About one in three vehicles here is a tuk tuk (AKA a three-wheeler, trishaw, auto rickshaw, or, simply, taxi). As anyone who has had
the pleasure of riding in one knows, they are basically much like a bumper car
but without any of the safety features. They are often wonderfully pimped up
with tassels, stickers, extra mirrors, shovels, ladders, plastic Buddhas/Christs,
etc.
They also come in a number of varieties beyond the basic
taxi tuk tuk, most notable of these variations here is the bakery tuk tuk,
which works rather like an ice cream van, peddling baked goods down the
streets. And like an ice cream van they also play a jingle to announce their
presence. By power of some undisclosed tuk tuk authority this tune is standardized to be a Casio rendition
of the first part of Für Elise. I took a sound recording of a bakery tuk tuk passing me.
You cannot imagine the saturation of this tune; it is a
definitive part of the soundscape of life in Colombo and you will probably here
it about twenty times in an average day: when in the shower or walking down the street, while cooking dinner or drinking a coffee. It worms into your brain.
It is a most odd fate for a two-hundred year old tune that
Beethoven wrote for some Elise (apparently either Therese Malfatti, who he proposed
to, or a soprano singer, Elizabeth Röckel). Now, here it is in Colombo – clipped,
digitalized, jingoized, omnipresent
and used like some Pavlovian bell.
