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Devolutions Proposals and the Private Sector Peace Initiative
(Continued from Saturday)
By ChanakyaThere is no provision in the Indian Constitution for the impeachment of the Governor by a State Assembly. In dealing with suggestions on procedures for removal of the Governor, the Sarkaria Commission States that " .... while discharging his role as a constitutional sentinel and a vital link between the Union and the State, the Governor may have incurred the displeasure of the political executive in the State.
Therefore, the removal of a Governor through the process of impeachment by the State Legislature or in pursuance of a written request from the Chief Minister, following a resolution of the Legislative Assembly, may not ensure objectivity and impartiality".
THE PUBLIC SERVICE IN OUR PROPOSALS AS COMPARED WITH THE INDIAN SITUATION
There is no specific provision in our Draft Constitution for "All Island Services" which are common to both the Union and the Regions. Under the powers vested in the Regions, they can conduct all affairs under the Regional List with only Regional Public Servants.
Article 312 of the Indian Constitution however, provides for All India Services, for deputization to hold key posts in the States and the Union, and empowers the Parliament to regulate their recruitment and conditions of service. The current All India Services are:
(a) Indian Administrative Service,
(b) Indian Police Service,
(c) Indian Service of Engineers,
(d) Indian Medical and Health Service.
The objective of the framers of the Indian Constitution in providing for the Scheme of All India Services were:
(a) facilitating liaison between the Union and the States,
(b) ensuring a certain uniformity in administration,
(c) enabling the administrative machinery at the Union level to keep in touch with the realities at the field in the States,
(d) helping the State administrative machinery to acquire a wide outlook and obtain the best possible for its senior posts,
(e) ensuring that political considerations either in recruitment or in discipline and control are reduced to minimum, if not eliminated altogether. (page 219, section 8.9.07)
With reference to the All India Services, the Administrative Reforms Commission of India (1969) confirmed that:
(a) All India recruitment makes possible a minimum and uniform standards of administration throughout the country. It enables the induction of the best available talent to these services.
(b) With personnel drawn from different States, each State cadre gets a leavening of senior officers from outside, whose vision and outlook transcend local horizons.
(c) Systematic disputation from the State to the Union broadens the vision of the officers so debuted and brings to the Union an experience of close to actual realities.
(d) The joint control of these officers by the State and the Union Government, with the latter having ultimate authority over them, provides a measure of remote control which, being more objective, enables officers to withstand local influence and to provide independent advice.
It was noted that the "outsiders" and "insiders", at the time of the reports, in the cadre of All India Services at the State level was in the ratio of 2:1. (page 221, section 8.3.01). The Sarkaria Commission observed that it would be a retrograde step for a State to opt out of the All India Service Scheme and "will be harmful to the larger interest of the country. Such a step is sure to encourage parochial tendencies and undermine the integrity, cohesion, efficiency, and coordination of the country as a whole". (page 225, section 8.7.09).
FINANCIAL ASPECTS - SRI LANKA AND INDIA
Article 210 of our Draft Constitution permits Regional Administrations to borrow domestically or internationally, with the concurrence and subject to criteria and limitations as specified by the Cabinet Minister in charge of the subject of finance. The Indian Constitution does not allow States to borrow outside India. ( Page 309, section 10.10.37 ) .This peculiar provision has been only marginally debated and the incipient emergence of separate foreign services that this proviso entails with its other implications has not yet been fully understood.
Article 211 of our Draft Constitution provides for the appointment of a Finance Commission. The Central Government shall, on recommendations of and in consultation with the Commission allocate from the annual budget such funds as are adequate for the purpose of meeting the needs of the Region.
In India, in addition to the Finance Commission constituted under Article 280 of the Indian Constitution, there is an all powerful Planning Commission which is not a body appointed under the Constitution. The Planning Commission functions under a National Economic and Development Council, which is chaired by the Prime Minister. The Planning Commission is vested with the exclusive authority to recommend the transfer of funds for Capital Expenditure, while the Finance Commission deals with Revenue Expenditure. It has been noted that on an average, the Capital transfers are around 40 percent of total transfers of funds to the States (page 260 section 10.4.15), and in the Seventh five Year Plan, Central assistance ( recommended by the Planning Commission) constituted 37 percent of the Plan Finance in the States .
