Chiranthi Rajapakse The letters have a familiar rounded shape. You think it’s Sinhala but it’s not. The priest – a thin boy in spectacles – describes how he cleans the ola leaf book. You light the lamp and rub the soot over the book, leave it for a while, and wipe it away. You need lamplight, not electric light. It takes a long time he says, standing proudly by the massive book, placed on the table in the centre of the room, in this small temple on an island in the river, and you know by his voice that this is a story he has told many times. But now because of the problems, we are the only visitors. We say something about everyone needing lamplight now, since there is so often no electricity – and we laugh. And you wonder who he has now to tell the story to.
Note –Ola leaf (Palm leaf) books were the widely used medium for writing and recording history in ancient Sri Lanka
