“THERE IS A NEW KIND of coming and going in the world these days,” V. S. Naipaul once wrote. That was in 1976, and the famous Indian writer from Trinidad had just arrived in Mumbai. Mumbai was still “Bombay,” but even then the old city, the colonial “gateway” with all its remnants of the Raj, must have been on its way to becoming something else.
Naipaul’s observation came to me as I made my way through Bandaranaike International Airport outside of Colombo. It was 2006, thirty years on from his arrival in India. And Mumbai, just a short distance away, was bursting out of its confines. One could feel its energy even as one arrived in the middle of the night. Now it is a “global city” — Indian, but also connected to some larger culture, some larger world. And the coming and going in Mumbai is incessant.
Colombo was very different. I had arrived from Hong Kong via Bangkok — two cities quite committed to the coming and going of our time. Then, arriving in Sri Lanka, there was no such coming and going. One had the sensation that time had stopped at some point and had not yet restarted. The airport seemed dated and dilapidated. But this was not at all the point: Many airports – not least Mumbai’s –require modernizing. The feeling of stopped time came in the pace of things, busy but spiritless, and in people’s faces, the faces of transients—uncertain, unanimated, a little disoriented. Most of the other passengers, burdened with heavy, bulky bundles, seemed to have come from homes and work, routines and families, that unfolded in other places. They were Sri Lankan, for the most part, but it was as if they had said, as we waited at the baggage carousel and passed through customs and changed our money, “No, life is elsewhere now.”
Something had happened in Sri Lanka. In the early 1970s, not so many years before Naipaul recorded his journey through India, Sri Lanka had been the envy of the developing world. Famously, as many Sri Lankans would remind me, it had been admired by leaders such as Lee Kuan Yew, the progress-obsessed prime minister in Singapore, who liked the new public housing he saw during a visit to Colombo. Now the place once to be emulated was a place full of tragedy and regret and missed opportunities. Almost unbelievably for a nation with so many advantages and so much promise, it was a legitimate question by 2006 whether Sri Lanka could be called “a failed state.” So something also had not happened: There was an absence. What was it that was missing? What had seemed so promising but had not been delivered upon? What had happened, or failed to happen—or both, in some combination or other? What had caused the clocks to stop?
LIKE MANY INTERNATIONAL FLIGHTS into Colombo, mine arrived late in the evening. We set out for the capital—my guide, his wife, a driver, and myself—sometime just after midnight.
It is a long drive from Bandaranaike International Airport into the city. For much of it I could make out only shapes, stilled reminders of daytime activity—rooftops, doorways, signboards, streets and lanes. Lights of all sorts—some old and yellowed and feeble against the night, others bright and declarative—glinted through a thick haze. It smelled of diesel fumes, wood smoke, dust, and a half-dozen other things I couldn’t name. This is the odor of the Third World, the haze of the South. I felt it in my eyes and my throat. It lingered heavily in the lights.
The side of the road was strewn with an uninterrupted line of objects, most of them metal and modern, the things of a society coming to terms with the process we call industrialization: cars, household goods, discarded steel products, cargo containers. Amid these things: half-built buildings, half-decayed houses, buses that may or may not have still been in service. Rows of shops sold building materials, cars and car parts (the latter new and used, the used stacked like fruit or hung like sides of beef). Other shops displayed kitchen and bathroom fixtures, furniture, computers and office equipment, groceries, fast food, produce, bottles of soft drinks and water. The profusion suggested a frenetic way of living, a local economy involving a daily struggle—local coming and going, subsistence coming and going, an energy that rose upward from the roads and lanes and went in all directions.
There were religious symbols and religious places of various kinds. They were like islands or order in a sea of disorder. They were numerous and seemed oddly out of place amid what looked like a kind of barely contained chaos, an anarchy of buying and selling and building and tearing down. Here and there were seated Buddhas in stone and white-painted stupas that seemed to glow through the darkness. There were Hindu temples and a mosque. And there was Christian imagery, more of it than I had expected. Statues of Saint Anthony of Padua—a special figure for Sri Lankan Catholics, it would turn out—alternated with Blessed Virgins, each one carefully colored, encased in glass, and lit against the night. There were also churches and Christian cemeteries. In the cemeteries some of the stone crosses were tall enough to reflect the light from the road.
These are the things Sri Lanka first reveals of itself. It seemed to struggle a little awkwardly with the objects of modern life. Atop an old civilization had been imposed a new one; on one level of development had been placed the things, the technology, of another. And between the old and the new there seemed to be an absence of organic connection. People had not quite absorbed the new objects. So the new things that came from elsewhere were little by little, by no one’s particular design, worn out or broken or cast aside or left where they were, while the old things went on unchanged. Next to an open shed there was a British-made car with years of undisturbed dust on it. It suggested the fate of modern things in Sri Lanka: They were a part of life but not a part of life—a separate part of life.
The Christian images should not have surprised me. When I arrived it had been five hundred and one years since the Portuguese first came to the west coast of what was then Ceylon. Later, of course, the Dutch came, and then the British. Each modified the missionary mix, so there were eventually Catholics, Dutch Reform Protestants, Methodists, Anglicans. The Christian layer was Western, but there was not much else to distinguish it. It was the most recent of the religious imports, and perhaps the most given to public display, but Buddhism was an import, too—as were Hinduism and Islam.
