2. Healing Wounds

Linking North and South: A challenge for us (not for locomotives)

Weeks before coming to Sri Lanka, I shared with some friends; a desire to help war affected Sri Lankans in whatever capacity possible while I am home. I had a vague grasp of the fact that refugees were just one fraction of the victims of war. Combatants constituted another fraction. I have never heard gunshots or seen bombs going off. However, having grown up in an impoverished country which spent hundreds of billions of rupees on armaments, and cultured by a desensitising daily death toll in the news every night, perhaps I too was one of its victims. So who were the ‘war affected’ that I was going to help and where were they?

One of my friends introduced me to Sachindra, who was organising groups of volunteers from the Colombo University to help with the food distribution efforts at Menik Farm – a camp housing more than a quarter million Sri Lankans who have been driven out of their homes during the recently concluded fighting in the north and east of the country. Through a series of electronic epistles that were haphazardly exchanged over the subsequent days, we arranged to work at Menik Farm for a week, with a local NGO that was responsible for distributing food to ‘Internally Displaced Sri Lankans’. The opportunity was random, but the choice was obvious.

I expected Shazard to be waving at me from a door or window on the train but there was no sign of him. I would not recognise any of the others that I was meeting for the first time. I got into the train and walked through the compartments and found them looking for me. I was meeting Shazard after four years and Sachindra, Gopi and Mauran for the first time. Gopi had grown up in Vavuniya, but now lived with his family in the suburbs of Colombo. Mauran was from Batticaloa and his family still lived there. They both had just passed out as Engineers from the University of Moratuwa, and as Tamils, had experienced the war and its consequences more intimately.

Sachindra pulled out a couple of sheets of paper. One was a letter from the head of the NGO that we were affiliated to. It was a vital document confirming that we were indeed working with an NGO that was authorised to function inside the tightly guarded camps. The government calls them “Welfare Villages” - almost tempting the uninitated to want to go and live there. Those opposed to the government’s policy of detaining these people in camps – admittedly for their own protection, until they are screened and resettled – calls them “concentration camps”, evoking deliberately, ghastly images of Nazi Germany. The true description of these camps floats unexplored and unadmitted somewhere in between these two extremes. We had plenty of warnings about the tight security in place around the camps and how access to the northern region in general is highly restricted, so Sachindra had diligently made copies of the original documents for each member of our group.

Sachindra had another document which he had printed out for himself and for me. It was a list of Tamil words in Sinhala typeface together with their meanings and this was for our use exclusively. Almost all Tamils who had lived outside the war zone are conversant in Sinhala. Gopi and Mauran were native Tamil speakers who spoke good English and could manage a conversation in Sinhala when necessary. Shazard spoke all three languages at home and had learnt enough Bangala (Bengali) to survive five years in Bangladesh while studying to be a Doctor in Medicine. To say that Sachindra and I are not fluent in Tamil would be a gross understatement. Yet we were going to be working among people who have been all but totally cut off from the rest of Sri Lanka for the past thirty years. All the children and most young adults of our age group living in the camps would not have even seen a Sinhala person until a couple of weeks ago.

I went through the list of words several times as the “Yal Devi” (Queen of Jaffna) chugged cheerfully on her way to Medawachchiya from where it will continue up to Vavuniya. This train had been a symbolic link between the Tamil speaking north and the Sinhala dominated south for decades, until the LTTE blew it up on 19 January 1985. At the end of the war, the government launched a well publicised project to reconstruct the pillaged railway infrastructure up to Jaffna and resume “Yal Devi” services to the estranged peninsula. The president had called the project a symbol of “our resolve for unity and coexistence” and had even donated his monthly salary in May to boost the reconstruction effort. We have inherited from our past a culture that is rich in such symbolism and imposing traditions. But the more I struggled to remember each new Tamil word and its meaning, the more I appreciated the futility in entrusting a train (let alone the deleterious Railway Department) with the task of representing our resolve for unity and coexistence.

The north and south of the country were like two siblings, separated at a time that now lay buried under layers of history that has been contaminated by many incomplete and unverifiable memories. One had been adopted by brutal, dehumanising violence and grwon up in its arid north-eastern plains and the other by deceit and corruption in the fertile valleys and misty mountains in post colonial Sri Lanka.

War, in a strange and cruel way, has brought us together. Perhaps we would recognise our common ancestry and intimate relationship if only we could talk to each other, but we cannot yet speak each other’s languages.

Mortal soul

Between Earth and smoky sky, originally uploaded by halwis.

Oh delicate, supple, unbounded mortal soul
Dance and sing through timeless, spaceless eternity
Enrich with life the living and spare death’s due toll
Your wealth lie in moments etched in fragile memory

The river and ocean is yours, every valley and knoll
And a spirit to cherish, not conquer their mystery
Forever and always may it be your unhindered goal
The treasures of life, and death's blissful serenity

1. Healing Wounds

End of a conflict: An ideal time to bear witness to a brutal war

The strap of my bag unbuckled under the strain as I squeezed out of the bus in Kurunegala. The clock tower read an unrushed 6.40 am on its weary face. It was quite possibly a relic from the Premadasa era, bearing testament to a President who erected large clocks in many city centres and villages, subtle messages about punctuality woven into a fabric of ageless and often useful, chaos. I checked my wrist watch, because the clock face that looked over the sleepy town looked too burdened to be reliable. If the train was on time, I had forty minutes to get to the railway station which I knew couldn’t be too far.

