragi-comic quality.  Attempts to leave Sri Lanka using commercial flights were thwarted by immigration officials refusing to process their papers and by fears that their fellow passengers would beat them up.

 

However, Gotabaya has definitely left now.  He flew in a military aircraft to the Maldives and from there travelled to Singapore.  Yes, at the moment, he’s in the country that I’m in.  Indeed, if the rumours are true about him being holed up in hotel in the Singaporean neighbourhood of Orchard, he might only be a stone’s throw away from my workplace.  The Singaporean authorities are adamant that he won’t be getting asylum.  While he’s here, I’m sure they won’t be taking any advice from him on how to run their economy either.

 

© Lilith & Cupid Studios

 

While it’s gratifying to see the Rajapaksas scuttle off like this, disgraced and despised, every Sri Lankan I’ve spoken to has insisted that they should stay in the country.  They should be put on trial for their many crimes, have their corrupt ways exposed and, most importantly, be stripped of all the money they’ve looted from Sri Lanka during the past two decades.  That money should be returned to the country in its greatest hour of need.

 

What happens next?  I’m afraid I’m not optimistic.  The Sri Lankan economy is now a disaster, and where there’s disaster, disaster capitalism is never far away.  I can see the country being at the mercy of the IMF and having to re-structure its economy in the extreme, impoverishing, free market-worshipping manner described by Naomi Klein in her book The Shock Doctrine (2005).  From past experience, that means the sale of public assets, with the result that the majority of people get poorer and an already-rich minority, able to take advantage of the new, rapacious economic climate, become even richer.

 

Meanwhile, the old Sri Lankan practice of confining politics to a small, wealthy, well-connected elite – which, come to think of it, they may have inherited from the British – shows no sign of going away.  The ubiquitous Ranil Wickremesinghe, who’s served as Prime Minster six times (yes, six!) in the past, has now installed himself in the presidency, has denounced the anti-government protestors as ‘fascists’, and has sent in police and security forces to violently clear the protestors from their encampment in Galle Face.  All this from a man who on May 9th condemned the attack by Mahinda Rajapaksa’s minions on the same protestors.

 

From twitter.com

 

It’s not the removal of a few, corrupt old faces that Sri Lanka needs.  it’s an overhaul of the whole, entitled, business-as-usual political system.  But I wonder how much chance there is of that happening.

 

As the Who sang, “Meet the new boss / Same as the old boss…”  But let’s hope Sri Lanka won’t get fooled again.

Posted on

Percy, prince of darkness

 

From wikipedia.org / © Prime Minister’s Office

 

In late February this year, I moved from Sri Lanka to Singapore.  It’s fair to say, though, that Sri Lanka still occupies most of my headspace. The country has made the headlines lately for all the wrong reasons and I’m constantly visiting the websites of Sri Lankan news outlets, following events on Sri Lankan social media, getting WhatsApp messages from friends still living in Sri Lanka and discussing the situation there with Sri Lankans I know in Singapore.  It will definitely be some time before I switch to a Singaporean frame of mind.

 

The crisis in Sri Lanka supports Ernest Hemmingway’s famous assertion that things first develop ‘gradually’ and then develop ‘suddenly’.  During the second half of 2021 it was apparent that, slowly but surely, the country was going off the rails.  Inflation had been an issue for a long time – I can think of many commodities that, within a couple of years of my arrival in Sri Lanka in 2014, had doubled in price – but even by recent standards prices were surging upwards. Also creeping up relentlessly were fuel prices, one symptom of which was the constant upping of fares by the country’s army of tuk-tuk drivers.

 

Then there was the exploding gas-canister phenomenon.  From the start of November until the middle of December 2021, almost 730 canisters had exploded, often in people’s kitchens. The majority of these had been bought from Sri Lanka’s state-run Litro Gas Lanka Ltd but nobody, company executives or politicians, seemed in a hurry to take responsibility or hold someone else responsible for the carnage. I heard rumours that Litro had changed the make-up of the canisters’ contents to cut costs, inadvertently making them dangerously volatile.  For a time, Litro and the other main supplier, Laugfs, had to stop selling their normal canisters and only sell ones that’d been approved by the country’s Standards Institute, which caused the gas supply to dry up.  This wasn’t ideal in a country where just over 40% of the population used the stuff and nothing else for cooking.

 

And then there was the fertiliser fiasco.  In April last year, the government banned all chemical fertilisers, plus pesticides, weedicides and fungicides, for the supposed purpose of converting Sri Lanka’s two million farmers to organic farming – overnight, apparently.  While this attempt to make the agricultural sector ‘go green’ might seem a noble, if fatally rushed and over-ambitious, undertaking, the Sri Lankan rumour mill suggested darker reasons for why the government did this – namely, that it was a ploy to make thousands of farmers bankrupt, so that powerful interests could buy up their land at reduced prices.  Whatever the real reason for it, the policy had quick, tangible but negative results. By October, food inflation was at nearly 12% and experts were predicting the output of the country’s paddy fields to drop by 43% in 2021.

