snippet (3)

(c) Harendra Alwis

... Perhaps if you listen on a silent moonlit night, you may hear it whisper to the ocean the stories it has witnessed of lives that had condensed along the banks of its fertile path, lives it had sustained, nourished and sometimes forcefully taken. Perhaps it boasts of how it flooded low lying plains after heavy rains, or cascaded like a misty veil down the face of an ancient rock on a mountain side. The ocean makes no attempt to hide its amusement as it listens to stories about vain bridges that had assumed they could transcend it, and delusional dams that thought they could contain it; about animals that drank cautiously at its banks and ferries that crossed it many times a day. The ocean consoles the ailing river which proudly deposits the burdensome sediment of its memories on the estuary; like offerings of flowers and incense with the prayers and confessions of the faithful at the feet of a motionless statue of a deity. Rich sediment that had been ripped off hills and flooded plains, during times when its waters were young and raging with passion, settle down into fertile islands at the river mouth where it is impossible to know for sure where the river ends and the ocean begins. The calmness of the river now, ridicules any suggestion that it was once a powerful force that violently hurled large rocks in its path and ground them, reducing them with the passage of time to harmless pebbles that little children could play with. Now at the end of a fruitful journey, the river dissolves into the setting sun, with its many arms absorbing the powerful calmness and boundless wisdom of the ocean...

snippet (2)

(c) Harendra Alwis

...The raindrop that dived out of the cloud was in fact made up of a multitude of tiny droplets; some whisked away by the wind from the boundless ocean, one was robbed from the leaf of a withering plant, a few from rivers and another from the white shirt that belonged to a schoolboy that was washed and hung out to dry by his mother on a bright warm afternoon.
For seconds that lasted an eternity, it careered freely through the cool damp air until suddenly its flight was rudely obstructed by a tender leaf that was perched at the tip of a lofty tree. The shock splattered and dislodged the briefly acquainted droplets and dispersed them in unknown directions into a world full of strangers again.
Some of them almost miraculously avoided further confrontations with the thick green canopy of the forest and fell on to a blanket of rotting leaves. Others unwillingly crawled along the spine of a leaf to its edge, where they dangled nervously for a few seconds and fell onto the lap another, only to trickle down a similar path and saturate in the heavy downpour until they were ready to leap back into the unknown. Some droplets, including the one whose memory was still fresh with the soapy smell of a schoolboy’s white shirt, was caught by a broad mature leaf along which it dripped back towards the stem. From there it began a slow crawl through the valleys and ridges of the bark, passing on its way stranded insects and trails of sap that the great tree had bled.
There, at the end of its pilgrimage, at the root of the oldest, wisest and the most magnificent tree of the forest, the tiny raindrops silently seeped into the bosom of mother earth...

snippet (1)

(c) Harendra Alwis

... One of the early symptoms of my infatuation was an irrational jealousy. 

As I watched her from the distance of my dreams and perhaps frustrated by how little of her attention I was able to win, I felt jealous of her dog which had the pleasure of indulging lavishly in her company, which I was wholly deprived of. I felt it a grave injustice that a dog was not only allowed to brush carelessly against her, but she would also gently caress it, whereas I needed an elaborate excuse even to shake her hand. 

I would be jealous of a dress that hugged her delicate body, bangles that teasingly dangled at her wrist or a necklace that occasionally had the pleasure of playfully wrapping itself around her delicate fingers as if in a maypole-dance. In my secret thoughts, I gained reprisal over the beautiful pendant she wore, which despite seeming like it was forged from starlight and morning dew, seemed to fade into obscurity whenever she lifted those eyes that held the entire universe within them. 

But I found myself harboring a burning jealousy toward her hairpin - this loveless, careless sliver of metal that spent its days entwined in her lustrous midnight hair, sitting idly on her secret thoughts, sometimes descending to her neck, only to be wrapped in her fingers with an intimacy I could only imagine, while I stood, composing silent poems to her beauty, nursing an epic love that, in my infinite wisdom, I had somehow decided was better left unconfessed...

now

I spent my fourth consecutive Christmas alone – away from the warmer, more familiar sights and sounds of home. Christmas this time around was a bit different. Even though I had to work on Christmas day, I decided not to make an issue of the desolation and hopelessness of the situation. Unlike previous years, I did not yield to the temptation of writing a poignant letter or poem detailing my woes despite knowing only too well that I may never get used to spending Christmas this way.

A few days are all that is left of another year. Perhaps years are just numbers we use to catalogue and file away memories. Does that really make them more accessible and searchable amid their volatility in our minds archives? My Christmas gift is perhaps this rare moment, to reflect on possible answers to such mundane questions.

The number of our revolutions around the sun is undoubtedly a fitting way to keep track of time. It offers useful annual reminders of events that have shaped our lives and the life of greater humanity. But when I look back on my life and on the year that’s about to end, I am amazed at how my mind has compressed a whole years worth of memories into a few seemingly inescapable images that act as cover-pages to vague memories that are bound to them.

Some of those images are of people and things that made the past year memorable. Some of them are pixelated renditions of decisions I have made, each one within a random mix of courage, blind faith, hope, desire, helplessness, grief, ecstasy, ambition...

Yet those images and memories are impoverished in their lack of detail, their inability to recollect the name of a stranger I encountered in a tram, with home I chatted for half an hour about a book I was reading. I am unable to deconstruct the 525600 minutes that made up 2007, let alone recapture even a few that stood out because they were starkly different from the rest. The simple pleasure filled minutes that the past year was studded with, like those I would have spent reading a long, personal letter from a friend, or lying on a little tuft gazing at the stars. My mind vaguely remembers the weeks I spent lost in unbearable grief, but my eyes have forgotten the steady stream of tears that flowed beneath them and flooded my heart.

The gentle flow of time has eroded most of the memories that the past year had created. It has blunted the edges of others and tinted even the most gruesome with a mild hue of romance.

Perhaps it is fitting that memories only offer hopelessly abbreviated and overly romanticised visions of the past, because there is little to be gained by fixating ourselves on the bygones of life, or for that matter on what is yet to come. While the wisdom of the past is meant to be consulted and the promises of the future summoned to inspire us, they can be meaningful instruments only when they are infused in the present moment; for ‘now’ is the only place where the wonders of life unfold.

it's warm and raining

It’s warm and raining
If I wasn’t working
I’ll be walking
Walking in the rain, thinking
Jumping over puddles, dreaming
But I am not complaining
Because I know the stars are blinking
And my heart is flaming...
Whenever it’s warm and raining