The singing train

Entertained today – singing, drumming, flirting – by young men and women on the train from Kandy into the high hill country to the south-east.  

They seemed to us to be travelling together: six young women, music students from Colombo with fine voices between them, off to a friend’s wedding in Bandula, along with eight or so young men with drums and tambourine and their own strong voices.

The men began first, with the women singing along. Then the women launched into their own songs, the men accompanying them with drums and tambourine. Then songs were begun together, then the men, then the women. Between them they had an immense repertory – love ballads, reggae, bouncy oompah-rhumba-sounding dance numbers – all in all six hours of music by the time we got off the bus, and their stop was two hours further on.

Only an hour or so into the journey did we discover that in fact the two groups had never met. All the more impressive, then, the pleasure with which they launched into song and the ease with which they created such pleasing music. Maybe not so remarkable is how they – mostly late teen and 20-somethings – came to hang out in small tight groups between cars, or kept shuffling seats, arms tentatively draped over shoulders, a hand gently pushed away, teasing and bravado from the men, murmurs among the women, but all with those easy, captivating, confident-seeming Sri Lankan smiles.

Popular music here, judging at least from what is played by local bus drivers, is to my ear a pleasing but incomprehensible mélange of sounds. Those oompah sounds again, but also reggae (Sri Lanka has several very popular reggae singers right now), sorrowful string interludes that might come from Rio or Lisbon and the rhythms of West African soukous, that infectiously rhythmic cat-and-mouse tight-stringed guitar work that one hears in bars across the central African plain.

I can’t make any sense of what I hear, but I do imagine I am hearing the sounds of an internetted, globalized world, now mingling with streams of earlier songs, the music of the many peoples of those vast oceans and winds that wash and blow between Sri Lanka, Africa, the Arab world, the music of invasions and invaders, of traders and missionaries, of the Sri Lankan diaspora, of travellers.

The monks' toilets

Toilets created out of cheeky spite, and by monks at that, are pretty rare. That’s why I just had to visit the carved squats at Anuradhapura’s Archaeological Museum.

The museum itself is a dusty, dimly-lit and, at least the day we were there, pretty-well forgotten place – forgotten even, it seemed, by the half-dozen dozing and chatting attendants hanging around as if by happenstance, only perking up to check our tickets and offer to “guide” us through the museum for “a small contribution.”

I finally found the toilets behind the museum, beyond dimly-lit cases of jewellery, gems, coins and pottery, beyond the shapely statue of Parvati, beyond the King of Dancers Shiva Nataraja, and out amidst a weed patch. There are ten or so toilets in all, each a plate carved from stone by monks from Anuradhapura’s western monasteries. The carver-monks had apparently forsaken their luxurious monasteries, but hadn’t forgotten their luxury-loving brothers.

There is surprisingly little information about the toilets at the museum or anywhere else. Our Lonely Planet guidebook includes this entry: “To show their contempt for the effete, luxury-loving monks, the monks of the western monasteries carved beautiful stone squat-style toilets, with their brother monks’ monasteries represented on the bottom! Their urinals illustrated the god of wealth showering handfuls of coins down the hole.”

Cheeky monks, these – although they still seemed to have been understanding, practical fellows.

At least this is what I make of the fact that some plates appear to have conveniently-placed footholds, especially appreciated by anyone who, balanced unsteadily on the astonishingly slick ceramic finish of one of those new-fangled modern squats, becomes obsessed with what feels like the certainty of slipping upended into the swill below. There also appear to be thoughtfully-positioned hollows into which a man can rest his scrotum.

All in all these ancient monks’ squats – forgotten in their weed patch by all things shiny, plain and modern – surely deserve the attention of some modern-day Thomas Crapper or William Ballcock.