POLICE AND SECURITY: THE SRI LANKA PROVISION
In terms of Article 3 (2) (b) and 130 (1 ) of our proposals the Executive power of the Region is vested in the Governor, acting on the advice of the Chief Minister and the Board of Ministers. However, in terms of Article 217 (4) the Regional Police Commissioner shall be responsible to, and be under the control of the Chief Minister in respect of the maintenance of public order in the Region. The Governor is powerless in respect of security in the Region.The Indian Constitution does not make such exclusive reservation of direct responsibility of executive power for the Chief Minister of a State.
Under our Draft Constitution the provisions empowering the President, the use of emergency powers are relatively restricted and conditional. They are under:
(a) Article 220 ( 1 ), where the President may bring the Public Security Act into force in a Region, on the advice of the Prime Minister. This action is available only in a situation where the security of public order is threatened, "which presents a clear and present danger to the unity and sovereignty of the Republic" A proclamation under this Article is valid only for four fourteen days unless it is approved by Parliament and will cease to have force after ninety days unless approved by the Regional Council.
(b) Article 221(1), where on the advice of the Chief Minister the governor is of the opinion that the preservation of public order or the maintenance of essential supplies and services is threatened, he may request the President to proclaim an emergency. Under such an emergency, on the advice of the Chief Minister the Central Government may assume powers over any of the powers under the Regional List and or make regulations overriding the laws made under the Regional List. A proclamation under this Article and shall be valid only for four fourteen days unless it is approved by the Regional Council in addition to the Parliament.
(c) Article 223(1), where on the advice of the Prime Minister, is the opinion that a situation has arisen, in which a Regional Administration is promoting armed rebellion or insurrection or violation of certain provision of the Constitution, "which constitutes a clear and present danger to the unity and integrity and sovereignty of the Republic", the President by proclamation may assume the powers of the Regional Administration and or dissolve the Regional Council. Such a proclamation has to be laid before Parliament and approved by it. in addition, the President must appoint a tribunal of three persons (one of which will be nominated by the Chief Minister of the Region) report on the situation in the Region, within a period of 60 days.
Continued tomorrow)
A Tamil heroine unmourned and the sociology of obfuscation by UTHR (Jaffna) – Chapter 08
The aims and the character of political killings by Tamil groups
(Continued from yesterday)Particularly in the wake of political killings by the LTTE there is the deliberate spreading of confusion. Theories and allegations pointing elsewhere seem credible since there are other groups with arms, an unsavoury record, and even a motive can be argued. We will try to bring some clarity into this before moving onto Sarojini Yogeswaran’s murder.
All militant groups opposed to the LTTE, namely the PLOTE, TELO, EPDP and EPRLF have been involved in killings. The first three are involved in security operations with the armed forces outside the Jaffna peninsula. The EPRLF was involved in political killings while ruhning the North-East Provincial Council during the IPKF period. But it has had mostly a clean record before and after. After June 1990 it has largely functioned as a political party. Killings by the PLOTE, TELO and EPDP have been largely internal,. In killing civilians they have generally not dared to touch anyone whose murder would become a big issue, without instructions or clearance from the Government or the security forces. We take some instances. In August 1985, TELO killed two TULF MPs, Dharmalingam and Alalasundaram in Jaffna. These are beleived to have been done on the instructions of Indian agency RAW.
According to a Special Correspondent (Sunday Island 13.2.94) quoting security officials, Uma Prakash, a leader of PLOTE-PLO which split from PLOTE, was killed near Colombo by Alavangu Dasan, a hatchet man of Manikkadasan, PLOTE’s military wing leader. Uma Prakash was used for some time in security operations in Colombo in late 1993 when his group was brought from India, reportedly on a deal worked out by him with Prime Minister Ranil Wickremasinghe and Defense Secretary Wanasinghe. The PLOTE was unhappy about it. When these operations were exposed, the Government of the day reportedly found him an embarrassment. Circumstances strongly suggest that his murder by the PLOTE had prior authorisation from the State [UTHR (J) Rep. No.13].
In January 1996, PLOTE killed Sritharan, a government servant and social worker in Vavuniya; and in July it killed, also in Vavuniya, Arjuna, PLOTE’s Trincomalee leader, who had been invited for talks by Manikkadasan [Our Bulletin No.12 of October 1996]. These killings were not investigated by the Police and were hardly even mentioned in the press, except perhaps in passing. They may be taken as part of the license the PLOTE enjoyed for aiding the security forces and for supporting the Government in parliament.
