In the Odyssey the blind poet Homer—who probably just had bad vision like me—described a Lotus Island. He said, via Odysseus, “My men went on and presently met the Lotus-Eaters, nor did these Lotus-Eaters have any thoughts of destroying our companions, but they only gave them lotus to taste of. But any of them who ate the honey-sweet fruit of lotus was unwilling to take any message back, or to go away, but they wanted to stay there with the lotus-eating people, feeding on lotus, and forget the way home.”

This reminds me of home in that Sri Lankans did not destroy our colonizers, and we literally eat the lotus (root). The lotus is everywhere in fact. It's not our national flower, but it is though. We curry the lotus, we cultivate it in ceremonial ponds, we construct it in giant concrete, we carry it to the Buddha's feet in temples both Hindu and Buddhist. The lotus is everywhere on this island, you can smell it in better establishments. A giant lotus greets you upon arrival to Colombo. Colombo itself is a wetland district, full of wild lotuses. As mentioned, we eat the edible lotus root, but it's not as good as Homer said. While lotus root salad is nice now and then, it's really the pol sambol that brings you back. Not that we want you, we should have destroyed those colonizers the minute they got off the boats and it's still a shame how servile we are.

Anyways, this is all just unnecessary caption to two photos, which I introduce as a break. One photo is of the Colombo Lotus Tower and the other is of a man gathering lotus flowers in a pond. The separate photos are available below, for more gracious viewing, but I think they look more interesting side by side. They are both shot at 10x zoom on a Huawei Pura 70. There's a post-post-colonial Easter Egg on the gentleman's hat if you look closely.

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