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Kindle Notes & Highlights
It also caught the eye of another writer, Daniel Defoe. Although his castaway, Robinson Crusoe, would end up alone, on the other side of the world, in tone and guile he is unmistakably Robert Knox.
This is quite amazing. Robinson Cruso is one of the earliest English novels and it's surprising it took its inspiration from the story of Robert Knox in Sri Lanka.
‘The whole world,’ he’d roar, ‘is a toilet for men!’
In the end, Colombo was lost for a piece of cheese. The British had wanted it for years. It wasn’t cinnamon they were after but a place to park their fleet.
There was only one thing on the menu, and that was ‘Chopsey’. It turned out to be a nursery version of curry, tasting mostly of ketchup. The waiter hovered over me whilst I ate it, and when I’d finished he asked if I could get him a job in England (and lend him fifty pounds).
This experience is very typical for Sri Lanka...
At 2,243 metres, Adam’s Peak may not be the tallest mountain on the island, but it’s certainly the most Kandyan.
For a moment, this worried me, the idea that I’d arrived in Kandy just too late for anything that had ever mattered.
We weren't worried by it... By the time we got to Kandy we were burnt out of all the temples we'd seen...
And was Kandy still a mountain redoubt in anything but height? For centuries, this was the last resort of the Sinhalese kings. They’d first holed up here in 1592, and, for the next 222 years, they’d kept the Europeans at bay. There was no need for complex breastworks. Usually a hedge was enough, and the mountains would do the rest, or the mighty Mahaveli River.
In a sense, he was right. A lot of these roads were English, many of them engineered by a single man: Thomas Skinner. He began building highways in 1820, at the age of sixteen. ‘Ceylon,’ the governor had said, ‘needs firstly roads, secondly roads, and thirdly roads.’ For the next forty-seven years, Skinner worked to this brief, covering the island in over three thousand miles of road. They creep along ledges, spiral up mountains, bore through rocks and wobble over forty-seven bridges. Now, each year, for hundreds of Sri Lankans, the last thing they’ll ever see is one of Skinner’s works of art.
So Thomas Skinner is the guy to blame for the roads... Some of them do feel they were planned by a sixteen year old.
We’d been driving all morning though camellia sinensis. It was the same topiary that I’d seen before: flat topped and a waxy dark green. But now it was everywhere, surging up the mountain walls, over the top, and into the valleys beyond. There were larger trees amongst it – dadap, albizia and chunky grevilleas – but the overwhelming sensation was always one of carpet. This great, bristly horizontal hedge would spread out over seven hundred square miles of hill country, and from now on, wherever I looked, it was always there. It was, of course, tea.
All that mattered was getting through today, and tomorrow would take care of itself. This had made them profligate with money. Kudden ill’arth’arl, moolay ill’arth’arl, as they’d say (He that has no debts, has no brains).
Not everyone had appreciated this lonely, overpopulated life. In 1948, one old planter, Harry Williams, tried to make sense of his time in the hills. His book, Ceylon: Pearl of the East, portrays the world of the planters as curiously sterile. The British were only ever boarders, he said, working their contracts until it was time to go home. They’d left almost nothing of themselves: no theatre, no opera, no ballet, no orchestra and no library of note. They hadn’t even understood the island around them. Travel was difficult; there were railway tours but no hire cars, and the rickshaw touts were
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Unlike the Romans who developed Israel... What have the Romans done for us?...
We really didn't see British libraries and other facilities in Sri Lanka.
a Gothic post office,
We were to that post office!
Beyond the plain, the forest began again. Few prisoners had tried to escape, and those that did were driven back by hunger and the leeches. Only two made it home, after jumping overboard in Colombo harbour and clambering on to a Russian ship. Their journey took them as far north as they’d ever imagined, via Aden, the Black Sea and St Petersburg, and then south through Berlin, Amsterdam and German West Africa. Amongst Afrikaners, they’d attain mythological status, known forever as ‘The Swimmers’.
In 1911, there were 5,342 Veddas, and yet, a hundred years later, there were barely five hundred. Some had perished in the Spanish flu pandemic,
Didn't know that Spanish Flu hit Sri Lanka.
There were also a lot of Israelis around, so many – it was said – that the village now sold kosher food.