Likewise with EPDP’s internal killing of Udaya Sooriyakumar in November 1994. The Police investigation appears to have been stalled by the present Government. The EPDP has been lending crucial support to the Government in parliament. All these were parochial killings by groups aimed at safeguarding their narrow turf, and the outlook was short term. In the case of the Thangathurai and Sarojini murders, although one could superficially attribute motives and argue that these groups could have killed, there are a number of pressing reasons why they would not go so far. They are vulnerable at many levels. They operate through parliament, have dealings with the main political circles in Colombo, and depend on the patronage of the Government and the security establishment. Any secrets they have, have a strong tendency to become open secrets. Every now and then cadre leaving these groups let out embarrassing secrets which are published by their rivals - such as happened during the recent election campaign in Jaffna. Two EPDP MPs who left the group continue to function under the patronage of influential elements in Colombo. These groups would not have been able to withstand the fall-out had they killed important figures like Thangathurai and Sarojini. On the other hand not a single person other than Rajini Thiranagama has come out of the LTTE and dared to expose it publicly.
The LTTE is not bound by any such restraints. Its strategy is to kill and remain silent when there is bound to be public resentment. Then its cohorts, locally and abroad, get to work in character assassination of the dead and in sowing confusion through the huge publicity machinery which includes almost the entire Tamil media. Confusion and sheer shortsightedness among other Tamil parties also plays into its hands. Thus when Thangathurai was killed, TULF circles talked as though the EPDP was involved. The EPDP through its paper ‘Thinamurasu’ went on to character assassinate the dead MP. When Mrs.Yogeswaran was killed, TULF again pretended not to know the killer. The EPDP spread the story that the PLOTE was guilty. Subsequently threatening letters were sent to all surviving local councillors in Jaffna asking them to quit. The letters, we reliably understand, were posted from Pungudutivu where the LTTE then maintained a prominent presence. The letter was moreover addressed to all Tamil parties on the council, calling them traitors. It was quite evident that the LTTE sent the letter.
But when a newspaper office in Colombo telephoned the Jaffna EPDP office, they pointed at the PLOTE. When PLOTE was contacted they pointed to the EPDP.
When the LTTE decides to kill someone the criterion is often based on the answer to the question, "Will this individual or his or her activities pose a long-term political threat to us?". The outlook here is long-term and the aim is nothing short of absolute power in a nation state. The decision to kill Amirthalingam, the TULF leader, who was a resilient politician and was bound to remain a key figure in Tamil, and indeed national politics, was very likely taken years before the murder in July 1989. The ideological justification for the murder was that Amirthalingam who pioneered the popularisation of the demand for a seperate Tamil State had gone back on it. The same reasoning had also been used to justify hundreds of other killings. Here, ideology cannot be separated from the drive for power. It is also a trap that has rendered the LTTE incapable of negotiating.
Amirthalingam had dominated Tamil politics for nearly 20 years and was widely looked up to, particularly by the middle class, as a person with the authority, experience and ability to thrash out a lasting political settlement. The LTTE faced considerable problems over killing Amirthalingam and many who worked for it overseas began distancing themselves. But it more than made up for it after June 1990 wheh it began another bout of war, by provocatively murdering hundreds of unarmed policemen and the security forces under Premadasa and Ranjan Wijeratne obliged the LTTE with large scale massacres of Tamils in the East. It is an irony that several Army officers who were responsible for these massacres then, are today commanding army divisions in the Vanni, facing LTTE forces whom their purblind conduct did much to strengthen vastly, and who are extracting a punitive price.
Another revealing affair was the LTTE’s approach to the Theepori group. The latter came out of the PLOTE in early 1985 exposing its internal killings on Indian soil, where the victims were buried in a casuarina grove, through publishing the book ‘A New Kind of World’. The members of the group came to Jaffna and survived harassment by the PLOTE over the next year until it ceased to function. The LTTE distributed the book to discredit the PLOTE, but was no doubt clear that such persons as in the Theepori were useful only as long as they were a threat to the PLOTE, but would not be countenanced when it took control. The Theepori leader Nobert, who survived torture and harassement from the PLOTE, disappeared after being taken into custody by the LTTE in 1991, however they would have instinctively assessed him six years earlier, in 1985.
