The trip that started this all, was my trip to Kandy in 2025. It is time I write a little about that trip, starting with the train ride.

It was a rainy day. Well that might be an understatement, a stormy monsoon day is a more apt descriptor for the day. As many living in and around Colombo are well aware, there is nothing more difficult than booking a taxi on a rainy day. So my father offered to drop me at the Fort Railway Station on his way to work or I may have asked him for a favour. I wasn’t going to miss that train and I wasn’t going to leave it to my reverse jinx to find me a taxi. It so happened that back then when I tried booking a taxi on Uber, I’d be left waiting for over twenty-minutes, and because it was imperative that someone from the law chamber be in court on time and also because it was what decency dictated, I would text my boss that I would most likely be late. The moment I sent this text, my ride requests were accepted and in fact I was even the first to arrive at the Court from amongst my colleagues. That text always worked like a charm.

Anyhow since my father was dropping me at the station, I had to work on his time and was early by one-hour for the train. Then it was a game of patience. With nothing else to do, I perched myself and my travel bag on a bench, and just waited. I had always wondered, whether I had the ability to observe and make inferences like Sherlock Holmes did, or Shawn from Psych. I was on a mission to observe.

A young East Asian man sat on a bench reading Harry Potter. You could tell he was an avid reader by the focus in his eyes. Also, I doubt a young man who had travelled from a far, would sit and read a bulky book at a railway station unless he really liked reading. Just for a moment he stopped to clean his Air Pods. I observed, ensuring not to traverse the lines of stalking of course. He opened his waist bag, took out a tissue, tore it in half, neatly folded one half and returned it to the bag before wiping his Air Pods with the remaining half. He was not just an avid reader, he was a responsible and organised young man.

This young man was one of the many people waiting on Platform 2 at the Fort Railway Station. It was a Saturday morning, five months of the year were ending, and a new month waiting to dawn at the stroke of midnight. Not twenty-four hours prior heavy winds had wrecked Colombo, rain persisted and the sky as some would call it, was gloomy. At the risk of sounding unsympathetic towards the many who had been affected by the weather, I must say that this was the kind of weather that excited me.

The train arrived at the platform and I found my way to the allocated seat on one of the air conditioned compartments. Passengers were pooling in, both old and young. Some were quiet, but the majority were loud. The loud ones seemingly took longer to find their seats and place their luggage on the overhead bins. Is it because they were distracted? Or did the quiet ones simply go unnoticed? Whichever it was, as was proven in the next three hours, the quiet ones were more desirable travel companions.

As the time for departure approached, I stilled my irritated mind. The rains were holding back for a moment, the winds were howling less and I was thankful to God for answering my prayers from the night before – I didn’t want train services to be cancelled on the upcountry line. The train began its journey, its movement was somewhat similar to our family tortoise Timmy, who we learnt years later was actually female. The start was a sudden and small jerk forward, then slowly moving forward and gradually gaining speed, though not by much.

The compartment had two loud groups of passengers. One immediately beside me, they were colleagues travelling to Kandy to attend an alms giving at their supervisor’s home. No, I did not make small talk with them, they were just that loud. The second group was extended family and perhaps some friends too. In this group, the women were loud. These women appeared to be mothers as they kept calling out to their children pointing to beautiful scenery and reiterating the many dos and don’ts of train travelling.

Along this journey the train reached the Rambukkana Railway Station. It is one of the many stations on this journey, but there is much significance attached to this station. Sometime ago during the course of litigation, I learnt some very interesting facts about the railways in Sri Lanka. The upcountry railway line from Rambukkana onwards merges into one. A single-line railway track guides the train from thereon and the Tyer’s Tablet Exchange System commences its operation. Tyer’s Tablet Exchange System is designed to protect trains on the single-line. An officer at stations along the single-line extends his arm holding a tablet, and an officer in the train catches it. This action gives the train carrying the tablet an exclusive right of way on that single-line railway track, ensuring the train avoids a collision course. Sri Lanka’s tablet exchange system is one of the very few remaining in the world and this station is a reminder of an age old practice that may one day become extinct. In fact the construction of double lines has commenced in some parts of this upcountry line, and perhaps serves as a signal of things to come.

My fellow train travelers may have been oblivious to this piece of information that has no utility whatsoever to many people. I too would have been one of the ignorant, if it had not been for the litigation I had been involved in.

