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rooster in the Hindu temple
Wednesday, July 2 2025
location: room 4, Thissa Wewa Rest House, Anuradhapura, Sri Lanka
I awoke feeling reasonably normal, so I made myself some Nescafe instant coffee using the supplies in the hotel room (I wasn't finding it as horrible as I remembered it) and went on a walk around the nearby compound with my good camera. I soon found a small female cat who was extremely friendly, which is probably a survival advantage, given the selection pressures acting on cats (as well as dogs) in Sri Lanka. Meanwhile some locals in festive historic garb appeared to be posing for an endless sequence of photographs. When I drew Gretchen's attention to this, I referred to the gentleman as a "satrap." Meanwhile, Danille and John, the Australians from Cambodia, seemed to be doing better. They were sitting on the huge balcony outside their room drinking hot beverages.
I couldn't get myself to eat anything other than bread for breakfast. I tried a little pineapple curry, and was alarmed by how spicy it was. I also had a cup of coffee, but it was perhaps the worst coffee I'd ever had; it tasted like microwaved swamp water.
As we waited for the bus to arrive to drive us up to Jaffna, Gretchen and I walked through the nearby grounds, where we soon found a troop of grey langur monkeys. The monkeys were of various ages, and one was a tiny baby. But it was impossible to tell whose baby it was, because various adults kept taking turns holding, carrying, grooming, and playing with the baby. It was so adorable, Gretchen was losing her mind. (I personally don't find monkeys as cute as she does; there is something uncanny-valley about them that makes me assign some humanity to them, which I then find off-putting.)
The drive up to Jaffna at the northmost tip of Sri Lanka was another long one, but this time I was comfortable in my body and could enjoy the ride. Along the way we swung by a massive baobab planted by the Portuguese (it's native only to Africa) and then stopped at a fort on the Mannar peninsula, the remnants of the last landbridge to the Indian mainland (which supposedly was still walkable in medieval times). The fort was hot, dusty, and still in the midst of what looked like a renovation. But we learned that it had been built by the Portuguese and then taken over by the Dutch. Somewhere along the walls, I saw some commemorative markers written in the language of those later European interlopers.
I noticed in the parking area at the Mannar fort that there were a couple street dogs just lying in the middle of everything, with idling buses nearby. It was as if they were trying to maximize their chances of being run over. But whatever they were doing has been selected for over many generations, because selection among south Asian street dogs is ruthless.
Our hotel was the Fox Jaffna, which, Gretchen was excited to know, included a pool. We checked in and went to our second floor room in the back, ate a reasonably good lunch, and then checked out the pool. To our disappointment, it was almost as warm as a warm bath. It would do nothing to refresh us from the heat. Exacerbating matters, a nearby wall had been covered with arrangements of palm fronds that had recently been spray-painted black as if by an HGTV dilettante with a particular love of the darker works of the Rolling Stones. The smell from the paint was heavy in the air all around the pool, so to bathe in it, one had to stand in warm water while breathing unnatural chemicals. I waded for awhile and then briefly lay in a chaise lounge, as did Gretchen, but we soon decided that this particular pool had little to offer. Meanwhile a guy who looked to be Sri Lankan was in the pool and appeared to be thoroughly enjoying himself. At some point a Ceylon golden-backed woodpecker showed up in a nearby palm (a fact that Myra the Patchouli Lady alerted me to), but he flew away before I could take a picture.
Later this afternoon, we all piled into the bus to check out two different Hindu temples. (The population in Jaffna is disproportionately Tamil, and unlike the largely Buddhist Sinhalese, they are mostly Hindu.) The first of these was in an urban part of Jaffna, and before we entered, the men in our contingent (which included Gretchen's father) were told to take off our shirts, supposedly to better absorb the spiritual energy of the place. Just inside the entrance was a collection of various platforms themed for particular gods, including a peacock stepping on a cobra, a multi-headed cobra, and a human-headed cow nursing a similar, smaller creature. At first I thought these might be mounts from a carousel, but it turns out they are used for certain specific religious parades.
Soon after we entered the main part of the temple, an automated mechanical system started beating out a simple series of bell and drum sounds. That's the kind of Hinduism I find interesting! I was also intrigued by tall brass objects that resembled huge distillation devices. They featured numerous technical-looking features and reached up through the roof, though I couldn't figure out what if any non-mystical purpose they served.
As we slowly walked around looking at the various images and statues, a couple temple employees marched past us looking very serious and a bit irritated as they lit various fires and did other rituals that apparently must be done to keep the universe from immediately collapsing into a singularity. Here they were performing cosmically-essential rituals while we, the ungrateful and non-participant beneficiaries of their work, were kind of in the way. Or that's how it felt. (Gretchen found this behavior extremely off-putting, and it ultimately precipitated a change in her attitude where she lost what remained of a live-and-let-live view about religion but instead came to feel that it's all offensive. What a stupid waste of time!)
One of the staffers on this expedition was a Tamil native to Jaffna, and in the temple he spent a long time explaining everything that was going on in excruciating detail in a version of English that few of us could follow. By the end there, Gretchen was barely able to contain her fury at having been made to waste so much time there. But we were trapped; we had to leave on the same bus as everyone else.
