Episodes

  • Encounters At The Jungle Hotel

    Encounters At The Jungle Hotel
    Dec 13 2025
    Encounters at the Jungle Hotel is a behind-the-scenes look at Sri Lanka’s Flame Tree Estate & Hotel. It starts, of course, with a welcome. And thanks for coming our way, for most of the listeners of this will no doubt be our guests. Whatever else is happening in the world, here at least there is a cake for tea; birdsong from dawn to dusk; and from everywhere the sound of civets, bickering monkeys that look a lot like Mr Trump; and squirrels bouncing on roofs like Keith Moon. To have made it this far, your car will have navigated our driveway of buffalo grass and untamed forest. Guerrilla gardening, we call it – it keeps at bay, if only metaphorically, what’s best avoided to safeguard a long and happy life: televisions, for example, or processed food, or terrorist warlords. We enjoy being a secret to most and a companion to some. Our sophisticated friends in Colombo call this Village Country, all jungle; tiny hamlets, simple living, feral nature. But really, the jungle is far from feral. What looks so random is ordered, artful, and immeasurably peaceful. Its discreet hills and valleys keep safe a rare seclusion. Nightclubs, branded food concessions, still less a shop selling extra virgin olive oil – all have yet to open here. Somehow, we cope. Nature, good food, schnauzers, art, walks, music, books, yoga, swimming, massage, few rules, bird watching, tree hugging, meditating, and that most lost of all life’s activities – just being: that’s what this tiny jungle principality is all about. That and the odd trip to a few places well off the beaten track. This little guide will try to give you a glimpse of what makes things tick. And how on earth did we get here in the first place? Geographically, we are neither part of the Rajarata, the oldest kingdom that reached from Jaffa to the edge of the hill country, nor the hill country itself. We lie between the two, on the first high hills that rise from the dry northern plains to eventually reach Mount Pedro near Nuwara Eliya at 8,000 feet. The hotel sits, belly button-like, in the middle of 25 acres of plantations and jungle that dip down to paddy and up to hills of 1,000 ft, all of it surrounded by yet more hills and valleys, almost all given over to forest. Until family wills and the 1960s land reform acts intervened, this estate was much bigger; a place where coffee, cocoa, and coconuts grew. They grow on still, fortified by newer plantations of cinnamon and cloves, and rarer trees. Now almost 100 years old, the main hotel block, Mudunahena Walawwa, was built by the Mayor of Kandy. Walawwas, or manor houses, pepper the island, exuberant disintegrating architectural marvels, now too often left to meet their ultimate maker. In size and style, they range from palaces to this, a modest and typical plantation Walawwa with metal roofs, inner courtyards, verandas, and stout columns arranged around it like retired members of the Household Calvary. But it was not always thus. This walawwa – like a caravan - moved to its present site when the water ran dry at its earlier location. The foundations of this first abode, on the estate’s eastern boundary, can still be seen. It overlooks the Galagedera Pass, which found its 15 minutes of fame in 1765 when villagers, fortified by the Kandyan king’s army, rained rocks down on an invading Dutch army that melted back to Colombo: fever, and early death. From that moment to much later, little happened - in the jungle that is. Elsewhere, America declared itself independent, and the Holy Roman Empire dissolved. Europe was beset by wars, the Napoleonic, the First, the Second, the Cold. Asia threw off its colonial masters. Not even the LTTE civil war that so rocked the rest of Sri Lanka made much of an impression here. In fact, it wasn’t until 1988 that the outside world caught up with the estate when a Marxist-Leninist insurrection crippled the country for three years in a blizzard of bombings, assassinations, riots and military strikes. Entrusting the Walawwa keys to three old retainers, the family left the estate, and for 20 years, weather and nature took turns budging it into a Babylonian wilderness. Landslides embraced it. Buildings tumbled. Termites struck. Trees rooted - indoors. Later, we arrived on holiday and bought it – a sort of vacation souvenir that could only be enjoyed in situ. No Excel spreadsheet; no SWOT or PESTLE analyses were manhandled into service to help escape the inevitable conclusion, which was, of course, to buy it. The estate, the buildings were lovely, and only needed some love. The love restoration programme that followed often felt like the unravelling of Denisovan DNA. Expect the unexpected, said Oscar Wilde. Prescient advice in the jungle as much as in Victorian London. There were monks, of course. They arrived to be fed, to bless and leave, their umbrella bearers running behind them. And five or six builders, not dissimilar to Henry VIII’s...