Yeah that's us the Israelis :)
Sri Lanka, they said, could be a confusing place for East Europeans. Whenever they’d seen that big, sad smile, they’d immediately assumed they were about to be robbed.
For centuries, they and the Sinhalese have lived amongst each other, without definable borders. Even in the far south, Tamil artefacts have been found, dating from the second century BC. Their language is all over the landscape, too, and it may even have been them who introduced the reservoirs. But Tamils weren’t just everywhere; it’s now thought they’d formed an integral part of Sinhalese life. Their genes are strikingly similar, and so are their homes, their clothes and their rules on kinship, caste and cousin marriage. Even in matters of religion, it’s surprising what they’ve shared. Works
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Similarly to Jews and Arabs in Israel.
On a map, the separatists’ claim looked like a crab’s pincers clamped around the island. Beginning just below Arugam Bay, their nation-to-be would extend all the way up the east coast, across the top (taking in the Jaffna Peninsula) and down the west coast, almost as far as Negombo. It would be known as ‘Tamil Eelam’, and would absorb almost half the island’s coastline and a third of its land mass. Given that Tamils made up only twelve per cent of the population, it was always an ambitious claim.
The Sri Lanka "Partition Plan".
‘Back then, the army had no plan. The initiative was always with the Tigers, and we could only react. We’d recapture territory and then, a few days later, we’d be driven back, and it would start all over again. A terrible waste of life!
Like the Israel-Hamas 2023 war.
Batticaloa had provided more guerrillas than any other city, and had suffered the highest losses. Some twenty-seven thousand women had been widowed, and – even now – there were eight thousand people whose fate was simply unknown.
Sri Lanka civil war losses in 30 years. Compare them with the Palestinians'.
Under the deal, the government would not only pay its enemy but also arm it. Ten trucks of grenades, T-56 rifles and mortars were sent off to the Tigers, all of which were bound to reappear when the civil war restarted. The LTTE was also to have its wounded smuggled out through an Indian blockade by the Sri Lankan navy. Amongst those on the boats was Ravi, or, as he then was, Commander Weerapperuma. ‘It was crazy,’ he told me. ‘We were helping the enemy in order to defeat the peacekeeper.’
איזה מטומטמים האלה בסרי לנקה... יאללה...
Three of the others had gone home, whilst Father Hebert had been abducted by guerrillas and never seen again.
Also reminds me of something...
No one seemed to regret the death of other Tamils. Moderates and rivals were always wiped out, along with Tamil civil servants and policemen. Over 160 Tamil MPs were assassinated, as well as the leaders of the main Tamil party. It’s sometimes said that, throughout the war, more Tamils were killed by the Tigers than by the army.
Gee I wonder why this sounds familiar.
Hizbullah Hall
Hizbullah hall???
It was obviously a language of great subtlety and, with its 247 characters and thirty-two different words for ‘mountain’, it clearly wasn’t an idiom for foreigners to dabble in.
Interesting facts about Tamil language
Although Colombo still registered its births and deaths, and paid for its health, the Tigers ran the rest. Here, on the government side, anyone leaving had to show their passport and give up their car.
they’d only ever feared failure and never death.
It also had new teeth, thanks to a curious medley of friends: Israel,
Of courae Israel wsas involved :)
For a while, Jaffnapatam was a kingdom of it own, and even today it still has a monarch (although he now lives in Holland and works in a bank).
During the civil war, both sides were reapers, and, between them, they’d planted over one and a half million mines.
According to Ceylon: Pearl of the East, a heretic could only rejoin society after drinking large quantities of cows’ urine, and after a thoughtful course of hot embers and branding.
In VVT, the lonely niece had said that women own everything here, and that it’s passed around in dowries.
The Whirlwind,
A fiction novel about the Sri Lanka civil war.
But that wasn’t how Jaffna’s Muslims remembered those years. For them, it was an era of upheaval and unresolved tragedy. One of the first things the Tigers had done was to announce their expulsion, and forty-six thousand Muslims were given two hours to leave.
Internetsing fact... Was it cinsidered a genocide?
Until 1995, there’d been no concept of ‘the white van’ in Jaffna, but, since then, people had vanished in their hundreds.
