Malinda Words: Songs from the vaekanda

Pic by Thilina Kaluthotage

A wewa, Peter Wise once insisted, is not a tank or a reservoir for those terms don’t capture the true social, cultural and ecological weight of this particular kind of water-body. People in Sri Lanka know what a wewa is. Children learn about the great bodies of water built by their ancestors, the Kala Wewa, the Tisa Wewa, the Nuwara Wewa, Minneriya, Giritale, Parakrama Samudra and so on.

And then there are the innumerable ‘lesser’ wew (wewas?) sometimes crafted into entire cascade systems. They are ingeniously designed water conservation mechanisms where at the top end you get the polkatu weva, then the kulu weva, then the gam weva associated with a particular village, followed by the maha weva and then of course the mighty ocean. They have certain common features. There are the sluice gates, a spill and canals leading into tracts of paddy fields of sizes corresponding to the capacities of the particular wewa. And they all have dams.

Dam. Earth-dam. Earth-mound. A thick wall if you will but one which enables the conservation of water. That’s the vaekanda.

I remember a day in an unforgettable April almost thirty years ago in a village called Kelegama located about a kilometre from Buduruwakanda, which lies around four kilometres from Galgamuwa along the Anuradhapura Road. It was late evening when I finally got to sink into the cool waters of the village wewa. It was night when I was done. Walking along the vaekanda towards the house where I was to spend the night I was greeted by an amazing sight.

Fireflies. Thousands of fireflies. They were blinking away on the other side of the vaekanda. It was as though the Milky Way had descended to earth. So I stopped in wonderment for a few minutes. It had to be ‘a few minutes’ for it was elephant territory as much as it was home to human beings.

The vaekanda offers magic at night. I’ve not seen the ‘Milky Way’ like I did that night, but when the moon is out there’s poetry undulating across the water. The faraway trees turn into sentinels. If there are stars, it’s a picture postcard.

The magic is not the preserve of the night, however. The vaekanda is a vantage point and as such can offer different landscapes at different times of the day and different times of the year in the seasonal arrivals and departures of trials and tribulations.

There’s a humble vessel moving across the water. There are steps leading to the water and there are people bathing or washing clothes. At the far end there could be a set of rocks, a hill, and a temple. There’s a lotus dance on the waters, choreographed by the wind. Light and shade play hide and seek among the sentence-shards of conversations where the day’s duka-sepa are measured and compared. And a bicycle silhouetted against the evening sky.

Vaekanda is vantage-point;
You can soak in
the union of sunset and tree-line
or let its innumerable lessons
clothe or pass over,
life ripples to you
as water and wind
thotupola chit-chat
the beats of clothes-wash
and on the other side
by and by
the festival of fireflies
the dusk symphony
of vakkada and insects
the gutterality of the buffalo;
and to this place
comes household and squabble
inter-generationality
and timeless tales of
life passing torch to life
the wounding of seizure
submission by the weak
equanimity of the wise,
it’s a tenurial narrative
of multi-crop extraction
that perfects the mind’s insistent questionnaire,
but cripples the researcher’s query;
loses itself in treatise
to be misquoted and re-misquoted
to conclude that the vaekanda must go
for smudging the blueprint of betterment.

These waters hold stories. The vaekanda is privy to them all and then some for there’s water-less commerce among people, creatures and elements. Those stories are impossible to transcribe in full. Incomplete poems whose charm lies in fact in their incompleteness. The echoes of a vaekanda song take residence in memory and rise now and then but seldom on request. Like now. Decades and thousands of miles removed from Kelegama, a song arrives and stays for a while. It has a vaekanda signature. That much I know.

malindadocs@gmail.com

['The Morning Inspection' is the title of a column I wrote for the Daily News from 2009 to 2011, one article a day, Monday through Saturday. This is 191st article in the new series. Links to previous articles are given below]

13 August 2023

Songs from the vaekanda

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