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    27 mins
  • Eminent Plebs

    Eminent Plebs
    Dec 13 2025
    Sri Lanka, like ancient Rome, has strict - albeit invisible - notions of caste and class. And class, not being exclusively human, is no less apparent within its smaller mammalian world – its rodents, and rodent-like cousins: its rats, shrews, mice, and squirrels. If the island’s tiny and elite mammalian senatorial class is represented by its elephants and leopards, its more capacious equestrian class comprises its monkeys, lorises, bears, mongooses, buffalo, anteaters, otters, jackals, hares, deer, civets, and wild cats. Which, of course, leaves the plebs. Bottom of the pyramid, they may have been, but the Roman pleb took nothing lying down. Famed for their resistance, resilience, and passion, they lived their lives with little submission or demureness. They were eminent, not intimidated. As are Sri Lanka’s rodents, whose existence is anything but deferential or docile. And numbering over 30, they make up not just over a quarter of the island’s land-living mammal species, but also 50% of its endemic species. To know them is to understand a key part of what really makes Sri Lanka Sri Lankan. Naturally, plebs had a firm pecking order all of their own and at its apex stood the Tribunes of the plebs – the People’s Tribune, which in a mammalian context can only mean the rats. Like tribunes, rats are the busy, brisk, no-nonsense influencers of what really happens or doesn’t, and they abound in Sri Lanka. Their collective poor reputation and cordial hosting of many especially nasty diseases mark them out as a mammal best enjoyed from a distance. However, as Jo Nesbo observed, "a rat is neither good nor evil. It does what a rat has to do." Two of the island’s ten rat species are endemic. Thirty centimetres in length, nose to tail, with steel grey fur and white undersides, the Ohiya Rat is named after a small village of barely 700 souls near Badulla. It lives quietly in forests and has gradually become scarcer, as biologists have counted. Its only other endemic cousin, the Nilgiri Rat, is no less endangered and is today found only in restricted highland locations such as the Knuckles, Horton Plains, and Nuwara Eliya. Little more than thirty-nine centimetres in length, nose to tail, its fur tends to be slightly redder than the typical grey of many of its relatives. Its name – Nillu, which means cease/settle/ stay/stand/stop - gives something of a clue about its willingness to get out and about. To these two are joined an embarrassment of other rat species, many common throughout the world, others restricted to South and Southeast Asia, and all much more successful in establishing an enduring dominance. These include the massive Greater Bandicoot Rat and its slightly smaller cousin, the Lesser Bandicoot Rat. Measuring almost sixty centimetres in length, nose to tail, the Greater Bandicoot Rat is known in Sri Lanka as the Pig Rat. Aggressive, highly fertile, widespread, happy to eat practically anything and an enthusiastic carrier of many diseases, it is not the sort of creature to closely befriend. A marginally smaller giant of the rat world is the Lesser Bandicoot Rat, coming in at 40 centimetres in length, nose to tail. It is found in significant numbers throughout India and Sri Lanka, and its fondness for burrowing in farmland and gardens has earned it a reputation for destruction. It can be aggressive and is a reliable host to a range of nasty diseases, including plague, typhus, leptospirosis, and salmonellosis. The Black Rat, or Rattus rattus, lives in all parts of Sri Lanka and occurs in at least five distinct subspecies: the Common House Rat, the Egyptian House Rat, the Indian House Rat, the Common Ceylon House Rat, and the Ceylon Highland Rat. None is much longer than thirty-three centimetres nose to tail, and despite their reputation for being black, they also sport the occasional lighter brown fur. They are phenomenally successful, with almost every country in the world calling them home, including Sri Lanka. They are also disconcertingly resilient transmitters of many diseases, with their blood serving as a habitat for large numbers of infectious bacteria, including those that cause the bubonic plague. Three other rats are restricted to South Asia: Blanford's Rat, the Indian Bush Rat, and the Indian Soft-Furred Rat. Indeed, Blanford's Rat, also known as the White-Tailed Wood Rat, is found in impressive numbers throughout India, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh. Measuring thirty-five centimetres in length, nose to tail, it has the classic grey fur of the kind of rat that scares most people. The Indian Bush Rat is also found widely across India and Sri Lanka. It even boasts a tiny pocket-sized colony in Iran. At twenty-five centimetres in length, nose to tail, it is smaller than many other rats. It has rather beautiful fur that is speckled yellow, black, and reddish, as if it had wandered out of a hair salon, unable to make up its mind about which exact hair dye to ask for, ...