The story of the Rambukkana Station doesn’t end there. The year 2022 was a turbulent time for democracy in Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka faced her worst economic crisis curated by none other than her rulers, sparing no one from the resulting chaos. Severe shortages of basic needs, people lining up for days to buy fuel, hospitals and pharmacies were out of medicine and the lack of food was commonplace. The crisis hit both the rich and poor. There were days that even the highest court of the land; the Supreme Court had to close down because transportation was at a standstill and probably because they couldn’t keep the lights on as well. Yes, the country couldn’t keep its lights on. We had thirteen hours of power cuts a day, though if you lived close enough to important people and places, you may have been spared. The struggles of the people inspired protests of varying capacities. One of them right there in the city of Rambukkana, on those same railway tracks that my train had stopped. The protest in Rambukkana ended with one civilian being shot dead and twelve others whose lives were also permanently altered by bullets exiting police rifles. Not to mention the families who for months and years that followed bore the pain of it all. Many narratives are told of that tragic day, each one with a different perspective. We can let the court be the arbiter of that tragedy. But one thing is true – it wasn’t the only day that the blood of my countrymen were spilt on our soil.

As these thoughts flooded my mind, I had been unbothered by the two loud groups that occupied my train compartment. These thoughts had become the ear phones that I had left behind at home. Well that was until a geography war almost erupted over the misidentification of a rock. The Bible Rock had come into our view. It is quite a stunning sight. The loud group of family proclaimed that this rock was the Sigiriya Rock Fortress. Only a few seconds had passed when one of the loud group of colleagues mocked the other group for their ignorance of the location of Sigiriya. She was like a broken record until an older woman from the group made her to be quiet. She wasn’t wrong, it definitely wasn’t Sigiriya. But in defense of the loud group of family, both the Sigiriya Rock Fortress and the Bible Rock have a similar shape. However, being a fly on the wall helps you see through somethings, like how the loud group of colleagues never actually did identify the rock. They too were most likely ignorant of the rock’s real identity.

Observing is quite a fascinating thing to do. It puts your grey matter to some good use. We observe not just with our eyes, but also our ears. If I had my ear phones on, I would have definitely listened to Isaac Hong on repeat. Yes, he is a real person, a real singer, who gets very real with his lyrics. He is no BTS on the popularity scale, not even close. It is quite possible that I am the only person who listened to him in Sri Lanka. But for a listener like myself his music carries many connotations about the deeper things in life. Maybe the music itself is like a window into the soul of the writer. But no matter how great a song is, I’ve come to realise, after not using ear phones for nearly eight months, that keeping my ears open, whether I am at home, on a walk or travelling on a train, whether the sounds are pleasing or irritating, there is much to be gleaned from them.

On this train journey, everything I heard showed me the depths of my levels of tolerance. I am usually very easily irritated by loud sounds. A year or two ago, I may have straight up told the loud ones beside me to quiet down. This time, I was holding back. Why? Did I want to maintain my composure? Did I want to be a more tolerant human being? There are some weaknesses about ourselves that we fail to see, but this one, that my patience ran thin, was no secret to me. One minute I would be tutoring student and the next minute, I would be like the devil incarnate snapping at him for a mistake. I am glad my life as a tutor and lecturer was short lived, even though it was for reasons beyond my control. One need not flare up to exercise authority. I learnt this from my senior in the legal profession. In him I witnessed true authority, the type of authority one commanded through patience and understanding. In other words, a complete contradiction of my old days. No one saw his patience as a weakness. On the contrary this virtue attracted respect and I learnt the folly of my ways, leading me to make a conscious effort to change as well.

On this journey to Kandy, I saw for myself that I had changed or at the very least I had made some progress. Before the train came to a halt, I grabbed my bag and hurried to the exit. Learning to be patient is a long and rough journey, and I have a long way to go. Three hours of constantly being impaled in the ears was enough to last a life time.

That night at the hotel I pondered about all that I observed while on that train. Not everything was pleasant. Certainly not my travel companions and not the tragedy of Rambukkana. But in many ways they added value to my life, influenced my personal character. Even the routine tablet exchange, now, several months later, living in a distant land continues to add value to my life. Of course that is a story for another time. Observing requires us to be present in the now. I left my ear phones behind by total happenstance that time. But I haven’t used them since (except when work required it). I left them behind again, this time deliberately, when I boarded the plane to Korea and it has made life richer.