Bite of the Buddha’s Tooth

October 2023

The rain was light and I couldn’t imagine a better story for my grandkids about Sri Lanka than an elephant attack. Instead, I was the prisoner of my hired chauffeur, Kamel, safely stowed in the backseat of an airport cab. I vowed never to make the smart choice again. My friend Praveen chastised my original plan to ride a motorcycle through Sri Lanka as trying to cram too much into a weekend. I agreed that a three hour motorcycle ride in the dark was a reckless way to start a 4-day trip. I could have arranged for a bike to meet me at the airport curb, but it felt like forcing the thing to happen. Now I was on my way to the Sri Lankan jungle, pampered, dry, and completely self-conscious about it.

Sigiriya

The destination we drove to was Sigiriya, also known as Lion’s Head Rock. The ruins of a castle fortress perch on a large, natural granite tower on a flat expanse of jungle. Before dawn the next morning, my objective wasn’t Lion’s Head, but Pigurndula Rock one mile away. On the first section of the trail, I could see a line of headlamps and cellphones snaking their way toward the top. The only sound was gravel under my feet. I stepped between stones lashed in place by the roots of large Banyan trees, then passed a Buddha statue reclining in the shadows. Sleep deprived and impatient, I scrambled around the slower groups where they bottlenecked at a pile of boulders.

The slope of Pigurndula Rock’s summit makes a natural grandstand for Sigiriya nearby. I could see it in the twilight topped with green and the brick foundations of the palace that stood at its top. Every minute that passed made the warm tones more intense. Then a horizontal beam of light kissed the tree tops and blazed into Lion’s Head Rock like God playing with the reflection of his wristwatch. I forced myself to take a breath.

Hives of jealous honeybees guard Sigiriya on four sides. They’ll attack any drone that approaches the dancing concubines painted beneath the overhang of the rock. I imagined catwalks suspended from hand twisted ropes like mossy webbing, their fibers groaning as porters walked across rough hewn planks. The site was overgrown with brush until the first excavation in the 1890s. On the lowest side, I spotted the wreckage of an arial cable car used to ferry Victorian archeologist to the summit and carry off its treasures. Facing west, 5th Century sunsets would have reflected off of the now empty water gardens at its base. The palace at the summit would have had a constant breeze to carry mosquitos away. During the monsoon, the cisterns at the summit still flood with water like infinity pools.

When I returned to the base a few hours later, I removed my shoes to pass through a Buddhist temple. I tip-toed past worshippers to where Kamel was waiting for me with the car. Drivers get a discounted rate for overnight stays. I had his services all weekend for the price of a couple long Uber rides. As we left the hill, I could see Stonehenge-like structures in the understory of the forest. Tilting stones like long crooked teeth stood beside mysterious circular pyramids. I’d read about stupas, a ritual object of Buddhist prayer, and realized these were their decayed domes. I asked Kamel to take me to the Buddhist monastic caves at Dambala.

Dambala Cave Temple

The Dambala site is a miniature Yosemite. A granite staircase leads to a series of caves at the top of a treeless hill where village women offer overpriced flowers to lay at the Buddha’s feet. Natural granite chambers were insulated places for Sri Lankan monks to meditate. In contemplative silence, they painted delicate patterns that covered the walls. The well lit paintings are so extensive and intricate, it would take another century of contemplation to take it all in.

I missed my motorcycle the most during the hours long drive to Kandy, an inland city to the south. The tree canopy of the lowlands makes a unique mosaic over the roadway. Their shade-shy branches fit together and never overlap. The shadows line up perfectly like a puzzle. Inside the car I felt divorced from the experience. We passed neatly stacked fruit stands and 3-wheeled Tuk Tuks. I made Kamel stop beneath an enormous granite boulder so I could load up on bananas and mangos, a staple of every ride. I missed the breeze blowing through my open faced helmet, even if it smelled like garbage fire.

