To the northwest of Sri Lanka lies the scenic and enchanted district of Mannar, or as is known in Tamil, Mannaram – so named because of its mythical link to the Indian subcontinent. The story goes that in ancient times when the gods walked the earth, the god Ram, the central figure in Valmiki’s - the Indian poet and epic writer variously dated 3rd or 4th Century BC – Ramayana, comes to the island of Sri Lanka, known as Lanka then, in search of his wife Sita, who has been taken away captive by Ravana, who’s abode is the island of Lanka. In order to get to the island crossing the great Indian Ocean, Ram builds a bridge from the southeastern tip of India, now known as Rameshwaram (also indicating the point at which Ram began his journey to rescue his wife) to Mannaram. Myth or reality, several years ago there were reports that NASA satellites had captured the remnants between these two points that may indicate there was a connection between India and this point of Sri Lanka at some point in history. Fact or fiction, this part of the island of Sri Lanka, remains sacred to Hindus both in Sri Lanka and the world over – at least to the parts of the world that know where Sri Lanka is even on the map!
My first entry to Mannar was very different to that of Ram – while his journey was in search of his ladylove and to engage in inter-national conflict in order to win the day for the gods and to restore conjugal relations, mine was nowhere near to such political and historical proportions. Significantly though, it was undertaken at a time when the warring factions of our own times and of a home-grown variety had come to a form of agreement to hold fire temporarily, if not as a prelude to a more certain peace. I entered this magnificent location with some trepidation disguised by the busyness of my profession. I, accompanied by an army of journalists, made our way to tell our stories of the progress in the no-war-no-peace times. Our aim was to capture whatever we could of the rehabilitation in the aftermath of several decades of a bloody war that had wounded us all. No small task this, considering that the last times journalists had attempted to enter this territory over the last two decades, they had paid with their lives, and very few, if any, escaped with their lives in tact.
But by the time we entered in the latter half of 2004, many of the refugee families that had fled to South India to escape the ethnic repression and tyrannies engineered by misguided political powers over the years, had returned relighting the fading hope they had had of being embraced as citizens in their own country once again. Some, I later found out, had returned because they couldn’t bear the indignity and inhuman treatment at Indian refugee camps, which they compared worse than being homeless and running from multi-barrel and mortar fire in the jungles of their own homeland. Whatever the case may be, there we were, spending almost a week taking in the rising and setting orange suns from the coasts of Mannar.
Once we had driven off the main town areas haunted with bullet-riddled and partially bombed out buildings that stood as a reminder of how hateful war is, we soon came to the large acreage of land that was demarcated for new housing by the Government, funded by bilateral and multilateral donors through the North East rehabilitation programmes instituted for this purpose alone. It was evident that some work was in progress, as the completed foundations and walls of several houses were visible. The houses themselves were incomplete, as they were built on a three-phase scheme where the government reimbursed percentage installments of grants to families in the programme upon completion of a stage of the house. In this way, the family was responsible for the construction and engaging themselves as labour in the building of their own home. This was meant to be a participatory programme, so that home owners could take responsibility and ownership to manage the grants accrued to them in an accountable manner. There were all the signs that this scheme had paid dividend – it was a dream for a family which had spent over ten years living off foreign governments or in ten by six temporary huts to own what was closest to something ‘permanent’. A ‘home’ or a ‘country’ gives one more than shelter or nationality, it gives a sense of belonging, a sense of freedom to be. In that freedom and belonging lies human dignity, invaluable to our existence, allowing us space and ability to breathe in a strangely reassured way. This visit taught me then how much I took both of these for granted.
We were escorted by villagers and aid workers to speak to some of the home owners. Of course it was in the middle of the day and most of the men folk were in the fields. Before the war, from Mannar came Sri Lanka’s largest exports of rice to other parts of the country. The fertility of the soil and the amazing resilience of the water table to the effects of salinity being so closely situated to the sea were the factors said to have made the large production of rice possible for the district. However, I realized those factors may have certainly helped, but what was clear was the pride most people took in hard work in this part of the country. The sun shone down on this large tract of land, situated in the dry zone of the country, and yet the farming population worked on undeterred, unlike in many of the more naturally endowed parts of Sri Lanka.
