I was the last person in our group to come out of the station after divulging the intricacies of my visit to the somnolent policeman and the Civil Defence Force home guard who had checked me to make sure I didn’t poses any lethal weapons. I have never had to sit at a desk interrogating and recording the personal details and intentions of a few thousand people on a daily basis, nor have I had to poke and prod them hoping not to stumble on a firearm or explosive-packed vest. Neither have I had to wield a firearm or been trained to use deadly force without any inhibitions to ensure my own survival and the survival of my comrades. Given my life’s experience, I would be a wretched judge of these men and their actions.
What’s more, I had grown up with a war that I knew very little about, let alone the intricate details about how wars are fought, by whom or for what reason. So, as I walked out of the station, still debating the pros and cons of the sacrifices we have made in the name of fighting terrorism, I was confronted with the humbling realisation that most of my opinions and biases about human dignity, civility and morality had not encountered the realities of war and the toxic world of deadly combat.
Outside the station, Sachindra was talking to a Catholic priest who seemed also to have arrived on the same train. As I rejoined the group, he introduced me to Rev. Lasantha who was animatedly talking to the others. Perhaps he may not have expected to find any familiar faces among the crowd that was trickling out of the station. The priest’s white robes contrasted with the arid rural landscape that surrounded the station while his glaring and honest smile stood out in the crowd. We all introduced ourselves – first by our names and then by which part of Sri Lanka we were from.
Despite being a tiny island, Sri Lankans have a strong association with the region we were born in and raised. My grandmother could often say where a person was from merely by their surname, and I felt she could do this with reasonable accuracy. A few decades ago, a persons name would have given some indication of their ancestral village or town as well as which clan and caste they belonged to – factors that may ultimately defined their role in society, their occupations, rights, obligations, limits to their freedom and power. It is difficult not to assume that we have progressed a fair distance as a society since then. Within a span of two generations, most of us have all but forgotten that the caste system even existed, and in principle, we could all aspire to have the same opportunities and same rights irrespective of what our surnames were on account of (almost) universal access to education.
The Portuguese were not as organised in their medieval conquests as the Dutch and British were. For what they lacked in organisation though, they compensated for with cunning and cruelty. Since a person's name defined to a large extent their role in society, the Sinhalese Kings would honour those who performed selfless, loyal service to them by bestowing part of the King's name on them. It didn't take too long for the Portugese to lure many from the costal Sinhalese populations, to perform loyal service to them - often betraying their fellow natives - for the promise of being allowed to use a Portugese surname. That's possibly how I inherited my Portuguese surname as did many others like me. In fact, the top three or four most common surnames in Sri Lanka are Portugese, but they distinctly identify their bearers - including me - as a Sinhalese. Shazard’s name was perhaps the only prominent facet of his personality that identified him distinctly as a Muslim. Mauran’s surname and Gopi’s clearly identified them as Tamils as much as Sachindra’s surname could not be mistaken for anything other than being Sinhalese.
Outside the main cities, the different ethnic groups cluster together more closely. Even though we all essentially look indistinguishable from our physical features, our names reveal our ethnicity. If the policemen at the railway station paid more attention to Mauran and Gopi because they were Tamil, they would have had needed more hours in the day than they had - because a majority of passengers who alighted would have been Tamils. But that would not have been the case in a street in Colombo - where some of my Tamil friends would often be made to linger on for much longer, at checkpoints during the war years. It seems our names do more than merely identify us - they determine the level of freedom we can enjoy and the ideas and thoughts we are allowed or prohibited to express. Not only that; but they often even insinuate our loyalties and prejudices, beliefs and biases to a society that has been made paranoid by its exposure to the mindlessness of ethnic war and increasingly stands in judgement of individuals for what race and religion they belong to.
It is dizzying to think about how a war that started as a result of differences in the way we are treated as a result of differences in our names; has resulted in people with different names being treated in extremely different ways. It is even more confounding that we would treat each other so differently based on names that we had once changed and swapped for frivolous reasons. After all, what's in a name?!
The Reverend’s questions about our names and where we were from were not sinister or even judgmental. They are of course how strangers often enter a conversation and more so among Sri Lankans, no matter where in the world they meet. And for good reason! Because we are a very closely knit society where it seems everyone knows someone who knows you. Finding out that I was from Kandy and now lived in Australia was enough to prompt Rev. Lasantha to ask me whether I happen to know his nephew who was also from Kandy and recently migrated to Melbourne.
Sri Lankans in Melbourne are no longer a small community of expatriates who know each other - as they were in the 1960s. As economic and political turmoil drove large swathes of the Sri Lankan population out of the country, Melbourne - despite its erratic weather - managed to attract the largest numbers of them. Today, it is the second largest Sri Lankan city in the world - after Colombo: there are more Sri Lankans in Melbourne than in Kandy! So I was already calculating the odds of knowing the Reverand's nephew - just to amuse myself.
Despite there being a twenty million or so of us, it seems almost a rarity for two random Sri Lankans to meet in a random corner of the world and not find that they have a mutual friend, at most once or twice removed. So it should have been only a little surprise when Rev. Lasantha mentioned his nephew's name - to admit not only that I knew him – but in fact I was now sharing a flat with him! Maybe it is bizarre that we could be so closely connected. However in that light, it is even more bizarre that a civil war could break out within such a closely knit society made up of friends of friends of friends.
No comments:
Post a Comment