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
