Colombo Impressions 3 -
Better Food, and Some Conversation

We dined that night at the Raja Bhojun, just across the road from our hotel. The restaurant was "atmospheric," as the Sri Lankan brochures like to say. The waiters wore yellow lungis with loose kaftan-style red and yellow tops and wove in and out between the tables. Well-dressed Sri Lankans eyed us curiously. Beyond the tables was a wall of tinted glass and through it we could see the ocean waves breaking gently.

We were with a group of Rags' colleagues, and they were more than ready to point out to us the vegetarian items in the buffet. Was the vegetarian an oddity in a land so near India? Or was it that we had already become oddities in India?

Anyway, at Raja Bhojun, we discovered that the mysterious "hopper" was our Kerala aappam and that the "string hopper" was the idiyappam. To go with these were a dal-like sambar and a dry chutney that was more fiery than it looked.

While we ate the spicy, tasty food, we got talking to our hosts. They had a lot of questions about India and seemed to not know too much about our country. One mild-mannered Sri Lankan asked me if we studied English early on. He spoke of the troubles they had because they were schooled in either Tamil or Sinhalese until high school and suddenly had to face English in college. Perhaps that explained the strange English accent. "The college dropout rates are very high here," he added.

I was told about the three communities in Sri Lanka - the Tamils, the Sinhalese and the Moors. There was also a hint about the oppression of the Tamils from one of our Tamil friends, but since we were in a mixed crowd, that thread did not carry on.

All the while, I was struck by how mild, even naive, the people here seemed, and how uncharacteristic it looked to an outsider that they should indulge in anything resembling war. I was also amused to find that my Indian ego had led me to believe that Sri Lanka was just an extension of India, when in fact it had an identity unique to itself.

By the time we got around to dessert (a lovely fruit custard-pie sort of thing), we were being advised about the places to visit in Colombo. I was still curious about what the average Sri Lankan thought about India. "What is the first thing that comes to mind when you think of India?" I asked one of our friends. "Indian women are beautiful!" he exclaimed, "All those lovely women in Indian movies!" And indeed, we remembered passing theatres advertising Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham. Time to see Bollywood in a new light, we thought as we left, having completed a long day in Kozhumbu.
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