This photo-story explores perspectives on Colombo through the eyes of some of its older residents. While none of them are famous or influential public figures, the people in this story all hail from various backgrounds and professions, and have lived through decades of watching the city morph and change around them.
Among the ten or so other determined activists currently fighting for the rights of the people of Lakmuthu Sevana at Mayura Place, Nalini is the only woman. Nalini joined the UNP officially at the age of 16, she is now 55 years old. In a world where the legal system and public servants only work in your favour if you can wield some form of influence over them, Nalini quickly realised the value of knowing the right people and having them owe you a favour or two. Over the years she has campaigned tirelessly for candidate after candidate of the party, in the hope that eventually that would translate into a better life for her and her community.
Both Nalini’s father, and his father before him, were employees of the Wellawatte Weaving Mills. Before they moved to their new apartment built by the UDA in 2014, Nalini and her husband ran a small grocery shop with which they serviced the community of Mayura place. Now however, with the shop gone, both of them have had to find work, which is scarce. And they have found themselves partly depending on the income of their 25 year old son.
In last year’s General Election, Nalini worked so hard for the UNP, especially for Rosy Senanayake who subsequently lost, that she fell ill. Her family wanted her to stop working on the campaign altogether, but desperate to solve the nagging problems the community has put up with for so long, Nalini poured her heart and soul into it, often pocketing out her own money in the process. Once the election was over and Senanayake had lost however, the expected support didn’t come.
As I sat chatting with her one afternoon, a neighbour walked in and started telling her about her worries. A third generation Weaving Mills Worker, her house, which she calls ‘my father’s house’, was written by the UDA in the name of her sister-in-law. She is now embroiled in a stressful lawsuit in an effort to try and get it ‘back’. Nalini remains a go-to person for the community to approach with their problems. But after decades of working for politicians, Nalini says she is now disillusioned and losing hope.
When it comes to tourism, H. A. Somapala Perera has seen it all. In the heyday of post WW2 travel, when the only big hotels in Sri Lanka were the GOH, the Galle Face Hotel, Queens Hotel and the Mount Lavinia Hotel, cruise-line passengers taking day tours in Colombo would remark how they'd seen his picture on the walls of ships' barbershops, taken by ship photographers documenting colourful aspects of the journey for their benefit.
He remembers how the passengers would land in Colombo and take the standard day tour. Stop at Town Hall, Viharamahadevi Park, the temples, the zoo (Pettah doesn't seem to have been a popular feature then) and finally arrive at the Mount Lavinia Hotel for lunch, where he would be waiting, a licensed artisan, to sell his goods.
When cruise-liners went out of fashion and 'jumbo jets' came on the scene, everything changed. The open economy policies of the late seventies eroded the market of small entrepreneurs like him. And nowadays tour operators only expose their passengers to big souvenir chains. Even the new tour buses, massive and with high windows, cut off access: the tourists can't even see him now, all the way down there at street level.
He still makes a living sitting in his cozy shack at the entrance to Mount Lavinia beach with his white cat at his feet. He has a regular contract to supply goods to a big souvenir chain, and manages to sell enough to tourists visiting the beach, though you don't get as many high spending Europeans as you used to. He splits his time between his 'office' and his family. All in all, life seems good.
Nimal Jayasiri (62) has been manning a lottery ticket stall at Maradana for 28 years. It’s a tough business and it can be seasonal, so one has to be tenacious to stick it out. Which he has. He is a native of Dematagoda, but moved to the suburbs of Makola after marriage. Dematagoda and Maradana are congested and crowded today. Minorities, especially Muslims have migrated in droves, he says. According to him, Muslims are richer because they get help from Middle-Eastern countries. The poorer Sinhalese had no choice but to sell their homes and their places of business to them.
Having been here for nearly three decades he has many loyal customers. One woman, who has been buying lotteries for 18 years everyday has only won a few small prizes, but she is still hoping to win the jackpot. ‘We’re not doing this to become kings’ she says. If she can live in luxury for a while and leave something for her children she will be happy.
Jayasiri says that this area of Colombo has seen a lot of change over his lifetime. He is sad that the environment has undergone such damage. So many trees have been cut, and there are too many vehicles on the roads. At this point Jayasiri and a friend have debate over whether public hygiene was as bad today as it used to be then. Jayasiri insists that not as many people used to urinate on the streets. His friend begs to differ. Jayasiri says that Western culture has taken over the youth, his friend mutters that this has also probably always been the case.
