Colombo local for you

I was visiting Colombo as part of a media group. We had an erudite tour guide, who introduced himself as Mr Vijay, which I realised later was spelt ‘Wije’. Mr Wije Manawadu was a sprightly young man of 71, with a temper to match.

His “Warm Welcome!” at Colombo airport did not take long to sour, courtesy a hopelessly indecisive, perpetually nicotine-seeking, casually arrogant bunch of Indian journalists who had only one thing in common: a supreme disregard for punctuality. In no time, we were way behind schedule, and the tour itinerary he had drawn up for us with meticulous precision was in total disarray. Fortunately for us, his innate sense of hospitality did not allow him to express himself candidly in front of his esteemed guests from India.

So Mr Wije, who had learnt punctuality under the stern tutelage of
the Japanese, stewed slowly in his own bile as we made him wait for hours, kept changing our plans, and found it impossible to agree on where to go next, as there were ten different opinions from ten media persons, and these kept changing every ten minutes. But the girls in the group found the old man's suppressed rage rather ‘cute’. They flattered him shamelessly until he cooled down, and then made him wait some more as they disappeared on another unscheduled shopping expedition.

So after the first day, which I mostly spent waiting with Mr Wije in the air-conditioned bus, I opted out of the group tours and decided to discover the city on my own.

All the Mawathas
If you don’t mind the heat, Colombo is one of those capital cities that are rather easy to get around. With its sunny humidity, it's a lot like any Indian city, though much cleaner. For someone from Mumbai, the trains are a breeze, the sidewalks are palatial, and you can choose your autorickshaws from any one of three primary colours: red, green or blue.

My biggest liability was my get-up — the camera on my shoulder, cap, and the rucksack, all of which screamed out in unison: I AM A TOURIST, FLEECE ME! No matter where I wanted to go, the initial quote from the autorickshaws — or tuk-tuks, as they are called here — would be 600 bucks. I made it a point to haggle with three different drivers, before settling down on the lowest common fare, which rarely went below 300 (or 150 Indian rupees, according to my cheap Indian mentality programmed for automatic currency conversion).

As I wandered around the city in an auto, I was amazed to see that, except for Galle Road, almost all other roads were called some 'Mawatha' or the other. Either Dharmapala Mawatha or RA de Mel Mawatha or Nawam Mawatha or some other Mawatha. Suspecting that I may have hit upon a unique facet of the city that could yield a startling cultural insight, I asked the autowallah, “Boss, can you tell me why all your roads, except for Galle Road, are called Mawatha? Isn’t it confusing — to be able to remember which Mawatha belongs to which road?”

The driver turned around and gave me a long and searching look. “Mawatha means street.” I admit I hadn’t thought of that. I’d somehow assumed that only the French used their own words for streets.

To the lightHouse
I also found the general architectural approach of the city, well, sort of unusual. Like having a lighthouse right in the middle of the city. It was built by the British in 1857, but they didn’t have the money to install it on the shore, so they kept it locked up in a warehouse for many years. Then in 1915, they decided they might as well use it since they’d built it. It looked so nice and tall. So they planted it in the centre of the city. Colombo got another lighthouse by the sea in 1950.

One area where Colombo beats all Indian metros hollow is in its Town Hall. It’s actually the White House, but since the Americans have a patent on the name, here they call it the ‘Duplicate White House’, which looks better and whiter than the ‘real’ White House in Washington.

I soon discovered that duplication is a recurring theme in Colombo. One of the city’s premier shopping districts is located along a ‘mawatha’ called Duplication Road, a name that may not inspire much confidence among serious shoppers. The most famous of the retail stops here is the House of Fashion, which is especially popular among Indians because you can get high-end brands here for nearly half of what they cost in India. “Indians come here and buy 10 or 12 Van Heusen shirts at a time,” Mr Wije informed me. But there is a catch: there are no trial rooms and you cannot try out any clothes before buying. You buy them, and if you discover back in India that they don’t fit, well, tough luck. 

But there are two things you can safely buy in Colombo without worrying too much about price or quality: gems and tea, both of which are specialties of the country.

Mount lavinia station  
Where Mumbai is a clear winner over Colombo is in the local train department: the crowds just don’t compare. I walked up to the ticket counter of Mount Lavinia station at nine in the morning on a weekday and found exactly one person in the queue.

The clerk at the counter asks me to hurry because the train is about to reach the platform. I sprinted up the over-bridge as a gaggle of school boys egged me on, and descended on platform number four just as the train began to move.

Even as my body instinctively tensed up to shove its way in, it got a shock as I jumped in: there was nobody to shove aside. That was because the compartment was empty. I had to cross two bogies before I found an inhabited compartment. The seats were along the length of the train, which meant that every seat was necessarily a window seat. Like the proverbial donkey that died of hunger because it couldn’t decide between different stacks of hay, I barely sat down as I kept changing my seat and the compartment in search of the best angle in which to take in the view.

And what a view it was. Imagine the Western line running on the parapet of Marine Drive. In Mumbai, there are slums, traffic and construction between the train and the sea. Here the slums and the city were on one side. On the other side, there was just the sea shimmering like plate glass in the morning sun. You are not over the water, as on a bridge, but glide alongside it. There is a meditative calm in the empty compartment as the waves explode over the rocks almost within touching distance and refract the sun into your brain. Across the bay, far away, you can see the modest skyline of downtown Colombo.

I got off at Fort, the seventh station from Mount Lavinia. For the sheer pleasure of rolling around Colombo’s place names in my mouth, I took a tuk-tuk for another jaunt across the city. “Take me to Bambalapitiya,” I told the tuk-tuk driver. Then, to Kompannavidiya. And then to Kollupitiya. What regally sonorous names! By the last day, I had composed a nursery rhyme around Bambalapitiya and Kompannavidiya which I chanted softly to myself in the bus on the way to the airport.