Hopeless”Rainbows in Braille” – A collection of short stories – By Elmo Jayawardena
If not for the hounding of the innocent and the semi innocent village youth in the late 80’s, Ekanayaka would never have come to Colombo. Then I would not have met him or known who he is. Strange how life unfolds; a remote village, a disturbing time, someone escapes a possible gruesome death for being found guilty for a tenth of a reason. Years later I hear the hardly recallable agonizing details and decided to write this story. That’s how it all began and here I am, locked up in a hotel room in Amsterdam on a cold winter day, making my infantile attempt to reach you and others who may want to know the truth. It is our sacred duty that we should do our best to remember, lest they be forgotten; the sad times and the horrifying events that plagued our beloved land and incinerated its innocent.
Those were the years the Island was deluged in deep turmoil. We certainly are no strangers to self-created disasters, but this was more dreadful than other times we remember. The war in the north was going from bad to worse and as if that wasn’t enough the south too was being fragmented on different issues. Not ethnic or minority rights but more on matters of equality and the pursuit of happiness and liberty, sacred to the down-trodden, meaningless to the powers that be. That would be the gist of this story.
“What is right and wrong Puthey?” questioned Silohami. “These do not apply to people like us; they just want to kill everyone.”
That was Ekanayaka’s mother Silohami. She was doing her best to get her son to join the minor exodus of the village youth who packed their meager belongings and left home in a hurry to get lost in the big cities. People in high places had given the orders to garland anyone with flaming tyres if they had even been remotely connected to the southern uprising. The crusade was on, like a slow-burning fuse, to cleanse the villages from the youthful vermin who were trying to tell the Government how to run the country. Silohami had heard things, and knew it wouldn’t be long before the black jeeps came to Kumburupitiya and maybe some dark-uniformed guards walked across the little paddy field to the mud and wattle hut that Silo called home. She was scared and she shared her thoughts with Sarali.
“It’s best Amme,” Sarali fought the tears. “We both will survive; but Aiya must leave the village and go away before it’s too late.”
“I haven’t done any wrong,” Ekanayaka made a mild protest. He was confused, not between possible answers but between options that seemed wrong whichever way he chose to look.
“I only went to the meeting to hear what they had to say,” he added in defence.
“Not that they have all the answers, but at least they are giving hope to poor people like us who have been corralled in poverty all our lives.”
“They know that Puthey, it’s just that they don’t care.”
“I’ll tell them.”
“They won’t ask Puthey, they have no time for that.”
She sighed in defeat. She’s seen similar things before, a long time ago.
That’s how Ekanayaka left Kumburupitiya and made his way to Colombo. It was the story of hundreds, the young who had gone to listen to the promises of a possible change that was to come.
“It’s been done before,” they proudly proclaimed wearing tilted berets.
They quoted China and Russia and went on to describe in mesmerizing detail about Fidel, Raul and Che, and the eighty-two who came in the ‘Granma’ from the Tuxpan riverbank across the Gulf of Mexico heading for Cuba to liberate their homeland.
“It’s been done before,” they confidently repeated. “It can be done again.”
“Now is the time to rise,” the oratory echoed in small gatherings, “better to stand and die than to kneel and be trodden.”
They took down the names and gave numbers. Ekanayaka was twenty three.
That’s why he left Kumburupitiya. Some youth had simply disappeared. They too had been mere numbers. Sarali cried and Silohami sighed when Ekanayaka said ‘Good-bye’.
Silo visits the temple almost everyday. It gives her peace. The flowers are always there on the scrub bushes. The trespassing creepers bloom hundreds of little purple flowers, maybe as a levy for the space they occupy. She picks them and takes them to the shrine. Sometimes she lights joss-sticks too, the few she can afford.
When the letters come she takes it to the temple and the novice priest reads them for her. Sometimes if he has the time he would write a reply, a short one to say Silo is well and the roof didn’t leak for the rain or maybe another detail of her long standing plan to go to Mihintale to take atasil for Poson.
“She is well, and she sounds happy,” the novice priest reads and tells Silo, he knows that’s all she wants to hear.
“Says she looks after two children and cleans the house and cooks for the family.”
“On Sundays she does not work, meets others like her in a park and talks of home and listens to cassettes, says still her favourite is Nanda Malini.”
“It seems to be getting cold there, she goes out in warm clothes and sometimes wears gloves to cover her hands; it is that cold, says she will send you a picture soon.”
Silo walks back home happy. The letters make the days bright and the skies bluer than blue. Sarali too had left like others. Silo thought her daughter was clever, that’s what they all said when the results came. Even the Principal was proud. That is why for two years she struggled and struggled, learning things Silo thought would get Sarali the best jobs in the best places.
“If your daughter completes the Course she only has to send a letter and they will come to Kumburupitiya looking for her,” so said the man in the tall building in Matara, they taught things about computers.
Nobody came looking; she did finish the course and sent the letters, carefully worded applications through registered post. She wrote them till her fingers were sore and the tears started to blot the very words on the neat white papers.
It was time to admit defeat and go someplace far away; to clean and cook and look after children and on Sundays to talk with friends of home and listen to Nanda Malini Gokula.
Ekanayaka wears a dark brown uniform, a brown cap and heavy boots to trample the planet. The whole lot looks cheap including the broad black belt that has a big brass buckle. Around his neck is a chord that carries a whistle, to blow if things go wrong.
“The buckle must shine for me to see my face,” the sergeant roars at everyone. He likes to roar, says he learnt it in the army, serving in the north. That’s how he had come be in the security business, richly rewarded for serving the country, to be a notch higher than the likes of Ekanayaka, a new platform to roar from at his minions, to imitate the roars he had heard when he was a younger man fighting a nobody’s war in the north.
