If it’s hot and crowded in the middle of Colombo, chances are it’s quiet and calm at Diyatha Uyana, in Battaramulla. On a recent weekday morning, only a few vendors were open in the marketplace built along the Diyawanna Oya. Shoppers strolled through the white-capped pavilions as a cool breeze blew off of the wetlands. Diyatha Uyana was opened in 2012, and since then, it has become a destination for people looking for handicrafts, plants, clothes, international food, and traditional sweets. The landscape of the market changes by the day. On weekends, and especially on Poya days, it explodes with shoppers, families, and vendors.
But during the week, the market is relaxed. On Thursday, Harshaka Lakmal sat in his open-air shop, painting.
Lakmal sells hand-painted textiles. He dipped his brush into bright yellow paint, and began painting an elephant on a piece of fabric, which he said he would later stitch into a pillow cover. After layering on the thick yellow base, he slowly blended it with a thinner, reddish-brown lacquer. The elephant slowly came to shape, its body seemingly moving across the fabric.
“I love my work,” he said. “I’ve been an artist all my life.”
Lakmal said he undertakes orders from hotels and for the government, but is in his shop at Diyatha Uyana six days a week, only taking Mondays off.
Next door, Kasuni Wanaguru was selling women’s clothing. She felt differently about the pace of the day.
“It’s very dull, here, boring,” she said. She’s had a shop at the market for two and a half years, she said, and stays in business because of the hoards of shoppers on the weekends.
Diyatha Uyana is organized around a central aquarium, where big tropical fish swim. People stopped to watch the fish as they browsed the shops.
Right in front of the fish tanks, Ifthikar and Rezona Mohideen were selling homemade jewellery, jewellery boxes, and key-chains
The couple said they split their time between two markets: Diyatha Uyana on Wednesdays and Thursdays, and the Good Market at the Colombo Race Course on Saturdays. They sell their ware to tourists and locals alike, but said that Diyatha Uyana is more popular with locals.
Ifthikar Mohideen said he originally started making crafts as a hobby. Until recently, he owned a hardware store in Pettah, which had been passed down to him by his father, and by his grandfather before him.
“But I don’t have a son to carry on after me,” he said. So after 105 years in business, he closed it. Now, making handicrafts is the new family business, he said. Even his grandchildren help: “They’re on the creative side, but they’re a little small, you know?” He said he often goes back to Pettah to get craft supplies, but that he doesn’t miss the hardware business. “This is a better life,” he said.
There are also more traditional Sri Lankan handicrafts for sale at Diyatha Uyana.
At Nilmini Handicraft, a shop near the road, a woman named Pradeepa was selling hand-woven baskets, wood carvings of elephants, and many, many items made from coconuts. There were coconut spoons, coconut tea cups, coconut bowls, coconut spice holders, coconut mortars, and coconut jewellery.
“I buy these in the village,” she said. According to her, she travels to villages around Kandy and Nuwara Eliya to find her crafts.
Across from the handicraft sellers, on the other side of Diyatha Uyana’s aquarium, is a food court. Some, like the Dissanayake family, visiting Colombo from Matara, were eating Thai food. Others bought sweets like kalu dodol and arsmi from the Thilaka traditional sweet shop, which gets its treats from an aunty’s home kitchen in Maharagama.
Nicholas Balasuriya, a senior at the University of Alberta, in Canada, sipped on a panidodan juice. He said he was home for the summer visiting his girlfriend and family, and liked to come to the market’s food court to eat and drink.
“I don’t miss much about Sri Lanka,” he said. “But this is pretty good.”
The market is built on wetlands, and there is a walking path on its edge that winds through little lagoons and the shore of Diyawanna Lake. On Thursday, children played on play structures, and aquatic birds waded through the reeds. Across the lake, couples in swan boats hugged, looking for some privacy away from watchful eyes.
Teenagers, just getting out of school, took “selfies” in groups against the backdrop of the lake. And it wasn’t just people enjoying the peace: on a grassy bank, a huge water monitor napped in the shade, its tail trailing down into the water. Diyatha Uyana, its market and its wetlands, are an oasis in the middle of a city that seems to only get louder, hotter, and more crowded by the day.
There is interest in further developing the area, as evidenced by the luxury condominiums going up across the lake. Hopefully, they’ll leave this island of sanity alone.
Pix: Saman Sri Wedage