A particular measure adopted by LTTE cohorts to sow confusion after a killing is to spread the story of an independent group having done the killing. This was tried after Thangathurai’s murder as well as after Sarojini’s murder (the so-called ‘Sangillyan Force’ in the latter case). Anyone familiar with Tamil politics would know immediately that when the existence of such a force in claimed by LTTE cohorts, it is none other than the LTTE itself. Historically the LTTE has been too paranoid to allow any other force to exist, even when there were no ideological differences and the other force was too weak to pose a threat. Take the case of EROS. By 1986 its leader had practically accepted the dominance of the LTTE and was conducting a parallel programme of bomb attacks in the South. Once the LTTE decimated the TELO, a group around the EROS leader groveled up to the LTTE to the dismay of several of its cadre. On one occasion the LTTE’s Jaffna political wing leader Thileepan went drunk with others into an EROS camp mostly manned by outstation cadre and threateningly asked them to surrender their weapons. On sensing that there was a mood of resistance, Thileepan said it was a joke, patted the camp leader on the back and went away. Eventually the EROS split up and a section under its leader Balakumar became servants of the LTTE. Panagoda Maheswaran’s TEA which had no political programme too was not allowed to exist.
In the case of the TULF again the LTTE has been going on killing its members, working towards a TULF that would completely be under their control. Although the killing of leading figures has been widely publicised, a significant number of the TULF’s cadre and local level leaders have also been killed by the LTTE - some in its notorious prisons. The continuing soft and confused approach of the TULF leadership towards the LTTE, even at the cost of dignity and truth, is puzzling. Some MPs are already behaving in a very compromised manner and on trips abroad appear to follow itineraries laid down by the LTTE. A1though the resolution for a separate state of Eelam was passed by the TULF in 1976, it must be clear to the TULF that there will be no place for them in such a state under the LTTE. Until the LTTE could achieve that goal, however, it may find some use for TULF MPs under its control. If it is true that a TULF MP went into peals of laughter upon hearing Sarojini Yogeswaran’s murder, he is living in a world of illusions. If there really was indeed an independent Sangiliyan Force that killed Mrs.Yogeswaran, a very alarmed LTTE would have been the first to be out hunting for them.
Therefore to anyone who knew the psychology of the LTTE and the difference between the LTTE and the other groups, it would have been immediately clear, with knowledge approaching certainty, that it was the LTTE which killed Thangathurai and Sarojini. The manner in which the Jaffna based Uthayan reported the murder of Thangathurai would have confirmed the suspicions of a seasoned Jaffna man, although the reporting was intentionally confusing:
The Uthayan of 8.7.97 reported that the Trincomalee Police arrested 3 persons including a woman over the killing. It added that the Urban Council Chairman Suriyamoorthy who belonged to the TELO was questioned by the Police for 3 hours. On 9.7.97 the paper quoted Lakhanda, a Colombo based Sinhalese broadcasting station, which reported local talk to the effect that persons who had left several militant groups were behind the killing (i.e. an independent group!). The report on 10.7.97 was more to the point. According to this, the Police under SSP T.N.de Silva with M.L.Ubaithullah, an investigator, well known to Thangathurai, arrested 3 more persons, two in Trincomalee Town and one from Chelvanayakapuram. Explosives and ammunition were recovered from two. One of them (the third) had in addition 3 pictures of Thangathurai, a murder list and a cyanide capsule.
The reference in the first report to the UC Chairman was plainly a red herring. Quoting misleading gossip from a Sinhalese radio station in Colombo was again suspicious, considering that Uthayan had its own reporter in Trincomalee. Here was again an attempt to foist an independent group. We did encounter more of this kind in connection with Mrs.Yogeswaran’s murder.