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    30 mins
  • Lost in Always

    Lost in Always
    Dec 13 2025
    The mind blanks at the glare,” wrote Philip Larkin “Not in remorse — The good not done, the love not given, time Torn off unused — nor wretchedly because An only life can take so long to climbClear of its wrong beginnings, and may never; But at the total emptiness for ever,The sure extinction that we travel toAnd shall be lost in always. Not to be here, Not to be anywhere,And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.” Larkin’s poem Aubade counts the cost of personal extension. But as Descartes might have gone onto conclude, with the value of hindsight, “If I don’t exist then everything else probably can.” For it is by being human that we are triggering the party to which no one desires an invitation, the Earth's most extraordinary extinction event. We were, of course, not responsible for the earlier ones, but anyone fond of models will find they all offer scenarios that even Hollywood would baulk at. The first of these events, the Late Devonian extinction (383-359 million years ago), killed off about 75 per cent of all living species. One hundred million years later came the worst of all – the Permian-Triassic extinction, or Great Dying. This event dispatched 96% of all marine animals and 3 out of every four land animals that had managed to survive since the previous extinction. After 51 million years of exhaustive recovery, the Triassic-Jurassic extinction swept across the Earth, exterminating 80% of all living species. All three, it seems, were caused by the climate change sparked by volcanic eruptions and shifting plate tectonics. The last, and most famous, mass extinction, the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction, 66 million years ago, was the one that claimed the lives of the dinosaurs – and with them 76% of all Earth’s species. For this, a wandering asteroid was probably to blame. The credit for the next one is one we, as a race, must step up to take: the winner of the Oscars from Hell. Already, the stage is being set: the tables for the Oscars ceremony, the red carpet laid out, invitations being sent for the pre- and post-ceremony parties, the Governors Ball, the Vanity Fair Party, cocktails in the Diamond 25 Lounge. Invitations have already reached many in Sri Lanka. Anteaters, jackets, bears, otters, fishing cats, civets, axis deer, lorises and Toque Macaque have already propped up their gold embossed cards on their jungle mantelpieces as have the Ceylon Highland Long Tailed Tree and Spiny Mice, the tiny Serendib Scops Owl, the Nillu and Ohiya Rats, the Dusky Striped Squirrel and the Ceylon Highland, Pigmy and Long-Tailed Shrews. Even the Ceylon Tree Skink had received an invitation to this perdition party. The big beasts are, of course, especially invited, and the island’s elephants are the guest of honour. Before the British arrived, there were over 15,000 elephants in Sri Lanka, but that was when big-game hunting became fashionable. Its most notorious celebrity was a government agent, a Major Thomas Rogers, who managed to kill 1400 elephants in just 11 years. “His whole house,” recalled one appalled guest in the 1840s, “was filled with ivory, for amongst the hosts of the slain more than sixty were tusked elephants… At each door of his veranda stood huge tusks, while in his dining room every corner was adorned with similar trophies…” Mercifully killed at just 41 years, Rogers’ grave, still to be found beside the gold course in Nuwara Eliya, offered him little by way of eternal rest as it has been struck by lightning over 100 times, indicating one of the silver linings of climate change. Today, the island lays claim to less than half that pre-colonial number of elephants, with the BBC recently reporting that nearly 500 are dying annually, half of them at the hands of humans. The maths for continued survival looks a little better for the equally famous Sri Lankan leopard, now reduced to around 800 adults and desperately trying to recover from a 75% population decline during the 20th century. All across the globe, the more modest number crunchers calculate that a million species of plants and animals are facing total extinction. This seems especially impossible to be true in the fecund space of this island, which is so full of life, it appears as if nothing can ever end. Yet it can. It does. It has. From shore to shore lurk the traces of previous extinctions, their wrath like an imprint plotting a course as much forwards as it does back. Even so, despite being composed of pre-Cambrian rocks of such antiquity, they were old when Gondwana was young and produced the most unmistakable evidence across the whole of South Asia for the first Homo sapiens. Planetology is still a science that has far more to yield. Much of what little we know about the island’s earliest history and its extinct animals dates back to the remarkable work carried out between the 1930s and 1963 by P. E. P. Deraniyagala, ...