 

With hindsight, I realise I left Sri Lanka near the end of the ‘gradually’ part of the process whereby things went tits up.  The ‘suddenly’ part happened a few weeks later. That was when the country was stricken by power cuts lasting many hours and its fuel supplies ran out, due to it having no more revenue to pay for imports.  The weeks after my departure was also when mass protests began against the government.  These protests culminated in the Rajapaksa clan being chased out of office and last week, in the case of the Rajapaksa who’d been president, chased out of the country.

 

Ah, the Rajapaksas.  Living in Sri Lanka for the last eight years was like living in a beautiful house with a beautiful garden and beautiful views, but with dodgy drains.  The Rajapaksa dynasty were like a bad smell from those drains, sometimes faint, sometimes severe, which never wafted away.

 

When I arrived in 2014, Mahinda Rajapaksa had been president for nine years.  In November 2005, during the later years of the Civil War between government forces (representative of the Sinhalese majority) and the northern-based Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, aka the Tamil Tigers, he’d taken power after winning an election with a slim majority of 190,000 votes.  He was fortunate that the Tamil Tigers forbade the Tamil people, who’d have definitely voted against him, from participating in the election.   It was as if the Tamil Tigers had wanted a Sinhalese-nationalist hard man like Rajapaksa to win.  There’d be no pussyfooting around.  There’d be a bloody fight, all Tamils would rally to the LTTE’s cause and hopefully, with Rajapaksa hammering at them, they’d win more international sympathy and support.

 

If that was the calculation, they got the fight they wanted but not the end-result.  By 2009, the Sri Lankan military had crushed the Tigers in the country’s northeast and Rajapaksa could declare victory.  Ignored, hushed-up and forgotten in the rush to celebrate the war’s end was the civilian death toll in the zone where Rajapaksa’s forces had wiped the Tigers out.  According to the United Nations in 2011, troops slaughtered some 40,000 people there, and that’s one of the more conservative estimates.

 

Among those demanding that the Sri Lankan government investigate its military for war crimes was Britain’s then-British Prime Minister David Cameron, who raised the issue at a Commonwealth summit in 2013.  Rajapaksa did not take this well and I suspect it contributed to the long, long wait I had subsequently before I could get a visa to live and work in Sri Lanka.  I have British and Irish passports, but the British passport was the one I applied for a visa with, and British passports weren’t flavour of the month at Colombo’s immigration office.  As is usually the case when Britain criticises its former colonies, Cameron’s criticism came with a large dollop of irony.  It was Britain, in its role as imperial overlord, that gave the Rajapaksa clan their first opportunity to shimmy up the greasy pole of Sri Lankan national politics.  In 1936, Don Matthew Rajapaksa, Mahinda’s uncle, was elected to the State Council of Ceylon, which the British had set up based on the model of London County Council.

 

As a foreigner, life in Sri Lanka was superficially pleasant, but I wasn’t there long before I became aware of things going on behind the scenes that you’d associate with bullying, semi-authoritarian, ‘strong-man’ regimes such as Erdogan’s Turkey, Orbán’s Hungary and Bolsonaro’s Brazil – discrimination against minorities, intimidation of journalists and so on.  Meanwhile, Rajapaksa’s face was ubiquitous.  It wasn’t quite George Orwell’s 1984 and ‘Big Brother is Watching You’ but you sometimes wondered if the place was setting off along that road.  I particularly remember seeing billboards depicting the president, plump, moustached and clad in a white jathika anduma, while he grasped the wheel of a ship.

 

It seemed appropriate that his birth-name was Percy Mahendra Rajapaksa.  He definitely looked like a Percy.  In fact, he reminded me of a well-fed Terry-Thomas, the comic actor who’d specialised in playing upper-class cads, bounders and scoundrels in old British movies, including one called Sir Percy Ware-Armitage in Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines (1965).

 

 

But Percy, sorry, Mahinda Rajapaksa wasn’t a one-man band.  He had three siblings who were also politicians: younger brother Gotabaya, a former military man who’d served as Secretary to the Ministry of Defence since 2005; younger brother Basil, who’d been Minister of Economic Development from 2010; and older brother Chamal, who’d been Speaker of Parliament from 2010 too.  Needless to say, holding such power, and with few, effective systems in place for public accountability, the family were in a position to squirrel large sums of government and party money away into their own bank accounts and businesses.  Meanwhile, money that was spent in public view was often borrowed and shovelled towards self-aggrandising white-elephant projects.  These included the Colombo Lotus Tower, commissioned in 2012 and finally opened in 2019.  Meant to represent a sacred lotus flower, I always thought of that tower as ‘the hand-grenade on a stick’.

 

The billboard depicting Mahinda Rajapaksa at the helm of a ship reflected the fact that another election was coming up.  In late 2014, as the election neared, I was running a training course on Colombo’s Duplication Road.  One day, for five minutes, the training was disrupted by a cacophony of revving engines and blaring horns outside the building.  This came from a procession of motorcyclists and tuk-tuk drivers, many with Sri Lankan flags fluttering from their vehicles, who were driving by in a stage-managed rally to show support for their beloved President Rajapaksa.  A Sri Lankan trainee explained to me that the rally would wind up at one of Rajapaksa’s residences, where the drivers would be treated to free grub and arrack.  “And that,” she concluded bitterly, “is what our taxes get spent on.”

