{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"The Sri Lanka Podcast: Island Stories","title":"Monsoon, Magic & Money: Sri Lanka, The Spice Trade & A Jungle Garden","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":1970,"description":"Field guide; saga; pharmacy; pantry - this memoir of the Spice Garden at The Flame Tree Estate and Hotel in the jungle northwest of Kandy confirms that most elemental of Sri Lankan horticultural truths – that plants – all 7,500 of them found here – divide into just three categories. They are medicinal. They are edible. Or they are useless.  Had we known this before things kicked off, life would have been much simpler, and plans far more straightforward. For, as with most plans, ours went off-mission within months, pursued across the neat pages of Excel by the best-intentioned of mission creeps. But God, as they say, is good; and no good God has much truck with plans of any sort. It took years to properly understand what a release this Plan Wilderness was, and just how unconditionally that most office Gulag of conditions had been trounced. Enslavement is a condition that takes time to undo. Even now, years later, I still place thankful and imaginary offerings of flowers and fruit before the altar of my imagined gods. As Mark Twain noted, “to succeed in life, you need two things: ignorance and confidence.” Servitude had begun to slide off, albeit unnoticed, just after the ceremonial signing of deeds to buy Mudhenna Wallawwa, the ancient, crumbling plantation house and estate in the jungle northwest of Kandy. Over 30 people representing the sellers, attended by scores more, met in an echoing room around a table that must have been related in some complex wooden way to the State Banquet table in Windsor Castle. Signatories, witnesses, supporters, attestors, senior and junior legal counsels, tea bearers and not a few passers-by transmuted the transfer of a deed into a Dhurbar. The plantation came with twenty-five acres of land that had long since reverted to jungle, though rampant hints of what once grew in smug order (rubber, cocoa, coffee, coconut) could still be glimpsed. The estate had been abandoned during the 1988 JVP civil war, the family fleeing to the greater...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/7CUca6C9EALNbLyQZMPMNrpo1fyKq_MC2tHuUC5ZiGs/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS85MWIx/NzY5MWZhY2Q4NmM5/ZTAzZTc1YjE4ZTZh/ZGY3Zi5wbmc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}