A Slim Volume

The Fat Lady Sings

by Michèle Leembruggen

Michèle Leembruggen has been writing verse all her life, but this is her first book of poetry. Best known as a successful actress in Sri Lankan English theatre and the radio ‘voice’ heard on a number of well-loved advertising jingles of the Seventies and Eighties, she was also, unbeknownst to her fans outside the advertising industry, the lyricist behind most of the jingles she sang and, more generally, a fine copywriter. She and I were, very briefly, colleagues in the early Nineties, but the time and circumstances were unpropitious and she did not stay long with the agency we were working for.

By then I already knew Michèle pretty well through her other great passions, music and the theatre. I had been involved (as crew, never cast) on several of the successful plays and musicals that were illuminated by her performance, worked with her on voicing some TV commercials I had written, and even played a guitar behind her on one or two occasions when she took the stage to sing. Somewhat younger than she, I was a mere amateur ’prentice at the time; she and her late husband Graham Hatch were big names and I was eager to learn what I could from them – from anyone, really – about music and performance. As time went on, we continued to interact, mostly in professional ways but also, from time to time, socially.

My interactions with the poet are relevant here because The Fat Lady Sings is full of some very personal verses, and no-one who knows Michèle and her circle will be able to resist the temptation to guess just who, in some cases, she is writing about. Some won’t need to guess; they’ll know, or think they know, already. I don’t mean to imply that there’s anything remotely kiss-and-tell about these poems; everything is presented with perfect discretion. Yet who could refrain from trying to guess (if they did not already know) which drop-kicking hero she had in mind when she wrote, ‘Out of a loose maul he came/the man of my dreams...’

Dark eyes intent below

the swatch of straight black hair

that obscured your forehead.

Your cheek, falling in that flat plane:

straight nose, full lips

and most notably, the stare…

very nearly a glare.

None of my business, obviously, nor yours; but if you’d lived in Colombo during a certain period, and went to rugger matches, wouldn’t you wonder whether she was talking about so-and-so, or maybe such-and-such? I certainly did.

And this is the main reason why I can’t really review The Fat Lady Sings. I have just enough personal acquaintance with the author to make it impossible for me to read these poems without wondering who she is talking about, who made her feel like that. This colours my experience of the verses, so that they act on me not simply as poetry – as literature – but also with something of the effect of a personal diary or, heaven forfend, a gossip column. I can’t think of them simply as the writer’s work.

There is another reason too. Michèle’s poetry is concerned essentially with matters of the heart. The heart in question is always hers; she makes no real effort to convey anyone else’s point of view in her poetry – it is only her impressions of other people, and how they make her feel, that are vouchsafed us. In other words, more than half the poems are intimate reflections on the ups and downs of a woman’s love life, and how other people, mostly close relatives and acquaintances, make her feel.

This, of course, is a staple of contemporary poetry, and has been since the days of Sylvia Plath. But it is a kind of poetry that, in my experience, rarely appeals to men. It certainly doesn’t appeal to me (but then, I also loathe the prose of Virginia Woolf). At any rate, I don’t fancy tramping through the garden of my old friend’s sensibilities in the Size Twelve men’s gumboots I usually wear when attempting literary criticism. One of the poems here, ‘Once More, With Feeling’, begins with the words ‘poetry is the language of unhappiness.’ Well yes, of course it is, but only some of the time. Poetry – as an actress of the calibre and experience of Michèle Leembruggen surely knows – is also the blank verse of Shakespeare, in which every emotion and passion of which human beings are capable is expressed in the most sublime terms. My own tastes in English poetry are unabashedly masculine – Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, Coleridge, Kipling, Wilfred Owen, Philip Larkin, Clive James. I don’t enjoy the girly stuff one bit, so it would be unfair to interrogate The Fat Lady Sings from the standpoint of my own very different likes and dislikes.