 

As it turned out, thanks to some wily manoeuvring by Maithripala Sirisena, who’d served as Rajapaksa’s Minister of Agriculture and then Health, the plump, moustached incumbent-president lost the election.  Sirisena replaced him in the presidency.  Sri Lankans I knew reckoned Sirisena had squeezed ahead of Rajapaksa thanks to the combined support of the country’ ethnic and religious minorities – Tamils, Muslims, Christians – and the more liberal-minded citizens living in Colombo.  My experiences bore that out.  When I was in the countryside of central and south Sri Lanka, where people were more conservative and Singhalese nationalism was more of a thing, the tuk-tuk drivers would regularly drop Rajapaksa into their conversations and tell me what a great guy he was.  The tuk-tuk drivers who took me to and from work in Colombo every day were less willing to gush about the topic of Rajapaksa’s greatness.

 

Power was handed over peacefully, though later there were allegations that once he’d realised the game was up, Rajapaksa attempted to do a Trump and trigger a coup.  The military, however, wouldn’t play ball.  Soon afterwards, Pope Francis came to visit Sri Lanka and told everyone how wonderful they all were.  The feel-good factor was high.  Folk were full of optimism, and felt not a little relief.  Surely a corner had been turned.

 

Would it last?  Of course not.

 

© Lilith & Cupid Studios

 

To be continued.

Posted on

Sri Lanka gets Guinness

 

 

One sad piece of news I received during 2021 was that Zac Sansom, a good friend of mine while we worked for the Voluntary Service Overseas organisation in Ethiopia from 1999 to 2001, had passed away.  He’d fallen victim to the lethal combination of a Covid-19 infection and an existing health issue that’d weakened his immune system.

 

One of my best memories of Zac was during the summer of 2000.  I bumped into him in Addis Ababa two days before I was due to take an early-morning flight to the UK and spend a fortnight with my family.  It transpired that we’d booked into the same hotel, the Wutma, in Addis’s bustling, nightlife-centric Piazza district.  On the first evening – well, starting on the first afternoon – we embarked on a pub crawl and, as a result, the following morning, 24 hours before my flight, I did not feel a particularly well man.  When Zac, somewhat the worse for wear too, joined me for breakfast in the Wutma’s dining area, I told him:

 

“I have a plane to catch first thing tomorrow morning.  So, we are not going out on another epic drinking session today.”

 

“Sure,” he said sheepishly.  “So, uh, what will we do today instead?”

 

I thought about it.  “Well, we could go for a walk.”

 

Thus, late that morning, we set off on our walk.  We walked to the top of the street where the Wutma was located, turned a corner and walked along another street.  We passed Piazza’s venerable Taitu Hotel and turned another corner.  Then we found ourselves facing another hotel, a smaller and more ramshackle one than the Taitu, whose façade was bedecked with banners and posters for…  Guinness.

 

Ireland’s greatest brand?  The black stuff?  The black nectar?  Irish champagne?  Mother’s milk?  Liffey water?  Here, in Addis Ababa?

 

This was very strange.  Ethiopians enjoy their beer and the country has – or at least, back then, had – a good number of indigenous brews, and there was even an Ethiopian stout, Hakim, produced by the Harar Brewery.  But never, ever had we seen the name Guinness on a label on a bar or shop-shelf, and certainly not slathered prominently over the whole front of a building.

 

Meanwhile, it sounded like a carnival was taking place in the hotel’s bar.  Curious, we went up its front steps and looked inside.  The bar was crammed with people who were clearly having a good time.  More Guinness banners and posters hung on the walls, Guinness tablecloths covered the tables, Guinness beermats sat on the tablecloths, and glasses of the famously black-but-creamy-topped Guinness stood on the beermats.  An Ethiopian guy wearing a smart suit came over and introduced himself as the Guinness company’s newly-recruited marketing executive in Ethiopia.  He looked delighted that two foreigners had shown their faces at the festivities.

 

He explained.  Today was a historic day.  It was when Guinness went on sale for the first time ever in Ethiopia.  The hotel was hosting the launch event and there was a special offer to encourage curious Ethiopians to partake of and acquaint themselves with Guinness: buy one and get one free!

 

Zac looked at me and ventured, “Well, I suppose we could stay and have one…  Or two…”

 

Feeling that fate had started to conspire against me, and resistance was going to be futile, I sighed, “All right.  Just one.  Or two.”

 

As it turned out, we consumed considerably more than two that day.

 

I still managed to catch the plane the next morning, but it was definitely not the most enjoyable flight I’ve ever made.  Hunched in my seat, stricken with an unholy blend of airsickness and severe hungover-ness, I cursed Zac and cursed fate for positioning the launch-day of Guinness in Ethiopia so painfully close to my big journey.  Of course, I should also have cursed myself for being so weak-willed.  But hey, I’m from Northern Ireland.  I’m good at blaming other people for my shortcomings.

