Fairies still dance in rounds

Waylaid in the abyss of reality
Hidden away from all gods' good glance
Dead childhoods getting ready
To dance their “Fairy Dance!

Before I get carried away with my weekly musings, I want to wish Aunty Manel a speedy recovery. The girls and I are waiting to hear her dragging her feet back at the editorial. We miss the music way too badly.
All this while, I have been wondering how one entirely woven story can haunt your better sense, keep you up days and nights, make you bite your nails, yet even after doing all these, leave you still depressed.
Fairy Dance by Brandon Ingram is not the most memorable book I read, but it’s undoubtedly the book that tortured me most after The Kite Runner and The Road from the Elephant Pass. A tale, inked in the silent tears of innocent children who become preys of poverty and brutalities of avaricious adults, makes too strong a mark in the reader’s mind that anyone who has a heart in his ribcage finds it difficult to let it go as just another book.
The story revolves around a girl who had been sold by her very own father to pleasure-seekers but later stands against the same evil forces who robbed her of her childhood. If there is one thing I don’t agree with Brandon that would be the ending. I asked myself a thousand times why, towards the latter stages of the story, Priya’s fate sound so promising that she had to be an eternal victim of the injustice- doesn’t she, the symbol of robbed innocence, deserve a better life. I did not expect an ultra-optimistic close as how can Brandon possibly give a sun-shiny conclusion to such a story when the real stories behind the fiction are still running down the southern sea-belt of Sri Lanka.
But it did not stop me from thinking that the story would be an ideal seed for a film because this is high time to let the flimsy curtain between ‘Sun, Sea and Sand’ and ‘child sex workers’ fall down to the ground.
I, in my egg-shell comfort, snuggled into my bed, read and re-read the book, ending up writing a poem to get out of the depression. When I sent my scribbling to Brandon, he wrote me back saying, “Thanks for being more aware of the tragedy that takes place under our very noses.” I think Brendon’s pen got it all right in his Fairy Dance about raising awareness when my friends who read the book were as shocked as I am, yet decided to do ‘something’ to stop the continuity of the calamity.
Buggy and Sarah both had a violent urge to act without knowing from where to start and how to go on. My copy of the book, doing rounds at the office is now with Sum. I hope a plan would dawn to her so then all of us can get together and start from somewhere to rip off the label mounted on those kids who do not even know what it really means.
Brandon certainly deserves something for his work of art which stirred the minds of so many. But like everything else, here in Sri Lanka, recognition sells for very high prices or even falls on the laps of mock-brilliant super stars by means of favouritisms ; which got me thinking, perhaps his book is too good for the Gratiaen.