Old thoughts and expired memories

My father commented this old letter I had written home about four and a half years ago as he was cleaning the "Inbox"... bringing back memories of the 'International Student" that I once was.

"I stand alone among the multitude… just another insignificant head among thousands of others walking along in a big free world. When I come back, along with the stories of pride and joy, of poverty and sacrifice, of victory and defeat, of freedom and confinement, I will also tell you what it feels like to live in a place where you are nobody's son… nobody's brother… or grand child or nephew… where even friends hardly notice you unless they think they are in competition with you and you win. I will also tell you of the pride you feel when you simply manage to survive in such a place for as long as I have… I am sure many others have done it before me, but I stand proud today for going though such times and not losing my sensitivity, my pride, or without forgetting who I am."

It's surreal now to look back at the course of my life. The way I have matured through the it's twists and turns of the last five years... but even more how much I have learnt... and yet remain none the wiser for it.

Untold stories

[Snippet 4] elaborated...

The serene stillness of the vehicle and calm rhythmic beat of its engine contrasted the looks of weariness and impatience on the faces of its passengers who were in a hurry to reach numerous destinations. Their bus bore without shame or self consciousness, evidence of rugged use, neglect, wear and tear of unkind roads, tolerance of ill mannered children who cut the lining on its modest seats and adolescents who etched their names on its sides, immortalising their desire for cheap fame. But the vehicle which had singularly served its rural village route for nearly three and a half decades looked much older and frail even considering the fact that it was toiling well past its retirement age. Perhaps it was not an icon of reassurance and dependability in the minds of its passengers, but even strangers who boarded it hardly found any reason to doubt its commitment to take them to their destination.

Passengers, who sat themselves on its rigid seats or prepared to endure the rocking journey with the aid of a steady metal pole fixed to its roof, rarely expected the ride to be comfortable or fast. A dented front bumper, gashed grill, smoky lights and rusted wipers that drooped across the scratched windshields, sculpted a look of profound sadness on its face, which was accentuated by occasional wails and shrieks of invisible body parts. Engineered into the body of this lifeless machine was however an eerie reflection of the sadness that some of its passengers bore deep inside.

The hollow metal chassis afforded them a space in which they were free to take off masks of stern looks and tight lips that they had worn through the day. It silently offered them comfort and empathy; perhaps because it is easier to embrace sadness in the company of others who are sad and therefore can understand and empathise with us in our misery. The burden of misery is amplified in the company of those who are happy, whose happiness enforces itself on us and compels us to smile out of fear and guilt, that any hint of sadness on our faces might rob them of their fleeting moment of bliss.

Yet the bus did not inhibit happiness. In fact it had witnessed on a daily basis, emotions ranging from the blissful excitement and hopeful anticipation to moments of life-altering happiness. For well over a generation, it had witnessed courtship, the composition and exchange of love letters which it often also couriered along with their bearers and recipients, a first brief kiss of lovers, holding hands and secret whispers.

It had hosted meetings of long lost friends and companies of youth on adventurous road-trips. Its windows had reflected smiles that passengers often stole from a bygone memory, an imagined conversation or a happy surprise; in the mysterious solitude within a community of tightly compressed commuters. At times those same windows may have framed and showcased a spectrum of emotions on those faces to a curious bystander standing by the roadside.

Even though its metal heart was too rigid to melt and dissolve with tears of a despondent soul, it was often sensitive enough to dry those tears with a murky breeze or hide them among stray raindrops that sometimes flew in through open shutters. The passage of many years had taught the rickety old metal beast to appreciate the richness of human life and the broad emotional spectrum of human experience.

There have been a few rare moments in its life when it actually felt more 'human' than the soulless, lifeless and senseless machine that people who nervously crossed the road in front of it, often suspected it to be. The driver and conductor harboured an unfurnished gratitude for the share of hard labour it had contributed to sustaining their lives and feeding their families. But with every pothole that it crawled back out of and with each passing year, the frail metal box and its wheels lost the ability to satisfy their patron's demands for comfort and speed.

Few of its passengers if any, held it in their thoughts, let alone feel a debt of thankfulness for its part in easing their daily struggles. Perhaps it was fitting that they didn't, because the bus would have been tormented by the guilt inducing suspicion that it may have robbed from its patrons, moments and thoughts that belonged to their own loved ones. Their mechanical slave that ungrudgingly took them to work, to school and to the markets in the city; did not possess any faculty to love its clients and so it did not make demands of love and affection from them either, or even make them feel obliged.

Yet the dead metal of its body, the worn out seats and wooden floor held in fond memory; each stop that punctuated the torturously monotonous journey that it repeated a dozen times each day. It remembered with affection, the faces of those who got on and off at each stop.

It paid equal attention to their moods each day and with patience and silent wisdom, watched their lives unfold. A child whose birth was excitedly announced within its chamber had grown into a man and had children of his own, and confined over all those years to the same narrow stretch of road that linked the green fields of an anonymous village to the intimidating highways and bellows of a crowded gray city, it chronicled wordlessly the unobserved stories of a nation.