(Continued tomorrow)
From the book 'The Palm of His Hand' by E.C.T. Candappa
Life never ended, it went onContinued from yesterday
About the author
E.C.T. Candappa was one of Sri Lanka's been feature writers in the mid-fifties till the seventies. He was an outstanding journalist at Lake House and distinguished himself as a reporter and feature writer. He is now domiciled in Australia but still very much interested in his country of origin. He visited Sri Lanka last year and interviewed many of the personalities featured in this book.The rapture of the reverential moment had been shattered. Chinks began to appear in the shining armour of the fallen, resplendent knight. The crowds which for hours earlier had been speculating on the possibility of Bandaranaike having indeed been a Bodhisatva, a potential Buddha, or Diyasena, the crowd which was poised to rush up to the burial place and light worshipful tapers, were already beginning to malign him. There is such a thing called karma, they pronounced sagely. Every action had a reaction.
After all some of his actions had caused blood to be shed, lives to be lost. It was all because he had betrayed the Sinhalese, his own race. He had promised to make Sinhala the official language in twenty- four hours and then had attempted to legislate for Tamil also to be an official language. Fortunately the Buddhist monks, traditional custodians of their language and religion, had intervened and prevented that insolence.
Another view being expressed was that whatever the Tamils were, pariahs and mongrels and low- born vassals, they were also human beings. And hundreds of them had died in horrible ways in the race riots, and surely many of them would have died with curses on their lips. How else could they explain his death? It was karma all right. He had paid for his deeds. He had died like a dog, shot in his own home.
Red blurs of mad rage blinded Raj's vision. He feared he would pass out or get sick.
What a sick, fucking entity is a mob, he thought. One minute they raise their hands in praise and obeisance, one minute they are crying sadhus and jayawewas, the cries of adulation and hero worship but now, even before the body of their demi-god has been interred, they are decrying him. You mindless curs, you ill-begotten bastards, Raj said, but very much to himself.
A mob he knew was without reason. It reacted like a beast.
Half an hour later the coffin emerged borne by close members of the family. They bore it along and interred it in a concrete vault with maximum media exposure and minimum consideration for the family's private grief.
Immediately afterwards the tomb was covered with concrete and smoothed over.
A police guard was placed over it and no one was permitted to approach it.
The crowd began to disperse and the police officers began to reappear. Journalists, too, surfaced and began gathering the information needed. They met and talked with old family retainers, took photographs. Raj was unable to meet Don. He had expediently rushed off with the exposed film. He had speculated that Raj could transmit his story from a distance. Don had to take the films himself.
Raj did contact ASP Paiva, who helped him to send his story over the Police radio.
When that was done, Paiva told him impassively, "My mother has expired."
"What? When?"
"Headquarters sent a message on the radio some time ago."
"So why didn't you get away?"
Paiva smiled tiredly. "Duty is duty, mate," he said.
Raj caught the allusion.
"Well heartfelt condolences," he said.
"Thanks."
Raj got a ride back home with Paiva.
"I thought Buddhists were always cremated," Raj said.
"That's what I thought, too."
"So was there a Christian service as well?"
It was quite dark by now. Paiva said nothing, and Raj could not see his face clearly.
Chapter 53
The fickleness and innate malice of the rabble was manifest, as has been noted, even before the body of the fallen leader had been interred.Indeed, it was abroad even before his gallant struggle against death had ended.
When the second bulletin was issued by the medical team, the mob curled its foul collective lip in scorn. He's already dead, they said. This is all eyewash.
And when the following day, Bandaranaike's statement was issued, indicating that he had survived the long night, they laughed like gurgling sewers. This was all part of the strategy of the wily Governor General, the mob declared. They want to keep up the illusion that the Prime Minister is alive until the machinations of succession have been settled.
It was in such a climate of doubt and evil rumour that on the fifth day after the obsequies had been completed that the editor Rhodes Kennedy himself by-passing Ishak, called Raj Indra and the City Editor Harold Gallican into his room about seven in the evening, bade them shut the door behind them, a very unusual procedure with a man who believed in the open door, and told them that what he was going to say, the assignment he was giving them, was to be considered to be in the strictest confidence.
Did they understand that clearly? He peered at them with bleary eyes as though trying to clear a fog before him.
Both nodded.
He then instructed them to call at the residence of one of the surgeons, not the chief one who had operated on the Prime Minister, at eight, an hour later. They were not to take any writing material. Whatever he said was also to be held in total secrecy.
Accordingly the two journalists found themselves in the affluent quarter of Colombo, the area known as Cinnamon Gardens, ringing the door bell of a house which presented a modest frontage but which concealed a spacious and luxurious apartment.
The bell was answered by a male servant in the livery of a houseboy who led them into a hall.