Nevertheless, Jayasiri believes that there is an inordinate amount of expectations and norms of success being imposed on young people today. And they are forced by society to comply with and follow them. When he was a boy, there wasn’t such heady competition. He didn’t even know what the year 5 scholarship exam was when he sat for it. Back then for school projects they would have to walk to do their research. He recalls going to foreign embassies to ask for magazines from which he could clip cuttings and pictures for geography class.
Mallika (62) is an occasional beggar. She is also diabetic. She grew up in Bambalapitiya and has studied up to the tenth standard in school. He father used to be a driver at Richard Peiris and they weren’t poor growing up. They used to have land in Bambalapitiya, but she says her relatives stole it from her ‘ada pita minissu newey wala kapanne thaman ge minissu’ she laments. It’s your own that screws you over today, not outsiders. She used to be a beauty in her youth, and was featured on a TV program in the eighties. She fondly remembers how all the boys would catcall at her back then because of it. People didn’t have jobs back then like they do now, they couldn’t go abroad to work. Otherwise, she says, she would have been able to make use of her education.
I ask her about Colombo today. ‘Apo’ she says, ‘Kolamba ada ganika madamak’ (Colombo is a brothel). ‘They seduce you promising all sorts of things and then rob you clean, nowadays men have to marry from outside city’ she asserts. I am uncertain if she is speaking metaphorically or otherwise. Society is so messed up today that it won’t allow even an old lady like her to beg in peace, she says. Men try to solicit her for prostitution and all sorts of other sick things ‘Jethawanaramayata gal gahala wanduran gen bana ahapu un ne ada inne’ (people today have stoned the Jethawnaramaya temple and have been preached to by monkeys) she adds. Her speech is littered with incisive bon mots often lost in translation.
In the seventies ‘when they killed those boys’, the JVP would also kidnap beautiful girls. ‘Eth wasai mama, deela arinawa’ (But I was very strict and I wouldn’t tolerate any of that nonsense). As a little girl she could cycle and play freely in the neighborhood. ‘Today even children are getting raped. We’re living in a sick society.’
Rasaiah came to Colombo from Nagadeepa, Jaffna when he was a young boy of 11. He initially worked at a restaurant, with a job to transport water from a distant well. When he joined the Wellawatte Weaving Mills in 1949 he was 22 years old. By the age of 23, he was the secretary of the Labour Union. He remembers the general strike of 1964, when workers refused to leave the premises until they received a salary increment, demanding that it be increased by Rs.2 a month. The government subsequently negotiated them down to 25 cents. Unions were strong in those days, and Rasiah remembers how they received aid and assistance from other unions as they carried out the strike.
He is now pushing ninety. Many of his compatriots have passed away. The Weaving Mills as an institution represented an important chapter in the Labour Movement, and Rasiah is one of the few left alive who can still reel off a wealth of oral history on a significant chapter of our post-independence economic and political landscape.
Muniamma (74) lives with her family in an old run down building accessed by through a dark, narrow alleyway in Mariakadey, Maradana. She has lived here since she was born. Her parents moved from India and found work in the city in the 1930s. Her late husband sold snacks like kadala and pakoda in the streets. This little neighborhood is highly cosmopolitan and people of multiple ethnicities existed together in peace.
But the several families living in this particular building, dubbed the ‘maduwa’, or shed for its possible use in some bygone industry, are living in constant fear of eviction, their politically connected landlord having threatened this many times. Muniamma just wants security for her children, she wants them to have a roof over their heads. “Being born and dying is life”, she says, “if you have you’re a wellakaran (white man) if you don’t have you’re a picchakaren (beggar).”
Nasurdeen has lived in Kompannyaveediya for decades. His family were initially renting land belonging to the Navarathna family, but then were forcefully evicted and move to Java Lane after the Navarathnas began to build the pool for the doomed Rio Hotel. His whole life is tied up with the neighbourhood. Among his more memorable recollections was a day when he found himself stopping at his father's watch repair shop, just down the street from the Rio Hotel. Nasurdeen on principle never did that, apparently because he didn't want to 'disturb' his dad. He didn't know what made him stop there on this occasion, but soon after he stepped in he witnessed his father being electrocuted in a freak accident. Nasurdeen immediately saved him. His father died sixteen years later of natural causes, and Nasurdeen still recalls this portentous incident as one of the most remarkable of his life.
