Sunday, December 9, 2012

Thesavalami தேசவழமை லா

Based on a true incident I was told of, of a conversation between two friends who belonged to the upper cast Tamil community. They had been classmates at one of Colombo’s leading schools. One had continued to live in Jaffna throughout the times of LTTE terror and rule and the other had left Sri Lanka’s shores to settle down in Canada and had returned for a holiday. These friends had met for a dinner outing, sometime during the ceasefire agreement, when both expressed interest in selling off their ancestral land in the North.  




What is mine
will be yours...

 
but only
if you were
my own kith and kin.

No one,
outside of family,
my village, my caste,
can take away this,
my birth right,

to what my father,
his father before him,
and his…and his …
made good,

for and on behalf of the Dutch.
 
The good old Dutch.
They were aware
that we must not
let those
from the South, West, Centre
or
even the East,
with their riches,
buy our land,
pollute our culture,
and encroach on us.

For them,
it served well,
to keep us apart.
For us,
it gave us fodder
to feel a sense of superiority,
over others.

Others, who are not us.

But what
good is it now,
for we are redefined,
reformulated,
and topsy-turvyed,
beyond recognition?

They did not care
for the whose-who.
Only ones
holding the gun ruled.
Boys and girls,
from families,
not the likes of ours,
now held those guns,
hurried in their mufti uniforms
and even took away,
high-cast boys and girls,
for their fight.

Ha! better still,
they called it,
our fight.

What good is this land,
with limited deeds.
Only Tambi in Montreal,
said he wants it
for sentimental reasons.

Why should I
hold it for him?
For he left us in the lurch,
for sentimental reasons.
And wants
to come now,
to buy this land.
“For sentimental reasons!”

It was
Bertolt Brecht
I think,
who said in his play,
‘Caucasian Chalk Circle’,
with that
rascal Judge Azdak,
sitting in judgment;

“What there is shall belong,
to those who are good for it.”

 
Renton de Alwis
Written in June 2009

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