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    18 mins
  • Sigiriya & The Party That Lasted 22 Years

    Sigiriya & The Party That Lasted 22 Years
    Dec 13 2025
    Now regarded as little more than ruins atop a rock that offers a magnificent view, Sigiriya is undoubtedly one of ancient Asia’s Seven Great Wonders, albeit one that wears its wonders with clandestine dignity. Its moment of destruction coincides most neatly with the date most historians give for the end of the ancient world itself – 500 CE. Just 5 years beforehand, the ancient world itself had come crashing to a bloody end around the base of this 1000-foot mountain in central Sri Lanka in 495 CE. With it ended one of the most notorious parties the world had yet enjoyed, one that, at 22 years, totally outlasted even Cleopatra’s Feast. The party was Gatsbyesque in its exuberant excess. More opulent than the Rothschilds’ surrealist ball of 1972; more majestic than the Shah of Iran’s 2,500-year dynastic celebrations the year before, this party, like the ancient world itself, raced to its corporeal end with all the aplomb of the last serving of the previous martini on board the Titanic. Of course, 500 CE is little more than a marker, a slender signal, a humble and iconic rounded-up figure that has been invented by historians eager to bring closure to the world of the Romans and Greeks, the Pharaohs, Assyrians, Hittites, Persians, or Han. But the date has stuck. Thereafter follows the medieval age, the early modern age. And the later early modern age; even the later modern age, and our own post-modern age, an age shorn of parties, or glamour, decadent or otherwise. Sri Lanka’s 22-year end-of-history party followed exactly the dates of the reign of one of its most outrageous kings, an equatorial Nero with mesmeric hints, like the best of expensive wines, of other things - Vlad the Impaler; Nebuchadnezzar, Louis XIV. In joy, as Mark Twain observed, is sorrow, and Kashyapa, king, party giver, gourmand, and libertine, knew that his moment of doom was due to come sooner rather than later. Gazing across the plains from his high fortress walls in Sigiriya, he would have been presciently aware that his brother would eventually arrive to stop all the fun. And so he did. Commanding a specially recruited mercenary army from nearby India, Moggallana had come to take back what he considered his by right – the throne. The legitimate son of Dhatusena, one of the country’s most fabulous kings, as his heir, Moggallana would have looked forward to a reign of plenty after his father had chased the occupying Dravidian Tamils from the kingdom, and rebuilt the country, tank by tank, temple by temple. It was years of milk and honey (or Kittel) he had in mind – not penurious exile. But it was not to be. His half-brother, Kashyapa, played family politics with the skill of a card shark. He outmanoeuvred his brother and, with the army commander's help, deposed his father, Dhatusena. Had things ended there, we may never have heard of Kashyapa. He would just have been yet another one of the island’s numerous coup d'état kings. But with Oedipian or Macbethian instincts, Kashyapa went further. Much further. He began by entombing his father alive in his palace walls. For so distinguished a king, to be reduced to mere bricks and mortar was a shocking way to end a reign. And, to escape the widespread disapprobation this would have created, Kashyapa abandoned his capital of Anuradhapura in much the same way as Tiberius had abandoned Rome for Capri, and headed for Sigiriya. It's like, anywhere in Asia, was probably not seen again until the Kangxi Emperor built the Gardens of Perfect Brightness in the Old Summer Palace, outside Peking, some twelve hundred years later, in 1707. A capital for just one reign, Sigiriya was a cross between the Tivoli, Akhenaten’s Amarna, and the Brighton Pavilion. It enjoyed every last innovation and refinement available – and there were many. The fortress itself sits atop a massive lump of granite - a hardened, much reduced magma plug – all that is left of an extinct volcano. Lost in forests, inhabited by hermit monks between the third century BCE and the first century CE, it was exposed by colossal landslides and then selected by Kashyapa as the location of a new fortress-capital in 477 CE. Much of it is hard to identify today but, in its day, it set new standards for urban planning, the royal bastion surrounded by an elaborately laid out outer city, with a final circle of three types of gardens around it: water, terraced, and boulder gardens - 3 km in length and nearly 1 km in width, flanking its famous rock citadel. Ponds, pavilions, fountains and cut pools made up the water gardens. More naturalistic gardens were created around massive boulders, creating an artless park with long, winding pathways to saunter down. Brick staircases and limestone steps led up to more formal terraced gardens. Across it all stretch double moats and triple ramparts, defendable gateways, and steps in perfect geometric symmetry, locking all the elements of the fortress city ...