However humble their homes, the people of Mannar certainly knew how to plan and decorate their territory in an eye-pleasing manner. The first signs of a village from a distance were the maze-like patterns made from woven dried palmyrah leaves. These were used for the fencing around each home plot. It was a pretty sight to behold. I remember standing in front of a few homes surrounded by the palmyrah fencing and imagining waking up to such a sight each morning stepping out into my garden if I were to live in one of those houses. Yes, they were very pretty indeed. And not to forget extremely economical – using local resources aplenty in this part of the country.
The fine white sand made for the ground we walked, even so, it was amazing to many of us just how well kept the gardens in each home plot were. Each plot was an area of about 800 – 1000 square feet, half of which was utilized for garden space and around the house for drainage. Each plot we visited, and we certainly visited a few, had gardens growing vegetables and fruit, all sorts of pretty flowers suitable for the climate and green leaves. I knew there were drives among women’s rural development societies by the agriculture department and NGOs to promote home-grown fruit and vegetable cultivation, but in many of the homes we visited the lady of the house had made it her special hobby to cultivate these plants and roots out of habit and as tradition to supplement household nutrition. Home gardening is very popular in any part of Sri Lanka. I suppose this is because Sri Lankans are as a people very close to nature and cultivation runs in their veins. The women folk especially are found to be very resourceful and industrious in this regard.
One of the women I spoke to, Lakshmi, a war widow with two teenaged sons, had returned from India just a year before then. She had had no other relatives to rely on - many killed in the war and others migrants to Western countries in search of hope and prosperity. She expressed her gratitude to the organizations that had assisted her in constructing a home, especially after quite a fight for land rights, as most land titles were written in the names of the male of a family, and so with their husbands deceased, women had to prove their entitlement to their husband’s land. Lakshmi had been fortunate that her entitlement went undisputed; not so for many other women whose’ in laws sometimes filed litigation against them to get at their sons’ lands after their death – so widowed women, especially with little children, and often unemployed and too poor to fight the case that extended over many years, would have little choice but to either live with their parents or migrate. Sometimes, remarriage was resorted to for purely economic reasons. Whichever way, I remember thinking at the time, with all the rights and privileges Sri Lankan women enjoyed unlike in many other neighbouring nations, there were certainly large chunks of our social customs and the legal system that required a massive overhaul, such as these practices.
Lakshmi’s story had a happy ending…at the time at least. She had managed to complete the construction of her home, and had supported her two children as they acclimatized to a new school and to a new life by making and selling take-away food that she sold at a small stall outside her home in the evenings. She also sold sweets made of molasses from palmyrah and other local produce. Lakshmi had set her goals high – to own her own food shop in the town some day, to educate her two boys until they finished their higher studies and to develop their economy as much as possible. No small dreams for a lone Tamil woman, recently returned and with no support from anyone else. She, I determined at the time, was definitely one of my heroes. She was bright-eyed and full of hope as she showed off to us the fruit in her little orchard – papaya, lime, banana and mango. In another corner by the newly constructed common well she had also planted chilli, vegetables and green leaves. She had founded a chit-system – where each member in the group of six women contributed a tiny sum of money each month and they each took turns at taking a loan from the collection. There were conditions. The money could only be used for economic activity and it had to be an investment with a clear profit in view. Here were examples of sound micro-financing born from local initiatives – these had the highest success rates it was evident.
Thinking back on Mannar – it is impossible to forget the sumptuous feast of Tiger prawns we had the privilege of enjoying on our visit. The meat in these gigantic prawns was soft but chunky and very very juicy! They were cooked just the way Sri Lankans liked it – with several kilograms of especially hot chilli thrown in! That is the litmus test for true nationalism in Sri Lanka – your ability to stand the hottest degree of mouth-burning spice and the mother of all spices – chili – a spice very close to our bellies. (And for most of the male Sri Lankan population there’s also the test of manhood – the ability to consume copious amounts of the local brew toddy or the more refined arrack. Between chili and high degrees of alcohol, a healthy male will be able to keep his insides pickled enough to kill any germ that may aspire to irritate his system – very valuable in virus-prone tropical climate and terrain no doubt.) But coming back to the prawns – they were certainly one of my favourite memories of Mannar.
One afternoon we visited the fishing community in Pesalai – a bustling coastal village in Mannar. As the sun dipped in the horizon, lulling the waves to seeming inactivity, the men and women of Pesalai were busy on the beach. The men were preparing to launch out to sea on their motorboats for the shoreline catch and the more traditional boats for the distant catches. The women, in the meantime, were busy washing and drying fish already caught in the day catch – ready for pickling and preparing for other dry fish assortments. Most of the fresh fish would be frozen in large ice boxes or the dried varieties bottled and sent to Colombo – the capital city – and to other markets in the country.