 

A few days ago, I was reminded of this incident because I discovered that Guinness had arrived in Sri Lanka, the country that’s been my home since 2014.  It came, apparently, with none of the fanfare that’d accompanied its entry into Ethiopia 21 years ago.  One day, it wasn’t in Sri Lanka.  The next day, it was.  As if by magic, it was suddenly occupying space on the shelves behind the bar-counter in Colombo’s Cricket Club, suddenly on display in the liquor section at my local branch of Keells Supermarket, suddenly jostling aside the cans of Carlsberg and Lion Lager in the fridge of my local off-licence, Walt & Row Associates on Marine Drive.

 

This surprised me because I’d assumed that Guinness would never get past Sri Lanka’s strict import regulations.  There was a protectionist element to this – the island’s Lion Brewery produces its own stout, claimed to be an eye-watering 8.8% proof, and I didn’t think the authorities wanted a foreign stout competing with their own homegrown one.  Thus, even the Irish Pub on Colombo’s Park Street has been a Guinness-free zone until now.  The closest you could get to replicating the Irish experience in there was to sip an 8.8%-proof Lion Stout whilst sitting under a framed picture of Bono.

 

I didn’t expect my first canned Guinness in Sri Lanka to taste like the real McCoy – and nope, it didn’t.  The Guinness flavour was there but it lacked some of the requisite smoothness and creaminess.  Coming out of a can, it had a faintly metallic tang too.  Actually, it reminded me of how canned Guinness tasted in the UK back in the 1980s, when I was a teenager, before widgets and other new technology were deployed to enhance its taste.  Also, perhaps in an effort to compensate for the metallic-ness, the stout seemed to have been sweetened.  As a result, it was slightly reminiscent of Sweetheart Stout, another drink that I quaffed in my teenage years.

 

That said, it’s better than no Guinness at all.

 

I’ll no doubt be downing a few cans of the black stuff during the festive season.  And I’ll drink them to the memory of my good mate, the late, great Zac Sansom.

 

© Guinness / From the Irish Times

 

(No, that’s not him or me in the picture.  That’s Rutger Hauer!)

Posted on

Beginning to look a lot like Colombo Christmas

 

 

Okay, Christmas doesn’t really look like Christmas in the Sri Lankan capital city of Colombo, which is my home just now.

 

For me, Christmas conjures up images of snow, snowmen, snowdrifts, snow-covered pine trees, Santa’s reindeer and sleigh hurtling across snowy landscapes, carol-singers chorusing outside doorways in falling snow, Macaulay Culkin inflicting grievous bodily harm on woollen-hatted, greatcoated intruders trying to break into his house from the snowy wastes outside.  In Colombo today, December 25th, Christmas Day, it’s 29 degrees centigrade with a 56% humidity level and I have just observed a pod of pelicans floating on the canal-water below my living-room balcony.

 

Mind you, there seemed something vaguely Christmassy about the sight of those pelicans.  Maybe the three wisest ones were making their way to the Baby Jesus to present him with gifts – fish, fish and fish.

 

 

Still, if there’s one thing I’ve learned from my travels, it’s that everyone loves Christmas.  Not only people in wintry Christian countries, but also folk in tropical, Mediterranean and sub-Saharan climes and in societies that are Buddhist, Muslim or downright atheistic.

 

In Addis Ababa in Ethiopia, Santa Claus was lurking outside the store-entrances in the run-up to December 25th, even though in that mainly Orthodox-Christian country people weren’t supposed to be celebrating the birth of Christ until two weeks later.  In Japan, the Christmas trees, decorations, presents, carols and so on provided a pretty backdrop to the end-of-year bonenkai parties.  In Tunisia, I saw Tunisians gamely sporting Santa hats while they did business in the alleyways of Tunis’s Medina.  Even in North Korea, where the only religion you were allowed to practice was one worshipping the abilities, achievements and overall brilliance of the Kim dynasty, my local supermarket insisted on having a rather scruffy-looking Christmas tree out in its foyer – not just over the festive season, but for the full twelve months of the year.

 

So, it’s no surprise that Sri Lankans are Christmas-philes too, even if their country is predominantly Buddhist.  Here is a selection of images from Christmas 2021 in Colombo.

 

 

Firstly, I find these nocturnal Christmas lights charming.  Arranged across the trees flanking the entrance to the Beach Wadiya Restaurant, just south of the Kirillapone Canal that separates the Colombo 4 and Colombo 6 districts (and on which I saw the pelicans today), they conjure up a festive atmosphere without being overly fancy or fussy.  Don’t, however, wait outside the restaurant and admire its Christmas lights for too long, because to get to its entrance you have to clamber over the coastal railway tracks heading south from central Colombo.  Stand entranced by those lights and you run a risk of being flattened by the evening Colombo-Galle express.

