All About Eve

It is 6 o'clock, and the skies are twitching with impossibly neon colours – but it's not the sunset I’m here for, but the quiet valleys and hills. They stretch as far as you can see, with not a building in sight.

And it is the sheer overwhelming greenness of the view, rather than the spectacular sunset, that fires the imagination.

I imagine the armies that struggled over these hills to try and capture Kandy, the Kings who fled Tamil invaders to hide out in caves nearby here. The millions of unrecorded lives lived out in spaces cleared for stacked paddy fields, spice, and fruit plantations—the rebels who almost toppled the British colonists.

And Eve, of course. For Eve, or at least her Sri Lankan sister, must have lived here quite happily centuries ago – and would have been so bedazzled by the range of native mangos, rambutans, belli fruit, coconut and other delicacies that she would have had no need to pluck any apples. Or even go looking for them in the tiny Cargil's supermarket outlet in the nearby village.

This is not a land where religion ever needs to be imagined, for it is present in every village temple and roadside shrine. And most especially right now in Kandy, where a very particular religious festival is drawing to its exhausted finale. This event happens just once every 16 or so years.

The golden casket containing the relic of Lord Buddha’s tooth is displayed in pubic. Normally, the casket is demurely screened deep within the temple, with a replica bought out annually for the Kandy Perahera. But for this festival, the real McCoy is unveiled. And in their hundreds of thousands, devotees file past to show their reverence.

Two million in 7 days – or thereabouts. The queues have coiled their way through city streets. People have fainted in the sun. One or two have expired. The odd queuing mother-to-be has become a mother in fact. But it is hard to find a similar gathering of so many people in a single place that has passed by with a quite so pacific and gentle a mood. The many police and soldiers on hand have had little more to do than twirl their batons and pass on bottled water.

But with traffic stacking back for at least 8 kilometres, getting into the city was impossible. Though one or two VIPs did manage to penetrate the cordon, they were transported there by the presidential train. – to be rewarded with a view of the tooth itself, and not simply its golden casket.

The many arguments over whether it is the tooth of Lord Buddha, still less a human tooth at all, seem rather beside the point amid so much conviction and pity. Belief has always been more important than mere facts, and if people are wrong about exactly what the relic is, then there are many worse things to be wrong about than this.

The festival’s ability to galvanise much of the nation with thoughts of god is also something of a triumph. In much of the rest of the world, it is largely thoughts of shopping that preoccupy most people, who have taken the real Eve too much to heart. Were she alive today, she would, of course, be an Influencer, eager to populate the pages of Hello magazine and advise her many social media followers exactly which lipsticks or fruit to buy.

The Bible is non-committal on any ongoing relationship between Eve and the troublesome serpent that so bewitched her.

But were the said serpent Sri Lankan, it is more than possible that he was the devil beloved of Christian mythology. In Buddhist and Hindu traditions, the cobra is actually something of a god.

Buddhist scriptures depict the serpent-king Mucalinda shielding Lord Buddha from a terrible storm. The Hindu Lord Shiva even wears the serpent-king Vasuki entwined around his neck. Cobra statues guard temples, stupas and shrines across the island. As in many traditional parts of the country, such as the one around us here in Galagedera, cobras are often considered incarnations of dead ancestors, useful for the enhanced protection they offer to the family.

Several protect us here. A splendidly large and old one lived in the mango tree in Frangipani Hill. She kept to her place and we to ours. Once, when I discovered several of her tiny offspring about to be washed down a monsoon drain in a storm, I rescued them and placed them back close to her in the mango tree. An unspoken symbiosis seemed to dawn.

My fondness for serpents does not, however, extend to the rather malicious little Russell's Viper, not to the Cruella de Vil-like krait with its glamorous black and white markings. These beasts have a much less considered life, with little of the philosophical trappings and preoccupations of the cobra.

But looking out over my unrestricted green jungle view, considering the dense soft undergrowth, the countless invisible rocky streams and giant trees, I am reminded of Thomas Jefferson’s proclamation that “all men are created equal and have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Of course, Jefferson neglected to practice what he preached, freeing just a couple of the 600 slaves he owned at his death. Not was he in any way memorable for his equal faith in the rights of animals - even snakes – to go about their business untroubled. “The time will come,” said Leonardo da Vinci, “when men such as I will look upon the murder of animals as they now look on the murder of men.”

Even so, his words carry as much truth for humans as for other animals. I try to bear this in mind when I dwell too much on the more terminal options for dealing with Eve and the lesser snakes of life. Living up to the real logic of morality is much harder than getting through the traffic in Kandy or even enduring a daily gym workout. And all its challenges are inescapably evident when considering my mindful sunset view of limitless jungle hills and valleys.