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Sunday, October 30, 2011

I write




I write, because the world makes me write. Everything, from political mud puddles to fall of dictators, and the democracies that had gone wrong, fills my notebooks. My words stop at the things that rather catch my heart than my eye. I let my heart command my pen and my mind dictate the diction. What comes out of my pen does not belong to me, but to the world, which plays the Muse to me.

I write because I fear boundaries. I learn discretion at every effort to thwart my writing with censorship. I sugarcoat. I sandwich my message between layers of honeyed terms and decorate it with frills and bows just to please those who come between the reader and me. I scribble before they discourage me. I send it off before they silence my voice.

I write on behalf of those who can’t hold a pen or don’t know the words to pen down their message. I write because, they have faith in my writing and they draw strength from my scribblings.  My words reflect their struggle, their agonies and above all their indomitable power to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

I write because, it is my religion, my faith and my conscience. My writing reflects my notion of good and bad, justice and freedom. I become a fighter with the weapons I best trust myself with. My battles do not know bloodshed. Yet, it can disturb someone with the questions I bombard him with, and the sarcasm I bury for someone to step on.

I write because I believe in the power of words. They can be razor blades or rose petals- depending on the person whom the words are directed at. My poetry makes people cry and my prose makes them smile. I believe they not only see me through my writing but also get a glimpse of themselves.

I write because I need to prove my innocence, counter many baseless allegations and bust the misconceptions. My written word is more lasting than the spoken one. My pen speaks more eloquently than my mouth does. My writing carries things I am not brave enough to say aloud. They are there for past reference- for someone to cherish or tear and burn in an autumn fire.

I write because I need to release the overload of emotions I take in from the books I read. I scribble poems on things I have never seen or people I have never met in real life. Gradually I come to realize that I am in love with fiction and treat reality as an unwelcome diversion.

I write because I need to confess the sins I commit in secret and the fantasies I hold close to my heart. I rewrite and publicize them, for the readers to empathise with me. Yet, those who come looking for uniqueness in them instead find universality.

I write because the words make me a timeless traveller. They take me through past, present and future across the seas and continents through all weathers and stop my heart closer to home.

Like many other writers would do, I cry, laugh and bleed words, but still I won’t call myself a writer.

Scribbler’s Diary


Sunday
It is partly true and partly false that idleness can kill you. For someone who had been as busy as the clock-hands, it can certainly be a blessing. Too often, people tend to pay themselves the minimum attention while running through the hectic schedules and impossible to-do lists. What is the point, even if you are a multi-millionaire, that your face tissues are too stressed to stretch themselves to smile? What is the point in living, if you cannot stop and look at your reflection on a shop window?

Monday
A lot of things in life are like the pictures you find in menu cards. The actual dish does not even come closer to the printed depiction. Yet, I would settle for the cooked dish rather than the uncooked one that looks heavenly in the picture but far from edible in reality. Looks do count-but you can’t eat them!

Tuesday
I will play you like a harp on a mid Summer morning, with a pull of each string, generating a different emotion. I can let you die of jealousy, or make you cry like a baby. I can shatter your defences and rebuild them in a moment. Call me your weakness and your strength, your life and your death. My notes can tweak your ears and speed up the flow of your blood. Like noble lovers would do, you will endure this torture with dignity and unlike other women would do, I won’t hold you above a cliff. Thank God, I didn’t turn into a harp and even if I did, you are not very good at playing string-instruments!

Wednesday
Flip flops are a temptation too strong to resist. Leave a lone the comfort, attractive colours and popular brands, who would have thought ‘rubber sereppu’ would attain fashion-icon status!

Thursday
You have no right to ask the world what you want simply because you fancy it. May be that was the old-fashioned way of doing things. But your predecessors once they reached their palaces in the sky, chose to close the gates against the world. That is when the world stopped conspiring to make things work for people. Prove yourself worthy of having it. And fight your way to the end without getting your hands stained by chicanery. You are not the first person who started innocent and lost that innocence during the journey nor will you be the last. The only consolation is that even if you fall from the sky, the earth will receive you without letting you fall into a bottomless vacuum. And that gives you very little right to call yourself a star!

Friday
Hunger can literary make you a criminal or go against your conscience. The self-made, breakfast table promises melt like icicles the moment you see the unhealthiest food pervading the most alluring aroma. The scenario often makes you wonder, “are all those who run little bake-houses, saints?”

Saturday
They say the world is round. Surely, it must be so round that what went around takes ages to come back to me. 