RA Jayasiri Perera was a classmate of the late Milton Mallawarachchi, the musical legend famous for daring to fall in love with the daughter of the business tycoon Nawaloka mudalali. ‘Milton’ was forced to leave the country at one point because of his impertinence, but not before being treated like dirt and slapped around by the angered mudalali and his family. He had the final word however, eventually marrying the woman he wanted. The story forms the core of the legend of Mallawarachchi. A legend his old friends and classmates, and millions of fans, continue to religiously perpetuate. Even though they lost touch a long time ago, his association with Milton clearly plays an important role in Jayasiri’s life. In school he would drum out a beat while Milton sang. Later on Jayasiri dabbled in a musical career of his own.
He’s lived in Mount Lavinia all his life. And is brimming with rich stories from the town’s past. Everyone knows the story of the town’s namesake Lavinia, the poor lansi (Burgher/Eurasian) girl who caught the English governor’s eye and then married him in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. Only to be left behind when he was forced to leave the country. Yet another tale of working class comeuppance laced with romance and tragedy, the mood of the story somehow encapsulates the mood of Mount Lavinia itself; a bustling beach town with a happy go lucky atmosphere, institutions with a strong colonial heritage and blessed with the glamour of tourism. It is also somewhat of a melting pot of classes. With deeply entrenched communities from all social walks rubbing shoulders on a daily basis.
Jayasiri tells of how Galle Road, today Colombo’s primary traffic artery, back in the day was no more than a street. The primary means of transport used to be rail. As people disembarked from the Mt. Lavinia station, they would be picked up in bullock carts (bakki karattha) and transported home. He remembers the glory days of the Mt. Lavinia Hotel with fondness. He tells me how a famous body builder came here in the fifties, and how the whole crew of the film The Bridge on the River Kwai stayed at the hotel during the shoot. They were hiring locals as extras, and all the lansi boys got bit parts the film as white soldiers. Mount Lavinia has changed a lot in his lifetime. He was born in 1943, and not a single two story building existed then, except for lone seven story tower built by the Birtish of unknown purpose. It was run down and broken, and was torn down when he was a boy.
Today this town by the sea isn’t as pleasant to live in as it used to be. An influx of construction and an expansion of Colombo has resulted in this already popular suburb for residents being hyper-developed with apartment complexes. The environment is getting harsher, trees are being cut down. The fresh breeze from the ocean is getting blocked. The cool breeze in the garden of his grandmother’s peaceful house for instance, is now obstructed by the huge wall of a concrete apartment block coming up right next to it.
Wijeratne (72) sat staring out from the window the whole time I spent up there with him, we were on the second floor of the restaurant he works at in Ratmalana. This large room has been reserved for the workers to sleep in. Small sleeping pallets and piles of clothes litter the floor. Wijeratne gives the impression of having spent all his leisure time staring out at the street, he seems to derive such contentment out of it. He’s been a cook at this restaurant since 1968, moving to the city from Eheliyagoda.
After nearly fifty years of watching this same patch of street, the biggest change he can point to is the number of buildings that are there now that weren’t there before. There is peace now he thinks, and more prosperity. In July 1983, Ratmalana burned as mobs targeted and killed any Tamils they could find, and destroyed their property. Those days you couldn’t leave your home and trust that you would return alive.
His face becomes animated when he talks about the JVP insurrection in 1971. Things were so bad at one point he couldn’t even sit at his favourite spot next to the window, especially during the curfews in April that year. The JVP had a grip on the local businesses, and would order them closed whenever they felt like it. Wijeratne would work hard, cooking for the morning meal for example, but then they would find out that the shop would have to be closed for breakfast. The food didn’t go to waste however, a steady trickle of people from the neighbourhood came in through the back entrance and bought it up.
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November 2016 - Photos and narrative by Abdul Halik Azeez. This is the third photo essay commissioned by the Centre for Policy Alternatives as a part of our Right to the City initiative. Please visit our website for more information about the initiative and follow us on Instagram for more stories related to development and rights.