Michael and Rajan – preparing their boats for the all-night vigil in the ocean – kept friendly chatter with me and some of my colleagues about their fishing careers and the profitability of their daily catch. They told us, although the Mannar coast was one of the more fish-rich coasts of Sri Lanka, they had a string of woes that were threatening their livelihood. Although a ceasefire existed between the Government and the LTTE, the Sri Lanka Navy patrolled most of the coast throughout much of the night to curtail surprise raids by the LTTE gunboats, some of the time creating a tense environment for their trade. However, they emphasized taking on a more angry tone to their voices, this was not what bothered them the most. They went on to tell us about the rogue fishermen who made their escapades from off the coasts of India, trespassing the maritime borders that separated the Sri Lankan fishing terrain from the Indian. Lately, they said, the Indian fishermen had been getting even more aggressive in pursuing fishing in the Sri Lankan waters – many of them armed with knives and other weapons to injure and wound Sri Lankan fishermen in order to get at their fish resource. They appreciated the Navy’s involvement in sounding the fishermen against the trespassers, however, the aggression had only increased at the time and they had formed groups to defend themselves. This disturbed me, I remember thinking. These communities had just begun to start the closest thing to normal lives after decades of interruption than had only created an environment of violence and aggression that modeled the male psyche. Finally they had a chance to live in a violence-free environment and the Indian fishermen did no good turn to these men and their families in restoring their lives and healing their minds.
Mannar was made up of an island connected to the mainland by a large causeway. Within the larger territory of the mainland, in Madhu, under the control of the LTTE until very recently, life was not very different – re-development was evident in the form of tarred roads and housing for returnee refugee families, dug wells and slowly developing community markets, obvious to us however not to the degree it was evident on the Government-controlled island. (The Sri Lanka Army has recently taken Madhu, taking over much of the land area in the command of the LTTE and pushing them further north.) One of our guides in Madhu took us to visit two landmarks – the Madhu Catholic Church – one of the oldest churches in the North and famous for its feast in August, attracting hundreds of thousands of devotees each year from all over Sri Lanka, India and other parts of the world. It was a fact of wonder to me that these crowds made their pilgrimage even amidst the fiercest fighting surrounding the Church. Special provisions were made between the conflicting parties to ensure that devotees were able to make their pilgrimage to the Church and worship at leisure. The Bishop of Mannar and the Madhu Church have stood as symbols of the greatest beacons of peace in the North over decades.
Another landmark we were taken to see was equally memorable, but very different to the grandeur of the Madhu Church. Our guide took us to visit the mass gravesite dedicated to hundreds of fallen LTTE cadres who had sacrificed their lives for the cause of separatism. It was a newly-opened gravesite at the time, and one that stood as a proud monument to remind the cadres’ families that their sons and daughters had not fallen in vain. It was also a less than subtle message to the Tamil population of Mannar that the ‘cause’ was never to be forgotten or taken lightly. Each gravestone was identical to the other – indicative of the LTTE’s staunch practice of equity between men and women, between adults and children and among those of varying lengths of service to the cause. What was impressive was that each tombstone erected was made of white marble – a grand display of royal burial rites to the heroes of the cause – probably the only purpose for which the faction broke from its customary practices of absolute austerity. It was chilling to behold for someone mostly protected from the country’s harsh past, but the sea of graves was eye-opening as well to the number of youngsters who had dedicated themselves to a movement – either for the lack of options or because the status quo had convicted them that this way was necessary to enable better options for generations who followed them. Either way, one cannot look on on so many graves at one time, many of them not much older than myself at the time if death, and not feel a great sense of sorrow and loss – loss of Sri Lanka’s potential for greatness, perhaps a different kind of greatness.
Leaving Mannar, we felt we had lived and grown decades in experience and perspective. It was a rich and a rare visit. Our hosts were warm-hearted and extremely generous folk. We piled into our vehicles laden with a rich assortment of tokens to remember Mannar by – various knickknacks – hats, baskets and such woven from palmyrah as well as dried and pickled fish in bottles. I did not carry many of these; I gave into my weakness – the assortment of traditional sweets made of palmyrah molasses and sesame stacked away in my backpack were to last me for most of my meals for at least a few weeks after I reached Colombo. Looking back, I muse to myself, it’s a wonder my teeth are still in tact.
