August

The month of August
has brought sudden rain – the heat would have been
unbearable, otherwise – the familiar
tea coloured puddles, like mirrors
of sky water reflecting earth

the school yard is strewn with hopes
this school, that is now our home.

we came here in a flock
wading across a hollowed lagoon
against a shower of a lethal kind
death falling from the sky
like the anger of gods

that was May.

in this classroom
the lessons are muted from life’s unfolding
the blackboard
empty like our immediate futures

the row of plastic toilets
is a part of our lives
like those guava trees
in our garden, or the well
the gutters are overflowing
with donated goods
and the kindness of other people

we wear bands
around our necks, sometimes hips
with keys to those homes
abandoned

like in those power-cut evenings
back in the village
we sit together cracking jokes
as the evenings grow longer
as the jokes run out or begin to repeat
as time refuses to tick

The Beauty of Vavuniya

the beauty of Vavuniya

In my recent visit to Vavuniya, I visited a women’s self help group in Thekkawatta. They had all come with their children, dressed up for a show. It was good to see how much beauty is there in Vavuniya, despite all the turmoil and sad stories we hear from the camps.

Beauty as a Basic Need

Yesterday, the discussion that meandered through censorship, cultural policies, art and society left my mind racing through out the night. My mind was working through the ideas expressed in the forum, sifting through, scrutinizing, recalling statements, evaluating…maybe like my family feels, I am just plain mad. Or I am just one of ‘them’. So who are ‘they’?

I would like to call ‘them’ as people whose basic needs are slightly different, or more than the others. I really have no idea, if the people whom I meet day in day out, people who seem to have everything, and people who don’t seem to have anything, have anything in common with me. Do they really want the things I want. Have they got them? Are they happy?

Do people feel beauty is a basic need? When I say beauty, i don’t mean the way some men are hung up on some fantasy woman with 32-28-32 figure Naomi Campbell types, or women dreaming of some male equivalent,(whatever their measurements are…) I mean do people want beauty as expressed in nature, in art, in the diversity of our smiles? Do we search for it, the way we search for truth, freedom, justice, identity?

Some of my colleagues expressed that in our community, spaces for social communion and sharing have been erased. Our families are emotionally sterile grounds, a simple site where a struggle is for survival alone. I wonder if it is merely the economics of it, why someone wouldn’t really consider watching a movie every now and then, a need? Or going to a play? At least some of these movies, plays, books, poems,paintings and music fulfill in me a sort of a hunger; they ease my pain a bit; make me reflect; give my mad meandering mind a meaning to hold on to. Why do people around me not want these, the way they want food, clothes, jobs, sex or religion? Or is this only normal, and it is again myself, slightly eccentric in my needs, slightly complicated, doomed for a bit of mad meandering?

Great thinkers have already said that basic needs goes beyond the requisites of basic survival. Maxneef says its well being, freedom, identity, love etc. But why is it only Maxneef and the like, a minority, and not the whole lot of us? Is there no common human element in us six billion?

Sunil says it’s a very Sinhalese-Buddhist disease, this negation of complex needs, as you find in Sri Lanka. I can call it Capitalist-Nationalist disease. I mean, Cancer or Aids; whichever, right?

After the forum, on my way home, I chat up the cab driver. He’s a shaken chap. Locked up in his small car, pushing into middle age. He’s no Maxneef. But his mind has started questioning. He says he hasn’t seen a movie or held the hand of a girl in a long time. he says he feels like living dead. Hacked. Tired. Hopeless. Lost. Lonely.

And I meet so many people like that day in day out. Tired, hopeless, lost, lonely people. It’s like we carry a tiny glass capsule around ourselves, and trapped inside we all feel the same.

And I really don’t know…when I get this feeling, which is not even loneliness, I go watch a film or read a book and it temporarily gives me the beauty I lack in myself, in my life. So, I recommend the same pill to the cabby, ‘there’s Akasa Kusum, go watch it…and about a girl, i don’t know really the way around that one, but i wish you luck!’

Ha ha ha! (Just a way of finishing the whole thing, in wanting better words…)

Summer Memories

Sometimes, in the most unexpected moments, random things fall into place, fitting together like in an Italian mosaic and you discover certain truths about yourself, that you should have known long ago.

