Colombo: A permanent home

[AjithR]

It is July 2000, and even though I am flying from London to Colombo to be with my father, who is on his deathbed, I have received countless lists of things to bring back. I say no, which is acceptable, because even though my family home is in Colombo, I am not Sri Lankan. If I was, I would have obliged. That is what Sri Lankans do. They oblige. I discover this 11 years later, when I marry a Sri Lankan and return from our honeymoon with the following items for her family and friends: four bottles of Nando’s sauces, a blender, a rice cooker, a speaker, some heavy-duty sticky tape and a car bumper.

Colombo feels the same as when I left to work in London two years earlier. Everyone looks content, but no one rushes; like an athlete who could be the best in the world if she paid more attention to detail. There is a finishing line, but the war keeps pushing it further away, so people are happy to wait and see what happens. Yet the city never sleeps, except at government offices, where it never wakes. There is a buzz of expectation. What could it be for? To me, Colombo is like a bushy-eyebrowed ex-girlfriend I can reconnect with in a second.

***

My family has been in Colombo since 1982, the year before the civil war started. I am unaware that the next time I get on a plane, one year after we scatter my father’s ashes in the hills of Sri Lanka, I will travel with my family to Bangkok, and while we are in the air, Sri Lanka’s international airport will be attacked by the Tigers. The war will finish eight years later; in all the time my father lived in Sri Lanka, he only saw one year of peace. He had an Indian passport, and my mother, brother, sister and I have British ones. So, through the war, we could have left whenever we wanted to. We could have left when our neighbours were assassinated metres from us. We could have left when a bomb went off near where my brother ate breakfast after a long night out. Yet, it never even crossed our mind.

I am half Tibetan, half English and cannot say more than please, thank you and kiss my ass in Sinhala and even less in Tamil, but I have the head wobble and I smile when I am in trouble. I would be Sri Lankan if I wasn’t a careful driver. I feel like this is my home, but I am still not sure how long I will stay.

***

It is 2011, and my wife and I marry under the vines of a massive banyan tree, while our guests sit in their sarongs and saris on the sandy floor in front of us. To our right is a kade—a village shop—selling fruit, sweets, newspapers, mops and brooms, and around us are mud huts with thatched roofs.

After we sign the registry, we dance (well, my wife dances and I move my jungle eyebrows) around a scarecrow, with a face painted on to a clay pot, guarding a vegetable patch. In the corner behind us, chickens roam free and a bull is tied to a tree. Women in traditional dress cook the most delicious curries in clay pots, above open wood fires, while the men serve arrack in cloudy glasses or coconut shells. It could be a typical Sri Lankan village scene, except that this is Nuga Gama, a restaurant at the Cinnamon Grand, Colombo’s finest five-star hotel. It is a carbon-neutral location, with the slogan “back to our roots”, and I cannot think of a better setting. Sri Lankans are known for their elaborate, often ostentatious weddings, but ours is as simple as my wife (just joking).

Visitors to Sri Lanka travel to beaches, tea estates, safari parks and historical ruins, but not many would get the chance to eat in such an authentic village setting without even having to leave their hotel. It’s a great photo op for the lazy.

Four years later, I return often with my three-year-old daughter, who loves to feed apples to the same bull, and sometimes I take her to see the restaurant’s weekly cultural show. It is my hat tip to a way of life I love. Can Colombo develop as everyone hopes, without losing its roots?

***

It is 2016, and I come into Colombo for the first time after the birth of my second child. I am sitting at Barefoot’s Garden Café on a Sunday listening to live jazz. I eat black pork curry and share a bottle of white wine with some friends. To my right, a lady weaves a fabric of colours so bright and cheerful that they lift our mood. The end result will be sold at Barefoot’s famous shop. We watch the plethora of visiting expatriate Sri Lankans marvelling at life here. I know each of them wonders when to make the final move back for good. The time is right, I tell these strangers with such authority that I realize that Colombo is my permanent home.

Things are happening here. Good friends of mine, whom I assumed had no talent, are showing great talent. Many are opening incredible shops and restaurants. Colombo is the same, but it just feels different. More traffic, more energy, more optimism. And it’s been spruced up. Like the ex-girlfriend I mentioned who has now plucked her eyebrows.
During the war, people were afraid to clean up, invest or develop. Security was the key concern, but now the army camp opposite the Galle Face Green is being replaced by a Shangri-La and an ITC hotel. Up the road, they have started work on the port city on reclaimed land. By doing so they have created a little bay bang in the city, on which brave tourists who can ignore men staring at them strip to swimwear.

The Galle Face Green. Photo: John Warburton-Lee Photography/IndiaPicture
The Galle Face Green. Photo: John Warburton-Lee Photography/IndiaPicture
I stand on this new beach looking at the area where a saltwater crocodile was spotted a few months earlier. That thought terrifies me. But when someone lights a firecracker behind me, I know it’s a firecracker. Pre-2009, it could have been anything.
Later, I move on to the Colombo Swimming Club to meet the editor of my first book, visiting from New Delhi. When I first arrived in the country, the club was foreigners only, and for some reason that did not seem strange at the time, even though it would be offensive today. With more local members than foreigners, it is less a bona-fide swimming club now than it is a place to meet “good eating-drinking buggers”. We share a gin and tonic, as the colonial founders of the club must have done, while trains splutter past, between us and the sea. The sun sinks into the Indian Ocean, and we can almost hear the sizzle as the clouds turn red. This is the heart of Colombo, but it feels a world away from anything stressful or busy.

***

I sit with my adopted street dogs, named after characters in my novels, on the balcony of the house my wife and I built in a district that may have been used for mass graves after the insurgency of the late 1980s. This is my Colombo, even though we are technically just outside, and I have no doubt it is my home. We are close enough to shopping centres and cinemas to feel comfortable, while also being able to see tropical birds, monkeys and paddy fields from where we sit. It feels like we are not far from the village life, albeit fake, of our wedding. Unusually for a Tibetan, I don’t believe in the afterlife. Yet, I can feel my father with me, because he was exactly like Colombo—his humour, his optimism, his potential, his lack of political correctness and mostly his smile after the cancer operation. It was just like the city I love—crooked but endearing.

Both my children are a quarter Tibetan, a quarter English, half Sri Lankan, with Australian passports. This is their home and will be till they go to university, at which point I will cry, like my father did every time I said goodbye to him. Maybe they will work abroad, but like me they will return every holiday. Wherever they are in the world they will think the grass is greener here in Colombo. One day, they will have a beer with me on this balcony. One day, this house will be theirs. One day, say, in 2080, they will be back here to look after my beautiful wife and to scatter my ashes in the hills of Sri Lanka.

Chhimi Tenduf-La is the author of two novels, The Amazing Racist and Panther.

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[කිත්සිරි ද සිල්වාTop contributor]

Wow.
Thanks Ajith for sharing.

[Market loverTop contributor]

Great

[The AlchemistTop contributor]

The writers mother is Elizabeth Moir, who was earlier the Principal of the British Scholl in Colombo and now owns the Elizabeth Moir International school.

[BackstageTop contributor]

Nicely written. Many of us who had a taste of 1960's and 70's Colombo are disturbed by the current version, but it still sure is a better place than most when all aspects are considered.