 

 

The Wadiya’s Christmas display is more effective than the one outside another restaurant you have to cross the railway line to reach, the Randiya Beach Restaurant north of the canal.  Presumably to avoid the cost of buying figures to populate a Nativity scene, they’ve set up a Nativity where the characters simply appear in a picture on the backdrop.  The cheapskates!

 

 

In contrast, no expense has been spared on the Nativity scene that’s been erected near the gates of St Peter’s College on Galle Road in Colombo 4.  It’s got the complete set of Nativity action figures.  However, when you look closely at it, you realise – Jesus, Mary and Joseph and the wee donkey! – how big the Holy Infant is.  He’s enormous!  Poor Mary must feel she’s given birth to a mutant.

 

 

Even the Westeern Hotel on Marine Drive, which houses my local pub, has got into the Christmas spirit and decked out its reception area not just with a Christmas tree but with trails of blue lights that form Christmas tree-type patterns along its front windows.  The bright blue glare emitted is, I have to say, a bit headache-inducing.  Thankfully, no blue light penetrates the bar at the back of the hotel-building where I frequently drink.  In fact, no light of any sort penetrates it ever.  And that’s the way I like it, baby (as Lemmy would say).

 

 

Meanwhile, Colombo’s – or at least my part of Colombo’s – rubbish collectors have evidently been told to show some Christmas spirit.  During the past couple of days, they’ve been prowling along the streets, enduring the sweltering heat and throwing the city’s festering garbage into the back of their trucks whilst wearing Santa Claus hats.  I tried taking a photograph of a group of these guys in their Santa hats, loading their truck with rubbish, while I sped past them in a tuk-tuk yesterday.  Unfortunately, I got my timing wrong and ended up with a picture of the side of the truck and nothing else.  So, you’ll just have to take my word for it.

 

Finally, although it’s on a humbler scale than most of the Christmas trees I’ve seen around Colombo, I like this skinny and slightly lopsided tree that the guard recently erected in the entrance area of my apartment building.  And I’d rather see a Santa hat at the top of an insentient Christmas tree than on the head of some poor, sweating guy who has to toil all day gathering up the city’s reeking garbage.

 

 

Merry Christmas, everybody!

Posted on

Toothy neebors*

 

 

During the seven years I’ve lived in Colombo, capital city of Sri Lanka, I’ve never been far away from the Kirillapone Canal.  For the first six years, my partner and I occupied a flat in the street immediately to the south of it.  Since late last year, we’ve been in a flat in the street immediately to its north.  In fact, our current living-room balcony offers a decent view of its last few hundred metres before it connects with the Indian Ocean.

 

I’d assumed this waterway was installed by the canal-loving Dutch when they occupied part of Sri Lanka in the 17th and 18th centuries.  Having done some research, however, I now know it was created by the British – on the orders of one Charles Peter Layard, the very first Mayor of Colombo and the Government Agent for the Western Province of what was then Ceylon.  The canal’s main function was not a transportation or economic one.  It was meant to act as a flood-control mechanism for the surrounding area.  Later, it transpired that the level of the canal’s bed was higher than that of its catchment area, so that excess water wouldn’t necessarily drain into it.  This miscalculation earned it the nickname ‘Layard’s Folly’.

 

The canal – or at least our stretch of it – is less malodorous than the Dehiwala Canal a mile or two further south, but it still looks polluted and I see a fair amount of gunk floating along it.  The city sends guys in boats along it now and then to pull out the trash, but it’s a never-ending battle.  Still, despite its less-than-pristine condition, it seems to act as a wildlife corridor.  Birds are able to follow it through the city, to and from the sea, without the risk of flying smack into any buildings.  The more exotic feathered wildlife I’ve seen in its vicinity over the years include pelicans and, on one surreal occasion, a colourful male peacock that managed somehow to flap up and land on a balcony of our apartment.

 

Though Colombo often encroaches right to the canal’s edges, there are patches of greenery along it and this seemingly serves as a corridor for land animals too.  I’ve been surprised by some of the furry or scaly creatures I’ve seen, living as deeply in the city as we do, and I assume they got here by following the canal.  We’ve had monkeys show up on our balconies a couple of times and, on one memorable night, a mongoose did too.  Several years back, we saw a sizeable monitor lizard plodding along one of our neighbourhood’s streets in a stately fashion.

 

A few weeks ago, one morning, I was standing on the living-room balcony when something in the water below caught my eye.  There’d been heavy rain the night before and plenty of debris had been flushed seawards along the canal.  This apparent piece of debris looked the biggest yet.  First of all, I assumed I was looking at a log.  However, its shape seemed to curve around and at one end it tapered to a point…  Could it be a…?  Surely not.  I grabbed my camera, zoomed in on the thing, took some photographs and transferred them to my laptop.  On the laptop-screen, I realised I had indeed been looking at a crocodile.

 

 

I know crocodiles are found in the wilder parts of the island and, when the Portuguese arrived here in the 16th century, Beira Lake – now a prominent feature of cosmopolitan, downtown Colombo – was supposed to be hoaching with the beasts.  But I hadn’t expected one to penetrate this far into the city in 2021.  The rain of the previous night must have washed him along.