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    30 mins
  • Escape: The Sri Lankan Reading List

    Escape: The Sri Lankan Reading List
    Dec 13 2025
    Stretched between the pleasure gardens of the bishops of London and the $300 million Fulham Football Club, once owned by the disgraced sexual predator Mohamed Al Fayed, Alphabet City is West London’s new Knightsbridge. From south to north, its streets are laid out with an intimidating, if inexact, alphabetical order. Its “exquisite array of Victorian and Edwardian homes,” claims its principal estate agent, “infuses the neighbourhood with a timeless architectural appeal.” One house in one street stands out, the J. K. Rowling of the area, confident, plush, sophisticated, discriminating, and flush with Sauvignon Blanc. For in D for “Doneraile Street,” is where one of London’s most agreeable book groups meets. Membership is by invitation only, and its invitations are as infrequent as dry days in Wales. There are more famous book groups - Daunts, for example or the Literary Lounge Book Club. But none so naughtily notorious as this. Blissfully undemocratic, it seethes behind silk curtains and French shutters; its gardens giving out to imported fig trees and olives; its tables glittering with canapes of citrus-cured seabass on blinis. But for months it has been the centre of reckless disagreements and tormented tiffs – for its members struggled with that eternal book club question: which book to read next. Their discussions, like Middle Eastern peace negotiations, were marred by insurmountable differences - until, that is, they hit upon a winning solution, proposed by a member who had just returned from a holiday in Kandy. Stick with novels from Sri Lanka, she said. And so, somewhat unexpectedly, they did. Harmony upon harmony has followed, it seems, like the notes of a celestial harp. And so it could for you too – for this guide offers a similar and blameless escape route to pleasure. It presents a long list of books that will keep you going for a good long time. A year at least. Sufficient time to give up the day job and move your grocery shopping to online deliveries only. The unexpected books included in this guide will take you into all the most comforting and familiar genres. But it will then upend them with the most surprising of settings, perspectives, voices, and approaches, as if you’ve found a trove of mille-feuille in a Dunkin’ Doughnuts Drive-Through. Surprise, delight, glee – that is barely the half of it. For the books assembled here are as much a travelogue for the body as for the mind; a history of the recent world as well as a picture of worlds to come – or even worlds framed forever in the most necessary of Forevers, like psychedelic carnivals or enchanted forests. They needed them most certainly. The merest glance tells you that the mainstream literary world has slipped into an odd torpor. As literary agents in London and New York whip their submissions into shape and tease them through the hoops, auctions, and cheque books of commissioning editors at Frankfurt, you may be forgiven for thinking that reading contemporary fiction is similar to eating a custard cream biscuit. It’s nice enough. But it’s as predictable as a dollop of AI creative writing. Sri Lanka offers an opportunity to escape this literary listlessness. Through, why? You may disputatiously ask: why Sri Lanka? Why not another one of the world’s 200-odd countries? Surely you can formulate a reading list for any country in the world. Or can you? Few other countries are currently producing as much world-class literature as Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka’s contemporary writers have burst onto the world fiction scene like firecrackers. Try just a few, and you will see. But which few? Of its multitude of authors and books, which ones should you start with? This guide brings together many of the best, in one sense or another, Sri Lankan. Most were born on the island; others left, often part of the diaspora created by civil war and corruption. But whether now in Canada and Australia, the UK, or New Zealand, each has written a novel only a Sri Lankan could, bringing humour, a unique sensibility and a sharp, ironic eye to the themes that preoccupy every great novel - from war, sex, fashion, addiction and love to loss, pets, the jungle, fame, fortune, bankruptcy. And, of course, family; for in Sri Lanka, as almost nowhere else, the family really does come - inconveniently, beautifully, reassuringly, alarmingly - first. The story starts relatively late, for although many inspired novels were written in the first half of the twentieth century, it was not until the 1960s that a trenchant new sensibility began to shape and flavour Sri Lanka’s fiction. A band of new writers emerged for whom little was out of bounds - from the incipient civil war, belief, ethnicity, and feminism to gender, and, of course, the perennial themes of the island: family, love, the jungle, loss, and living. Take Carl Muller and his famous trilogy, which is to Sri Lankan ...