“Here, you just stand and keep watch,” he growls in contempt.
“There we fought and died.”
He certainly was very much alive, maybe the phrase was borrowed; true he had been with the forces, true many died in the north and other places, maybe far too many. At least he is alive to bark or roar and tell the stories and look at his face on belt buckles.
Ekanayaka’s job is to keep standing; twelve hours he stands outside the gate and cannot even lean against the wall. The sun scorches and his throat gets dry and he sips a mouthful from the plastic bottle he has in his satchel. The water is warm and tasteless.
The last three hours are the worst. He counts half hours and then the quarters and brings it down to five minute slots and breathes a sigh of relief when his replacement comes.
“Time to go,” says his counterpart. They look the same, cheap brown uniform and cheap cap and boots to trample the planet and the shining buckle to see the face.
“Any plans?” he smiles smugly and inquires.
“Yes, I am going to the Hilton for dinner,” Ekanayaka replies. That’s what he planned to do today and spent twelve hours going through the details. It’s a good thing he had the time, standing in the sun, hour after hour, watching what’s around till he couldn’t see anything, then watching again to see something, eyes rolling thoughts twirling, twelve hours is a long time, it goes from boring to very boring and then settles at annoying. That is why it is nice to plan something, like the Hilton trip, what to do, where to sit and what to order to eat and how much to drink.
He ambles to the bus and takes a window seat. The bus is almost empty, only a few girls going home from their factory job; just cloth-cutters and button fixers, not the type that you can take to the Hilton for dinner. Ekanayaka sits and makes attempts to relax, his legs ache from the long tedious half day’s stand. He fine tunes his evening rendezvous, going into little details like whether he would take butter or margarine and whether it would be tea or coffee to wash down the food and then of course how fat the tip should be. The bus ploughs through the evening traffic in front of the Lake House and turns left to come around the bend passing the old parliament. Ekanayaka sees the sunlight reflected on the multi-tiered windows of the majestic Hilton.
“Take me to the Hilton” he remembers that picture of a man in a smart dark-blue suit standing on a snow covered plain looking up to the sky and instructing to none.
“Stupid people who have nothing else to do than say stupid things to the world,” Ekanayaka used to think. He had at one time stood twelve hours near that picture when he did guard rounds at the hotel. Enough time to digest every detail of the blue suited man’s “take me to the Hilton” command.
The bus comes adjacent to the hotel and stops to board someone standing with an outstretched hand. That’s when Ekanayaka makes his decision and postpones his trip to another day. He changes his mind and decides to go to the hovel that he shares with three others like him in Pamankada.
“Take me to the Hilton,” he mumbles in mock as the bus pulls out from the bus-stop and the hotel disappears behind the dust covered rear window. He squashes his dream of drinking and dining with the rich and curses the parliament and the leaders who had sat there, the ones who had made him leave his home in Kumburupitiya and waste his life in Colombo wearing his silly uniform and polishing his belt buckle. The bus heads towards the Galle Face Green where the fat and the rich of Colombo walk to keep their cholesterol down and their heartbeats in rhythm.
Silohami knows her son is safe. Silohami knows her daughter is safe. She misses them both very much, most times on most days and in vast measures. It is as if someone had gorged her eyes out and shut her world. But they are safe, that’s why she goes to the temple to kneel and pray and offer little purple flowers in gratitude.
She knows a lot more than she tells the world. She hides a lot too. Such memories are hidden and concealed deep, locked and sealed, too painful to takeout and ponder unless they come out on their own to torment her. That she cannot help, she just endures.
Silohami knows Ekanayaka wears a uniform and lives in a hovel. She knows he is protecting people by standing twelve hours at a time in front of a wall. Could be the very same people they once wanted to destroy, the ones who had wickedly and indelibly destroyed them. He protects their system too, the one they so passionately wanted to change, the system that had perpetually suffocated them and finally annihilated most of them. The story sounds meaningless to Silohami. But then, she knows such is life, mostly meaningless.
Sarali sends her salary home, hard earned dinars by cleaning houses and cooking for a family and looking after their children. She slaves and saves and wants to come back one day to Kumburupitiya to look after Silo and find some happiness. The yearnings she had of life are no more. She knows that they were nothing but dreams that danced in her mind and disappeared in the morning.
It was the novice priest who praised to Silohami about people like her Sarali.
“They are the ones who send the money, the poor who have gone to slave and suffer in other lands; it is their money that this country spends.”
Some of these things she understands, but most she couldn’t. What good would understanding do when it changed nothing? That’s why she went to the temple and picked the purple flowers on the creepers to offer to the gods in humble gratitude.
Sometimes she opens the locks and breaks the seals and brings out the past and weeps. She remembers in detail, how she was heavy with her second child and how she waited carrying the toddler Ekanayaka in her arms. She waited and waited but he never came back.
He just disappeared; they came in a black jeep and took him away, never to return. He and his friends simply vanished without a trace, guilty of making infant attempts to change the tide that had nearly drowned them for so long. They were all young and they believed.
It was a long time ago, in the early seventies, when the then youth arose in revolt. The death-toll would never be known, a lot lay in unmarked graves and no one knows who they are or why they died. They too spoke about faraway countries that had changed for the better and given the masses an identity and dignity. They often spoke about the eighty-two who came by ship and changed the fortunes of an island and its people.
The hope had always been there, but then, it gradually became hopeless.
Mini Glossary
Puthey – Son
Amme – Mother
Atasil – religious ceremony
Poson – month of June
Aiya – elder brother