Within minutes the doctor appeared, fully clad in a cotton suit and tie.
He led them without a word into a dimly lit room, which was the surgery. He bade the journalists to be seated on two well upholstered chairs while he took a swivel chair at his desk.
He turned it around and then facing them said: "Gentlemen, you have been made to understand that this is an unusual interview. I asked your editor to nominate two reporters who can be trusted without question. You will take no notes, nor divulge what I say to anyone, or even that this interview ever took place. I am going to tell you exactly what transpired until the time he died. No detail will be spared. No fact will be hidden. This is to ensure that someone knows what happened and that you might be able to refute in a sworn affidavit uner extreme necessity, any false accounts in the knowledge that you are in possession of the true account."
For more than half an hour, behind that locked door, and in a soft but clear voice, he told the journalists the story of the historic event. It was exactly as they had written it, with several deeply moving details relating the final moments of which they had not been aware, and which certainly would not have been published.
It was nearly nine when he rose, took out a handkerchief from his trouser pocket and wiped his face thoroughly.
"That's all, gentlemen," he said. "Thank you for your patience and courtesy." He rang a bell and the liveried servant showed them out.
Other rumours afloat were that, on the very night of the interment, a bolt of lightning had struck the concrete slab under which the coffin of the Prime Minister lay.
While it could have happened in a most natural manner, the site being beside open fields, the suggestion was that it had been a vengeful, celestial visitation upon an evil ruler.
Raj did not bother to verify it.
Upon this site later a most magnificent tomb was erected and it became a place of pilgrimage amounting to worship by the same mob, and also a shrine to which visiting royalty, heads of state and other dignitaries were taken, almost by mandate.
With the fluctuations of politics and a change of government, the shrine's importance began to decline until the People's Republic of China gifted a conference hall to commemorate Bandaranaike and perpetuate his memory. To this day it stands as a splendid testimony to a man who was above all an orator. Many voices have been heard there since, and though some of them could be his peers in eloquence, none could be his superior.
An international airport gifted by the Canadian people was also named after him. Though a six-syllable tongue- twister, too trying for a foreign tongue, it held its own and propagated his name across the world. With a change of government, envy rather than expediency caused a change, this time to the name of the little town in which it is located, Katunayake, this one but one syllable less than the previous name.
His widow, who succeeded him, gained world-wide fame and an unique place in history for herself and for her gender by becoming the world's first woman Prime Minister.
From a shy, retiring spouse of a Prime Minister, quite a stranger to the devious world of politics, she grew in stature to become one of Ceylon's strongest post-independence leaders.
Her power and influence among the masses was such that after the defael of her government at the polls, another democratically elected government, mouthing the jargon of democracy, quite systematically deprived her of her civic rights with surgical thoroughness invoking the superficial propriety of a doctored constitution and due process.
After sixteen years of changing political fortunes and not excluding mayhem, ruthless violence and skulduggery, Mrs Bandaranaike was once again installed, for the third time, against tremendous odds, as the country's Prime Minister, while her widowed daughter ascended the heights of the nation's presidency.
Epilogue
It was dusk. It had rained a few minutes earlier and for twenty seconds of sheer ecstatic delight the world was bathed in an incredibly yellow light. It was not the gold of the lush tropical sunsets but a pure canary yellow such as is not given to city dwellers to behold too often.Darkness had descended, and swiftly, and the fragrance of frangipanni filled the air on the pocket handkerchief lawn outside.
Raj, by now married, had spent the past hour with his wife and two small children, a son with furry, fresh-grass, bristly hair and a daughter with a straight black donkey fringe, playing about them.
When the mosquitoes came out carolling and stinging the family sought the sanctuary of the lounge. Raj's wife opened the piano and played a few old familiar melodies. Raj read the evening papers.
It was such a typical scene of middle- class domestic felicity.
It was then he saw the obituary in a stop press column.
The surname, Hapangama, not a common one, was right. But the initials, the full names of which she had sworn she would not reveal, were also right.
"Oh, my God," he said, his mind reeling from the shock.
His cry was not heard.
An overpowering loneliness overcame him.
He felt he could not bear the grief alone.
It was futile speaking to someone, even one's wife, of the death of a friend if the friendship was not shared by the other.
Silent grief would be better by far.
