A City I Have Not Been to Yet - Kandy Sketchbook
A good Sri Lankan friend gave me Kandy Sketchbook: A Watercolour Journalby Weerakkodige Vasantha Perera.
I have never been to Sri Lanka. I knew Kandy mostly as a name from cultural heritage study: a UNESCO World Heritage city, the last kingdom of Sri Lanka, and home to the Temple of the Sacred Tooth Relic.
That sounds important, but also a little distant.
This book made it feel closer. Not because it explains everything, but because it notices things. Streets, buildings, rooflines, temple scenes, small corners of a city that may not stay the same forever.
What stayed with me was not one famous monument, but the feeling of a city appearing in pieces: a roofline, a temple wall, a street corner, a building the artist had clearly spent time with.
I do have a few sketchbooks, but this one feels especially tied to place. A photograph can catch a view quickly. A watercolour asks someone to sit with it for longer. You can feel that time in the drawings.
That is what I like about it. It does not make me feel that I understand Kandy. I have not been there, and I do not want to pretend I know a city through one book.
But it does remind me that heritage is not only in official names or famous buildings. Sometimes it is also in what someone chooses to stop for, draw, and keep.
Maybe that is what a good sketchbook can do. It does not make you feel that you know a place. It makes you want to look more carefully.
Before I visit Kandy one day, this is how I have met it first: through a friend's gift, and through another person's careful looking.