Mannar with all its charms has today also become an oil exploration site, as research has indicated Sri Lanka may have an untapped energy source off the northwestern coast. Oil or no oil, to me, Mannar is rich in a variety of other resources far more valuable than mere minerals – her people and their ways, her scenic beauty and her breathtaking coasts and of course her succulent Tiger prawns!
My first entry to Mannar was very different to that of Ram – while his journey was in search of his ladylove and to engage in inter-national conflict in order to win the day for the gods and to restore conjugal relations, mine was nowhere near to such political and historical proportions. Significantly though, it was undertaken at a time when the warring factions of our own times and of a home-grown variety had come to a form of agreement to hold fire temporarily, if not as a prelude to a more certain peace. I entered this magnificent location with some trepidation disguised by the busyness of my profession. I, accompanied by an army of journalists, made our way to tell our stories of the progress in the no-war-no-peace times. Our aim was to capture whatever we could of the rehabilitation in the aftermath of several decades of a bloody war that had wounded us all. No small task this, considering that the last times journalists had attempted to enter this territory over the last two decades, they had paid with their lives, and very few, if any, escaped with their lives in tact.
But by the time we entered in the latter half of 2004, many of the refugee families that had fled to South India to escape the ethnic repression and tyrannies engineered by misguided political powers over the years, had returned relighting the fading hope they had had of being embraced as citizens in their own country once again. Some, I later found out, had returned because they couldn’t bear the indignity and inhuman treatment at Indian refugee camps, which they compared worse than being homeless and running from multi-barrel and mortar fire in the jungles of their own homeland. Whatever the case may be, there we were, spending almost a week taking in the rising and setting orange suns from the coasts of Mannar.
Once we had driven off the main town areas haunted with bullet-riddled and partially bombed out buildings that stood as a reminder of how hateful war is, we soon came to the large acreage of land that was demarcated for new housing by the Government, funded by bilateral and multilateral donors through the North East rehabilitation programmes instituted for this purpose alone. It was evident that some work was in progress, as the completed foundations and walls of several houses were visible. The houses themselves were incomplete, as they were built on a three-phase scheme where the government reimbursed percentage installments of grants to families in the programme upon completion of a stage of the house. In this way, the family was responsible for the construction and engaging themselves as labour in the building of their own home. This was meant to be a participatory programme, so that home owners could take responsibility and ownership to manage the grants accrued to them in an accountable manner. There were all the signs that this scheme had paid dividend – it was a dream for a family which had spent over ten years living off foreign governments or in ten by six temporary huts to own what was closest to something ‘permanent’. A ‘home’ or a ‘country’ gives one more than shelter or nationality, it gives a sense of belonging, a sense of freedom to be. In that freedom and belonging lies human dignity, invaluable to our existence, allowing us space and ability to breathe in a strangely reassured way. This visit taught me then how much I took both of these for granted.
We were escorted by villagers and aid workers to speak to some of the home owners. Of course it was in the middle of the day and most of the men folk were in the fields. Before the war, from Mannar came Sri Lanka’s largest exports of rice to other parts of the country. The fertility of the soil and the amazing resilience of the water table to the effects of salinity being so closely situated to the sea were the factors said to have made the large production of rice possible for the district. However, I realized those factors may have certainly helped, but what was clear was the pride most people took in hard work in this part of the country. The sun shone down on this large tract of land, situated in the dry zone of the country, and yet the farming population worked on undeterred, unlike in many of the more naturally endowed parts of Sri Lanka.
However humble their homes, the people of Mannar certainly knew how to plan and decorate their territory in an eye-pleasing manner. The first signs of a village from a distance were the maze-like patterns made from woven dried palmyrah leaves. These were used for the fencing around each home plot. It was a pretty sight to behold. I remember standing in front of a few homes surrounded by the palmyrah fencing and imagining waking up to such a sight each morning stepping out into my garden if I were to live in one of those houses. Yes, they were very pretty indeed. And not to forget extremely economical – using local resources aplenty in this part of the country.