He would speak to Patil tomorrow.
He barred himself against the flash flood of tears. He knew how it was done. He had done it once before.
London, two years earlier.
He had been posted there by his company for training.
He was living in an apartment house popular with Sri Lankans, especially with employees of his firm.
One morning a fellow guest, Jennifer, a compatriot, a stunningly beautiful reporter, was leaving for Scotland. Raj was to accompany her to Charing Cross Station. But when the post was delivered with his breakfast Raj learnt that his grandfather had died.
He was a very special grandfather. He had come to see Raj off at the Colombo airport when he had left for England and he had been deliriously ill then. But the tough old soldier had recovered and died, a few months later, on Christmas Eve.
Memories rushed in and Raj was at breaking point.
But Jennifer was due to leave in a couple of minutes, and it wouldn't do, thought Raj, to upset her.
So he accompanied her to Charing Cross Station, took a train back home, and having locked the door of his room, succumbed to the relief of tears.
But now, all night long, he could not sleep.
Why, why, why had he not kept in touch? He who believed that there were no coincidences in life. Surely there must have been a reason for their meeting and not just meeting as a patient would meet a nurse?
He tried to trace the paths of their individual lives from their respective births to the time they met and all the intervening circumstances that led to it. Step by step, year by year, day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute, second by second. A second could represent a glance, the turn of a head, the blink of an eye.
He thought of the vast sweep of life and the encapsulating moment. At any moment of time everything that could possibly happen in life could be contained in it; birth and death and mating and pain and ecstasy, success and failure, the questing and the finding, fulfilment and frustration, tenderness and cruelty, growing up and growing old, the budding and flowering and fruiting and fading and rotting, the first blade of grass bursting through the earth and the dry grass set on fire, the quickening of rivers, the floods, the freezing and the thawing, the spark of first love and the dying embers of decayed lives, the wonder and the cynicism, the dying, and the loss and the loneliness and the endless grieving, all, all this in any pulsating segment of time.
His wife stirred beside him. The children slept serenely in their beds.
What did people do with their memories when they got married? Letters could be shredded, photographs could be burnt, you could decide sagely to avoid people, you could leave the country and go to another continent; but what did you do with your memories?
How much wholeness was possible within marriage? One gave oneself so completely to the other; was there no room for another affection, even for the memory of a dead and banked affection. The mere mention of an old attachment, perfectly innocent in its time, caused some spouses to resent it so much that it threatened to fracture the integrity of the marital relationship; and often did.
So people kept hidden compartments of the mind in which they stored away such memories but that reduced the integrity of the marriage too. Some wisely accepted the past as irrevocable and thus protected the marriage.
Should he take the risk, even with a dead person?
Better not, he decided.
It was an extremely delicate matter, and he feared that one single insensitive word could affect him immeasurably.
So he decided to leave it till the morrow when he would meet Patil somewhere and unburden himself.
His body went slack and his mind began to float weightlessly. Faces appeared, disappeared and re-appeared in his mind, or was it on his mind? When one thought, was one separate from the thought? He could see things with a mental vision. He and his vision were separate. Where did he see? He was obviously not seeing anything physical nor with his physical eyes. Something, therefore, subsisted that was not physical.
In a flash he realised the truth of survival after death, till then only a creed to which he subscribed.
Miss Hapangama, damn, he wished he knew her first name, she remained formal, institutionalised even in death; she was not dead thus, but surviving somewhere. She lived, survived in the totality of her personality, as completely as he would visualise her.
The first smile that welcomed him, the word of assurance, "don't worry, we'll look after you," the clatter of her shoes one Saturday night on the generous errand to tell him the time of Mass, the same generosity expresse in another way when she was covered with vomit giving an emetic to a patient, the smile like the morning sun, the golden brown skin like sunset-burnished sheaves of harvested paddy, her cheerful voice, the fragrance of cologne and talc which announced her arrival.
What did it matter if he had not been able to see her more often? There would be no need to torment himself that he did not even know that she had left for England, that he did not know why she went, what she did there, how she died. Nothing mattered now.
Now he was sure she lived. Now he was confident she would never die.
Oh, he was sure they would meet again.
Life never ended. Life went on.
How wonderful to have been born, to have made friends.
How glorious to be alive.
THE END
(C) E.C.T. Candappa
