Gods, Ghosts & and the faintest haunting of historical whispers of what was and - just about - still is, is the subject of this podcast, which delves beneath Trincomalee on Sri Lanka’s eastern seaboard.

Haunted might be too strong a word for Trincomalee – but by any measure, the town, like the country, has more than its fair share of ghosts. And plenty of gods as well: all of them centre stage; stage left, stage right. Indeed, rarely, if ever, off stage. Not least Buddhism itself, the foremost and complex creed, is little different now from when it first arrived on the island in 236 BCE.

From the ten-headed demon king Ravana of Lanka to the country’s founding father, a terrorising prince descended from lions, the island’s earliest creation myths feature a multitude of alarming divinities. Set beside them, the animist and ancestral spirits of the island’s original inhabitants, the Vedda, feature with almost kindly comfort.

Kindness might be said to have been in short supply with much of what followed: the demanding Catholic dogmas of the early Portuguese invaders, the innumerable Hindu gods of the Tamils, the strict protestant god of the Dutch, and his Anglican iteration; the rigorous god of Islam, albeit with a more forgiving spirit among the Malay moors.

And all are present in distant Trincomalee. But for a place so abundantly represented on any map, Trincomalee itself remains oddly invisible.

It is not what it seems, a small town of passing consequence. Like a true aristocrat, it wears its reputation with uttermost modesty, restrained as a crown of sapphires under a hoodie.

The great eastern port of the ancient kings, a later key link in the chain of European wars fought from 1652 to the downfall of Napoleon that turned South Asia British, it holds its history with absolute discretion, noticeable only if you look amongst its graves and within some of its almost vanished communities; in the scared walls of temples and buildings linked to the passage of its many gods, its forgotten kings and even great artists – all symbolised by the rare birds that flock to an overlooked lagoons north of the town.

Whilst Sri Lankans and tourists alike cluster around the south coast, and a few choice parts of the centre of the island, barely any make it to this part of the east coast.

Once part of the Rajarata, the homeland of the first island kings, Trincomalee and the east slowly became ever more isolated as the island’s development surged along the western seaboard, in the hill country, and in the far south.

The modern world pushed it even further to a back seat - thirty years of civil war, a tsunami, and the troubled new decades of the twenty first century, years marked so extravagantly by the fact that it was an island off the town that was selected as one of the only remote safe spots to house a prime minster, toppled by the 2022 Aragalaya that saw so much old government swept aside.

Two main roads lead into the town – the A12 from Anuradhapura and the A6 from Dambulla, both skirting a large wildlife park - whilst a third, the A15, leads towards the coastal villages of the south.

None brings with them that dawning sense of bleak certainty that you are approaching an urban centre. There are no outlying suburbs or factory sites to speak of. Optimistic half-built retail outlets, busted petrol stations, billboards proclaiming glittering but affordable developments of villas and family homes: all are missing.

A beautiful, sparse, and dry landscape borders the roads, ceding very occasionally to almost green forests. A most twenty-first-century silence grows as you cut through the countryside, arriving, almost without notice, at Trincomalee itself.

And almost immediately, you find yourself driving along an esplanade, the sea on one side and a graveyard of miniature and broken architectural wonders on the other.

Within it, most unexpectedly lies a monument connected to the world’s greatest novelist: Jane Austen, for the cemetery contains the grave of her favourite brother, Charles Austen - her “own particular little brother,” and the model for the manly and caring character of William Price in Mansfield Park.

Etched indelibly across a wide rectangle of granite read the words

“Sacred to the memory of His Excellency C.J. Austen, Esq., Champion of the Most Honourable Military Order of the Bath, Rear Admiral of the Red and Commander-in-Chief of Her Majesty’s Naval Forces on the East India and China Station, Rear Admiral Charles Austen CB. Died off Prome, while in command of the Naval Expedition on the river Irrawaddy against the Burmese Forces, aged 73 years.”

Outliving his more famous sister by decades, Charles was an euthanistic reader of novels – especially hers; and it is perhaps no little accident that the brother of so great a writer should lie in gentle comfort here on an island whose contemporary writers have so recently burst like firecrackers over world fiction – from Sri Lanka itself of course, but also from Canada, Australia, the UK, the US or New Zealand, part of a raw diaspora created by civil war and corruption.

Their fiction has become an unexpected global embassy, bringing humour, a unique sensibility and a sharp, ironic eye to the themes that preoccupy every great novel - from war, sex, fashion, addiction and love to loss, pets, the jungle, fame, fortune, and bankruptcy. And, of course, family; for in Sri Lanka, as almost nowhere else, the family really does come - inconveniently, beautifully, reassuringly, alarmingly - first.

Family was close to Charles Austen’s heart far beyond his famous sister, for he created a scandal back home with his serial marriage to two sisters. But this failed to detract from his lasting memory, and he is remembered by one of his subordinates as stoic and dutiful to the end.

“Our good admiral won the hearts of all by his gentleness and kindness while he was struggling with disease and endeavouring to do his duty as Commander-in-Chief of the British naval forces in these waters. His death was a great grief to the whole fleet. I know that I cried bitterly when I found he was dead.”

All around his grave are earlier and later graves, mostly of British colonists, military officers and engineers who staffed this most distant part of the empire. Out of tombs and obelisks, which enhance the weathered details of Georgian architecture, grow trees and shrubs. Buffalo graze amidst them. “Home at last, thy labours done, “reads the tomb of Charles Frank Miller, who died aged 235 in 1899, “safe and blessed the victory won…angels now have welcomed thee.”

It is rumoured that occasionally a few dedicated members of the Jane Austen society fly out to tend Charles Austen’s grave; but come more often they must, for within the next few decades the graveyard will be all but obliterated by weather and neglect, like the vanished church of St Stephen’s that once oversaw it all.

In the placid residential suburbs north of the graveyard lives another fast-disappearing record of the island’s colonial times – this one linked to the Portuguese, who first came to the island in 1505. For here, around the self-contained streets of Palayittu live the last descendants of the island’s Burgher community – descendants of Portuguese and sometimes Dutch men and local women who still speak a remarkabl...