Pettah Manning Market

It is almost 3 am and Pettah, Colombo’s busiest and most hectic shopping district, looks uncharacteristically calm. There isn’t a stallholder in sight flogging a sari, gold necklace or mobile phone.

But just north of the railway station, off Olcott Mawatha, momentum is starting to build. Colourful lorries, overloaded with bananas, pineapples and mangoes, are fighting to squeeze into the narrow laneways that will soon be congested to biblical proportions. Hunched coolies struggle with loads triple their weight, grunting ‘jer, jer’ to warn anyone in their path. This is the first glimpse of what will soon be the chaos and life of Pettah Manning Wholesale Market.