Having said which, allow me to add that it is wonderful to read a Lankan poet who (1) can write properly and (2) knows the conventions of English verse – including blank and free verse – and how to deploy them. The stultifying influence of the Bard of Hulftsdorp (So may I end this tribute feeble/To the lamented Thomas Keble) still hangs over Lankan poetry in English, making people believe that any loose rhyme will do in a tight place. Michèle isn’t having that: her metre is strict (though ill-served by the typesetter), her rhymes, when she uses rhymes, click shut with a snap, her vocabulary is limber and precise. The only poem of which I have cause to make a technical complaint is ‘On Music’, for which she has chosen, doubtless with intent, an ugly, crippled metre that she forces to dance the jig through the use of a knout. The poem is all about how music fails to soothe her but rather makes her jittery, and the metre complements this theme; but trying to read it is like chewing on a piece of gristle that’s still alive and moving between your teeth. I was reminded of that poem of Clive James’s (I forget the title) which adopts the sesquipedalian, trotting metre of country songs like Gentle On My Mind to poke affectionate fun at the genre; but to be honest, that was one those poems of James’s that didn’t really work for me.

The Fat Lady Sings is a slim volume even by the standards of poetry collections; if I extend my review just a little further, it will be as long as the book. Just one final thing, though, before I close: I loved the last poem, which differs greatly from the rest of the collection and which, quite by accident, identified for me a huge, odd-shaped rock that rises out of the Vanni jungle along the east coast, south of Tiriyai. I saw it eight years ago from a very low-flying helicopter, but none of the people aboard knew its name or its history. I know it now, thanks to Michèle: Pinnalé Rock, on the northwest bank of Periya Karachchi lagoon. The poem is called ‘The Last Place’, and it expresses the poet’s wish to be buried at Pinnalé, ‘for there it was/I first felt sure/of who I was.’ I wonder how she knows of it, and what formative experience befell her there, but I suppose that’s a story for another day, if ever. Sing on, fat lady; Pinnalé can wait.

How to Feed A Tourist

Do you, like me, immediately think of hospitals, nurseries and geriatric wards whenever you are presented with one of these disgusting platters of pre-peeled fruit at the end of your meal at almost any Sri Lankan ‘tourist hotel’?

Baby’s Woke Again

 

I shared this video of dogs coming down some kind of playground chute or slide on Facebook. The dogs all look very happy at the bottom and some even try to climb back up for a second ride. Still, a few people looked at the video and wondered if the dogs had been frightened and not wanted to go. Had they been forced down the chute – pushed into it – against their will? It didn't matter to these people that the dogs had had a great experience and were happy at the bottom. They were focused on the fear the animals might have felt at the top. They were concerned that cruelty and trauma might have been involved. I suppose you might say they were woke.

These people made me wonder whether I should feel bad for having shared the video. But I couldn’t. The dogs were unharmed and obviously happy. It seemed to me that they were better off after going down the chute than they had been before. 

Then it came to me that those dogs being put through a chute were a metaphor for things like education, hard work and the duties we all owe to community and society.

Not many people enjoy being educated, or working hard, or having to obey laws and rules and conventions. Social duties like voting are a real chore, as is everything else we need to do to play our part in a complex modern society – paying taxes, going on jury duty, wearing a mask during a pandemic, obeying road rules, etc. These things are difficult, tedious, sometimes painful, always more or less unpleasant. Not as bad as going to the dentist, true, but no fun.

Yet when we've done them, the benefits are clear to us. We’re personally empowered, have added to our own resources and feel good about ourselves. Often we find that we've enjoyed the ride despite ourselves, just like the dogs in the video. And everyone around us (i.e. society) has benefited too

But since these things don't seem like fun (and even daunting or scary at first), we often have to be coerced into them – ‘trained’, if you like, or ‘traumatized’ and ‘brainwashed’ if you prefer. Much of this is done to us as children, but it continues into adulthood – difficult and unpleasant things that we do or endure in order to improve our own lives, and the lives of others, in the long run.

