Kandy Shop

I saw my first loose Sri Lankan beast on the highway to Kandy, Asia's foremost city named after a stripper. Over a week in Colombo I hadn't seen so much as a chicken loose in the streets, let alone goats. This is not even to speak of cows being allowed to occupy the thoroughfares of India with such dispassion that it takes at minimum a multi-ton vehicle to inspire them to budge. I had hopped off the bus at a brief snack stop, and lo and behold, across the street was said Sri Lankan beast munching on a pile of discarded mango rinds. I stopped in my tracks and stared, because this was no common sheep, or even a yak in the road: I was looking at a four-and-half-foot monitor lizard, gorging itself on fruit by the side of the road as if it had just emerged, famished, from the fires of Lizard Hell and was enjoying some fresh produce and the mountain breeze.

I was slightly hesitant to tackle Sri Lanka's second biggest city immediately after pronouncing an unfavorable verdict on the capital, but if Kandy is all Sri Lanka's got left to throw in terms of urban madness, this will be a comfortable country indeed. Kandy, despite being much, much smaller than Colombo, is still called "The Great City" in some circles, because it is the symbol of the Sinhalese kingdom....STOP. I hate to do this, but it's time we had our introductory Ghostface Buddha Lecture in Sri Lankan History.

So, there was the beginning of time, and a bunch of stuff happened, and then the Europeans colonized the shit out of Sri Lanka. The Portuguese got there first, then the Dutch had it for a few centuries. However, in all this time they only had the coasts, because the kings of Kandy in the mountains became extremely paranoid, defense-minded rulers and made themselves unconquerable. Thus, for several hundred years (~1500's-1815), Kandy was the capital of all that you could call an independent Sri Lanka. It also bears mentioning that Kandy was a Sinhalese kingdom, populated almost entirely by Sinhala-speaking Buddhists. This is as opposed to Sri Lanka's main minority group, the Tamils, who are essentially the same as their South Indian cousins, mostly dwell in other parts of the island, and had their own coastal kingdom in the north that got conquered earlier. The Tamils' lack of interest in Kandy, and the fact that the Tamils and Sinhalese have never quite gotten along, figures in later as we shall see. OK, now that's out of the way, back to your stimulant-deprived Sri Lankan travelogue. God. These Sri Lankan drug laws are making me scholarly.

OK, so I arrived in Kandy and the first thing I did, as usual, was take stock of the city. I quickly decided that Kandy was Good. Yes, it now has its obnoxiously long, aesthetically offensive, highway-hugging suburban sprawl, but once you get into the urban center proper it is surprisingly small. Though it bustles relentlessly, it feels homey, a sensation no doubt encouraged by its well-ordered traffic, its plethora of open-fronted bakeries, and the many pleasant white Kandyan- and Colonial-era buildings at the heart of town. It all reaches a splendid glow when you get to the central lake and walk along its promenade looking at the forested mountains that creep all the way into the heart of downtown, right beside the immaculate white Temple of the Tooth.

Temple of the Tooth? Some more explanation is in order. Yes, kids, time for GFB to put his professor hat back on and start scratching arcane notes on the chalkboard while making snide Sri Lankan History Department in-jokes about Econ majors. The good news, is that although all this material will be on the final exam, during said exam Professor Buddha will instigate a bomb hoax in the building. Our story begins waaaaayyy back in the day of the Buddha (that Buddha). You see, thing is, he died. Then they burned his body. But -miracle of miracles!- one of his teeth was saved from the fire. Then, over the course of centuries, via various peregrinations that prove definitively (so it goes) that Sri Lanka is like Buddhist Zion, the Tooth ended up in the possession of the Sri Lankan kings. It then moved through just about every city in Sri Lanka that was ever a capital of some sort, until finally it settled in Kandy, where it allegedly rests to this day, although there is something of a chance that the Portuguese actually ground it to dust and threw it in the sea, forcing the Sri Lankan priests to replace it with a three-inch buffalo tooth. Suffice to say, portions of its history are cloudy. As it houses the sole existing relic of the Buddha himself, the Temple of the Tooth is far and away the most important Buddhist temple on the island, and lies at the very heart of the Sinhalese identity. This is probably why the Tamil Tigers, the world's most colorful defunct guerilla army/terrorist organization, decided that the front of the temple could use a good truck bombing.

I checked into a bizarre little hotel just outside the security cordon of the sacred precinct, a grand colonial building of some sort that looked like it had just been gutted by fire, which, the owner told me, it had. The hotel sat on an incredibly strategic location, no more than 50 paces from the entrance to the temple park, 100 paces to the "devales" shrine precinct, and 40 paces from Pizza Hut. I was to visit all of these repeatedly, usually arriving at an early hour on a slightly overcast morning and lingering within just long enough to be trapped by a monsoon rainstorm. Though let me tell you, walking nonchalantly out of the monsoon, sopping wet into the lobby of a Pizza Hut, approaching a group of despondent-looking Sri Lankan girls, and asking if they'd like me to go out and fetch them some umbrellas is one of the smoothest ways I have conceived to use being drenched to the core.