 

Let’s hope he made it back to his usual territory and didn’t stop to snack on any citizens on the way.  Although I doubt very much if anyone would be taking a swim in the insalubrious waters of the Kirillapone Canal.

 

* A play on the opening lines of the epic poem Tam O’Shanter by Robert Burns.

Posted on

Travellers at the bar

 

 

As I mentioned in my previous blog-entry, the latest Covid-19 lockdown in Sri Lanka, which was imposed for a good part of May and June, has recently been relaxed.  This relaxation has allowed some eating and drinking places to re-open.

 

However, one place that my partner and I have often retreated to in the past, when we’ve felt the need for calm and a touch of soothing, old-school luxury (to convey the illusion for a few hours that we’ve actually got money), remains off-limits to us.  This is the Traveller’s Bar and its lovely outdoor verandah, which overlooks the Indian Ocean, at Colombo’s Galle Face Hotel.  For now, the bar and verandah are open only for hotel guests, not outside customers.  This is a shame because few things are as good for the soul as sitting there between six and six-thirty on a clear evening and watching the sky segue from one gorgeous colour to another while the sun sinks behind the distant waves.

 

The Galle Face Hotel will soon be a venerable 120 years old and it’s prestigious enough to have featured in Patricia Schultz’s 2003 travel book 1000 Places to See Before You Die.  Predictably, during its long history, it has accommodated some very famous guests.  Many of these are commemorated by a gallery of framed photographs adorning the interior of the Traveller’s Bar, with information about the years, occasionally just the decades, when they stayed there.

 

Among the earliest people featured in the gallery are writers.  You see Anton Chekov (credited with being at the Galle Face in 1890), George Bernard Shaw (in the 1930s), W. Somerset Maugham (the 1920s), Noel Coward (1944) and Evelyn Waugh (the 1950s).  D.H. Lawrence showed up there in 1922, presumably either on his way to or from the 99-day sojourn he had in Australia that gave rise to his novel Kangaroo, published the following year.

 

 

One literary hero of mine, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, stayed at the Galle Face Hotel in 1920 and, unimpressed by its prices, described it as ‘a place where the preposterous charges are partly compensated for by the glorious rollers that break upon the beach outside.”  He was also unimpressed by the equally famous Mount Lavinia Hotel, which in those days stood beyond the southern edge of Colombo.  “There are two robbers’ castles, as the unhappy visitor calls them, facing the glorious sea, the one Galle Face, the other the Mount Lavinia Hotel.” At least he appreciated the journey between the castles: “They are connected by an eight-mile road, which has all the colour and life and variety of the East for every inch of the way.”

 

At this point Doyle was heavily into spiritualism and had been gullible enough to believe that the notoriously faked Cottingley fairies were real.  However, he retained enough of his wits not to be taken in by a display of the famous ‘mango-tree’ trick, which a Sri Lankan magician did for him just outside the hotel.  Doyle praised the magician’s skill, though: “He did it so admirably that I can well understand those who think that it is an occult process.”

 

I’m perplexed by the presence of a portrait of James Joyce, supposedly a guest of the Galle Face in 1904.  (Coincidentally, June 16th, 1904, was the date of ‘Bloomsday’, the day during which all the events of Joyce’s 1922 masterpiece Ulysses take place).  To the best of my knowledge, he never travelled outside Europe, let alone visited southern Asia.  In fact, the only connections I can dig up between Joyce and Sri Lanka are that: (1) he makes mention of the ‘Cinghalese’ in Ulysses; and (2) he was known to own a copy of Henry Olcott’s Buddhist Catechism According to the Sinhalese Canon – Olcott was the American army officer who became the first president of the Theosophical Society and was an important figure in the revival of Buddhism in Sri Lanka, so much so that he’s honoured with a statue in front of Fort Railway Station today.

 

 

Perhaps somebody else with the name ‘James Joyce’ stayed at the hotel in 1904?

 

One writer not displayed in the Traveller’s Bar is legendary science-fiction scribe Sir Arthur C. Clarke, even though it was in the Galle Face that he supposedly wrote the last chapters of the last volume of his Space Odyssey series, 3001: The Final Odyssey (1997).  However, Clarke had lived in Sri Lanka since 1956, so he wasn’t really what you’d call a ‘visitor’ or a ‘guest’.

 

The Traveller’s Bar gallery is mostly a collection of the great and good, but it has at least one rogue in it, namely Richard Nixon.  He stayed at the hotel in the 1950s, sometime before he became the second-most crooked US president in modern history.  Other political dignitaries who were guests there include father and daughter Indian Prime Ministers Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru (1950) and Indira Gandhi (1976); and iconic revolutionary Che Guevara, whose portrait says he stayed in 1958, although according to a feature in Sri Lanka’s FT his visit was actually in August 1959.  He’d come to Sri Lanka because it was one of the first countries to recognize Castro’s Cuba.