Wise folk have no problem with this. Others resent it and often push back. The rebels used to be ignored or suffer general rebuke for as long as people accepted that some irritations and inconveniences are necessary in life. But they don’t any more. They think they don’t need to. And so the rebellion spreads.

That is only possible because the world, compared to how it was (say) fifty years ago, is richer, healthier, better developed and – in the places where most of us live, at least – cleaner. Life, most of the time, is not that hard. And for all the worry about growing authoritarianism, people today have many more choices than they did back then, which makes them, by definition, more free. 

All this is great – progress! But something else was happening too, silently and without many people noticing, while we were beating back poverty around the world, destroying Communism on the left and old elites on the right, and establishing our interconnected, mediated consumer society. We slipped our tether to reality, and we didn’t even realize that we were now adrift.

Life today, even for modest working folk in most parts of the world, has a lot in common with the old dream of living in Aladdin's cave. Everything is available at the touch of a screen (to be lusted after and yearned for even if we can’t afford it); household chores and most jobs are easy and safe, wars and revolutions are rare (except when, and where, they aren't) and everything is about aspiration: getting better, doing great, cutting away all the stuff that keeps you from ‘ascending’ – materially, socially, spiritually. But along the way, we became distanced from and largely forgot about the real, dirty, complex, difficult processes that deliver to us the necessities and luxuries of life – the factories, farms, roads and bridges and other infrastructure, the legal systems, bureaucracies and governments needed to manage and regulate it, the social conventions that keep us from one another’s throats. We have even learnt to look away from the huge amounts of hard labour and misery that are still needed to make our everyone-an-island consumer society work. We can do this because everything now comes and goes through a media-devised interface – a simulation of the world that is partly designed to help you escape from ugly reality into a paradise of artificial entertainment, but mainly designed to encourage you to consume – by making you anxious and envious and discontented, because that’s the way you get people to want things. Trust me on this: I was an advertising and public relations man for 35 years, and I've sold everything from antacids to education reform. I know how people are made to want things: by appealing to their lowest instincts.

Lost in this consumerist simulation of reality, we – the bourgeoisie, the striving classes (once known as the working class but now including clerical, sales – ‘and marketing’ – and mid-level executive workers), even some of the upper classes – have come to ignore or take for granted the contract that we are all party to – the mutual agreement that props up the real world. Forgetting our commitments, we have come to think that all the things we enjoy so easily nowadays – every one of which is a privilege – are ours by right. We have forgotten that life is difficult and dangerous, that it demands labour and sacrifice and growing a thicker skin. We have become infantilized: spoilt brats who don't see why they have to go through the chute. We don't just want it all and want it now; we want it our way, too, without any sacrifice on our own part.

Few any longer enjoy the happiness and peace of mind that comes from having gone through the chute, of being a fully equipped, adequately educated and emotionally mature adult. Few people derive any satisfaction from doing the right thing in life, or in doing their part to help make the world go round. And society, bereft of their participation, becomes a little less functional, a bit less effective. Slowly, it begins to crumble. 

In some places, like the unhappy, brutalized, communalist state that has displaced my native country of Ceylon, society is at the point of collapse. In the West and the technocratic East, despite all the weeping and wailing, it’s still pretty strong; but it won’t be if this goes on for much longer. Consumer capitalism has become a victim of its own success. It has become disconnected from reality, and it has no place left to go but down.

Move Along, There

Restless Creatures
by Matt Wilkinson

Matt Wilkinson proposes that locomotion – getting from place to place – is the primary driver of evolution in all living things including, perhaps surprisingly, plants. It makes sense if you think about it. Getting from one place to another isn’t absolutely essential for survival or reproduction, but it does offer compelling selective advantages.