The fine white sand made for the ground we walked, even so, it was amazing to many of us just how well kept the gardens in each home plot were. Each plot was an area of about 800 – 1000 square feet, half of which was utilized for garden space and around the house for drainage. Each plot we visited, and we certainly visited a few, had gardens growing vegetables and fruit, all sorts of pretty flowers suitable for the climate and green leaves. I knew there were drives among women’s rural development societies by the agriculture department and NGOs to promote home-grown fruit and vegetable cultivation, but in many of the homes we visited the lady of the house had made it her special hobby to cultivate these plants and roots out of habit and as tradition to supplement household nutrition. Home gardening is very popular in any part of Sri Lanka. I suppose this is because Sri Lankans are as a people very close to nature and cultivation runs in their veins. The women folk especially are found to be very resourceful and industrious in this regard.
One of the women I spoke to, Lakshmi, a war widow with two teenaged sons, had returned from India just a year before then. She had had no other relatives to rely on - many killed in the war and others migrants to Western countries in search of hope and prosperity. She expressed her gratitude to the organizations that had assisted her in constructing a home, especially after quite a fight for land rights, as most land titles were written in the names of the male of a family, and so with their husbands deceased, women had to prove their entitlement to their husband’s land. Lakshmi had been fortunate that her entitlement went undisputed; not so for many other women whose’ in laws sometimes filed litigation against them to get at their sons’ lands after their death – so widowed women, especially with little children, and often unemployed and too poor to fight the case that extended over many years, would have little choice but to either live with their parents or migrate. Sometimes, remarriage was resorted to for purely economic reasons. Whichever way, I remember thinking at the time, with all the rights and privileges Sri Lankan women enjoyed unlike in many other neighbouring nations, there were certainly large chunks of our social customs and the legal system that required a massive overhaul, such as these practices.
Lakshmi’s story had a happy ending…at the time at least. She had managed to complete the construction of her home, and had supported her two children as they acclimatized to a new school and to a new life by making and selling take-away food that she sold at a small stall outside her home in the evenings. She also sold sweets made of molasses from palmyrah and other local produce. Lakshmi had set her goals high – to own her own food shop in the town some day, to educate her two boys until they finished their higher studies and to develop their economy as much as possible. No small dreams for a lone Tamil woman, recently returned and with no support from anyone else. She, I determined at the time, was definitely one of my heroes. She was bright-eyed and full of hope as she showed off to us the fruit in her little orchard – papaya, lime, banana and mango. In another corner by the newly constructed common well she had also planted chilli, vegetables and green leaves. She had founded a chit-system – where each member in the group of six women contributed a tiny sum of money each month and they each took turns at taking a loan from the collection. There were conditions. The money could only be used for economic activity and it had to be an investment with a clear profit in view. Here were examples of sound micro-financing born from local initiatives – these had the highest success rates it was evident.
Thinking back on Mannar – it is impossible to forget the sumptuous feast of Tiger prawns we had the privilege of enjoying on our visit. The meat in these gigantic prawns was soft but chunky and very very juicy! They were cooked just the way Sri Lankans liked it – with several kilograms of especially hot chilli thrown in! That is the litmus test for true nationalism in Sri Lanka – your ability to stand the hottest degree of mouth-burning spice and the mother of all spices – chili – a spice very close to our bellies. (And for most of the male Sri Lankan population there’s also the test of manhood – the ability to consume copious amounts of the local brew toddy or the more refined arrack. Between chili and high degrees of alcohol, a healthy male will be able to keep his insides pickled enough to kill any germ that may aspire to irritate his system – very valuable in virus-prone tropical climate and terrain no doubt.) But coming back to the prawns – they were certainly one of my favourite memories of Mannar.
One afternoon we visited the fishing community in Pesalai – a bustling coastal village in Mannar. As the sun dipped in the horizon, lulling the waves to seeming inactivity, the men and women of Pesalai were busy on the beach. The men were preparing to launch out to sea on their motorboats for the shoreline catch and the more traditional boats for the distant catches. The women, in the meantime, were busy washing and drying fish already caught in the day catch – ready for pickling and preparing for other dry fish assortments. Most of the fresh fish would be frozen in large ice boxes or the dried varieties bottled and sent to Colombo – the capital city – and to other markets in the country.