(Published in The Sunday Times - Mirror Magazine (20/01/2008)

4. Healing Wounds

Living in a very small world: and dying to have a piece of it

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.

3. Healing Wounds

Crossing over to the other side: of a unitary state

The refurbished metal “Queen of Jaffna” gracefully strode up to the platform in Medawachchiya by 10.30 am - the time I usually start to begin to consider the prospect of crawling out of bed on a regular holiday. But this day was different. I was running without knowing why, being urged by Sachindra to hurry, and dashing along the platform without knowing what the rush is all about, clutching my travel bag by its failing strap and water bottle in tow.

It seemed the whole train was disembarking and everyone was running in from both directions of the platform towards the only exit. Sachindra was already standing in line and I joined him a few paces behind. Soon a throng of people were waiting impatiently, in a line that stretched beyond my view of the distant edge of the platform, to be interrogated and for their belongings and bodies to be dug and prodded by unfriendly policemen.

Having spent five years away from Sri Lanka, I could no longer take roadblocks and body checks as facts of daily life. My mind was no longer numb to the predicament of the lady in front of us whose neatly packed clothes were rudely pulled out of her bag and carelessly put back in by the male serviceman. My ideological right cerebral hemisphere was protesting her unquestioned submission to this gross invasion of privacy and the insensitivity of the individual policeman. I was next, and as clothes, chocolates and a torch were dug out from my bag, a residual anger frothed inside me, not so much about the inconvenience I had to suffer but for the embarrassment a fellow citizen, much like my own mother, had been subjected to a few minutes before. Yet, the less emotional left cerebral hemisphere kept interjecting that these body and bag checks made my journey relatively safer. Would she prefer a higher level of 'customer care' at the cost of an additional delay, perhaps an hour or two more for the entire train to be checked with gentle courtesy? ‘But the war is over’, the right side of the brain shot back. ‘Is it really?’ the left planted an arguably rational, but forever undeterminable, state-sponsored doubt.

It took another two and a half hours until all the passengers and the train itself was declared bomb free. By then, the entire length of the train, its every passenger and their belongings had been thoroughly checked. Our destinations, intentions of travel, national identity card details, those of our host and the intended date of return had all been recorded in a large register by two other policemen. I assumed their neck muscles would not have survived a single day if they had looked up from the register to spare a smile or polite glance at each individual traveller. Any terrorist whose details were recorded in that book, would have the peace of mind that a search for his or her record in it would take longer than their life-expectancy at birth - however long terrorists and their human shields were expected to live.

I have a faint memory of the news of the “Yal Devi” train being blown up by the LTTE. There was even a song about it that I repeatedly heard on TV, “Yal Devi dumriya mediri, pipiree visiunaa… Thrasthavadin kala aparaaden, mithuran ahimi unaa…” I could not explain how, but after 24 years, I cloud still remember its tune and opening stanza. Would those people who lost their lives on that fateful day in January 1985 still be alive if the passengers were checked as we were? Between then and now, when did we stop writing songs for the friends we lost in this war? How could we have learned to be numb and submissive in the face of so much death and violence and yet have so much energy and sensitivity left over to celebrate its end?

I could not recall being so thoroughly checked or interrogated in any of my limited travels abroad. As permanent resident of Australia (but a Sri Lankan citizen travelling on a Sri Lankan passport) I would not be hassled so much on a visit to New Zealand. Here I was, travelling from one city to another within Sri Lanka as a Sri Lankan citizen! Politically, the war had been won and the country has been ‘unified’ under one government and its rule of law. Constitutionally, Sri Lanka is a unitary state because we can travel within the country without a visa. In reality however, under the provisions of the enacted state of emergency, it is more difficult for an ordinary Sri Lankan citizen to gain access to the northern regions beyond Medawachchiya than it is to enter Singapore – where Sri Lankan citizens are given temporary visas on arrival. Legally, we were travelling within a free and democratic country, but practically it felt like crossing over to another. Literally, I could get assaulted or threatened (or abducted in an unmarked van) for publicly voicing such ‘unpatriotic’ thoughts.

I had embarked on this journey with preconceived opinions about the sanctity of human liberty what it means to be free, uninformed perceptions about war and its consequences as well as moral and intellectual biases that tinted my view of society, its power structures and politics. Men and women had to submit their bodies to be searched, for the soldiers to determine whether any of us posed a threat to national security. As I walked out of the station, still debating the pros and cons of how we have chosen to fight terrorism, I was confronted with the humbling realisation that all my opinions, perceptions and biases were being severely challenged by the complexity of this reality that I had grown up with, yet knew very little about and remained unexplored and unchallenged by thought or reason.

2. Healing Wounds

Linking North and South: what trains cannot do

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 deliberate.

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.