“Sri Lanka is an island that everyone loves at some level inside themselves. A very special island that travellers, from Sinbad to Marco Polo, dreamed about. A place where the contours of the land itself forms a kind of sinewy poetry. “
- Romesh Gunesekera
Ayubowan. I was in Srilanka last week to attend the Kandy Esala Perahera, a sacred festival with a pageant that pays tribute to the Sacred Tooth Relic housed at the temple. I was invited by Srilankan Airlines and we visited Colombo, Kandy and Dambulla. And while we were based mainly in Kandy for a week, we visited villages meeting artists, dancers, and artisans. We visited hamlets where they make drums and brass embroidered costumes for elephants.
We also explored the country, visiting supermarkets, restaurants, and markets and I felt that Srilanka is safe now and the crisis is slowly stabilizing but they need tourism to help them stabilize. So if you are planning a trip, ensure that you have it planned well beforehand with a reliable travel designer who will arrange for your transport and stay. I will be sharing more insights and experiences from my Srilanka trip in the next few issues as well, so stay tuned. And if you have any questions on travel in Srilanka, please do message me as well.
Hello and welcome to the 35th issue of Journeys and Jottings. This issue has a lot of recommendations - podcasts, books, shows . We talk about the journey of the Sacred Tooth Relic of Lord Buddha. In You have Got Mail, we see a larger than life sized postcard from the streets of Bangalore, courtesy writer, Anita Rao Kashi and in People Make Places, we meet writer Harini Nagendra, who talks about her first crime fiction, The Bangalore Detectives Club.
The journey of the Sacred Tooth Relic
Kelaniya is a magnificent Buddhist temple filled with large murals and sculptures, located near Colombo. But it was also of spiritual significance to both Hindus and Buddhists. However, the temple was once a palace and it also marked the culmination of Rama’s tryst with Lanka. It was believed to be a palace handed over to Vibeeshana, Ravana’s brother after the war. The paintings here depicted stories from Buddha’s life but one painting like the one above shows the journey of Buddha’s sacred tooth relic from India to Srilanka.
Princess Hemmamali was apparently the daughter of King Guhasiva of Kalinga and Prince Danta was the son of King Udeni who came to Kalinga to worship the sacred relic which was guarded by the Kalinga rulers. They later get married and the Princess hides the tooth relic in her hair as she entered Srilanka. They later handed it over to the king Sirimeghavanna of Anuradhapura who enshrined the relic in his capital, before the relic eventually found a sacred home at Kandy. It was an explicable feeling, being at the Kandy Tooth Relic Temple and later watching the colourful pageant of the Kandy Esala Perahera, but more of this on the next issue.
You have got mail.
Anita Rao Kashi, freelance journalist and travel writer sends us this postcard that she spotted in Malleshwaram, Bangalore and she says, “For postcards a literal postcard, but larger than life. As part of Malleswaram Hogona, an public art project to reclaim conservancies, this mural of a postcard is endearing to me for two reasons. t is very nostalgic as we have quite forgotten the joy of writing and receiving letters. Secondly, the artist has showcased everything that is representative of Bangalore and Karnataka.” You can read Anita’s stories here
Would you like to contribute for You have Got Mail series and share a postcard ?
Top three recommendations
What to see - Only Murders in the Building on Hotstar.
The dark comic thriller, which is also a podcast is one of my favourite shows and Season 2 is now streaming on Hotstar. Set in an upscale historic building with its own secrets, the story is about three strangers, who also happen to be neighbours with an obsession for crime and crime shows. And before they know it, they are caught in one as well.
What to listen - The Responsible Travel Podcast - Alpaca My Bags
Hosted by Erin Elizabeth Hynes and produced by Katie Laur, the responsible travel podcast feature fascinating travellers and storytellers, who are a far cry from the travellers we see on our social media timeline today. I stumbled upon this podcast only quite recetly when I was looking for inspiration and I was hooked. They are well into their fifth season now with over 80 episodes but some of my favourite episiodes deal with indepth topics like mental health and travel, climate change, dark tourism , over tourism and what it means to travel authentically. One of the most insteresting and inspiring shows I listen to every day . Give it a listen here
What to read - The Bangalore Detectives Club by Harini Nagendra.
Harini lives in Bangalore with her family, in a home filled with maps – and loves trees, mysteries, and traditional recipes. And this book is her first foray into the world of crime fiction. To know more read the next section.
