Postcards from Sri Lanka: Vesak

Just finished off a long weekend here, the Buddhist holy days of Vesak where the birth, enlightenment and death of Buddha are all celebrated simultaneously. Dude, Buddhists? Total multi-taskers. So as a result of Vesak folks here get a four day long weekend. The rich ones head off on holiday retreats while the poor ones enter into the city from the villages in droves in order to see the city lights and take in the festivities. After spending two mind numbing days at my grandparents’ place my uncle very kindly came to my rescue on Monday. He came and got me on his way home from Nuwara Eliya.

My uncle lives in a ‘gated’ community in Colombo. He works for the Sri Lanka Ports Authority and lives in a Ports Authority home in Mutwal now. They have a beautiful home of their own in Nawala, surrounded by a jungle, cows, the works. The place they live in now is pretty much in the very heart and soul of the city. Car horns can be heard at any time of the day and the rumble of big container trucks aren’t at all foreign. As a result of their proximity to the city there’s always something interesting going on.

Pandols and Dhansalas
On Monday night, the first day of Vesak was celebrated by the lighting of pandols and dhansalas. This was my first Vesak here in Sri Lanka since we left. Not that I remember anything about it from our time here; it was all a new experience for me. We went to see the pandols in Borella at about 9:00ish (the Buddhist wait for an auspicious time before they light the pandols so there’s no set starting). It’s difficult to explain what a pandol is. The best way I can describe it is that it’s like a massive brightly coloured billboard with Lord Buddha in the middle meeting a LiteBrite. Then there are small scenes from the Buddha’s life surrounding the larger picture. It’s lit up in such a way that in the dark it looks it really does look like someone did a giant Buddhist LiteBrite and the colours change and rotate. (I took a video of it, so if you’re really interested in seeing what it looks like, wait until I come home.) Droves of people line the streets to take a look at the pandols because of their sheer size, and supposed beauty, they’re easily a few storeys high. Along with the ever present street noises, there is a man who does a Sinhala freestyle over a really bad sound system telling stories from the Buddha’s life and thanking those who have given donations to the temple. It’s hardcore yo.

In the streets you can see long lines of people waiting to get into white tents that have Buddhist flags waving in front of them. These are the dhansalas where free food can be found. Essentially a dhansala is part of the Vesak celebrations, people in the community get together, take up collections and use the money to cook large amounts of food for the start of Vesak and continue on for a few days. The entire city is lit-up for Vesak, it’s like Christmas with all the bright lights, but instead of the colour palate being red, green etc it’s all yellow, orange blue and white.

Tour de France
After two solid weeks of inactivity and eating I thought it best to take advantage of the empty Colombo streets (during the day, because of Vesak) and my cousin’s abandoned bike. Shanga’s not much of a bike enthusiast, but it didn’t take much to convince her brother Amresh to head out into the mean streets of Colombo Tour de France style. We had a great time on Tuesday morning, rode through one of the slummiest areas of town, Kottehane where most of the Port labourers live. It’s absolutely filthy. So I braved the heat, catcalls and even took the whistles in stride (girls in Colombo don’t ride bicycles on the streets unlike those in Jaffna and Trincomalee).

I prefer biking to any other type of physical activity just because you get a bigger rush off of it than you would by walking (and I have zero endurance so running is out of the question) also, you can totally take in your surroundings and absorb what’s going on around you. I saw a set of white kittens playing on a rubbish heap, and wanted to bring them home with me, then there was the fluffy little brown puppies asleep in a gutter with their mother no where in sight and how could I forget the sight of the fat, black pot bellied pig eating rice on the side of the road. (And no, it wasn’t Aiya, he left on Friday remember.) If I had a house here it would most likely end up
being an animal menagerie.

There’s also all the interesting people and their homes. Not that I find squalor and poverty fascinating, and I don’t mean to be trite and sensationalize it either. But the fact of the matter remains that in Sri Lanka because our family leads an incredibly comfortable existence, this is the side of the Colombo which I hardly get a good glimpse at. Men drunk off of toddy (made from the sap of the Kithul tree, kind of like getting plastered on Maple sap, they make syrup out of Kithul sap too) before 10:30 in the morning, stumbling around in their sarongs smoking and cursing. Children in tattered and faded clothing running and filling the streets with their carefree laughter, playing high catches not bothered at all about their surroundings. Then there are the little girls who were fascinated by the girl on the bike wearing pants and a chapeau who’d wave shyly as we passed. For all their poverty, the people of this Colombo are like ‘a breath of fresh air,’ to use the cliche. (But more on why I think that at another juncture.)

Colombo Port
In the evening we convinced my uncle to use his Ports Authority pass to go biking through the Colombo port. Flipping AWESOME folks. A little bit scary yes, but that’s because there’s armed Navy and Army personnel everywhere, with their AKs in plain sight; completely juxtaposed against the the lights and banners which were up for Vesak. Yeah even the port was decorated! I felt so tiny in there, surrounded by the container ships, cargo and the brightly coloured cranes which can easily carry a few 45 tonnes of weight. When a truck rumbles past (very quickly I might add) the sheer force of it had the potential to knock me off my bike. We went past the yard where all the tsunami relief is being held. Because of the excise taxes that the government is charging on some types of cargo, a lot of it is just sitting there being pummelled by the monsoon rains and becoming useless. NGOs are unable or unwilling to pay the government to release the goods.

In the ship yard on a flatbed truck was a little red aluminium boat named ‘Baby Pradeepa’ which was badly beaten up. During the tsunami this boat, which belongs to the Galle port’s lighthouse, was tossed about in the sea and eventually ended up in Yalle (which is an animal reserve in the south). On Saturday it found its way into Colombo to be repaired.

Unfortunately I was unable to take any pictures of my bicycle travels. In Kottehane I probably would’ve been jumped (for the camera) and in the Port a sniper would’ve finished me off even before my flash went off. But this has all reasserted to me the pressing need to get a motorcycle licence and ride across Europe. Screw the backpacking kids.