Gimlette, John Elephant Complex ISBN 13: 9781782067962

Elephant Complex - Hardcover

9781782067962: Elephant Complex
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Everyone has wanted a piece of paradise.

Sri Lanka is a small island with a long, violent and enthralling history. Home to thousands of wild elephants, this is a place where natural beauty has endured, indifferent to human tragedy.

Journeying through its many regions - some haunted by war, many rarely seen by our eyes - award-winning travel writer John Gimlette interviews ex-presidents and cricketers, tea planters and terrorists, negotiating the complex relationships of Sinhalese, Tamil and Muslim communities and the more sinister forms of tourism.

Each city raises the ghosts of old colonies: Portuguese, Dutch and British armies striving to claim the most significant ports in the southern seas; each site resurrects a civilization that preceded, and sometimes, outfaced them. The political families of Colombo lead Gimlette through recent years of turmoil, survivors of the tsunami tell of their recovery and, tale by tale, scrap by scrap, the thorny truths of the civil war emerge - a war whose wounds have yet to heal.

As he walks in the steps of old conquerors, follows the secret paths of elephants and marches alongside pilgrims, Gimlette seeks the soul of a country that is struggling to free itself from trauma and embody an identity to match its vitality, its power and its people.

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About the Author:
John Gimlette is the winner of the Shiva Naipaul Prize for Travel Writing. He crossed the Soviet Union at the age of seventeen, worked in Argentina on the eve of war and has travelled to over eighty countries. He has published four previous books: At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig, Theatre of Fish, Panther Soup and Wild Coast (winner of the Dolman Travel Book Prize) which have all featured on Radio 4, and contributes articles and photographs to various newspapers and magazines. He lives in London where he practices as a barrister.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
This journey begins with a bus ride. A few minutes from my house in south-west London is a large and yet barely visible community of Sri Lankans, in Tooting. They’re all Tamils, mostly refugees and mostly from a single town, Velvettithurai. Nobody knows exactly how many there are, although the usual figure is eight thousand. Whatever the number, there are now more Sri Lankans in Tooting than there were ever Britons in Ceylon (even in 1911, at the height of the empire,the British population numbered only six thousand). But Tooting, of course, is only part of the picture. Across the country, there are 110,000 Sri Lankan Tamils, with twenty-two temples in London alone.

For years, I’ve been intrigued by my Tamil neighbours. Perhaps it’s their seclusion that’s fascinated me. They demand little of the outside world; they have their own shops, their own after-school academies,their own charities, their own leaders and their own cafés (where lunch still costs four pounds). There are also Tamil newspapers and a special Tamil Yellow Pages, which offers a curious glimpse of another London: coy, jewelled and Asian.

The Tamils (or, strictly speaking, the Tamilians) even have their own internal crime wave, vicious gangs with names like “The Jaffna Boys” or “The Tamil Posse,” who go at each other with knives, Tasers and samurai swords. In one year alone (2005), sixteen Tamils died at the hands of their own. London hardly seems to notice.

As Sri Lanka’s civil war (1983–2009) drew to a close, I decided toexplore this shy community further, and to begin with the temple. Tamil friends from elsewhere had plenty of advice about what I mustdo (I mustn’t wear any leather, and I mustn’t eat any beef for two days before), but none of them would come with me, and nor would they ever allow themselves to be named or quoted in anything I ever wrote. That, of course, made me more curious than ever.

I made several visits. From the outside, the Sri Muthumari Amman Temple still looked like a little department store. Its tiled art-deco façade—now cracked and grimy like old eggshell—had previously housed the Royal Arsenal Co-operative Society. But once over the threshold, a new world appeared, which I always assumed was SriLanka. My eyes would prickle with incense, and the air was greasy with the smoke of coconut lamps. Upstairs, there were twelve deitiesarranged around the old shop floor, and the walls (once a delicate Bakelitegreen) were darkened with soot. The gods, all made of silver and bronze, were tended by twelve priests, each half-naked with hair down to the waist. It would have been easy to forget where I was, except for the odd London bus, glimpsed through the vapours.

I was always the only white face amidst the crowds. The older menoften offered me snippets of information, perhaps as a way of gaugingmy intentions. “Our deities weigh six hundred and fifty kilogramseach,” they’d say, or, “Five hundred people worship here every day.”

From time to time, the most important deity, the goddess Mari Amman, would be ritually bathed in gallons of milk, rosewater and orange juice, before being dressed again in a fresh silk sari. Around her,the worshippers would prostrate themselves on the floor, and stuff her coffers with money. I’d never imagined such devotion in England, let alone a mile from home. On the notice board was a letter, asking everydevotee to give the temple ten thousand pounds.

There was also a shrine to the Tamil Tigers. It looked like a four poster bed, but with photographs and flowers. For many people around the world, the LTTE or “Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam” has been the most heartless, cold-blooded terrorist organisation mankind has ever known. But not here. In this temple, the pictures staring back were of martyrs: a boy who’d died in a hunger strike; pretty girls in that distinctive tiger-striped camouflage. “And these ones,” one of the worshippers told me, “were poisoned, with nerve gas.”

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  • PublisherQuercus Publishing
  • Publication date2016
  • ISBN 10 1782067965
  • ISBN 13 9781782067962
  • BindingHardcover
  • Number of pages528
  • Rating

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