The book is divided into ten chapters. Nine of them trace the evolution of movement backward through time, beginning with human locomotion (walking and running) and ending with the transport mechanisms of prokaryotes – the famous bacterial flagella and the more primitive method of mucus excretion, or pooping yourself along. The final chapter deals with the impact of locomotion on cognition, and why humans need to return to a more legwork-powered lifestyle.

All this is enormously interesting but I am not sure that Wilkinson explains it as effectively as he might. It’s a difficult task he’s taken on and he discharges it quite well, but I often found myself having to re-read passages with close attention and trace obsessively the accompanying diagrams before I understood what was going on. I have an education in the (physical) sciences; I’m not sure how readers without that advantage will fare.

In Wilkinson’s defence, some of the phenomena he describes are very complex and still quite poorly understood. It is only this century, for example, that we have really come to understand how the movements fish make with their tails and bodies propel them through the water. The construction, operation and evolution of bacterial cilia is also, he makes us understand, an ongoing field of biological research.

I enjoyed reading the book and found it very instructive, but I could not avoid the feeling that Richard Dawkins or Matt Ridley would have made a better fist of the subject.

Colonialism: A Good Thing after All?

 

1602: Joris van Spilbergen of the Dutch East India Company is greeted 

by the emissaries of King Vimala Dharma Suriya of Kandy as he steps 

ashore at Batticaloa. Painting at the Dutch Burgher Union, Colombo.

Over the past ten years or so, my principal occupation has been writing books and articles about recent Lankan history. When I say recent, I mean the last two hundred years – the British colonial period and the post-independence era. Some of the things I wrote were written for money, but since mid-2017 the focus of my attention has been a wholly personal project: a history of St Thomas’s College, highlighting the mutual influence between events and persons in school and national history. STC was – in its origins – highly Anglocentric as well as Anglican and Anglophone, so you can see how the subject of colonialism might keep coming up.

On this subject, my own feelings have always been conflicted. As a Lankan whose mother tongue is English and whose parents and grandparents were loyal imperial subjects in their time, I have a distinct affinity for Western – indeed, English – ideas and culture. My Thomian education did not seriously challenge this orientation but rather promoted it. As a result, I feel more comfortable and confident in the Western mental universe than in any ‘indigenous’ Lankan culture, including that of my nominal ethnic group, the Sinhalese. For all that, I love my country dearly and feel myself to be as wholly Lankan as any සිංහ ලේ-sporting three-wheeler driver. Nativism and communalism have been Lanka’s downfall, where acceptance of our colonial past and institutional continuity with the late British period might have saved us.

Thus do I confess my inevitable bias, knowing full well that on this subject, no Lankan can offer an unbiased opinion.

Yet despite these woggish tendencies of mine, I have never seriously questioned, in speech or writing, the fundamental assumption that colonialism was a great evil: a terrible infliction upon our country and people, destructive of our welfare, our national resources, our culture and customs, our natural and historical heritage, our confidence and our pride. Neither have I ever before questioned the judgement of historians far better qualified than I am with regard to the deleterious effects of imperial conquest and colonial rule on the peoples who suffered them.

Imagine, then, my astonishment, when I discovered ‘The Case for Colonialism’ by the political scientist Bruce Gilley, which proposes that colonialism was actually a great benefit to the people who suffered it, and could well be a solution to the governance and equity problems facing the developing world today. The article was originally submitted in 2018 to Third World Quarterly, a magazine that ‘publishes leading research in the field of international studies, examining issues, policy and development discourses that affect the Global South.’ Following peer review, TWQ accepted the article for publication, then withdrew it after fifteen members of the editorial board resigned and the publishers, Taylor & Francis, received death threats. The article was later published on line by an American conservative advocacy group, the National Association of Scholars. The above link is to the article as it appears on their website.