 

 

From the mid-20th century onwards, Sri Lanka began to appeal as an exotic location to Western filmmakers and so the Galle Face Hotel had Hollywood movie stars stay while on their way to or from film shoots.  These include Sir Alec Guinness (1957), in town for the making of Bridge on the River Kwai and, I have to say, looking a bit shifty in his photograph; Harrison Ford (1983), there to make Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (whose production had switched from India to Sri Lanka after the Indian government objected to the ‘thuggee’ elements in its script); and Ursula Andress, whom I trust enjoyed her stay in Sri Lanka in 1976 even though she probably prefers to forget the film she made there, the Italian horror movie The Mountain of the Cannibal God, directed by Sergio Martini and considered so offensive in Britain that it was classified as a ‘video nasty’ and banned until 2001.

 

Andress, of course, found international fame as the very first Bond girl.  Meanwhile, the man responsible for the third cinematic incarnation of James Bond, Roger Moore, appears in the Traveller’s Bar too.  He’s said to have stayed at the hotel in the 1960s, but he’s depicted in his famous 1970s Bondian bowtie and dinner-suit, so the photo obviously wasn’t taken at the time.

 

 

One star in the Traveller’s Bar who’s rather forgotten nowadays is Lex Barker, who took over the role of Tarzan from Johnny Weissmuller in 1949.  Barker’s picture says he was there in the 1950s, although the only thing I can find in his filmography that was made in Sri Lanka was a 1963 movie called Storm Over Ceylon.  While Barker’s Hollywood Tarzan movies were too low-budget to be filmed on location in a tropical country like Sri Lanka, money was not a problem for Bo Derek and her director-husband John Derek, who used Sri Lanka for the jungle scenes of their notorious, mammary-obsessed Tarzan the Ape Man (1981), while using the Maldives for its beach scenes.  For their salacious take on Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Lord of the Jungle, Bo, John and their crew imported some decidedly non-native wildlife into the country.  According to an article in the New York Times, they brought with them a lion (called Dandi), an orangutan (called C.J.), three chimpanzees, two Irish wolfhounds and an 18-foot, 120-pound python.  Thus, Ms Derek is now commemorated by a portrait in the Traveller’s Bar as well.

 

A nice story is attached to Gregory Peck, who stayed in 1954 whilst making a film called The Purple Plain.  Apparently, he came down with a nasty bout of flu, but recovered with the help of a traditional local remedy of plain tea incorporating inguru and kothamalli (ginger and coriander).  In the 1950s Peck was a global heartthrob and his use of this remedy didn’t go unnoticed by his lady admirers in Sri Lanka.  As another article in the Daily FT observes: “It used to be said in lighter vein those days that many upper-class ladies of Colombo 7 began drinking ginger / coriander tea only after Gregory Peck told them about it.”

 

 

Finally, the gallery sports a picture of the first man in space, Yuri Gagarin, symbolically holding a white dove.  The great Russian cosmonaut came to Sri Lanka in 1961 and among the things done to mark the visit was the planting of a tree in his honour at the botanical gardens in Peradeniya, close to Kandy.  According to a piece published by the Russian Centre for Science and Culture in Colombo, the tree was said to have stopped growing at the time of Gagarin’s death in a jet crash in 1968.  However, mysteriously, it continued to live, so that it’s resembled a young tree for the past half-century.  This is contradicted by an article in Ceylon Today, which claims it merely fell ill at the time of Gagarin’s death, but recovered and kept on growing.  I was at the botanical gardens a few years ago and really wish I’d examined the Yuri Gagarin tree to find out which of these accounts was true.

 

Posted on

Still ruled by the Queen

 

© EMI / Elektra Records

 

Back in 2018, I found myself in a Colombo pub one evening having a blether with Suresh De Silva, the vocalist and co-founder of the Sri Lankan heavy metal band Stigmata.  Within seconds of the start of our conversation De Silva had asked me if I’d seen Bohemian Rhapsody, the movie biopic of the 1970s / 1980s rock band Queen, which’d been released in Colombo cinemas a few weeks earlier.  The unexpectedness of the question threw me a little.  It also reminded me of the hugeness of the phenomenon that is Queen.

 

It’s a phenomenon that transcends place.  National boundaries seem not to matter when it comes to liking Queen.  Meeting a Sri Lankan heavy metaller in 2018 who wanted to talk about the band wasn’t my first experience of this.  I remember working long ago at a language school in the UK that had weekend discos for its kids.  At one point there were a lot of self-consciously trendy and streetwise teenagers from Milan at the school and the DJ who oversaw that weekend’s disco thought he’d please his audience by playing then-modish big beat, drums and bass, UK garage and hard trance tunes.  But he ended up nearly causing a riot.  What did those trendy Italian teens want him to play? I Want to Break Free by Queen.  All bloody evening.

 

Their popularity also transcends time.  They remain fabulously popular today even though they’ve been creatively inert since 1991, when their singer Freddie Mercury passed away from AIDS.

