Travel to Sri Lanka: Kandy: Now

As confined by hills as ever, Kandy now struggles to keep moving: traffic jams are a part of daily life, a blend of trucks, buses, and the cars of privileged class. 

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One of the city's gridded streets, taken very early in the morning.

A fairer picture of a main street in mid-day. The initials DSI, on the right, refer not to some telecom operator but to a locally ubiquitous shoe store.

Another view, with another DSI outlet.  The cream-and-red striped building in the middle distance, on the left, is a mosque.

There's not a lot of English in Sri Lanka, unlike India.  English remains the language of the elite, however, and therefore of businesses claiming to serve the elite.  That's why English signs abound in Kandy but hardly exist in nearby villages. Then there are the police vans labelled Tactical Action Contingency Team.  Not one Sinhalese in a thousand would claim to understand that label, and not one in ten thousand would understand that it's jargon.  Still, the lure of English is such that the words give status to the vehicle. 

Streetmarket, especially crowded on the very busy shopping days before the New Year holiday.

Unless you've seen it, you wouldn't believe it, but packed into the city's grid and tucked into a corner of the Queen's Hotel lot, there's a swimming pool, invisible from the outer world.

A few blocks away: one of several fruit vendors in the municipal market.  Among the imported items are probably Chinese oranges, Pakistani pomegranates, and Australian grapes.

The market stalls wrap around a surprisingly well-cared-for patio garden.

Most Sri Lankans cook not with gas or electricity but with firewood, and scattered through the town you'll find places where logs are split by maul, wedge, and ax into tiny pieces, then loaded--never in trucks, always in oxcarts.  The odd thing is that oxcarts are hardly used for anything else.

Finally, developers have begun breaking away from the old pattern of each business in its own building

International marketers have just begun arriving.

Real estate in Sri Lanka is in a state of administrative chaos: there's no government record of ownership by tract.  Instead, there's only a room full of deeds to land described by metes and bounds.  Each deed is numbered and gives the number of the deed of the previous owner.  In this way, a chain of title can be reconstructed, once you know the present owner.  Yet there's no way to determine the present owner except by asking around, and the compilation of a cadastral map showing ownership in a village--let alone a larger area--would be a huge undertaking involving an original survey and data compilation, tract by tract.  Nobody bothers.  The one thing people do know is the size of their parcel, measured by that elsewhere-obsolete unit of measure, the perch.  There's 160 of them to one acre.

A modern house.

Another new house, this one on the ridge overlooking Kandy from the west.

What's left of the past?  In this case, the stylized heritage of a moonstone, as though an office building could be a sacred space.

The old courthouse is now closed and a new court complex has been opened.  Security checks force everyone entering the building into long lines.

More peaceful, at least if you find a moment not seized by protestors: the Arts College of Peradeniya University--its roof once again echoing the Assembly Hall adjoining the Temple of the Tooth.