Elephant Complex

by John Gimlette

One was S. W. R. D.’s widow, Sirimavo, who’d step into his role and become the world’s first female prime minister.

I was given lots of advice on what I might need, or how I’d die. Out in the bush, there’d be scorpions, landmines, rabies, marauding elephants and – of course – the serpents. If there is one thing they love telling you in Colombo it’s that, out there, more people die of snakebite than anywhere else in the world.

Soon, they were channelling water in from the highlands, 150 miles to the south. Their calculations were so precise that these ellas, or channels – some up to forty feet wide – dropped no more than an inch a mile.

not many outsiders have heard of Anuradhapura, but in Roman times it was so huge that it would have taken an entire day to walk across. It’s reputed to have had over fifty miles of ramparts and a population of two million, or about the same as Paris today. For over 1,400 years, this was the island’s capital, and it’s been the seat of 113 kings and queens.

At the heart of Anuradhapura is a bo tree (or ficus religiosa), thought to have been an offshoot of the tree known to Buddha. It’s now been here for twenty-three centuries, which makes it not only the oldest tree known to man but also one of the oldest living things.

Sigiriya has to be the most beautiful battlefield ever built.

‘But what do you do when the elephants turn up?’ ‘Ah, that’s when you sing, no?’

Nowhere in Sri Lanka is more than seventy kilometres from the sea,

With so much hungry water, the town had been forced upwards, into the walls of the valley. Beyond a rim of temples and monasteries, it rose in ever more secular tiers: seminaries and courts to start with, then the mansions of the great and good, a few noble hotels, and then everyone else, vanishing off into the jungle. Only the wildlife ignored this hierarchy, and was always pouring over the city. Each evening, millions of crows would appear in the rain trees round the lake, and everyone would flee. During the night, it was the turn of the leopards, who’d come down and drink from the hotel pools, and eat all the dogs. Then, at dawn, the daily battle would commence, as the Kandyans took on the wildfowl and the fruitbats, in a vigorous exchange of droppings and rockets.

Although the king had a favourite consort, Rangamma, there was no limit to the wives he could’ve had. Kandyan queens were usually Tamil, carefully selected in India.

The year 1814 began with forty-seven rebels impaled on sharpened stakes. But when the king couldn’t find their leader – an impetuous courtier, called Ehelepola – he ordered that the family be found and brought here to the plaza. As the king watched from the Octagon, first the children were decapitated and then their mother was made to pound their heads in a mortar.

At dawn, there was a thunder of paws, and then a barrage of rockets. My room was behind the church in a small house made of cement and corrugated iron, and it was often raided by monkeys. Whenever this happened, the girl would bang one of the big steel thaachchis from the kitchen, and then loose off a string of crackers. This would bring the langurs crashing back over the roof, and would set off the dogs and the frogs and everything else.

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.