Struggling to buckle the strap, I went into the nearest shop to ask for directions. “It’s that way, you won’t miss it”. The little I knew about Kurunegala town was enough to give me confidence that I had all the information needed to walk to the station in time. As I stepped out on to the road, I realised that I may have left my cap in the car when my father dropped me - sleepy eyed and still jet lagged - at the central bus-stand in Kandy an hour and forty minutes ago. It seemed like I was going to miss it a lot.

Walking to the station through the light mist, trying to read the faces of over worked strangers on a regular Monday morning, I resisted the temptation to take a three-wheeler. Busses limped past me on all fours, saturated and overflowing with white uniforms, heavy schoolbags, briefcases and flowery saris – battle fatigues of sorts I thought. I called Shazard to make sure that they were on the train and that the train itself was on track. Time has also steadily eroded the Railways. Over years of being one of its loyal customers, the Railway Department had taught me to expect its services to be reliably late and not to take such minor blessings for granted.

What if we missed the train or never even volunteered to dedicate a week of our time and energy to help out at the camps? We had no grand illusions about what we were trying to achieve or contribute. I could not believe that my efforts were going to make a noticeable difference, because in my absence there would have been plenty of others to take this place. But I hoped that our presence there on the other hand would make a difference. We hoped it would personify a more meaningful expression of a message that was being preached from high platforms. It was a personal acknowledgement of the hard work that lie ahead of as while the notion that forces of evil in this country have been defeated and that the nation has been unified - at least politically –was being celebrated with fireworks and parties.

Perhaps we needed to do something - if only to convince ourselves that we have done 'something'. Even though we have all been brutalised by the violence and horrors of war, demonstrating that we still had a capacity to empathise and care would make us feel better. Maybe we were guided by our moral obligation to serve. Despite having lived under the clouds of war, I have never been exposed to the downpour of its terror and violent images. Now the war was over and this was a fleeting chance to catch the last glimpse of what it was all about. I had read about the psychological implications of war and violence on society and tried to understand how soldiers are trained and prepare for battle. I have tried to understand what they experience on the battlefield and afterwards. Survivors or war have had little time to write about it and the stories of the victims will forever be silent. I felt intellectually and morally obliged to hear the silent stories and know for myself what so many around me were speaking about with unquestioned authority. I felt obliged as a Sri Lankan, to find out and share in whatever way I could - the experiences of so many of my own countrymen and women who has known this war as a fact of daily life. Their lives have so far been so very distant from my own.

The train was indeed on its way and a stranger assured me in his haste that I was making good time to get on it.

Why we fight

Dream

Where the mind is without fear and the head held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by Thee into ever-widening thought and action;
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.
~ Rabindranath Tagore ~

Our yesterdays are stained with the blood of many loved ones, friends and fellow Sri Lankans. We would have been friends and relatives if we had not been forced to be trapped on two sides of a fabricated division. This moment belongs to those who faced unimaginable violence and were consumed by it during past three decades. This is a moment to solemnly remember the many tens of thousands of victims of meaningless violence. This is a moment to understand that the images of this violence will continue to haunt the worriors and victims for the rest of their lives. For every physical casualty of war, there are two (unreported) physiological casualties. Post Traumatic Stress will plague them and us for at least a couple of generations. That is part of the costs of this war that we will have to bear for many decades.

So if anything, this is the time to say "NEVER AGAIN!!"
Never again will the sons and daughters of Sri Lanka be divided or deprived... Never again will we fight with each other, but we will always fight for each other... never again will the blood of our countrymen be shed in vain. Never again will we let ourselves be conscripted by inequality, injustice, racism or moral poverty.
NEVER AGAIN. EVER!!!

Peace

Shadow 360, originally uploaded by halwis.

Listen, the final bugle calls. Come sing with it, when the final shot is fired towards the waking stars... Look! The final worrier falls into a bloody pit; and our search for peace, though mired, under the magnificent starlight pass. History, for a brief moment has been summoned with sacrificial offerings. All our countrymen and women who have been victims of violence or denied human dignity - on the battle field and in our neighbourhood streets - have paid with their lives, for the freedom we can now hope to enjoy.

Today, they lie on a different plain, a different time. This moment belongs to them; to their silent memory. Let us not rob this moment from them. We owe it to them at least now, in solemn reflection, to cherish the hope and promise of this moment. Our yesterdays are stained with their blood. It is left for us to remember their plight so that our ‘tomorrow’ would be a monument befitting their memory.

Renascence

Condensed exhilaration, originally uploaded by halwis.

I moved… away from the edge of a raucous highway to a quiet edge of suburbia… where I am welcomed home every day by a warm sunset that dissolves into a distant tree line and watch the stars awaking to a night undisturbed by city lights. (Note to self: get a decent telescope) There’s space to revel in the pleasure of soft grass under my feet and for my ears to recuperate in a therapeutic silence. The spine is also unwinding to its natural shape once again (and I should definitely get this embarrassing little pot-belly replaced with decent abdominal muscles). Life is improving at a noticeable pace again. I’ve just had a few very good weekends of dignified company, clean fun, a lot of laughter and exhilaration. The gods of photography has also been particularly kind. My heart is beating a pace… the days are still bright, even though the saffron tint of autumn is lurking to swoop across the landscape as the last fragments of summer are blown away in the cold southerly winds… maybe it’s time to take out the guitar again and resume my quest for the finest melody and still finer words…