Of Bards and Beasts

The late Dr SR Kottegoda used, rather cruelly, to tell of an Indian colleague at Oxford, who had a thick Sub-continental accent. One day the Hindustani had spoken of a 'bard in the garden', so old 'Kotte' had expected to see a modern day Shakespeare on the lawn. However, it turned out to be an item of avi-fauna : a 'bird in the garden'.

Unfortunately, after hearing this anecdote, I have been unable to look at one of our feathered friends without thinking of it as a 'bard'. Nevertheless, this is an appropriate description of the song-bird who trills out its melifluous birdsong, and in few places have I heard it in such variety as in Pattinigodella. And of all those sounds, the most outstanding (in the sense of it drowning out everything else) is the 'call of the kirala' (incidentally the title of a book by James Goonewardene); the kirala being the lapwing.

Red-wattled lapwing (Vanellus indicus)

This call is a series of high-pitched screeches: 'Did you do it?', 'Did you do do it?' - fascinating at first, as you triy to discern what it is saying, but it tends to wear down your nerves after the fiftieth repetition of these inane questions. When a bird or beast approaches its eggs, which it lays out in the open, the lapwing and its mate (and sometimes its pals) will begin a crescendo of that infernal screeching and swoop over the head of its foe. Apparently this is part of an elaborate feint, to lure away the potential predator by making them think the lapwings are injured (and hence easy prey). Hence the collective noun for 'lapwing' is 'a deceit'.

Lapwing eggs

These were eggs one lapwing laid upon my land. They look like and are about the same size as plover eggs, and may sometimes be seen in supermarkets masquerading as such.

Rather quieter is the Maina or Gon Kavadiya (Common mynah), which goes about its omnivorous business without too much fuss. It is a singer, but like all divas, it doesn't waste its voice.

Common mynah (Acridotheres tristis melanostemus)

The mynah has become one of the worst invasive species in the world, causing ecological havoc in Australia - particularly in Canberra, where its population has outstripped even that of the civil service. Pattinigodella, however, is its natural habitat.

Another omnivore is the ubiquitous Demalichcha (Yellow-billed babbler). As its name suggests, it constantly expresses its opinion on everything in sight, babbling and chattering and chirping and squeaking. In that way it rather resembles myself, I am afraid.

Yellow-billed babbler (Turdoides affinis taprobanus)

The Sri Lankan variety (T. a. taprobanus) is a drabber grey than its Indian counterparts. Less noisy and far less common (in all senses of the word) is the kalu-polkichcha or kalukichcha, the Indian robin - an endangered species.

Indian robin (Saxicoloides fulicata leucopterus)

This chirpy chap loves earth creatures. Whenever I started digging or dumping earth, a robin would pop up and start rooting around. The male is distinguished by its black coat and red rump. The female is a drab brown. Strangely, I have yet to come across its far more common cousin, the Polkichcha or Oriental magpie robin (Copsychus saularis ceylonensis) at Pattinigodella.

Once plants and flowers started coming up on the land, it began to be visited by sunbirds, generally of the purple-rumped variety. A dainty bird, like the elephant of the poem, it certainly flits from twig to twig, and at a fantastic speed.

Purple-rumped sunbird (Leptocoma Zeylonica)

The female of the species is rather drabber:

Female purple-rumped sunbird (Leptocoma zeylonica)

Sunbirds are nectar-drinkers and were attracted to my land by both wild and cultivated flowers. My new crops also attracted foragers, out to rob me of the fruits of my labour. Especially fond of Lima beans are parakeets. A company of Layard's parakeets descended on my plantation and ate the unripe beans (leaving the pods).

Layard's Parakeet (Psittacula calthropae)

Layard's Parakeet (Alu girava) - also known as the Emerald-collared parakeet - is endemic to Sri Lanka. It is named for Edgar Leopold Layard, the naturalist and brother of Henry Austen Layard of Nineveh fame. Layard's wife's maiden name was Calthorp, hence the Latin name.

The beasts that inhabit my land are far less obvious. Amazingly, things that creep and things that crawl are far more visible than their mammallian counterparts. Hares (Lepus nigricollis singhala) left their droppings and left-overs of Kura-thampala (green amaranth) overnight, but I only saw one once - and it made off at great speed.

I found holes dug everywhere in my garden. These were dug by bandicoot rats (mus giganteus), now divided into greater (bandicota indica) and lesser (bandicota bengalensis) species.

Bandicoot rat hole

'Bandicoot' is apparently derived from the Telugu Pandi-kokku, meaning - loosely - 'pig-rat'. The Sinhala is ooru meeya ('pig rat' exactly). At some time in the 19th century, the term travelled across the ocean to Queensland, where it came to be applied to marsupials of the order paramelemorphia. This was the origin of the Victoria place name Bendigo.

Meanwhile, to avoid confusion, the original Bandicoot was renamed the 'Bandicoot Rat' - a tautology. Bandicoot rats are great excavators, not only digging over gardens, but also undermining walls.