Michael and Rajan – preparing their boats for the all-night vigil in the ocean – kept friendly chatter with me and some of my colleagues about their fishing careers and the profitability of their daily catch. They told us, although the Mannar coast was one of the more fish-rich coasts of Sri Lanka, they had a string of woes that were threatening their livelihood. Although a ceasefire existed between the Government and the LTTE, the Sri Lanka Navy patrolled most of the coast throughout much of the night to curtail surprise raids by the LTTE gunboats, some of the time creating a tense environment for their trade. However, they emphasized taking on a more angry tone to their voices, this was not what bothered them the most. They went on to tell us about the rogue fishermen who made their escapades from off the coasts of India, trespassing the maritime borders that separated the Sri Lankan fishing terrain from the Indian. Lately, they said, the Indian fishermen had been getting even more aggressive in pursuing fishing in the Sri Lankan waters – many of them armed with knives and other weapons to injure and wound Sri Lankan fishermen in order to get at their fish resource. They appreciated the Navy’s involvement in sounding the fishermen against the trespassers, however, the aggression had only increased at the time and they had formed groups to defend themselves. This disturbed me, I remember thinking. These communities had just begun to start the closest thing to normal lives after decades of interruption than had only created an environment of violence and aggression that modeled the male psyche. Finally they had a chance to live in a violence-free environment and the Indian fishermen did no good turn to these men and their families in restoring their lives and healing their minds.
Mannar was made up of an island connected to the mainland by a large causeway. Within the larger territory of the mainland, in Madhu, under the control of the LTTE until very recently, life was not very different – re-development was evident in the form of tarred roads and housing for returnee refugee families, dug wells and slowly developing community markets, obvious to us however not to the degree it was evident on the Government-controlled island. (The Sri Lanka Army has recently taken Madhu, taking over much of the land area in the command of the LTTE and pushing them further north.) One of our guides in Madhu took us to visit two landmarks – the Madhu Catholic Church – one of the oldest churches in the North and famous for its feast in August, attracting hundreds of thousands of devotees each year from all over Sri Lanka, India and other parts of the world. It was a fact of wonder to me that these crowds made their pilgrimage even amidst the fiercest fighting surrounding the Church. Special provisions were made between the conflicting parties to ensure that devotees were able to make their pilgrimage to the Church and worship at leisure. The Bishop of Mannar and the Madhu Church have stood as symbols of the greatest beacons of peace in the North over decades.
Another landmark we were taken to see was equally memorable, but very different to the grandeur of the Madhu Church. Our guide took us to visit the mass gravesite dedicated to hundreds of fallen LTTE cadres who had sacrificed their lives for the cause of separatism. It was a newly-opened gravesite at the time, and one that stood as a proud monument to remind the cadres’ families that their sons and daughters had not fallen in vain. It was also a less than subtle message to the Tamil population of Mannar that the ‘cause’ was never to be forgotten or taken lightly. Each gravestone was identical to the other – indicative of the LTTE’s staunch practice of equity between men and women, between adults and children and among those of varying lengths of service to the cause. What was impressive was that each tombstone erected was made of white marble – a grand display of royal burial rites to the heroes of the cause – probably the only purpose for which the faction broke from its customary practices of absolute austerity. It was chilling to behold for someone mostly protected from the country’s harsh past, but the sea of graves was eye-opening as well to the number of youngsters who had dedicated themselves to a movement – either for the lack of options or because the status quo had convicted them that this way was necessary to enable better options for generations who followed them. Either way, one cannot look on on so many graves at one time, many of them not much older than myself at the time if death, and not feel a great sense of sorrow and loss – loss of Sri Lanka’s potential for greatness, perhaps a different kind of greatness.
Leaving Mannar, we felt we had lived and grown decades in experience and perspective. It was a rich and a rare visit. Our hosts were warm-hearted and extremely generous folk. We piled into our vehicles laden with a rich assortment of tokens to remember Mannar by – various knickknacks – hats, baskets and such woven from palmyrah as well as dried and pickled fish in bottles. I did not carry many of these; I gave into my weakness – the assortment of traditional sweets made of palmyrah molasses and sesame stacked away in my backpack were to last me for most of my meals for at least a few weeks after I reached Colombo. Looking back, I muse to myself, it’s a wonder my teeth are still in tact.
Mannar with all its charms has today also become an oil exploration site, as research has indicated Sri Lanka may have an untapped energy source off the northwestern coast. Oil or no oil, to me, Mannar is rich in a variety of other resources far more valuable than mere minerals – her people and their ways, her scenic beauty and her breathtaking coasts and of course her succulent Tiger prawns!
