Mud Ghecko

Love. Pain. Life.Hope- sometimes you need a bit of encouragement to go on. When I return to Ceylon, no matter how old I get there is one place I must see. And no it is not an endangered archaeological site or a famous land mark, since they are around and will be taken care of by the authorities and I do not need to check on them. But from time to time I visit an ordinary temple in a modern suburb, the sort of place you don't need to write home about, peaceful incense tinged, floor tiled sort of edifice with multitudes of Araliya trees and Jasmine bushes and the usual stray cats and dogs wondering contentedly around, where stands a particular stone door guard who captured my heart a long time ago..   I come to see a statue, a oversized cream coloured sentinel who guards the temple doors fixed eternally in standard pose, dressed in fifth century Indian ornaments , with his long hair tied up in ancient head gear. He has sightless eyes which look nevertheless deep into your thoughts an...

I've known Harry for three years now. He is one of my closest confidantes and "advisory committee members", my " cheer-er up", and my honored partner in crime; we screen each others partners, SMS each other at unholy times of the night and we know so much about each other that should we fall out, blackmail would not be a feasible alternative - the worst stories would simply cancel each other out. I also know what not many other people have a chance to know, that beneath that tough machang exterior is a very sensitive and caring human, someone who goes out of the way to help without any reason and without expecting anything in return. And occasionally gets exploited!   By strange co incidence, we are actually first cousins and for twenty five years, we didn't know about each other … The internet is a really dangerous place, my girlfriends tell me with wide eyed conviction, all kinds of weirdoes live on the net ….well, seriously considering that I am quite wel...

About two month's back, in the course of duty I was instructed to visit Ampara. I've seen many photographs of this dusty outback territory and these always seem to give the impression of stubborn survival amongst rather desperate odds and a desolate environment. I have sat and painted the barren landscapes and dusty ruins I saw in some photos and I really wanted to see those places for myself. Names like Ninthavur and Sainthamaruthu have, to my thinking, a wonderfully exotic ring to them, and I had practiced rolling them off my tongue while writing (admittedly arm chair based) progress reports from Colombo : I really wanted to experience the dust, heat and live action of awesome Ampara, first hand. First came the usual administrative hurdles of sanctioning a decent set of wheels, a cool laptop (with wireless mind you!), an old Canon digital camera, and last but not least a willing driver ** and then my hurdles of packing phone charger, biscuits, cotton clothes, extra cotton und...

The tsunami struck Matara at 9 23 on the morning of Sunday the 26th December 2004. I was in a small 30 seater inter-city bus on the coast, with my beloved father and a dear friend named Dieter. There were perhaps 3 minutes between us and a monstrous, 30 foot high, wall of destruction ploughing directly towards us at the speed of a runaway train.   This was the most terrifying moment I have ever faced and perhaps ever will. Thousands of metric tonnes of churning, raging, impersonal annihilation was coming straight for us. We were staring certain death in the face. I could not move. Passengers in the bus had begun screaming in panic and grappling their way out. Human decency had given way to a sheer atavistic desperate race for survival. They had chosen, tragically for everyone of them, to outrun the wave. I felt screams locking up my throat but somehow I was too weak to even let them form. I was simply paralyzed. I knew we had to run, but looking back at my father and then the wave, I s...

June 4 2007 I will not forget Dieter, in many ways he made me who I am. . He was different, so different and although he touched my life only comparatively briefly, he made impressions that will never be lost. To say that I owe a lot of what I learnt in life to him, would not be enough. I owe him my life. Christmas Day 2004. When I was at home by the beach ,in Matara, with my father and Dieter, they would be discussing philosophy as usual, and I would sit watching their faces at the dinner table , listening not to the words but to the comforting cadence of their tones.   Dieter was soon to leave our country, to go back to his own, to gracefully relinquish a dream that could have been, because we knew it should not. Dieter was leaving me tomorrow and we knew this. We loved each other, we knew this, but we had never spoken about this. There would be too much upheaval caused in the lives of the people I loved. He did not want to cause this. Although I was his student in a language and in ...

Fifteen years ago, in this serene month of June, and for my birthday I suppose, I was blessed with a baby daughter.  Red in the face, cherubic and complaining loudly in the harsh lights of the nursing home she had pushed me into, she was placed swaddled in flannel on to a table near me, and I stared at her in total panic. I was supposed to feel maternal hormones coursing through me naturally guiding me on what to do next.* But, the heck I didn't ! - the father of all this stress was standing around cheerfully taking photos of me just emerging from labor looking like a drowning -victim which didn't really help at all…. Where do I start? I wondered, in shock. At the best of times I'm clumsy around kids but this was my responsibility entirely, or so I felt, and I was honestly clueless. Sure, there were famous books written on this sort of thing but this was a person and she would have opinions some day and I was the one who would be held somehow responsible for them. How coul...