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    20 mins
  • Demon Queen: The Quest for Kuveni

    Demon Queen: The Quest for Kuveni
    Dec 13 2025
    The Search for Sri Lanka’s Demon Queen unpicks with the very earliest stories and places associated with Sri Lanka’s first steps as a nation, and with two particular people: Kuveni and Vijaya. The pair were the pin-up lovers of their generation, the Bonnie and Clyde, Tristan and Isolde, Tarzan, and Jane of 543 BCE. Only theirs was a more unorthodox passion - more akin to Dido and Aeneas, with the queen immolating herself. Or Medea plunged into full-scale murder after a disastrous encounter with Jason and the Golden Fleece. Vijaya and Kuveni are the Sri Lankan lovers whose names are most unequally recalled on the island today. Public roads, management consultants, radio celebrities, hospitals, even bags of branded cement: it is hard to find a corner of Sri Lanka that is not branded “Vijaya,” in besotted memory of the country’s founding king and paterfamilias, Prince Vijaya. Much harder, indeed impossible, is to find similarly smitten organisations or people who bear the name “Kuveni,” Prince Vijaya’s first wife. Coming from a nation that proudly boasts the modern world’s first female head of state, Sirimavo Bandaranaike, in 1960, this seems a monumental omission. But delve a little further, and it becomes increasingly clear why Kuveni, the lost queen of the isle of rubies, is the queen the country is too alarmed by to acknowledge adequately. For Kuveni was not simply a wife and weaver of cloth, a mother, lover, and queen - but also a demon, a metamorphoser, an outcast, an avenging fury, suicide, traitor, murderess, ghost, and mistress of deception. A descendant of the gods, she is also a goddess to the country’s still-living Aboriginal peoples. For anyone, still less a queen, that’s more than enough baggage to weigh down one’s reputation. But the baggage need not weigh down your journey for the locations on the island where you are likely to draw close to her are few and scattered. And if taking in important sites, monuments, and attractions at a rate of (say) half a dozen a day, or perhaps just one and a half a day, is an essential measure of how successful a holiday or tour goes, then it would be best to abandon the search for Kuvani immediately. For she is, thankfully, not made to measure for orthodox sightseeing. The obvious eludes her. Mercifully, she is no credible candidate for Instagram. She is more like a Slender Loris or Serendib Scops Owl, rare, almost nocturnal, secretive, whose sightings are best made for the journey, not the destination. Yet, in following her wreathlike footsteps, which are still, from time to time, just about discernible in certain parts of the island, one puts together a travel schedule like no other; unique, eccentric, authentic. It will take you into the secret heart of the country itself, past, present, and future, and allow the muscles of your personal imagination to demonstrate their value. Much of what we know about Kuveni and her husband, Vijaya, comes from two of three incomparable, paternalistic and subjective ancient chronicles (Dipavaṃsa, Mahavamsa, and Culavamsa) written from the third century CE onwards. Laying a shadowy trail of events and people through what would otherwise be a historical vacuum, they riotously mix up man, God and magic with morality, history, and myth. Historians naturally debate their factual accuracy, in which the doings of men and kings take a poor second place to that of monks and Lord Buddha, but this misses the point. No country, after all, is simply the total of its facts. It is also – and much more importantly - fattened up, like old-style foie gras, on all that its people believe too. And that is why the sorrowful and violent tale of Prince Vijaya and his demon queen so shockingly illuminates an island that, as Romesh Gunesekera put it, “everyone loves at some level inside themselves. A very special island that travellers, from Sinbad to Marco Polo, dreamed about. A place where the contours of the land itself form a kind of sinewy poetry.” “In Sri Lanka,” notes another writer, Michael Ondaatje, “a well-told lie is worth a thousand facts;” and, in the tale of Vijaya and Kuveni, the polar opposite of what is believed is the more likely truth. Vijaya, whose alter ego may well have most recently emerged on The Dick Van Dyke Show, was doubtless ever one to say “That ain't no lady. That's my wife.” For a monster though Kuveni seems to be, one hardly needs the helpful filter of modern feminism to realise that she was in fact an iconic victim of men, and most heartening of all, a victim who bit back with unrestrained fury. Had a man behaved like her, it would have generated awe-stuck changing-room chatter, eager to understand, sympathise with, and even emulate. But not a woman. Kuveni was to confound and challenge all ancient ideas of womanhood, and go on challenging them to this day. Keep this in mind as you set out to first encounter Viyaja, ...
