The Forgotten: He who died for me

There was always something that bothered me about the man in olive fatigues holding a gun who stood at the top of the street. I think this is a feeling that was/ is shared by a good many people in Sri Lanka over the last years and now. The fact that he stood in the sun, two wet streaks running down the sides of his face, while we scuttled to find a shady spot bothered me then. It bothers me now.

But I’d never really been able to put my finger on why it exactly bothered me. I rationalised that in a country where there was a war, someone had to die, someone had to give their life. For if I didn’t think like that, I guess I would need to take up arms and give my life too for ‘the cause’ whatever that was.

Yesterday, I found why it bothered me so much. I went for a concert held as a fundraiser to fund a housing scheme for soldiers. At the start of the concert two minutes’ silence was observed for those who gave their life for us. And images I’d seen in the media rose unbidden while I stood thinking, being reminded once again, that every day of my life I stood on the blood and tears of so many men. And though for a moment something snapped within me as it always does at the end of this train of thought, this wasn’t the powerful moment. That was to come much later.

In the middle of the concert a soldier, who had lost his leg to the war, sang a couple of songs too. After the singing, he hobbled off stage – stiff-legged, leaning heavily on a metal cane, concentratingly watching his feet put one in front of the other. That half a minute he took to painfully walk off the stage brought home the fact that no matter how much we thank the forces, no matter how much we give to ‘them’, it’s never enough. Never.

We thank the army, the navy, the air force, the entire thrivida hamudava. But how many of us remember that it’s not a ‘people’, a mass we must thank, but one person at a time? One person at a time? A person who will live the rest of his life without an arm and/ or leg that was familiar to him as much as my arm and leg is familiar to me now?

When we observe those two minutes of silence, when we see images of the dead, our dead, we think of them as those who died for us, but forget to see that it was he who died for us.

And I guess that is the reality of war. Not that someone had to stand in the sun so I can stand in the shade, but that when I pay tribute, I pay tribute to a lot of people. Not really to the one person who watched life expire from his limbs, lungs, loved ones.

In reality then, doesn’t that one soldier, that one person who died forever, or in bits and pieces as he was de-limbed, therefore remain to me forever nameless? Faceless?

Forgotten?

Dimi tagged me..Grrr!

Ok, so I have to do this weird tag thing all because of Dimi..

To do:

1. Grab the book closest to you.

2. Open to page 123, go down to the fifth sentence.

3. Post the text of next 3 sentences on your blog.

4. Name of the book and the author.

5. Tag three people.

Done:

1. Grabbed

2. Opened. Fifth sentence found.

3. "The serfs, as it happened, believed rumours then circulating that the new king, Alexander II, intended to liberate them unconditionally. They smelled a rat. They did not spot Count Tolstoy's pretentiousness but feared, rather, his (non-existent) business acumen, and flatly refused his proposal."

4. Paul Johnson, Intellectuals

5. I tag Turtle (whose uni work is not half as important as this!), Jokerman (who will finally kill me for this surely) and Evil (who will either find this distraction useful in his new dis-tobacco-ed state OR never visit this blog again!).

And Dimi, you ain't getting any chocolate from ME! :op

Going home - the scary and the hope :o)

Tonight I go back home to Sri Lanka and I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit this week. There are things I look forward to, but there are lots of things that also scare me. This fear, I think, is rooted in the fact that I have come to realize that I don’t really know Sri Lanka. I grew up in Colombo, and I don’t think I knew the real Sri Lanka except in glimpses here and there. It is as Arthur Jarvis said, in Alan Paton's Cry, The Beloved Country, of growing up in South Africa:

“One can ride, as I rode when I was a boy, over green hills and into great valleys. One can see, as I saw when I was a boy, the reserves of the Bantu people and see nothing of what was happening there at all… One can read, as I read when I was a boy, the brochures about lovely South Africa, that land of sun and beauty sheltered from the storms of the world, and feel pride in it and love for it, and yet know nothing about it at all. It is only as one grows up that one learns of the hates and fears of our country. It is only then that one’s love grows deep and passionate, as a man may love a woman who is true, false, cold, loving, cruel and afraid.”

What I know of the real Sri Lanka is so little because as a teenager growing up, one lives (at least I did) in a bubble where there’s so much going on – school, exams, sport, emotional roller-coasters – that you don’t let yourself really open your eyes and look around you…except for a brief cursory glance. It really is when you start growing up that you learn of the real storms thundering around you. But I did that growing up elsewhere, outside of Sri Lanka. I saw bits of Sri Lanka through these new “grown up” eyes during holidays – but that’s really what they were in the end – holidays in which I saw things, heard things, but left behind at the end of the month.

I did my growing up and the real seeing and hearing in Melbourne. I did find a lot of 'good' here, but in end, I can’t reconcile myself to accept the pile of bad no matter how sparkly the pile of good glitters. Men arrive on these shores with only the clothes on their back, for fear of their lives, and are locked up like common criminals; and families which were victimised and broken apart by fundamentalists elsewhere are once again victimised and broken apart by liberals here – again and again. There's nothing as painful as watching a grown man cry for his wife, for his children; there's nothing as uplifting as promising him you'd find a way; and there's nothing to compare to the fear that keeps you awake night after night afraid of other men's policies that'll make your words drown in nothingness. In some ways, I'm leaving because I know I don't want to stay.