The Norwegian mediators had first appeared in 1999, and would leave seven years later, despised, defeated and utterly baffled. It had been a confusing period. To begin with, everyone seemed conciliatory, and, in 2002, the great truce was signed. But it wasn’t long before the peace began to look like warfare cloaked in denial. Over the next four years, the Norwegians would count 351 treaty violations by the army and 3,830 by the LTTE. The mediators must often have wondered what they were doing here, and whether anyone wanted this war to end. Every day, they’d set out from the olive compound,
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Exactly the Israel-Hamas story.
The Norwegians could see which way things were going, and ended up hated. The government accused them of sheltering the Tigers, and even now there were those in the army who still believed it. One such was the major I’d met at Thoppigala. He was adamant the Norwegians had been running guns. ‘Look at their failures in Palestine and the Balkans,’ he’d said. ‘They’re bullshit people.’
I' glad he made the link to Palestine.
‘They didn’t understand us,’ he said, ‘and our local ways.’
Many Israelis would say the same.
For many, it’s the skirmishes and massacres that have shaped this conflict, but for me it’s this, the great betrayal. At a stroke, six thousand cadres had abandoned the cause. Some went home, some went abroad, but many sided with the army and became yet another sinister militia.
So that's how it ended. By a great betrayal.
Wonder if that could happen to Hamas...
A few days later, the entire length of the bloody A9 was back in government hands for the first time in twenty-three years.
What caused such a dramatic change?
It’s the impunity, however, that worries people, and the idea that here’s an army that countenances evil. I always think you can see this best in the statistics for sexual violence. According to the government’s own figures, not a single soldier was charged with sexual abuse between 2005 and 2010, and there was only one conviction for rape. That’s odd considering that these are figures from the war zone, and that – during that time – several hundred thousand men were posted here, often young, fired up and absorbed in the violence. Perhaps the army had enveloped itself in some other-worldly
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This is alsp true for fhs IDF soldiers. Very few of ghem were charged with sexual abuse of Palestinian women. And it's not that there had been such crimes the IDF whitewashed.
By that stage, the Tigers were throwing everything into the battle, even the civilians. For months, the LTTE had been sheltering amongst them, harvesting the children.
Hamas was doing it from day one.
‘The pirate ship,’ announced Isuru. ‘Farah III!’
Should read more about that ship...
Not even the Tiger’s head of policy, Nadesan, seemed to appreciate the carnage all around. Nor had he realised that, in Colombo, his fate had already been decided. He and his lieutenants were killed on the last day of the war, 18 May 2009, in a cleansing burst of machine-gun fire. They were carrying white flags at the time, as they emerged from their enclave. The last thing they’d heard was the sound of disbelief. It was Nadesan’s wife, struggling under the bullets. ‘He’s trying to surrender!’ she protested. ‘And you’re shooting him!’
Hope to see that happening for Sinwar. Soon.
Sri Lanka has a strange way of subverting the conscience. I sometimes wondered if there wasn’t some vast emotional transponder buried deep in the island, scrambling all the signals.
At some point, we all breezed past a filling station with a notice over the forecourt: NO SMORKING. It seemed a perfect word at the time. I’d been ‘smorking’ for miles: riding along, empty of thought, and enjoying the cruel beauty of somebody else’s world, smug in the knowledge that I was only passing through.
A beauticul excerpt.
I now realise how little I understand this. Perhaps it’s always the same for outsiders. You get a tiny glimpse of ‘reality’ and you think it will haunt you, but then the sheer splendour of this country wells up all around, and you love it all over again.
That was a complication I could do without, and so I settled for a virtual visit, via Google Earth. Even from beyond the outer atmosphere, Menik Farm looked agricultural, covered in human cloches. The plastic was dazzling, and I could see that it was divided into smaller and smaller allotments, like tented suburbs, each with its own ring road of mud. Back in 2009, it had become the largest refugee camp in the world.
Maybe I'll also do such a tour via Google Earth.
This book is also full of vital information, such as how to feed a Sinhalese baby and how to bury your dead (thumbs tied together, apparently, and toes).
WTF
More difficult is the work of Major Roland Raven-Hart. After fifteen years spent travelling the island, he knew it as well as any other writer. Although his writing can be jumbled and chatty, there’s no doubting its scholarship, and – in matters archaeological – Ceylon History in Stone (Lake House, 1964, Colombo) is an impressive work. More troubling was his interest in boys, who appear, largely naked, throughout the pictures. Nowadays, a book like this would land you in jail.
Island of pedophilia.