The bus then took us to a second Hindu temple, Sangarathai, this one out in the rice paddies outside of the city. The big feature of this temple was that it emphasizes the goddesses of Dravidian Hinduism. Perhaps for this reason, us men were not encouraged to take our shirts off along with our shoes before entering. Inside, this temple was fairly similar to the one we'd just seen, though there was no automated bell-and-drum gizmo banging away. But then we rounded a corner and saw a rooster seemingly stock against a grating. At first the rooster looked dead, but then he moved. It turned out that he'd been tied there as part of some not-very-vegan-friendly religious ritual. While the others (including me) stood there looking at him a state of befuddlement, Gretchen expressed horror, and it was clear she wasn't going to be respectful of whatever fucked-up religious purpose was being served. If an international incident should happen, so be it. Soon we were joined by Jiva, and somehow one of the men running the temple was pulled over. In a state of great annoyance, he flung the rooster back through the bars into the room he was supposed to be in, evidently secured by a tied to his leg. Evidently the rooster come out from between the bars, gone along a ledge, and been prevented from going further by the string. It wasn't clear what exactly his purpose was in being tied there, but we were assured he was at least being fed. In any case, it wasn't the kind of thing a group of vegan tourists are going to want to see when they enter a Hindu temple.
So, again, we were left feeling like religion in Sri Lanka was at best a waste of time, though possibly also a bit malevolent.
The next thing that was supposed to happen was a banana-leaf meal at someone's house. But when we learned that the bus would be going back past the hotel, we opted to be let off there and avoid what was sure to be an unsatisfactory dining experience.
At some point while we were riding on the bus today (perhaps after all the unpleasantness in the Hindu temples), Gretchen turned to me and declared, "I know why there are no white people in Sri Lanka. It sucks!"
Back at the hotel, we happened by the pool, which didn't smell as bad now that the sun was no longer beating of spray-painted palm fronds. Several of the people who hadn't gone out this evening were there, including the Danielle and John, the nice Australian couple by way of Cambodia. Massive fruit bats, each the size of a cat with wingspans something like four or five feet, were flapping past low overhead, and they looked like something out of Game of Thrones. But they're a familiar sight to Australians, who didn't think them all that remarkable.
Out of desire to eat something not Sri Lankan, we checked out the hotel's menu and found it had a spaghetti with marinara sauce. They also had good fries, as I'd already established by sampling some of Danielle and John's. So Gretchen and I took an outdoor table and ordered the spaghetti, fries, some sort of drink for Gretchen (she's been liking the lime juice) and a big 24 ounce Lion lager for me. The ketchup that came with te fries was that weirdly sweet Sri Lankan kind, and perhaps some of that had gone into the marinara sauce, which was also too sweet and had an odd flavor profile that one would never encounter in the United States, as though local spices had been added. Gretchen thought she might be able to eat what she couldn't finish tonight if she could somehow wash the sauce away. Our waiter spoke good English and had been completely briefed on the vegans staying at the hotel, and he served us well. Unfortunately, though, he insisted on giving us plastic to-go containers and even putting those in plastic bags, apparently oblivious to the huge south Asian plastic pollution crisis.
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The super friendly cat at the hotel this morning. Click to enlarge.
Parakeets at the hotel this morning. Click to enlarge.
A palm squirrel at the hotel this morning. Click to enlarge.
A myna bird at the hotel this morning. Click to enlarge.
A grey langur at the hotel this morning. Click to enlarge.
A house lizard at Mannar Fort. Click to enlarge.
Plaques labled in Dutch at the Mannar Fort. Click to enlarge.
Crownflower, which is some sort of milkweed. It even bleeds white, which I fully expected to see when I plucked off a leaf. It can grow into a shrub with trunks that have bark on them. Click to enlarge.
A donkey at Mannar Fort. The north half of Sri Lanka is increasingly semi-arid, and you find donkeys and goats in this area. Click to enlarge.
A street dog in the middle of the dusty parking lot where buses bringing tourists to the Mannar Fort park. Click to enlarge.
Spray-painted palm fronds at Fox Jaffna. Click to enlarge.
Okay, I did get a single terrible picture of that golden-backed woodpecker with my phone. Click to enlarge.
The outside of that first Hindu temple. Click to enlarge.
The inner sanctum of that first Hindu temple. Click to enlarge.
Colorful platformed creatures for religous parades at that first Hindu temple. Click to enlarge.
Multi-headed cobra platform at that first Hindu temple. Click to enlarge.
The lady centaur platform at that first Hindu temple. Click to enlarge.
The dull lecture about that first Hindu temple. Note the absence of shirts on the men, including my father-in-law in the right background. Click to enlarge.
The outside of the second Hindu temple. Click to enlarge.
The poor tethered rooster inside that second Hindu temple, with us wondering what to do. Jiva is the dark gentleman facing us. Carly from Rochester is on the left and Myra the Patchouli Lady is in the middle. Click to enlarge.
Me outside the second Hindu temple, taken by our bus driver. Click to enlarge.
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