I read Gilley’s article with a strong sense of recognition. Many of his observations seemed to be borne out by my own experience as a post-colonial Lankan. They also seemed to confirm what I have learnt from my research into the history of Lanka during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The colonial period saw our country make considerable progress with respect to general welfare, economic growth, institutional development, governance, law and order, tolerance and equality. Signs of regress in a number of these areas began to appear almost as soon we became a free country in 1948 – and in some cases, even earlier, with the advent of the State Council and universal franchise. As I write today, Sri Lanka appears to be trembling on the brink of democratic collapse and, quite possibly, state failure.

My studies have, of course, made me well aware of the evils of colonialism: in Ceylon, these included frequent episodes of hunger and even starvation in various parts of the country under colonial mismanagement; inadequate support for public health and education; the gearing of the national economy to foreign interests and the exclusion of natives from the most profitable enterprises; the environmental ruin wrought by industrial-scale monoculture, especially in the hill country, and of course the ever-present humiliation of foreign dominion. Yet even when these are accounted for, it is hard to deny that Lanka was, generally, a happier, better-ordered and certainly more peaceful place under British rule than it has since become. During the days when the colonial era was still accessible to living memory a large fraction of the populace continued to look back on it as a kind of Paradise lost, and might well have welcomed a return to it. I’m not sure this is still true today; but then, politicians and other interested parties have pumped so much anti-colonial propaganda into the media and the education system in the last sixty or seventy years that it would be astonishing if it was.

And of course we have made progress – in some areas. Lankan educational and public-health outcomes during the early post-colonial period were among the best in Asia, and we still retain some of the social capital generated during the first forty years or so of independence. Of course, our educational outcomes were among the best in Asia even during the colonial period, but one cannot deny that there was a continued, steady improvement in public services until at least the end of the Seventies. More recently, the country has enjoyed a long period of economic diversification and growth, occasionally comparable to the boom times of the colonial era. Efforts at poverty alleviation have also proved broadly successful, and the kind of grinding poverty that was once widespread throughout rural Lanka has now largely disappeared – from Sinhalese-majority regions, at least.

Yet, even with these achievements counted, it would be hard for anyone to argue that Lankans are happier today than we were on the eve of Independence. If that sounds like a fixed match, feel free to choose any other period during the post-Colebrooke British era and compare any period in our post-colonial history with that. The worst time of all was probably the early 1930s, when Lankans suffered the effects of the Great Depression, as well as a deadly malaria epidemic, food shortages and widespread unemployment, all at once. Or perhaps you would prefer to consider 1915, the year of the country’s first ethnic pogrom, which the British mishandled quite brutally. But were those times worse than the ones in which we are living today? Was 1915 worse than 1958 or 1983? Were the tribulations of the mid-Thirties worse than the self-inflicted economic devastation of the 1950s and 1970s, or the kleptocratic state of affairs that pertains today?

I don’t have answers to these questions. I leave them as an exercise for the reader. Certainly I don’t think Gilley’s call for a return to colonialism – voluntary, this time, rather than involuntary on the part of the colonized – is feasible. But his article is well worth reading, if only because it questions a proposition that has been conventional wisdom for decades, and which would-be tyrants, kleptocrats and communalist demagogues regularly use to justify their evil actions. 

The Gleanings of An Extraordinary Life

A Man Called Ceylon

Somasiri Devendra

The postage-stamp-sized photo I found on the internet won’t take much enlargement, but it should still be possible to make out the salient details of the cover of A Man Called Ceylon in the image at right. Two uniformed schoolgirls, satchels in hand, balance expertly on a raft made of nailed-together planks while a boy, also in school uniform, punts them towards a landing-place on a riverbank somewhere in the hinterland of Sri Lanka. The crystal-clear water and sandy stream bottom tell us that we are looking at a forest scene; the clothing and relaxed postures of the children on the raft make it obvious that it is an everyday one. It is, we realise, how these children travel to school every day.

It would be hard to think of a more perfect cover illustration for Somasiri Devendra’s book, which – not to beat about the bush – I confess I found utterly delightful. A Man Called Ceylon is a set of essays and articles produced by the author over many years and is quite probably the result of an computer spring-cleaning effort like the one he describes in ‘The Forests of the Night’ (herein). Yet judging by its structure, Devendra clearly intends us to take A Man Called Ceylon as a record – though by no means, I hope, the definitive record – of his life. 