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    26 mins
  • The Three "B's" of Lanka

    The Three "B's" of Lanka
    Dec 13 2025
    It is all too easy to mistake what Sri Lankans might call the “Three Big B’s” for Mr Bandaranaike Senior, Mrs Bandaranaike Senior, and Mrs Bandaranaike Kumaratunga. But in fact, Sri Lanka’s Three Big B’s are not politicians. They are its bears, buffalo, and boars. And remarkably, each beast shares a close and initial affinity with those other, and still more famous, Big Three “B’s” of the classical music world: Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. The buffalo, that most solid, refined, and traditional of creatures ever seen in all corners of the island, is the Bach of the mammalian world. The wild boar, with its laudable pack control and mastery of its environment, is the unmistakable Brahmas of the jungle and grassland, blending the complexity of its world with ease. And the bear, of course, is the Beethoven of the country: powerful, introspective, heroic. “It seems,” wrote Beethoven in his most bear-like mood, “as if every tree said to me, 'Holy! Holy!' Who can ever express the ecstasy of the woods! Almighty One, In the woods I am blessed.” As to the Sri Lankan sloth bear, although it is most often found in the dry zones of the country – such as Yala and Wilpattu – it is never far from trees, for in the trees it finds the ants, honey, and fruit it especially loves. Hanging like the strangest of fruits themselves, they will stay in the branches for hours at a time, often bringing cubs with them to join the feast. Having feasted, it will usually then continue to hang on in the most relaxed of ways, enabled by twenty sharp, curved claws that give them the kind of grip that denture wearers can only dream about. To see one suspended in so complete a seventh heaven is, of course, to call immediately to mind the Allegretto or "Shepherd's song” from Beethoven’s Pastoral itself – that moment when all that remains is pure gratitude and celebration of the tranquillity of the natural world. Even so, the bear is easily tempted to descend from its high table for termites – a food item of indulgent delight, for which their highly mobile snouts are exceptionally well designed. With nostrils closed, the snouts become vacuums, sucking out the termites from their nest. And their long claws enable them to dig the nest ever deeper till the last juicy termite has been consumed. Sri Lanka’s Sloth Bear is a unique endemic subspecies of the very same sloth bear that inhabits the Indian subcontinent, in ever-declining numbers from India to Bhutan, Nepal, and, until recently, Bangladesh. It is a little smaller in size than its Indian cousin, with shorter fur and, sadly, sometimes without the cuddly-looking white tummy fur of its northern relative. Even so, it is no midget, typically measuring six feet in length and weighing in at up to 300 pounds for a male or 200 pounds for a female. Once found in plentiful numbers across the island, they are now in severe decline, with an estimated 500-1000 bears in the wild today. The destruction of their habitats has been instrumental in their decline, but the fear they engender amongst village populations has also played its part. They are often hunted and killed, with a reputation for damaging property and killing or maiming domestic animals, humans running like a wave of terror before them. The “sloth” part of their name is somewhat misleading, for the bears are quite capable of reaching speeds of thirty miles an hour – faster than the fastest human yet recorded. Evolution has cast the sloth bear towards the Grumpy Old Man side of the mammalian spectrum – brooding, bothered, and bold, as if Beethoven’s late soul-searching Sonata No.32 in C minor, Op.111 had assumed a furry life of its own. Its poor sight and hearing leave it very dependent on its sense of smell, so it can all too often be surprised by what seems like the abrupt appearance of something threatening – like a human – which it will attack with warrior-like ferocity before asking any questions. In this, the bear It is very solitary, living alone in the forest except for those rare moments when it seeks a mate. Reproduction is not its strongest skill, and most females produce a single cub that stays with them for two to three years, the first months of which are endearingly spent living or travelling on its mother's back. D.J.G. Hennessy, a policeman who had a couple of bears on his land in Horowapotana in 1939, noted the emotive articulateness of their paw-sucking. Hed wrote that “ the significance of the notes on which the bear sucks his paw is interesting; a high whine and rapid sucking denotes impatience and anger, a deep note like the humming of a hive full of bees on a summer’s day indicates that he is contented and pleased with life, a barely audible note shows great happiness while a silent suck in which he usually indulges in just before going to sleep on a full stomach denotes the acme of bliss”. It was as if, ...