After a great deal of such gallantry brought about by my continual inability to predict the need for a raincoat, the day finally came to visit the Temple of the Tooth itself. I entered the security cordon, realized I had forgotten to put any battery in my camera, and exited the security cordon.

I returned soon after and had to explain to the guards why it was that they kept having to check the same doofus American. Eyes were rolled. Finally however, I entered the temple park for reals. The first thing one sees of the temple is the pure white octagonal tower jutting out towards you. This was the king's speechifying platform in the days of old, and continues to fulfill the same role for the country's democratic leaders. I don't know the first thing about current Sri Lankan politics, except that the people who rise to power here have a tendency to be a bit eccentric, and that the current President has a silly face. One such president, who had Parliament moved to a neighorhood of Colombo that happened to have the same name as himself, also made the more edifying contribution to the nation of an utterly superfluous but quite tasteful golden roof that balances delicately and uselessly on its perch above the actual roof of the relic chamber.

Passing the second security layer and crossing the moat, I was quickly within the main courtyard of the temple itself. It is an odd, semi-indoor space with elements of stone, wood, plaster, metal, and brick visible depending on where you turn, and monkeys jumping on shit regardless of where you look. In the center is the shrine itself, on two stories. The actual tooth chamber is on the second floor, with a lodge-like wooden ambulatory suspended in front of it. For reasons that are not entirely clear, the chamber directly below the tooth, which is what you see when you enter, can easily be mistaken for the actual thing seeing as it has all the requisite ornate doors and curtains, not to mention an impressive array of elephant tusks guarding the door. The door of the actual, upper chamber is comparatively understated, though the shrine within is said to be quite something. I never saw the shrine itself. They only open it a few times a day, and waiting in line to shuffle past the door would have also entailed suffering an hour and a half of the worship ceremony. The ceremony starts promisingly, with a display of drumming by half-naked men with strange hats, but then the priests disappear into the lower chamber and shut the doors behind them, leaving nothing to watch while you endure the endless wheezing of one of those accursed kazoo-sounding flutes that plague the Orient. I opted to explore elsewhere.

I went on to the rear building of the complex, a 20th-century piece called the "New Shrine", which was built to compensate for the fact that the original temple seems to have forgotten to include any actual Buddhist imagery. The New Shrine more than makes up for this shortcoming. It is a marvellous, thoroughly strange, pseudo-baroque chamber with black and white tile floors and rows of square, white pillars on either side, each topped by a capital of a golden elephant face. Hung from these are numerous paintings detailing the rather fantastic history of the tooth, and below these are a gallery of immaculately polished white Buddha statues. At the front of the room, a gold Buddha flanked by more shining white idols, rows of elephant tusks, and fabulous drapes makes for a spectacular, almost science-fiction neo-Rennaisance uber-kitsch that I thought was just splendid. It looks like what would happen if Stanley Kubrick revised the famous "hotel scene" at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey to have the astronaut hero encounter not the Monolith, but a big shining Buddha, and then the Space Baby shows up and squeals "Let me show you the Jewels of Wisdom", and then the movie ends.

Passing back through the main courtyard and observing that, yes, the insufferable assault of wheedling wind instruments was still ongoing, I passed out of the temple proper and onto the lawn, crossing through yet another rainstorm into the fascinatingly freakish Tusker Raja museum. Raja, the Tusker, is none other than Sri Lanka's favorite elephant, longtime servant of the Temple, and many-time carrier of the Tooth. People come to the museum to visit Raja and even pray before him, so high is the esteem in which he is held. And indeed, he is a fine elephant. The only problem with this entire scene is that Raja died in 1988 and now occupies his museum quite tranquilly. I must say, the skill (and the scope) of the taxidermy is quite impressive, but it is more than a little weird to be looking at a dead elephant in a glass case while people around you kneel and mutter prayers. If I were a Sri Lankan, I would take advantage of the fact that elephants never forget, and whisper many important things to Raja, then go pray to him in times of need. "Oh Raja, what's my social security number again? And where did I put the spare key to the baby cage? The wife comes home in an hour and she is going to be pissed."

The Temple of the Tooth was unquestionably the highlight of my trip to Kandy, so I will spare you a more exhaustive recounting of the sights, save for my thorough catalog of the exhibits in the Archaeological Museum, which is as follows: Miscellaneous Dusty Shit, ~100-200 pcs. I will however spare you the details, which are somewhat personal, of why I turned down a lovely Sri Lankan girl's offer to accompany me to the Peradeniya Royal Botanical Gardens, and went to the Botanical Gardens by myself, which did not go uncommented upon by the general public. So, there we go, I committed myself to loneliness and ridicule, but hey, that's been going on for a solid year now! Zing!

Oh God..... Dignity. I don't even know what it feels like any more.