What a remarkable life it has been, and how beautifully the sagely-chosen photo reflects it. The plank raft, with its ancient, functional design, evokes the author’s enduring (indeed, hereditary) involvement with boats, ships and navigation. It also refers, in a glancing way, to his learned accomplishments in marine archaeology and the study of vernacular marine architecture. The clear, fast-moving stream shaded by overhanging trees, meanwhile, gives us the forested interior of Lanka, Devendra’s preferred environment when on dry land. The children represent education, which the author values so highly that he has turned its acquisition and dissemination into a lifelong project. The children’s disposition and activity are also full of meaning for those who know our country well: traditional folkways adapted to modern needs, the peaceable acceptance of well-established social roles, even the extraordinary lengths to which Lankans are known to go in order to obtain a decent education – all these are in the picture, just as they are in Somasiri Devendra’s life.

A Man Called Ceylon is divided into halves. The first of these, subtitled Waterways & Watercraft, deals with what we might call the author’s maternal heritage. The title story is that of Lloyd Oswald Felsianes, a Ceylonese teenager of mixed race who ran away from home to enlist as a cabin boy on a British merchant ship. Nicknamed ‘Ceylon’ by his white shipmates, Felsianes sailed the world for seven years before returning home to marry, settle down and become, in the fullness of time, a tugboat captain or ‘driver’ at the Port of the Colombo and the grandfather of Somasiri Devendra. 

This section largely features articles about boats and the sea, and about the author’s experiences as an officer in what was then the Royal Ceylon Navy – but to describe it so gives no idea of the scope of the material. There are lapidary disquisitions on ancient Indian Ocean trade, Arab navigation techniques and the construction of sambuqs and boums – traditional wooden ships – by Indian craftsmen in Sharjah. There is an account of the voyages of the Annapooryanamal, a Jaffna-built sailing ship that circumnavigated the globe under a variety of different names (and a number of different captains, one of whom was the film star Sterling Hayden). There is a scholarly account on the evolution of inland watercraft in Sri Lanka, as revealed by archaeology, and an item about the surrender of an Italian naval vessel, the Eritria, to a ship of the Ceylon Naval Reserve during the Second World War. Also in this section are a scholarly meditation on the Malwatu Oya, a river that served the ancient Sinhalese capital of Anuradhapura as its main link to the sea and thus to the world beyond the shores of Lanka, but whose course is now almost dry; a tentative identification of sailing-ships in a drawing scratched into the surface of a temple mural in Kandy by a seventeenth-century Dutch vandal; and much more besides. Though the material is sometimes recondite, the style is easy and clear, often elegant and never affected or over-literary. In spite of the editorial and proofreading howlers that all writers who publish in English in this country must suffer, it is a pleasure to read.

The second half of A Man Called Ceylon, subtitled History & Heritage, deals with Lanka – its history and prehistory as well as its timeless quiddity. It is presented to us as the author’s legacy from his father, the educator, archaeologist and man of letters Don Titus Devendra. The elder Devendra, a co-editor of the Buddhist Encyclopaedia, was a Sinhalese nationalist during that hopeful period (roughly 1920 to 1950) when the term had not yet been besmirched and travestied by vandals. Appropriately, the heritage dealt with here is in large part a Sinhalese one, though the author also deals with the prehistory of the island and its peoples before the coming of the legendary Sinhalese ancestor Vijaya, and includes a number of pieces relating to more recent times as well.