Lizards and chameleons (katussas) use these Bandicoot-rat holes:

Lizaed near bandicoot rat-hole

I found a chameleon on the dead leaf of a coconut plant:

Chameleon on coconut plant

Note how its colour changes from its greenish head to its greyish-brown tail, blending in well with its surroundings. When I was in primary school, my colleagues used to slap my face so that it changed from its pasty colour to a bright red. They called me katussa because of this ability; however, I never became a true Chameleon, as I was never able truly to blend in, unlike Woody Allen's super-conformist Zelig.

Here is a scene from Zelig, to break the monotony.

Improving the soil

The earth at my plot at Pattinigodella was pretty barren. I think the developers had used some kind of herbicide to clear off the undergrowth. They had already cut down all the trees. They had also bulldozed downhill - so the best soil was on the plot for common use.

The land, already murdered by real-estate-Genghis-Khans, was threatened further by erosion - whenever it rained the water gouged out great chunks of the earth, carving great big runnels and taking even more soil downhill. The first thing to do was to limit erosion damage by digging two lateral drains across the land, along the contours.

The next thing to do was to cover the soil with vegetation. This was easier said than done. The earth was so barren that barely anything took root. The soil between the large plants which I put in was mostly bare, except for a few clumps of wild grass and citronella.

So then I began covering the soil with grass cuttings taken from the lawn of my rented house. This has a large lawn of about 25 perches and needs regular cutting, after which I get the clippings piled up in a corner. I started putting the clippings into large plastic fertilizer bags and carrying it to Pattinigodella in the back of my car.

I deployed this grass at strategic spots across the land, often on top of several small branches laid out diagonally. I also added compost made from the organic waste from cooking at my rented house. This too I either dumped at strategic locations or on top of the piles of grass. I also surreptitiously urinated at strategic spots when nobody was looking.

Measuring land

The ancients of Sri Lanka used a complex set of measures of length and distance, ranging from the noola (⅛ of an inch or 3.17 mm) and riyana (cubit - 18 inches or 450 mm) to the gauwa (Sinhalese league - 5600 yards or 3¼ miles or 5.12 kilometres) and yoduna (Sanskrit yojana - 4 gauwas).

Agricultural measurements were rather less precise. The peasants measured distance across the fields in hoos; a hoo I being the distance across which a hoot could be heard. Another measure of distance was how far it took for a man walking at a normal pace to raise his sarong high enough for the wind to cool his testicles, generally called a mile (hæthapuma).

Agricultural land was traditionally measured in Amunams; an amunam of land being the area which could be sown with an amunam (5-6 bushels) of grain, or about 0.8-1 hectares (2-2 ½ acres). This unit was in use well into the middle of the 20^th century, particular in litigation.

However, when the all-encompassing British Empire took over, it imposed its own imperial system of weights and measures. Imperial feet and miles took over from riyanas and gauwas. The relatively simple Sinhalese system was replaced by a complicated structure of multiplications by 3, 4, 5½, 12, 16 and 20.

Henceforth land area was measured in acres, roods, and perches. An acre was the amount of land that a team of mediaeval English oxen could plough in a day. An acre has 4 roods and a rood, 40 perches.

A perch is defined as a square pole (or rod or goad or perch), originally the length of the stick with which the ploughman goaded his oxen. In modern use a pole is 5½ yards (16½ feet or 5.03 m), so a square perch is 30¼ square yards (272.25 square feet or 82.98 m²).

Nowadays all land measurements are supposed to be in the metric system, with square metres and hectares. However, property is still sold by the perch and by the acre, although (sadly) no longer by the amunam.

The beginning

I bought 40 perches (3,319 square metres, or a quarter acre) of land at Pattiniwatte on the hill of Pattinigodella at Poré, in the Hewagam county. Poré is part of the town area of Athurugiriya.

The land lies approximately 15 km from the municipal limits of Colombo and 12 km from the Parliament building at Sri Jayawardena Pura Kotte, the capital of Sri Lanka.

I actually bought 4 plots of land, of 10 perches each, my intention being to build a house on two of them. I didn’t envisage a ground area of more than 150 m² (1,500 sq ft) , so the remainder would provide a large garden.

While waiting for such time as I would be able to build a house, at the behest of that venerable beauty, my older sister, I decided to plant the garden. I wanted trees and I wanted flowers. I wanted fruit and vegetables and tubers and spices.

My sister was up to scratch (as should be anyone who wishes to make a career in the dark art of architecture and town planning) with Vaastu and Feng Shui. So I read up on them both.

The first order of business was to build a fence around the land, to prevent cattle and water buffalo from entering and destroying the plantation. There was a herd of water buffalo and a few head of neat cattle around.

For this I used plastic-covered chain-link fencing, supported by round concrete posts at 2.5 metre (8 ft) intervals. I chose green because it would blend most with the background and (I hoped) give an impression of not being there.

Below the land was an area reserved by the developer for public space. It was likely to become a playground, so the chain-link fencing would allow me to see into the playground and give an impression of more space. Besides, it is not as forbidding as barbed wire...

Unfortunately, the developer built an ugly big water tank smack in the centre of the public space.

So then I had to think of planting trees in front of it to obscure this ghastly structure.

The horrid box on stilts can be seen to the right of centre in the photograph.