People Make Places
I have never met a detective as endearing and fascinating as 19 year old Kaveri and Harini Nagendra brings her alive in the pages of her first crime fiction, The Bangalore Detectives Club. Set in the colonial era, the old world charm of Bangalore fascinates you and it transports you to a different realm.
Harini Nagendra is a professor of ecology at Azim Premji University. I have read Cities and Canopies - Trees in Indian Cities penned jointly by Harini and Seema Mundoli, which is an ode to the trees , “ nature’s own museum” and won the Book of the Year Award at the Publishing Next Awards in 2020. The duo have also written Nature in the City: Bengaluru in the Past, Present and Future,
However Harini’s foray in crime fiction presented another unique facet of her as a writer. We chatted a bit about her inspiration , the backdrop of colonial Bangalore and her quaint charming characters.
1. What inspired you to write a crime story ?
I love reading crime fiction, especially the lighter, more domestic types of mysteries with amateur sleuths. I have written short stories before – more literary fiction, in style – but when I wanted to write a full length fiction novel I knew I would want to write a mystery. The inspiration for The Bangalore Detectives Club came to me in 2007, when I was immersed in a sea of archival material about the history of Bangalore, as part of my academic research on the ecological history of the city. There were so many fascinating stories and anecdotes that I could not cover in a scholarly academic book, and I really wanted to bring this period alive through a work of imagination. A mystery seemed the best way to engage readers and transport them right into old Bangalore.
2. How did you choose to present these charming locations of Old Bangalore in your book ?
I would classify myself as an old Bangalorean! I have lived in this city for most of my life, and though I’ve spent time in many other cities, Bangalore is my home – so I know the city very well. A large part of my academic research on urban ecology is also based on Bangalore, and I have walked the city, looked at old maps and documents, talked to people, read books about the city, collected data from different parts and written about Bangalore for over 15 years. It was quite easy in the end to find locations – the harder part was deciding which ones to select, as you can only fit so much into a book. My father was a member of Century Club, and so was I for a short while – since I spent so much time there, it was an easy choice for me to keep this in as an important setting. I also loved many of the older buildings in the city such as Bowring and Victoria Hospital, and equally love traversing the small twisty lanes in the interior parts of the city, such as the parts of Ulsoor I write about. I also have a large collection of old maps of the city, which helped me ensure that the places I write about now also existed in the 1920s.
3. Every character is endearing.. tell us about a few of them besides Kaveri.
Thank you! When I started writing the book, I only had two main characters in mind – Kaveri, my 19-year-old protagonist, who is newly married and has just moved to Bangalore – and her husband Ramu, an up-and-coming doctor in Bowring Hospital. Slowly, others began to populate the story – of these my especial favourites are Venu, their young milk delivery boy, whom Kaveri becomes very fond of; Uma aunty, the gossipy elderly lady who lives in the house behind them, who collaborates with Kaveri in finding out who-done-it; and Ismail, the police inspector who is a steadfast supporter of Kaveri’s. Venu came in first, as he was essential to the plot (I don’t want to say more, as that may give away a critical plot point). Uma aunty came in next, as I was wondering how Kaveri would get access to the homes of suspects – an elderly neighbour who took Kaveri under her wing seemed like a perfect solution. Inspector Ismail parachuted into the page, before I realized it, becoming a main character of his own – I had initially written in a policeman who was younger and bumbling, but within a couple of pages I found Ismail had entered the story, booted out the foolish young man, and taken over! I hope to continue to feature many of these side characters in future books in the series.
4. Your inspiration for Kaveri- she is so endearing and unusual for a detective I must say.
J I love her too! I can’t point to a conscious inspiration for her, as she came into my head as a fully formed character with her own personality quirks, and likes and dislikes. But my best guess is that she was subconsciously inspired by all the strong women in my own family – including my great grandmother, who was an ayurvedic practitioner, my mother and mother-in-law, both of whom had to work strenuously to convince their families to send them to a hostel to complete their BSc degrees; and my husband’s aunt, now in her nineties, who was the original inspiration for Kaveri’s swimming in a sari.
5. Are we looking at sequels, series, web/TV series? What’s next for Kaveri?
The Bangalore Detectives Club is the first of a proposed series, which will have at least three books - and I hope many more. The second in the series, Murder Under a Red Moon, takes Kaveri out and about, sleuthing during the time of an eclipse – and her disapproving mother-in-law Bhargavi is back in this book, playing a much more prominent role than she did in the first book (where I sent her off mid-way on a convenient care-giving trip). I would love to see the book on screen as well, as a movie, web or TV series, but I guess time will tell!
You can follow Harini Nagendra on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram .
Feedback
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