Cats plague me. They greet me with loud vibrating purry meows when I get home, hunt me excitedly around the house tripping me up, when I'm desperately looking for my sandals, spray my motorcycle jacket cheerfully with nauseous civet musks and drop suddenly out of the ceiling onto my dining table when I'm entertaining important but cat averse guests…. I look around and wonder to myself how I ever got so surrounded by this many smelly mewling mangy excuses for former Egyptian Gods. The answer perhaps is I love my kids and they love playing with kittens and bits of newspaper tied onto strings. I too love kittens, I admit, and from garbage dumps and temple corners they all seem to be asking me to take them home. The problem is that these kittens I bring in mutate alarmingly within four to six months and for the next decade I am hounded (there's just no other word for it) by large, obnoxious feline predators calmly decimating my crockery and waving insouciant, in – your –face ba...

This is not a technical article - tekky advice you can get from just about any guy you know who rides a bike, or from the friendly salesmen at joints selling them. What follows are the kinds of tips you won't hear from the guys: stuff like how to choose road friendly feminine underwear and what parts of your riding trainer it is better not to grab on those early test runs. Also please understand, first and foremost you need to know how to balance on a foot-cycle as its called, it's a pre requisite without which you make life a living nightmare for the poor soul who has to teach you, since he will be worrying about how many tumbles he has to take with you and gravel rash on ones elbows hurts to the point of being crippling, trust me.   Helmets are a good idea whether the government requires then or not, since we only have one grey hard disk and damaging that could have embarrassing permanent repercussions. I was given this polite advice by a fatherly grey haired gentleman whil...

Two years ago, around this time of the year, I bought myself a shiny new Chinese moped from a very user friendly joint in Kohuwela. There was, I recall, a significant amount of family opposition to the idea of me riding a "motorcycle". Notably most of the negative attitude was feminine. My best friend, a lovely, most lady like creature I have known since grade 7 in Lindsay BMV, wrote me a 234 Kilobyte email from New York, expressing in detail, her delicate horror at the idea.   My long suffering mother called me IDD from Nairobi, to vocalise a pleading monologue on the subject and from something like 13,000 miles away and without a web-cam, I could clearly picture her wringing those lovely hands all over the place and getting red nosed with emotion.(Failing to change my resolve, she lapsed into prayers to the entire Hindu pantheon, which is generally something she has had to do for many years now, since it's the only way she can resign herself to my fate….)Another of my v...

2009 Well, I'm back: I survived the recent holiday and the astounding sense of boredom and anticipation that nationally relevant times like this carry with them, and did not actually get hit by the chikun virus ,perhaps because, like in Jurassic Park, I already harbor viruses which are ten times nastier and crunch up the chikuny ones on sight...old Picky, my unfaithful canine friend paid me that bi annual visit he does because he wants to escape from cracker noises by hiding under my bed...and I steadfastly continue to maintain the grinchy theory that compulsory breaks are a pointless waste of time involving loss of focus, something Im always trying to hang on to.   IN the meantime I got to thinking about so called "auspicious times" .Arnt we a society totally happy with leaving things to a nakath welawa? Isnt that why we love being absolutely depraved on New Years eve and then following it up with a list of goody goody resolutions on New Years day? Waiting for the Correc...

A CURIOUS TALE if any By al Juhara Curious* was discovered by a local garbage dump, weak, hungry and crooked, one soggy July evening in 2005 . Numerous unpleasant incidents with our growing menagerie mean, that we try not to see or hear stray orphans as we walk or drive around the streets of Colombo, but this one hit my eyes, solidly and firmly although it probably measured no more than three inches across at the time, from nose to ratty tail tip. This bug eyed, quizzical looking vision of a blurred orange ball with a string on one end, would not leave me. Curious was destined to be my favourite. Mentally and physically Curious is slightly handicapped, possibly mildly "autistic". Just like with humans, in the animal world too, this happens occasionally but we see hardly any instances of such because cruel laws of the jungle dictate survival of the fittest and shrewdest and even they never get a second chance. Curious it would appear, was supposed to. Add to this the fact that...