The material here is even more wide-ranging than in the first part. Since much of it is based on personal experience, it also gives a better indication of what a varied and adventurous life Somasiri Devendra has led. Its centrepiece, however, is a three-part prehistorical essay of astonishing scope, ‘Ratna-dweepa, Janma-bhoomi’, which begins with a description of the geological evolution of the island of Lanka from the supercontinent Pangea by way of the Indian Plate and its wanderings, and concludes with a speculative account of native society at the time of Vijaya’s putative arrival. Speculative, yes, but informed by science and scholarship: Devendra eschews both nativist mythmaking and the flights of imaginative fancy indulged in by the likes of the late C. Rasanayagam, the author of Ancient Jaffna. ‘No man or god built this bridge’, he states flatly of the barely-submerged isthmus connecting Lanka to South India, putting confabulators on both sides of the Palk Strait firmly in their place. His attitude – even when wandering through the dreamtime of ancient myth and fable – is determinedly empirical. ‘History...depends only on written records,’ he writes in the same essay, ‘but science has provided us with tools to use and draws credible conclusions that can be tested.’ A generalist and a polymath, he often glimpses connexions that a specialist might not see, and is not shy about discussing them: the one he draws between Buddhist veneration for the peepul or bo tree and prehistoric fertility rites, by way of a Sinhala kavi he heard chanted by pilgrims before the Maha Bodhi in Anuradhapura, is a particularly intriguing example.

It is hard to give a fair description of the riches Devendra has crammed into this part of the book. His writing owes something to the prose-poetry of John Still’s Jungle Tide – a debt he frankly acknowledges – but the experiences he describes are all his own. He gained them first as a schoolboy accompanying his father on reconnoitres and ‘digs’, then as a naval officer helping to set up and man military outposts in the middle of nowhere, and finally – after intervening decades in the Colombo tea trade, a period of which he tells us nothing – as commanding officer of a group of irregular volunteers (he does not say so, but we gather that they were special ops of some sort) during the Sri Lankan civil war. There is a wealth of knowledge about Sinhalese history and folkways interwoven with this, gained largely in the form of personal encounters and experiences. And there is more – a review of Robert Crusz’s book on the Cocos Island Mutiny, and another of Lewcock, Sansoni and Senanayake’s The Architecture of an Island, personalized with reminscences of Barbara Sansoni and her family. There are colonial curiosities: forgotten surveyors’ benchmarks discovered in unlikely places, a stone slab at the end of Wellawatte Bridge. The inscription on the latter is effaced and illegible, yet Devendra manages to trace the provenance of the slab, only to find that it was an English lady resident’s poetic tribute to, of all things, a banyan-tree. 

My favourite anecdote from this section, however, is the author’s description of the excavation of a ruined dagoba or stupa in the middle of the forest: he evokes vividly the jungle sounds and scents, the painstaking archaeologists at work, the long-concealed relic-chamber slowly coming into view.

The chamber was now visible, but more delicate work remained to be done. The remaining [granite] beams were cracked: each cracked piece had to be secured by rope and every one lifted out at the same time... It was a solemn moment to see the chamber after eight centuries. In the middle was the Meru gala, the square stone pillar representing Mount Meru, the Cosmic Mountain. Resting on it was the main reliquary. Around the central pillar and at the corners of the chamber were multi-headed cobras in terracotta. Set into niches on the four walls were images of the Buddha made of gold foil filled with sandalwood paste. The walls were covered with a paper-thin plaster, painted – but in a manner never before seen in this country – black background with beautiful red line-work figures, classical in simplicity and rendering.

No matter what he is writing about, Devendra’s mind and personality are vividly present on every page. It is an inquiring and capacious mind and a friendly easygoing personality, as free of prejudice as it would be possible to find, I think, anywhere on Earth. He has a gift for describing personal experiences, so that it is easy to empathise with his feelings and share his sense of wonder. But there is something else here as well, something that can only rightly be described as love – the unconditional, all-encompassing love of all being that Buddhists call metta, and which Christians refer to as agapé. 

It shines undimmed throughout the book, adding its grace to these haphazard, unsystematic yet thoroughly enchanting gleanings of an extraordinary life.