BEAUTY & THE GNOME

Hills are, of course, what Kandy and the area around The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel are all about. Its most notorious peak is Bahirawa Kanda, or Gnome Mountain, home to one of the tallest statues of Lord Buddha – and once, more memorably, home to some atypical human sacrifice, involving a lovely girl, Dingiri Menika, who lived right next to the Flame Tree Estate and Hotel, in Galagedera.

Selected to stimulate the moribund fertility of a Kandyan queen, the girl was kidnapped by soldiers, loaded with jasmine, and propelled with elephants, drummers, and banner-bearers to a stake for overnight consumption by demons. Quite why anyone thought a feast such as this might make the despondent queen procreate is a mystery.

Fortunately, the king’s elephant keeper got to Dingiri Menika first, rescued her, married her, in fact, and set up home with her in Welligalle Maya, in Cross Street, close to Kandy Super Phone, Ltd, a present-day telecommunications equipment supplier. But although the king, Sri Wickrama Rajasinghe, chose to terminate all future human sacrifice, his late-burgeoning liberal values were not destined to bring him any greater luck. Within a few years, he had been exiled to India, along with at least two of his four wives, the third of whom was to use her exile for bankrupting shopping sprees.