Mud Ghecko

Around twelve years ago,  when I was hovering on the magical brink of becoming a symbolic 39, I went in for my annual overall check up and the reports came in with a positive diagnosis of diabetes. Well, yours truly, Chands, was in shock for a while and thought it was some kind of mistake! This was an OLD PEOPLES disease! It was one of those incurable inconvenient things that happened after you are sixty or something! This went along with Alzheimer's, dentures and incontinence, in my list of geriatric issues.   This wasn't for me; I didn't deserve it,  I didn't really do any of the things I imagined would make me into a diabetic. Ok I was rather lazy about the exercise thing although on and off I would try to keep in shape, not for health reasons at all but because I wanted to wear some dress…and I liked having a coke once in a way but actually I couldn't even afford junk food, so why had this happened to me? I was by no me...

….ie  more of that rahu/ kethu/ aturu dasha crap   Its about two years since I last wrote for WOW officially and may I say I'm glad to be back. Quite a lot has happened in my life in these two years and you can be sure I will be updating you about it, in occasionally painful detail. Now where do I start? . I have a lovely young friend in office who studies horoscopes in her spare time. I mean it very seriously, its like you can have a Diploma in Mumbo Jumbo, supervised by a number of lecturers in various sub topics, the main one is the Astrology Diploma and the sub topics include stuff like Herbal Remedies, Exorcism, and Spells. (ok this may sound like Hogwarts to you but this is good old fashioned Mattakkuliya where she is studying this stuff from an ancient and venerable guru, the type who probably takes about half a minute to turn a yellowed page in his crumbling antique textbooks….using of course, a shaking, saliva-moistened old digit…) And she t...

So my friend   Zeeny sterilizes stray cats. Regularly. Obsessively. And persistently. She is happy that I told her how to go get them operated. You just have to grab them, starve them a few hours before, and make an appointment with a vet and take them over and then look after them for a few days afterwards till they heal. And then no matter how much you grow to love them, you have to release them back to the pitiless street from where you got them because most people are not very willing to give street cats a home. People criticize us religiously saying that we are interfering with Gods plan. Or that we are accumulating bad karma and we should be childless in the next birth. But she cares about the cats. People who don't know her scold her and judge her and tell her that she will be barren in her next life. If you never had access to birth control, and you continued helplessly to have child after child after child would you be so judgmental ? Have you looked at a s...

FAA AGAIN So the next day I took the toy motorbike and gave to Nuzrath. I was feeling maybe that it was for his kid, Muad, but later I found that wasn't the case.  Nuzrat didnt let me get away, he made me sit down and showed me how he had taken Amor's lost sock and sewed it onto the plastic biker guy, like a kind of body bag/straight jacket. When Im doing this I have to undergo some rituals and I have to do some chanting , he  told me. And he had to draw a particular charm on a thin piece of copper plating which he stuffed into the stomach of the plastic doll. He had an ancient book with these charms drawn in it and he put on his glasses to look through this book. It looked as if the page corners were all worn out. He must have studied this book a lot.   He also found ashes, they say from a crematorium. In Sri Lanka there is a market for the ashes of dead people, which were unclaimed. So these may be ashes from some homeless person, or elderly beggar, which no one had picked up...

Chapter One  CHUBS What would drive a man to cut off his dead lover's head?  Its not easy. That is the thought running through my mind as I race to meet my writing deadline at the Weekend Financial Review. I am frustrated. "No, you cannot interview the wife, because she is just too tired to talk anymore," says my editor. I stare angrily at him down the phone. I can picture him running around the office with his sleeves rolled up and his collar awry. He has nice grey eyes. He does not take leave, even on his birthday or on Ramadan. He goes home at 2 am, after everyone else has left the evening shift. How will I write my piece on the Midway Murder? All I can think about is this buff sexy ole cop dude who has now hung himself in the middle of the jungle.  He had annoyingly taken the mystery with him. A mystery that has this entire island talking. "How do you know the wife didn't have something to do with this?" says my mango friend Faa, in the mid...

An appreciation of Grand Master Hassan Khalid founder of Fei Quan Do International   It was with the greatest sorrow I heard of the sudden passing away of our beloved martial arts Master the Grandmaster Hassan Khalid founder of the Fei Quan Do international school of karate in Colombo. He passed away last Thursday at a ripe age of 72 with nary a warning of his departure and having lived life to the very fullest. A couple of days before his sudden passing he had been conducting training as usual at his Wellawatte class. I remember him from years of attending his karate classes in Dematagoda and Wellawatte, after my quest for personal security and independence, brought me to train in karate. In the first place I had always been inspired by the 70s film Kung Fu featuring David Carradine which introduced me to the silent and noble beauty of the Shao Lin tradition. Grandmaster Khalid's philosophies were very similar too, with more of an emphasis on internal mast...