We had been driving for almost an hour, and we were nearing Colombo. And I had seen almost nothing in this densely populated strip of Sri Lanka that was plainly, self-evidently Sri Lankan. I had noticed no “Welcome to Sri Lanka” sign as we exited the airport. I had seen no public places—no parks, no government buildings, nothing of what we can call “civic space,” or “public space.” I had seen not a single Sri Lankan flag—not even, as I recalled during our drive through the haze, in the arrival terminal itself. The airport, surely, was a public facility, but even that had seemed oddly un-public in character. It was named not for the city it served but for a family, an old political clan whose influence during Sri Lanka’s fifty-seven years of independence was more or less unrivaled. The Bandaranaike’s, I knew, were proud of the place they occupied in the national story. But they were prideful, I had sensed in the reading I had done, as Bandaranaike’s more than as Sri Lankans. In that first, revealing hour, when impressions accumulate as if pressed upon a blank surface, all that I saw that could be called Sri Lankan were police units, barricades that turned the road into a kind of driver’s training track, and army units equipped with automatic rifles and submachine guns.
Sri Lanka is at war with itself, and I had expected as much. After four years of relative peace under an internationally brokered cease-fire—the negotiators, too, were from elsewhere—fighting had recently broken out again in the north and east of the island between government troops and the Liberation Tigers, the group that had been demanding, for the previous quarter of a century, an independent state for the island’s Tamil community. Security, perhaps of necessity, was tight around the airport and in the capital. There had been incidents, even in the south, and there would be more of them in the months to come. But was this how Sri Lanka represented itself to its people, by way of barricades and checkpoints and security forces? It suggested, even then, the notion of a nation as a kind of forced imposition, as an idea no Sri Lankan appeared to grasp—not, at least, with enthusiasm or understanding.
In the days that followed, the truths that suggested themselves during that first hour would be elaborated. I had arrived in a traditional society. And tradition in some fashion means belonging, even as belonging must in some way involve exclusion. One was, on this island, Sinhalese or Tamil or a member of one or another of the smaller minorities. In a deeply religious society—or a society much given to religious form, at least—one was also Buddhist or Hindu or Christian or Muslim. One spoke Sinhala or Tamil or English as a first language. One passed out of this school or university, one was of this profession, and above all of this class or that—one was above or below. Among others, in Canada or Britain or California, one might be Sri Lankan. But one was not Sri Lankan at home, it did not seem to me.
I had arrived, too, in a modernizing country—and a modernizing city, certainly. As the drive from the airport had suggested, Colombo is a riot of individuation. So there is this paradox (among others) at the core of Sri Lankan life: Deep down one belongs, but in everyday life one makes one’s own way. As a city Colombo is not so much mismanaged or poorly managed, as many other cities are; it is, rather, something closer to unmanaged. Everyone goes in his or her direction, off this way and that, caring not at all for the direction anyone else may have chosen.
The modern makes the individual, some scholars would say. In theory, at least, the modern also provides the means and the rules by which the individuals modernity creates can live among others. Perhaps this is a simple definition of a modern nation-state. But here was a place where one could see the traditional and the modern, the old and the new, the belonger and the free-standing individual, jostling and bumping against one another without any such means and rules. This was evident not just on the streets and in the shops but on the very faces of the inhabitants—again, uncertain faces, faces that suggested uncertainty as a condition of life in Sri Lanka.
Everyone, then, seemed to know what it meant to belong and to exclude, for Sri Lanka is a place of distinctions and barriers. Everyone knew, just as well, the necessity of making one’s own way. There was religious life and there was private life, the latter manifest in the myriad pursuits of self-interest typical of any busy society. There was sacred space and profane space. But there did not seem to be any public space. By what principle did Sri Lankans bring order to what would otherwise have to be counted an evident disarray? What was their larger idea of themselves? There seemed to me to be energy without organization, which produced a kind of confusion, a want of design. This is not a political problem or a social problem—or it is not only these. It is at bottom a psychological problem, a problem of consciousness.
I WAS TO STAY in a suburb of the capital called Nugegoda. Today it is virtually indistinguishable from Colombo proper. One could see that once it had been a separate place. The train that originated in the center of Colombo made a stop in Nugegoda. Here and there along some of the smaller roads leading to the city there were still bits of empty, untouched land, land still in grass or trees. But there were not many such places, and they were hard to find. In the days that followed I would have to adjust to the idea that my little rented house was not, as it seemed to me, in the Sri Lankan capital but in some other place. This became a small daily reminder of something large and important: The common frame of reference among those all around me was to a past I could not easily see and had not lived.
Once in the city that first night we drove along a wide commercial street—silent and deserted, for it was very late, but plainly a place of great activity during the day. We crossed another thoroughfare called Highlevel Road, and then a railroad track. Then we passed the train stop and turned down a narrow lane called Thilaka Gardens (or Telaka Gardens, depending on which sign one read). In an instant we had left the city and entered a village. There were low houses with roofs of ceramic tile and windows with shades against the daytime sun. The houses were surrounded by gardens dense with plants, and the gardens were walled. One of these houses would be home.
As I settled in, another question formed itself, the question that had brought me to this island before I was able even to pose it: What does it mean to be Sri Lankan?
In one way or another I would ask this until the day I left.