When I return to Sri Lanka, I return to what I'd seen only in glimpses here and there over the last couple of decades. But also buried deep within those slightly thundery unsure images and the “golden beaches” of brochures and postcards, I also carry a few special images; rare glimpses of real radiance like the complete untouched beauty of the morning fog over Lokgaloya. I found that unexpectedly, the breath caught in my throat, as I passed through on the way elsewhere.

So I leave behind the country I could not really connect with, the country that destroyed my faith in simple humanity. I know I will never return to Melbourne. For me, that golden ball of fire in the sky here is a hypocrite; lighting the blue skies whilst a dark thundery cloud lies hidden on the horizon; firing mundane trees to blanket whole areas in thick grey fog.

Yes, it's inevitable that I’ll see such dark clouds in the blue skies of Sri Lanka too. Yet that is MY country and right now, that seems to make all the difference. And so here's hoping for real love for Sri Lanka in the coming months and years. And maybe, just maybe, even real and dramatic enough to be “deep and passionate, as a man may love a woman who is true, false, cold, loving, cruel and afraid.”

Painting: Monet's Red Kerchief

Too damn hilarious! :o)

You know how you see something hilarious and think, damn, why didn't I bring my camera? Well, this friend of mine had her camera and captured these on the doors of the Ladies and Gents bathrooms in (I believe) Amsterdam :o) Apparently, a friend who was with her was embarrassed she chose to photograph this, but as she later told me, "but how often do you see things like that???" (That quote's in pink cos she's a pink sort of person :o)

The Ladies:

The Gents:

Just too damn funny!

Both photos: Viola Lobert

Note for Viola: Thank yoouuuu for letting me put these up here! :o) Remembering that you're a "pink sort of person" made me miss you more now!! :'o( xox

Do I really want to be a lawyer?!?

Next Tuesday I sit for (hopefully) my final exam and so this is probably not the time to question the point of the last four years…yet, now that I’m almost at the end, I do question it. I wanted to read and write, write and read all my life, yet law was tempting and when it knocked, I gave in and bid it welcome. And now that I have to decide on a career path and find a job, I really do wonder at it. At the choice I made. And more at the choice I might have let slip past.

There’s a path before you, a path that ends at a cliff, a path you have not walked before. Once you start walking it, you know there can be no returning, not to what you leave behind. So you make a decision to walk, you find someone who makes the sunshine a little bit brighter around you and put one foot in front of the other.

You take their hand and walk, the sweet scent of the world wafting around you. Little stones prick the soft soles, boulders lie across the path, flowers bloom prettily while thorns run down their green stalks. You choose to walk around the boulders, furtively wipe the blood off your fingers and ignore the pricks of pain for if you did not, that path would be walked alone. Alone, in the dark of night when pain is unseen, in the monsoons when tears invisible.

At the end of the path lies the cliff, with the ocean below, yet out of sight. And you don’t know if the waves roll in softly or thunder against the rock. You don’t know if the water is warm and light-dappled or icy and deep. Without the safety of knowing, you need to jump. For you said you would. You took a foot off that cliff, that promising hand in your clammy one, and know now it’s too late to refuse. Too late to run to the footsteps you now suddenly hear behind you. The foot prints you had not stopped to examine before. But it’s too late to run back now for you have committed yourself too much.

If a drowning man clutches at straws, a falling man grabs at anything that floats past. And when you take that jump, what else do you hang on to but optimism? But optimism can be reality’s worst nightmare for it creates hope. It’s the softly fading rainbow of the man losing sight. It makes you search the vacant air for a stray parachute. It keeps the water warm, the sand soft below. And hope never dies. Not till the icy water numbs the pain and you lie on the rocks below, your head splintered, unseeing eyes staring at the empty blue of the sky arching above. Only then, only then, will hope die its silently shattered death.

But who’s to say the parachute will not come?

Now back to the studying...ack!

Hope on the Edge

When you’re a kid, there’s this game some adults play with you. They hold out a fist to you and ask you to guess what they hold within. So you guess – a chocolate! a marble! And some adults give you whatever it is they brought. But there were others. Others who made you peel back their fingers, one by one, till you can see the treasure they hold, till you can grasp it within your own small fist.

Life is like this I think. A fist held out to you, fingers to be peeled back one by one. Yet the difference is you’re no longer a child. You hope for the chocolate, the coloured marble, but somewhere in the back of your mind you know there could be something nasty, something sick. Yet, since hope is a funny thing, you peel back the fingers anyway.

Some are fast enough to find a glittery treasure within a few minutes, whilst others spend their whole life without once catching sight of anything beautiful. Some catch sight of a pretty shade and grasp it only to find that the colour fades too soon. Some peel back the fingers to find that the fist held nothing at all.

However, there are lucky ones among us. The ones who find the marble. The marble with the stripe of colours held tight within the glass. In this marble of life, that stripe is a Mobius strip – one-sided, one edged. Bits of it we walk the right way up, bits of upside down, but all of it on the same path. There’s only one very small challenge in walking through this colourfully marbled world. Whether one breaks into dance on the right-way-up bits or gets too dizzy on the upside-down bits, we need to stay away from the edge.

For beyond that edge, hope does not exist. And fists will never be extended again.