The last two weeks in summer Europe had a moment like that. I was on a train from Bern to Geneva and looking out of the window came across this perfect rainbow over a field of sunflowers. The rainbow traveled with me for a while, as if to show, life is as vast as this, so smile…

This picture will stay with me, crystallized in to a Van Gough painting. I was leafing through Devisidero by Michael Ondaatje, casually mixing those words with the residues of my emotions over Sujee. It was as if I could turn my head and see him returning from the restaurant car with a cappuccino. His presence stayed with me those two weeks… with this book he gifted me, with his little note and signature on its inner folio…

Devisidero talks of the delicate violence in our lives. About relationships left without closure. And I suddenly realized why I sulk over coming to Europe so much. I love the European  summers. Walking on small footpaths hemmed in with blue berry bushes and crab apple trees. The blood maples. The sun light on your skin…and yet there is this strage foreboding I have that makes me want to rush for the next flight back home. And I realise now, that it is my past in Sweden. The summer trees return to haunt me about relationships I have left behind without a closure some years back. And I remember the plum tree from Ulla’s garden…the lawn I used to mow for her…

I had left Sweden promising to return 3 months later and I never did. I somehow feel guilty about entering the inner circle of the Wingmark family and then having to leave it. You can’t enter in to peoples hearts randomly and walk away…there’s an unbearable amount of guilt invovlved in the act. You can’t have two families at two corners in the world. And my circumstances were such that I would have felt terribly guilty which ever I chose to be with. But this must be what I must reconcile with.

There are so many things about the choice I made to stay in Colombo something I do not regret; and am truly happy with. However these occasional visits to Europe bring me these past memories of summer time and days of love and being a part of someone else’s life. There’s an aching when you know that you cannot bring these two worlds together; that they are separate, and you are the thin stretched line between them.

And I see my ghost walking down familiar footpath from my home in Hjarup to the bus stop on a similar summer day, the silver Birch shimmering in the sun…

Landscapes I have once loved and abandoned…

Making a Difference

(To Tissa, for making a difference, and hoping you would continue)

On your forty-first birthday

You tell me

You are worried of leaving the world

Without making a difference

 

And I,

Penchant for the affections

Missing in your voice

Mark the contours of Difference

By my own everyday-terms

Splashing words, convictions

That make little sense to you

Like tears

 

I fear

Our destinies will not allow us

Triumphs beyond mundane glories

 

You casually gaze at the sketch

Of years behind you:

In the long run, nothing makes sense

 

And I stare at the abstract years ahead

As scars blossom inside

In hybrid fluorescence

As Loss yawns in to the

Darkness, spreading

 

***

In my personal tragedy

Trivial, smothering

I forget you once again

Loose conscience in daily workload

Sink into a willful comatose

 

And in your personal tragedy

Poignant, lethal

You slip into intractable coma

Beyond my reach

 

It’s a year of knowing you –

Not knowing you –

A thin cord binding us

Professionally, and beyond –

A connection I could have easily defined

 

Now I have to invent this moment

For myself, beside your bed

Tugging at that amorphous end to lift you

From your slumber

 

With an incomplete invitation:

I have written sentences

That needs your healing

Perfection

 

Is how you make a difference,

I reckon

 

A word in its right place

Lodged deeply in some one’s thoughts

 

Betal

Motifs

 

it is the line of motifs,

 

the rule of fate

 

as ancient as the carvings

 

on a moonstone,

 

like something symbolic

written on an ola leaf

with a speical sort of pen.

something scultped in to the sands of time

an elephantine miniature, in stone

Dark Mere

And then I come across

this dark mere

this stony cliff inside you

rising out of the soft waves of

the most gentle soul I knew you had

 against this cold dark battered rock

I lay my cheek and wonder why 

Galle

 

 

 

 

 

IL DIVO

Watch how these four handsome men make Opera go Pop. Well, indeed thye are amazingly good looking, multicultural and suave, classic, talented etc etc…everything to make a woman’s heart melt.
But I am so sick of super stars. It’s the Amrican Idol’s Simon behind them.
They are great singers…but I am so sick of perfect looking men with perfect voices in prefect dresses in perfect places…singing in Spanish at that.

Do we all want so much ‘phenomena’ in our lives?