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