 

I find this interesting because back in the days when they were a properly functioning band, friends of mine who considered themselves serious and knowledgeable connoisseurs of music would tell me that though they tried to be broad-minded, they just couldn’t stomach bloody Queen, whom they saw as purveyors of bloated, corny, stomp-along, guitar-twiddling shite.  Meanwhile, other folk, who bought at most three CDs a year and barely knew the difference between Elvis Costello, Elvis Presley and Reg Presley – the majority of the British population in other words – believed Queen were the absolute bees’ knees.

 

Incidentally, it seemed ironic to me how popular Queen were in the 1970s and 1980s among guys who were unreconstructed, macho and laddish and who, in all likelihood, were pretty homophobic too.  They were liable to punch you in the face if you suggested they were into anything that might be classified as ‘gay’ culture.  But after a few moments of hearing the unashamedly camp Freddie Mercury crooning, “Oooh, you make me live… / Oooh, you’re my best friend!”, they’d be hugging each other, shedding sentimental tears and singing along in emotion-cracked voices.

 

© 20th Century Fox / Regency Enterprises / GK Films

 

I wasn’t greatly impressed by Bohemian Rhapsody when I caught up with it, sometime after speaking to Suresh De Silva.  It takes many liberties with the truth.  For example, the band weren’t on the wane before their barnstorming appearance at the 1985 Live Aid concert at Wembley Stadium, which the film claims pulled them back from the brink.  On the contrary, during the previous year and following the release of their 1984 album The Works, I remember them being as popular and prominent as ever.  And there was no big emotional moment before they took the Wembley stage when Freddie told his bandmates he was HIV positive.  In reality, he didn’t know this until 1987.

 

Meanwhile the film airbrushes away the band’s real-life moral warts and carbuncles. We get nothing about, for instance, their misguided and money-fuelled decision to play at the Sun City Super Bowl in Bophuthatswana, South Africa, at the height of the apartheid era.  This act of unprincipled greed earned them a ban by the British Musicians’ Union.  Also doused in a tankerload of whitewash is the issue of Freddie’s promiscuity.  In 1984, the real Freddie bragged to the DJ Paul Gambaccini with hedonistic and, considering the times, reckless abandon: “Darling, my attitude is ‘f**k it’.  I’m doing everything with everybody.”  But in Bohemian Rhapsody he’s presented as a victim, insecure about his sexuality and led astray by his personal manager Paul Prenter, who introduces him to a world of partying, orgy-ing and general dissolution.

 

Still, the sequence in the film with Mike Myers as a (fictional) record executive called Ray Foster, who’s aghast at the idea that Bohemian Rhapsody-the-song should be released as a single, is funny.  “It goes on forever.  Six bloody minutes!”  To which Freddie retorts: “I pity your wife if you think six minutes is forever.”

 

Personally, I thought 1970s Queen were great.  They produced albums like Sheer Heart Attack (1974), A Night at the Opera (1975), A Day at the Races (1976) and News of the World (1977) that were studded with classic songs and, though they sometimes felt all over the place stylistically, were admirable for trying to explore a wide range of musical genres, everything from music-hall singalongs and salsa-y Spanish guitar workouts to blues and jazz and even, with 1974’s Stone Cold Crazy, nascent speed metal.  The rip-roaring Death on Two Legs, which kicks off A Night at the Opera, is one of my favourite songs ever.

 

But for me they seemed to lose their creative mojo at the beginning of the 1980s.  The last song by them that I liked was probably their 1981 duet with David Bowie, Under Pressure.  Actually, I didn’t think much of Under Pressure at the time, but it’s grown on me since then.  It’s certainly a zillion times better than Vanilla Ice’s dire 1990 single Ice Ice Baby, which appropriated Under Pressure’s memorably nagging bassline.  (I remember being at a Saturday-night disco in my hometown in Scotland – the clubhouse of Peebles Rugby Club to be precise – when the DJ put on Ice Ice Baby.  The bassline started and everyone cheered and hurried onto the dance floor, thinking it was Queen and David Bowie.  Then the lyrics started: “Yo!  Let’s kick it!  Ice, ice baby…”  Everyone threw up their hands in horror and shouted, “Och, shite!  It’s Vanilla Ice!”  The dance floor immediately cleared again.)

 

Anyway, a few days ago, taking advantage of the fact that Sri Lanka’s most recent Covid-19 lockdown has been lifted, I went for a walk and ended up at the area where Colombo’s Dehiwala Canal meets with the Indian Ocean. It’s a pleasantly grassy and leafy neighbourhood although, thanks to the condition of the water in the canal, it’s a bit smelly too.  And lo and behold, on a wall standing at the canal’s southern bank, I saw further evidence of the global love for Queen.

 

 

Yes, it was a mural of Freddie Mercury in his moustached, short-haired, white-vested Live Aid incarnation, which presumably someone had painted after seeing Bohemian Rhapsody in 2018.

 

As I’ve suggested in this post, I have mixed feelings about Queen overall.  But the fact that in the 21st century a Sri Lankan graffiti artist was inspired to paint their iconic vocalist and master showman on an out-of-the-way, canal-side wall makes me feel strangely happy.