Travels in war-torn Sri Lanka

Travel writing is a bit like Scrabble&mdasha game enjoyed and engaged with, but rarely considered a potential Olympic Sport. Also like Scrabble, which relies on one word to build another, travel writing relies on one world (the writer&rsquos) to build another (the book&rsquos).

Seen in this light, John Gimlette&rsquos Elephant Complex is more than just about Travels in Sri Lanka. It&rsquos a political and ethnographic commentary with &lsquoOlympic&rsquo ambitions, outreaching the breadth of its 500-odd pages. Not the book you&rsquod carry, let&rsquos say, to read under a beach umbrella, cold martini in hand. But the kind you&rsquod return to every time the complexity of this small, bullet-holed nation baffles you again.

A British lawyer and travel writer who had never set foot on the island before he decided to write the book, Gimlette is clearly an outsider. The kind who sets out to be an insider before page one&mdashwandering in his own neighbourhood of Tooting in South London, which now has more Sri Lankan Tamils than &ldquothere were ever Britons in Cey­-lon&rdquo. Before he arrives, he also carefully constructs a network of people through whose eyes he wishes to see the country and its political and historical trajecto&shyries. Not for him the accidental fe&shylicity alone of meeting a thieving auto driver or a conman in a suit, but also the certainty of &lsquoencoun&shyters&rsquo with a former President, a minister of Parliament with beacons in his cars, a well-known cricketer or two and a belligerent novelist, among other chosen conduits of culture.

The writing though doesn&rsquot appear to suffer from such law&shyyerly predisposition, effortlessly winding its way through the in&shyner and outer worlds of Colombo and Anuradhapura, Galle and Kandy, Trincomalee and Jaffna. A story of the land told through the stories of its people and for&shymer colonisers and raiders. From the eccentric Dutch &lsquoburghers&rsquo of Kandy and the British lieutenant who was the &ldquowould-be Sultan&rdquo of the northern isle of Delft (tam&shying wild horses and making sure that &ldquoeven today, many Delf&shytians&hellip smile with Irish eyes&rdquo) to Chinese admirals who whisked away a Sinhalese king &ldquoas exotic booty&rdquo and the captured armies of President Kruger, there&rsquos veri&shyfiable intrigue at every bend.

Yet largely, it&rsquos today&rsquos Sin&shyhalese and Tamils in post-war Sri Lanka that people the pages of Gimlette&rsquos book&mdashone from which the shadow of the war never quite seems to lift. By the end of it in fact, the author appears entirely taken by the civil war and the civil war alone. Not as a voyeur as much as a man faced with the challenge of making sense of it all and put&shyting it into words and sentences, punctuating it with empathy. The only time Gimlette seems to slip and teeters close to the ethical edge is when he pockets a &ldquopeppermint nugget&rdquo from the rubble of LTTE leader Prabha&shykaran&rsquos home. He recovers soon enough, of course, and wonders why he feels no rage on his way back to the capital. &ldquoSri Lanka has a strange way of subverting the conscience. I sometimes wondered if there wasn&rsquot some vast emotional transponder buried deep in the island, scrambling all the signals. How else had the tourism survived, as the bloody battles raged&rdquo But it did. And war tourism or not, it continues to thrive. Rea&shyson enough to read a book like this and other award-winning non-fiction titles on the country that have been steadily filling the shelves in recent years. To remind yourself that no matter how prepared you are, a trip to Sri Lanka will not be about &ldquothe search for comprehension, but a battle with perplexity.&rdquo