Please follow this link to see "White in Sri Lanka," and enjoy Meg Pier's travel site. 
http://www.viewfromthepier.com/guestroom/white-in-sri-lanka/

Everyone in Sri Lanka, including me, has b.o. It can’t be from lack of hygiene because people wash frequently. It must be from the onion, garlic, lime juice, red pepper, Maldivean dried fish and chilli infused curries. There is nothing that is not on fire.

Rice and curry may be the cornerstone of Sri Lankan cuisine, but short eats fill in the gaps. Short eats are savory pastries, golf ball sized croquettes, patties, doughnuts and buns. They may be filled with beef, chicken, fish, egg or vegetables, have flakey crusts or be breaded and fried, but short eats are always greasy and always spicy. When you sit down at a table in a “hotel,” which is Sri Lankan for greasy spoon, you’re served a platter heaped high with a variety of short eats, along with a squeeze jar of hot sauce just in case you want to raise the temperature even more. Eat all you want, leave the rest, get charged for whatever you’ve ingested and the platter gets reloaded for the next patron. 

Rather than the seemingly serendipitous affiliations I’d lined up before I left, it turns out that I fell in with a band of thieves when I first got to Sri Lanka. Not only did the avuncular landlord in Mount Lavinia keep finding more expenses to tack on to my rent, he started paying too close attention to my comings and goings and with whom I did those comings and goings. He turned out to be a bit of a con and a bit more of a creep. I "shifted" to a friend's place in Thimbirigasaya, an upscale neighborhood in Colombo, then to the artists' guesthouse at Sapumal Foundation, about which an article appeared just yesterday in Pakistan's Express Tribune:
 . . . a quiet Saturday morning, on wide roads, rain trees shading the affluent Colombo 7 area, holding out an intense, oncoming humidity, leafy, green, fragrant. Turn on to a small side-road, and you have arrived at the 100-year old bungalow, at 32/4 Barnes Place. Here lies Sapumal Foundation. It is fabled as possessing one of the finest collections of modern art in Sri Lanka.
   The Foundation was established in 1974 by portrait artist Harry Pieris. Managed by a trust, it serves primarily as a gallery and as an art resource space. The property maintains a detailed reference library and newspaper archive, supplying both university and independent research projects. It also contains on its premises a working studio and a flat for art residencies. And it maintains Pieris’ permanent art collection. At any one time, there are on display some 350 paintings, drawings and photographs, which trace the development of Sri Lankan art from the 1920s to date.
   The core of the collection consists of work by members of the original ‘43 Group. As its name implies, the Group was founded in Colombo in 1943, as a reaction against the then prevalent mode of painting, Victorian naturalism and the redundancy of its patron, the Ceylon Society of Arts. Regularly barred from exhibiting by the judges of the Society, the ‘43 Group provided a platform for new, experimental expression in Sri Lanka . . . . . .room upon room opens onto cool polished cement floors and high ceilings, walls filled with paintings. The light here is dappled, and carries with it the scent of champa and jasmine flowers from the rambling green garden outside. There is nothing of the museum here, nor of monument. Instead, one discovers a manner of generosity. Sapumal Foundation provides an excerpt of art history, at human scale, in simple, richly distilled lines.
Barnes Place is in Colombo 7 or Cinnamon Gardens, one of the city's more posh neighborhoods. The home of Sir Arthur C Clark is across the street, his study just as he left it. 

Every month,the Buddhist poya holiday celebrates the full moon. Believers wear white and spend the day in temple, praying, meditating, being. At Karagampitiya in Colombo, these men dyed the fabric for monks' robes. Historically, monks' robes were made from rags and clothing of the deceased. Plant material provided the "discolor" of the cloth. Blue, yellow and black were proscribed. Brown and its brilliant sister, saffron, remain the signature hues.  The fabric is torn and restitched to to resemble the patterns of rice paddies. All this to ward off attachment to possessions or luxuries. In a perverse logic, such a humbly attired monk will squat over an ornate commode, demonstrating disregard for any niceties. 

In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day. F. Scott Fitzgerald
    But darkness comforts after color’s crushing power, it's saturation the equivalent of the excruciating despair of three o’clock in the afternoon when beauty and light have exhausted you. Only the grey of rain can bring relief, or a freshly whitewashed wall offer rest, after which color again becomes reason enough to live another day. 

In Payagala, there is a home for wayward boys, boys whose parents are incarcerated, boys who steal. They are children and youthful adults who seem to languish and have little to do. Volunteers bring art classes. There is a small temple under construction nearby.

The relentless jungle had swallowed up these clusters of fortresses, stupas, temples, reservoirs, gardens and palaces, built in the first half of the Christian era. Rediscovered after centuries of neglect, they’ve been added to the list of UNESCO World Heritage sites. These ruins sit beyond time and testimony while touts, shills, hawkers, tuk-tuk drivers and beggars encamp in their periphery.

All over the island, men and dogs loiter. Dogs lie in the gutter and men lanquish on molded plastic chairs on the street. The dogs are mostly benign, exemplifying a live and let live attitude. Dogs do not offer to escort yout to exclusive gem sales. They do not introducket you to trishaw drivers who can bring you to one day only festivals at temples, find you the best masseuse in Asia or circle round and round the block on which you stroll. The dogs don't walk along side you and start conversations that inevitably end in a request for money, matrimony, sex, entrance to America, or all of the above. These strays do not gather in groups that shield them from their own weaknesses to stand on corners and talk about you.  These mongrels do not stare openly at your breasts or, with lecherous eyes, scan your body at length from head to toe. They do not accidently on purpose touch your ass. They make not sniggering comments as you pass by. They do not grope you or press up against you on busses and trains. They play not parr in the endless ways by which women are corralled and controlled through irritation and intimidation. Nor are the dogs frustrated and shackled by chronic unemployment. But dogs are not repeatedly rebuffed by the industrializied nations to which they apply for visas so they can get off this island and get jobs, even if it means leaving their families. Apart form and unknowing of poverty amidst unseemly wealth, post conflict trauma, neocolonial malaise, sexism and virulent classism, these dogs just keep walking. 

Galle Road runs like a spine through Colombo. I walked  from Wellawatta to Bambalapitiya after Lakmal, a trishaw driver who lives nearby, took me to meet his mom and see his home in Dehiwala.. 

Kalutara Vihara on Vap Poyafull, the moon holiday in October, then on to Galle.