During my first days in Kataragama, I explored a few places on my own.
One evening, I joined the crowds gathering around the large Buddhist stupa. People dressed in white moved quietly between flowers, candles, and offerings. As the sun began to set, monks walked slowly around the stupa, followed by long lines of devotees.
Yet, without realizing it, I was still standing at a certain distance from the place itself.
Until then, the places I had discovered were the ones anyone could find on a map.
Not long after I moved upstairs at Gem River Edge, Muna looked at me one evening and asked whether I could share something.
The question caught me slightly off guard.
He looked directly into my eyes and said it gently, with a smile, as if its meaning were obvious. But it didn’t feel like a simple request. I was slightly confused, although I tried not to show it.
Sometime later, perhaps the following day, he asked me again.
This time, I answered that I would write about the place. And perhaps about him as well.
From then on, our conversations became different. He began telling me stories about his Sri Lanka—about the tsunami, the years of conflict that had shaped parts of the island, and about his own life. In the evenings, he sometimes suggested going out. Not to visit famous attractions, but to see places that mattered to him.
On one of those evenings, before going anywhere else, we stopped at a small local restaurant. It was the kind of place I might have passed without noticing on my own. Plastic chairs, simple food, and local families gathered around a handful of tables.
It marked the beginning of my discovery of the simpler, more authentic places around Kataragama—small local restaurants, family-run kitchens, dishes I would probably never have found on my own.
Wherever we went, there always seemed to be something unexpected to try, and more often than not, it turned out to be delicious. Only later did I realize that food was one of the ways Muna shared the island.
Lagoon
After dinner, instead of returning to Gem River Edge, he drove toward the lagoon.
It was a place where he came whenever he wanted to be alone.
By then, it was already dark. Perhaps there were stars. I honestly don’t remember.
He opened the trunk of his old SUV, rebuilt and modified so many times that it looked somewhere between a jeep, a tractor, and a small tank, and invited me to sit beside him.
I was curious to see what would happen next.
He said he often came here to be in nature, even though nature surrounded us everywhere. There was no dense jungle here. Water stretched between patches of land, and the air was filled with the sounds of the forest, the water, the birds, and countless other permanent inhabitants whose presence could only be guessed.
We sat there in silence for a while.
At the time, I didn’t fully appreciate the depth of that moment.
Only later did I realize that this was his way of sharing himself.
Without words. Simply by being.