Temple of the Tooth

The Indian and Sri Lankan cultures are linked by their ancestors. Half of Sri Lanka is ethnically Tamil Hindu. In Tamil mythology, the island of Sri Lanka was connected to India’s eastern coast by a bridge a Hindu god built to rescue his abducted wife. As evidence, fundamentalist Hindus point to satellite images of natural limestone formations in the shallow Bay of Bengal. Known as Adam’s Bridge, the submerged rocks line up like paving stones from Tamil Nadu, the South Indian state where I work twice a year. The other half of Sri Lanka is Sinhalese, a group of predominantly Buddhist Pacific Islanders. Sri Lanka is the only place the Buddha (Siddhartha Gautama) is known to have traveled outside India during his lifetime. Fights between the two groups today are mostly about monetary policy, but in the early 2000s, the two sides fought a civil war. The Sinhalese government defeated the Tamil Tigers, and assassinations of Indian leaders, who supported the effort, or didn’t support it enough, continued after the conflict.

In Kandy, Sri Lanka, the two groups come together around a revered figure for both cultures. Hindus consider Buddha an avatar of the god Vishnu. After his death, Buddha’s body was burned on a funeral pyre and his teeth dispersed like seeds of faith throughout South Asia to Singapore, Nepal, and Sri Lanka. His left canine returned as a holy relic to Sri Lanka in the 3rd Century B.C. At Kandy, a temple was built around it in 1603.

The Sri Dalada Maligawa, “Temple of the Tooth”, is wholly devoted to its care. The tooth is greeted by the sound of a conch shell every morning and fed twice a day by an offering laid before its 7 concentric golden caskets. The temple performs three services daily to drum beats and wailing pipes. A pair of elephant tusks, taller than a man, guard the entrance to the inner sanctum. Amid candles, flame, and smoke, I merged with the solid mass of bodies that moved clockwise around the tooth.

Highlands

The Kingdom of Kandy was an independent Sri Lankan state before the British arrived. The palace, the temple, and the colonial governor’s mansion sit in a row on Kandy Lake. I walked down the lake’s wide boulevard to the station to catch my train. A group of Russian travelers were ahead of me in line for tickets. I’d read stories about Russia’s train culture and its infamous history of hard partying. I hoped I wouldn’t be seated next to them, but in the scramble for seats, I found myself sitting face to face with one of their group.

She was beautiful. Dark eyes, black hair, and light olive skin. I would have mistaken her for Persian if I hadn’t overheard them speaking at the ticket counter. She laughed when I dared her to try the greasy prawns a train wala was selling from a basket of newspapers. I learned her name was Anna. She was in Sri Lanka on a four month stay in a surf town called Wagamama. She and her friends were on their way to Ella, a scenic party spot in the highlands.

The train’s wheels screamed against the track and we moved our heads closer to hear our conversation. I found out that due to a mixup on their Sri Lankan visas, they’d had to cancel their original plan to attend a yoga retreat, and were going to dance away their frustration. When the Tamil woman next to me stood up and insisted Anna take her place, we were both secretly delighted. Now shoulder to shoulder, we fell deeper into talk about surf, meditation, and self-publishing. She was a social-media influencer with a book published on the online publishing service I’ve worked for the past 10 years. She was ethnically Jewish Armenian and grew up in Russian Siberia. Twenty minutes later, her 2 Russian friends joined us as more seats freed up. Gamitriv was a former military high-school cadet dodging the draft for the war in Ukraine. His Russian fiancé, Nikki, was with him. They all met in Sri Lanka. I didn’t ask for their views on the conflict and didn’t share mine. My own country fought an unpopular war when I lived abroad in the 2000s. It was October 8, 2023, the day after the Palestinian militant group Hamas massacred 1200 Israeli Jews. My sympathy was with Anna.

We shared mangos and finally noticed the view outside. So far, I’d only had eyes for Anna. White splashes of waterfalls fell like lightning across an immense green. The British built a railroad to bring tea and coffee out of the forest in 1864 when Sri Lanka was the territory “Ceylon”. The train line runs 181 miles from Colombo, the capital city on the west coast, over the mountains to Badulla in the east. Guidebooks call it an engineering marvel. It threads through 3 national parks on a system of 43 tunnels, trestles, and viaducts. The 3 trips a day are packed in each direction with ordinary Sri Lankans as well as tourists. It’s now Sri Lanka’s main line. The total trip time from Colombo to Badulla is 11 hours.