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    17 mins
  • Deer Friends: On Safari with Sri Lanka's Deer, Ponies & Donkeys

    Deer Friends: On Safari with Sri Lanka's Deer, Ponies & Donkeys
    Dec 13 2025
    Deer abound across Sri Lanka, some like the Ceylon Spotted Deer are increasingly vulnerable, prey to poachers and habitat loss; others – like the Barking Deer – are flourishing and present little concern to the scientists who maintain the Red List of Threatened Species. Two species are considered endemic to the island – the Ceylon Spotted Deer, the Sri Lankan Spotted Chevrotain, with the Sri Lankan Sambar Deer the subject of mild debate among patriotic environmentalists trying to assess if it is so significantly more evolved as to present nature with what amounts to a new subspecies unique to the island. The remaining species found in Sri Lanka are also found across South and Southeast India – the Hog Deer and the Barkling Deer. Joining these quadrupeds are an extraordinary herd of feral ponies, abandoned by departing colonists, and a pack of wild donkeys, descendants of beasts brought to the island by ancient traders. Troubled by the sheer lack of scientific information about the behaviour of the Ceylon Spotted Deer, the Department of Zoology at Sri Lanka’s Eastern University conducted a detailed study of a particular population in Trincomalee. After months of observation, they concluded, reassuringly, that “their main activities were feeding and play.” Scientists are much divided on the subject of animal play, and tortured monographs have been written attempting to pin down the very concept of animal play. To some, it is merely an evolutionary byproduct; others claim it ensures animals teach one another about fairness and consequences. That the Sri Lankan Axis Deer should be minded to play at all is encouraging for it is an increasingly vulnerable species, its preferred habitats - lowland forests, and shrub lands –are shrinking, and with it the grasses, leaves, and fruit it lives on. Their numbers are now counted in the thousands. They live in herds of up to one hundred and are seen by leopards, bears, crocodiles, jackals, and hungry villagers as living supermarkets of fresh meat. Standing up to a hundred centimetres high, their delicately white spotted fawn coats present them as everything a perfect deer ought to be, as is appropriate for an animal that is part of the island’s select few endemic mammals. The Mouse Deer, or Sri Lankan Spotted Chevrotain, has evolved so dramatically that it presents scientists with the opportunity to grant it full endemic status as the Sri Lankan Spotted Chevrotain. Barely twelve inches high, it lives scattered in the forests of South & Southeast Asia. The Sri Lankan variant mostly sticks to the dry zones, especially Wilpattu, Udawalawa, and Sigiriya. It is tiny, gorgeous, even-toed and, unless you are a plant, entirely harmless– although popular superstition adds the caveat that a man who gets scratched by the hind foot of one will develop leprosy. This has yet to be verified by scientists. Tiny too is the Hog Deer – barely seventy centimetres tall. It has short legs, a predilection to whistle, fine antlers and dark brown fur. It actually looks nothing like a pig but gains that interspecies appellation for its tendency to rush through the forest, head down like one of the racing pigs at Bob Hale Racing Stables in far-off Michigan. Stretching across the grasslands of Sri Lanka and South and Southeast Asia, it is now classified as highly vulnerable, with its small herds shrinking amid habitat loss. Less threatened is the Indian Muntjak or Barking Deer. Carefree and with a propensity to eat almost anything, the Barking Deer is a cuddly irritant in the jungle and on low-hill estates, its numbers flourishing across South and Southeast Asia. It grows to around sixty centimetres in height and is covered in reddish brown fur and, for males, throws in a modest set of antlers. Shy, solid, rarely seen in numbers more than two, it gets its name for the dog-barking sound it makes when alarmed. It is a modest, if reliable breeder, with pregnancies lasting six months after which one or, occasionally, two pups are born. But among the island deer, the Sambar Deer claims the title of the largest and most impressive of the several deer species with which it shares genes. Within Sri Lanka, the species has evolved further and teeters on the edge of being declared endemic, as the Sri Lankan Sambar (Rusa unicolour). Much mistaken for an elk by early British colonists eager to shoot it, it can be seen in herds in places like Horton Plains – but it is classified as highly vulnerable all the same. It is a tempting target for poachers stocking up on game meat to sell, and the pressures on its grassland habitats are not getting any easier. Typically one and a half metres high (sometimes more), their herds consist of females with their fawns, which they usually produce yearly. The males, like men with sheds who have taken the designation to extremes, prefer to live alone - except when the mating urge overcomes them. Fossil records from tens of thousands of ...
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    11 mins