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Published: February 21st 2008
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Beer Crash 1
Pondering how to clean up the crashed beer truck I finished my lectures in Kandy, including my public lecture, which had to be rescheduled because no one showed up the first time. The only people who showed up the second time were students who were forced to come. Once upon a time something like that would have bothered me, but now I just shrug it off.
To compensate, the director of the Institute arranged a little party for me at the faculty club, where we could avoid the alcohol ban imposed on Kandy during the week of the Perahera. Third World faculty clubs are my kind of scene: chalky, disillusioned academics slouched over their gin and tonics, bathed in the eerie blue glow of neon lighting, wondering where things went wrong. Even the mosquitoes seem too burned out to bite.
I was impressed that both the Vice Chancellor and the Dean of Science made appearances at my party. My friend Shelton was there, too. I'll bet he wonders why I always insist on his presence at these functions. It's because he seems like a brilliant guy and we can talk about weird theories of Buddhism and mathematics. He asked why "Rana" didn't accompany me. I explained as best I
Beer Crash 2
Bus back up outside my bedroom window at 6 AM! could. I was impressed that he sort of remembered her name. I'm sure she doesn't remember him. (But then I'm not sure she remembers me!) Shelton is a big drinker. We quickly downed three gin and tonics each. We were gloriously inarticulate at that point. I got the impression that like me, he didn't have any particular reason to go home.
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On my way to my party I passed a large beer truck that had failed to negotiate a sharp downhill turn. It rolled over a hill and landed on its back on top of a bodega creating a lake of beer. Apparently no one was hurt. I found this terribly ironic because the Perahera alcohol ban is a relatively new idea and now the stench of stale beer hangs over the Temple of the Tooth like a cloud of industrial waste. In fact, signs later sprouted up around Kandy warning people that if they violated the alcohol ban the gods might strike them like they struck the now infamous beer truck.
At 4 AM the next morning the beer truck incident ceased to be amusing. The police decided to reroute all of the city buses
Anuradapura 1
The Great Stupa down my street while a crane tried to lift the beer truck. This was not such a great idea. The first bus got stuck in the sharp S-turn below my bedroom window and in a few minutes there were twenty buses behind it, all honking and revving their engines. When I left the house at 9 AM they were still there. I guess they were waiting for the crane.
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My friend Kule, the former Dean of Science at Peradeniya University, was kind enough to invite me to join his family on their pilgrimage to Anuradhapura. There are several holy cities in Sri Lanka that families routinely make pilgrimages to. Kandy is probably the most important. Katragama, in the south, is devoted to a Hindu deity of the same name important to Sri Lankan Buddhists. Among other things people go there to seek blessings when they buy new cars. Tamil invaders destroyed Polonnaruwa in the 13th Century. Anuradhapura pre-dates Christianity. It was abandoned for unknown reasons 1000 years ago. Although both cities are in ruins, they still attract thousands of pilgrims.
As a former dean, Kule had no difficulty getting the chief archaeologist at Anuradhapura to lend
us his best man as a guide. Although archaeologists have been excavating the site for over a century, most of it is still undiscovered. Under tall hills overgrown with trees are spectacular stupas that rival the pyramids in size. The museum is nothing more than a storage shed where carefully labeled carvings collect dust. I imagine the atmosphere at Anuradhapura must be similar to the atmosphere in the Valley of Kings in the 1930s when Howard Carter was digging up tombs and making headlines.
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I returned to Kandy in time for the Maha Perahera or Great Procession. This procession culminates ten days of lesser peraheras and has taken place every year for the past 2000 years on the full moon day in the month of Esala (July-August). In essence, the Perahera is an elaborate rain dance. But since Buddhism arrived in Kandy, along with a tooth snatched from Buddha's funeral pyre, the purpose of the Maha Perahera has been to honor the tooth, which is placed in a casket and carried on the back of a giant elephant draped in a white and blue Elvis costume studded with Christmas tree lights.
The elephant does not walk
alone, however. Fifty other similarly attired elephants normally accompany him. But this year is different. A new man has been appointed as the organizer of the Perahera and he has promised 180 elephants! Kandy has been filling up with elephants for days. The scent of elephant shit mixed with the aforementioned scent of stale beer has made my daily walk past the Temple of the Tooth especially aromatic.
Elephants aren't the only Perahera story. There are also thousands of performers: horn players, drummers, dancers, street whippers, and torchbearers. But the division is not just by talent; it's also by caste. A low caste torchbearer could never aspire to be a high caste dancer, and a new comer couldn't aspire to be anything as the honor of performing in the Maha Perahera has been handed down from father to son for countless generations.
Tickets for seats along the route of the Maha Perahera start around US$50. The alternative is to sit on the sidewalk, but this requires claiming and subsequently defending your seat some seven hours before the parade starts. For some reason (Rukman's father) none of this applied to me. The police allowed me to stand in the
middle of the street between the Temple of the Tooth and the VIP seating. I was the only one there who didn't have a flak jacket and a press pass. I literally had to dodge all 180 elephants as they passed by!
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During my stay in Kandy I had breakfast with a French family who had taken a break from their surfing vacation in Arugam Bay on the southeaster coast of Sri Lanka to see the Perahera. (They were impressed when I told them that I was a big time surfer from Santa Cruz!) Arugam Bay was featured on the cover of last December’s Surfer Magazine. The same month the tsunami hit. They told me the local surfers described the third wave of the tsunami as an awesome 40 foot wall of water that curled at the top like the head of a cobra coiled to strike. I made up my mind that before my return to Colombo became general knowledge, I would take a quick trip down to Galle to get a first hand look at the tsunami damage.
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