Locals crowd the Kandy to Ella train in the jungle
We move as a tight-knit herd. “It’s like a sauna in here,” whispers my guide Kapi, mopping his brow and wafting air up his white polo shirt. A baby’s foot digs into my ribs as we lurch forward, carried by a sea of people trying to get closer to a casket so luminously golden it looks like it’s glowing. Tray after tray of perfumed white jasmine, gardenia and lotus flowers are held aloft and pushed forward by human chains of devotees.
All this for a tooth — but not just any tooth. The casket holds a rare relic of the Buddha, said to have been smuggled out of southern India in the locks of a princess’s hair in the 4th century CE. It eventually found its way here to the highland kingdom of Kandy in central Sri Lanka. Kandy fell to the British in 1815 during colonial rule but reverence for the Temple of the Sacred Tooth that houses the casket continued to grow. Three times a day, hundreds of pilgrims and curious travellers now come for this pooja ceremony — when the doors to the shrine are opened — played out to booming thammattama drums and shrill horanawa clarinets. It’s one of the world’s holiest Buddhist sites — and a baptism of fire for my trip into the east of Sri Lanka.
For all the symbols of gilded devotion, it’s the temple’s volume of ivory — some fake, some real — that stays with me. Dozens of tusks protect the shrine complex, like a rib cage around a precious beating heart. “The British came to Sri Lanka not just for spices, but for ivories,” says Koralagamage Lalith Kapila Chandraratne, known as ‘Kapi’, after the ceremony. “At the time, the whole of Sri Lanka was covered in elephants. The British came to the highlands, hunted