We were mesmerized by the endless hillside tea plantations. Waterfalls cascaded through hedges beneath curved wooden trestle bridges. Plantation factories drying tea billowed steam into ornamental gardens. Teenagers jostled in the doorway for a turn to surf the outside stairs of the train carriage. Then jumped back to avoid being whipped by bamboo underbrush or pulverized by the wall of a tunnel. We each took a turn of our own. Young voices screamed with delight as we plunged into tunnels with walls blackened by the soot of steam locomotives.

So much of the land was cultivated and so little of it was developed. The scenery couldn’t have changed much since Ceylon. Farm workers beside the track lifted portions of fruit in sandwich bags up to the door. Dark faces hung out of the windows. For 10 cents, I bought a bag of what looked like thick skinned cherries. They tasted like pear with the texture of a grape and the astringent mouth feel of rhubarb. The train tunneled through more hillsides into eucalyptus groves at the heart of the national park.

Ella

I lingered at a doorway to film a section of track, then returned to my seat to find Anna and her friends gathering their things. I remembered their conversation with the ticket seller at the station. They had First Class seats waiting for them. Halfway to the old British mountain resort at Ella Nurwara, they moved to the forward part of the train. My years of solo travel had never felt lonely until those few hours of companionship were over. The clouds outside the windows seemed to thicken with my mood. In my despair, I bought the prawns.

The air cooled as we rose in elevation. Rain chased passengers from the empty doorways. Hours later, we finally reached Ella Station. I tried to catch a glimpse of Anna as the crowd left the train, but the First Class carriages were too far away. I resisted the urge to get off too. Stick to the plan, I told myself. I’d booked all the way to Badulla, the end of the line, so I could see a landmark on the downward slope called Nine Arches Bridge.

A few miles past Ella, the train stopped at a rockslide. Moths flooded into the open doors and covered the inside of the cars like a biblical plague. By the time the tracks cleared an hour later, we were passing Nine Arches in the dark. Instead of the photo I wanted, I was granting selfies to a boys high-school volleyball team. I couldn’t match their vibe as the 14-year-olds played drums and sang their school song. At the end of the line, the train emptied and I walked to my cheap hotel. The manager didn’t speak English. A cold, fluorescent light lit my damp room. Now pouring outside like a monsoon, the rain blotted out the Wi-Fi and the mobile network connection. I flagged down a Tuk Tuk from the porch. Instead of giving the driver 200 Sri Lankan Rupees ($0.64) for a ride to a restaurant, I offered him 5000 to take me and my duffle bag back into the mountains. I had to find Anna.

The British developed Sri Lanka before the car. There’s no interstate through the middle of the country. Train is the only efficient way to travel and the next one wouldn’t pass through town until 3am. It was lucky I’d sworn off smart decisions, because my only choice was a winding mountain path in what amounted to a motorized grocery cart. The road is so steep, that in places I had to walk alongside the Tuk Tuk. It took over an hour to reach Ella. A half-mile outside town, even my duffle was too much for it to handle. I flagged down one of the local rides with lower gearing.

Above the clouds in Ella, the skies cleared. I found a cell signal strong enough to use my Agoda app. I woke up a guesthouse manager to tell him I’d just booked a room. I thought about how I was going to find Anna without her contact info. On the train I’d heard Nikki mention a cafe in Ella called One Love. I dropped off my bag and started my search. I did a lap through every bar in town, then got dinner at a food stall with a view of the street. For an hour, I scanned for white faces and listened for European accents. At 9pm, I thought they must be out by now. I walked to One Love and got a table with a view of the door. Ten minutes later, Anna walked in.

Nikki came through the door first. I made eye contact and waved. It took second to register, then she shouted for Anna, who rushed forward. As soon as we embraced, she asked if I’d gotten her message. I said, “What message?” She told me that the moment they reached their seats in the frigid and sterile First Class, they’d wanted to come back to where I was sitting. She’d found my Instagram handle on my website, then DM’d me to ask if there was still room for them in the Third Class cabin. My heart did a flip to know she was trying to find me too. We drank, danced, played pool, and walked around town. Then talked on the porch of her room until 3am. I had to meet my driver to catch my train back to Colombo in 3 hours. Wise enough not to let our plans run away from us, we ended the night with gentle kisses and whispers about visas and sanctions. We wondered what third country we’d be able to meet in next. Even if they weren’t her grandkids, I’d found a better story to tell mine about my time in Sri Lanka than an elephant attack.