Most children beg for ice cream. I, at seven, demanded a graveyard. On our way from Partapur to Udaipur, Daddy pulled over by a lake flanked with graves. To my mother’s horror, her gap-toothed daughter wished to stay the night with the departed. My parents finally tore me away from that moonlit playground of bones, kicking, screaming and entirely enchanted. Even today, Mummy breaks into her own gap-toothed smile at the memory of her daughter’s chosen roommates. Decades later, in Colombo, I find myself drawn to Kanatte, the Borella Cemetery. The city’s sprawling republic of the dead offers something we the living struggle with: An unruffled coexistence. Beneath its trees, faiths and races lie together, equal at last. The Buddhist monk and the Catholic nun sleep in the same dormitory. The Hindu priest, the colonial officer, and the coolie are all bunkmates.
On the probable chance of being buried here someday, I’ve drawn up a list of epitaphs:
A municipal officer quipped a few years back, “The outsiders are dying to be buried here,” when they decided on a tenfold increase in plot prices. The 48-acre land of the dead overlooking the posh Royal Golf Club is running out of space, with 50,000 residents already in the ground.
Founded in 1866, Kanatte was supposed to be an exercise in imperial order: Anglicans here, Catholics there, “heathens” in that corner. But the land had its own ideas. Over a century, the necropolis grew into Sri Lanka’s most radical experiment in pluralism. A quiet coup by coffins. If Kotte is a parliament of quarrels, Kanatte is its afterlife’s parliament, more unanimous than the United Nations — the only bills passed — civet poop and wild grass.
While under the influence, we may lean on a stranger’s shoulder, calling her our sister from another mister, but many of us remain wary of “the other” in our senses. We achieve true unity only when we’re horizontal. While Paris’s Père Lachaise is a carnival of celebrity ghosts and Washington’s Arlington a parade ground of patriotism, Kanatte is the exuberant republic our countries never quite managed in life. This truth hits hardest where the war dead are buried. Sri Lanka’s civil war carved wounds so deep the island still limps, its phantom pains stirred by politicians every election cycle. But Kanatte’s soil swallowed the bitterness. Here, soldiers from both sides rest near each other. There is no victory or defeat in the angle of the headstones, no separate sections for heroes and traitors. There is only the shared shade of magnificent trees and the quiet understanding that here, no one has an ethnicity —only a date of birth and a date of death.
Oh well, I’ll make do with a cenotaph. Especially since this is a forest within a city, a true urban wilderness. It’s a safe haven for monitor lizards sunning themselves on warm tombs, for porcupines in the undergrowth, and for owls calling from high branches. It is a living ecosystem thriving on decay. My kinda place.
And the quietest. No noisy jeeps, no selfie sticks — just wild things utterly indifferent to the human stories etched in stone around them.
The stories are here, half-told, waiting. Tales from the colonial military hospital that received the dying from passing ships; modern tragedies of love, loss, and political drama. Aspiring authors, are you listening?
By evening, the mourners leave and the gates close. The bats rise. Kanatte has a healthy share of ghost stories — men in white who vanish by the mortuary wall, women in saris who flutter under moonlight. The guards report resveem, ghost meetings, where figures coalesce and blur into the night air like an arrack-filled breath. With my rational upbringing, tombstones or swaying trees never took spooky shapes for me. I find the night cemetery a picture of profound tranquillity. The air grows heavy with frangipani and damp earth, a quiet punctuated by the scurry of a civet or the leathery flap of a fruit bat’s wings. The dead are wiser because they have run out of time to be foolish.
Standing here, you realise Kanatte tells a story, too. A silent epic written in granite and grief, it insists that pluralism is not a lofty ideal but an inevitable reality. Do we really need to die to discover our common ground?
With this, I list my last future epitaph: “Deadline met. This column ends here.”
Tehsin is a Colombo-based writer and environmentalist