Thursday, October 20, 2011

Staple food of happiness



My memory may be little photographic. Yet, even the greatest photographs cannot capture a certain characteristics of some objects; taste is one of them. Likewise, I too can’t remember the taste of the first ‘kiribath’ I ate, for I must have been too small to tell apart ‘kiribath’ from usual rice when Achchi stuffed a ball of milk rice into my mouth at the auspicious time. According to her, that was how they started giving me solid food. When times went by, I would have certainly preferred milk rice to red rice and usual curries, for it had a nice flavor and a strange charm to make me happy.
Like every child, I would have been addicted to it at some point that Amma had to cook kiribath once a week to pacify my cravings. Kiribath made another special appearance when I read my first alphabet. As a three-year-old I had an alphabet of my own which mostly looked like a line of ladybugs who could not walk straight. They took a fair amount of space in my father’s books. The need to learn the letters escaped my little brain as I could look at the pictures and tell what they were without reading the word underneath. The first official word I read must have been ‘Amma’ since it is the first word in the ‘hodi potha.’ Quite shamefully, my most vivid memory of the day is a huge plate of kiributh and a dish of red-hot lunu miris on the table where I sat by.  
Its aroma crosses my mind again with a softness of a forgotten lullaby, which drags me all the way back to my first day at school; new books, crispy white uniforms and shiny shoes, and of course to complete the picture, a steamy plate of kiribath on the breakfast table. Perhaps I was too ignorant to be nervous about the new life I was about to enter, or I was too excited to show off my new things that I couldn’t feel butterflies in my stomach. Perhaps, my breakfast would have devoured the naughty creatures!
Like every other Sri Lankan, I have come to accept kiributh as another name for happiness and a symbol of good. It hardly misses to come to table on birthdays, weddings, every first day of the year and on the day of Avurudu, no matter at what time the auspicious time for eating falls. Perhaps I have grown out of my childhood cravings, yet I view it with respect. Kiributh is one of those things that walk with you through every milestone of your life and tells you that you are part of a timeless tradition. As for me, it is a page-marker that has flagged all my picturesque memories and an air-freshener of past that will keep refreshing my air in future.

Traveller’s wish



Take me down a road that I have never walked before. Sweep me through alleys that had never been trodden by tourists. Let me see people who are not accustomed to perform for them. Let me see the life in an unknown land in its unspoilt state where the natives go about their daily tasks without acknowledging the fact that tourists are there to observe them.
Make me sit by an unknown fountain and listen to your adventures, all the while, ignoring the stares of the onlookers. I will laugh at your globetrotting madness while envying your limitless freedom. I will force you to teach me the way to be a survivor instead of a rebel who goes against every rule set by the world. I will try stealing from you the theory of travelling light and living out of suitcase.
Take me to the far away past when history is synonymous with myth. I want to touch the the  high walls of Troy before their collapse, see  the tears of Andromache at the death of Hektor  and Penelope’s gaze of never-dying hope, awaiting the return of Odysseus.  Show me the island of Thera before the most destructive volcanic eruption that destroyed an entire civilization. Let me see the relaxing lifestyles of its people who thought they had forever and a day to live. Let me indulge in their unsophisticated food; not the much hyped Santorini sundried tomatoes and cucumbers that taste like water-melon when they are ripe.
Let’s sit on the steps of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi and talk about how prophesies could not stop war from ravaging great cities. When you try to call it all a myth, I will try to drive the point that even the history could not stop people from committing the same mistake over and again let alone prophesies uttered in unknown languages and lost in translation.
Take me through books and unwritten epilogues of the stories I keep reading for the thousandth time. A tour to Pemberley or a surprise visit to the recovering Mr. Rochester might not do any harm. I can be your guide for a moment and take you around the orangeries and topiaries, dining halls and haunted staircases. Don’t ask me how I know my way around so well- they will just happen to be in the exact location I painted them to be in my imagination.
Take me to see ‘The Magic Flute’ at Opéra National de Paris on a winter night. Though you know I don’t fare well in the snowy weather, I will promise not to sneeze or cough while the opera is staged. I will hold my breath not because I am scared of you; but for the simple of joy of being stung by the magical notes.
Sweep me through the streets of Prague, the fairytale city I keep dreaming to set my feet on. Perhaps, one more trip to Giza before you drag me home. Teach me how to live like a traveller; to see the beauty of everything without being possessive and greedy to bring Taj Mahal or the Great Wall home. Teach me to be detached while being attached to the maps and travelling bag. Teach me to meet the horizon and come home looking for the comforts of my small bed and worn-out blanket.

Let go…



Even though your life is very much yours sometimes you can’t decide on the shelf-life of the people and things you find fascinating in life. They come and go on their own accord. All you can do is be grateful for them while they are there and cherish them once they make an exit. Letting go of things both physically and emotionally is how you de-clutter your emotional waste and get a new start.
Let go of the physical remnants of a past that you no longer need in your future. Let them march to the dustbin, leaving space for more beautiful pictures on your bedside table. Let there be space in your trinket-box for the ones you are going to receive in future. Let the letters and cards find another place so then you’ll have space for the ones that are on the way.
Let go of the faces of those who torture you in your dreams. Come to terms with reality. Even if you play the last moment hundredth time in your head, things are not going to change. Do not beat yourself up for the dates that didn’t work, relationships that didn’t last and the deals you couldn’t win. Let go of the incidents that made you feel like the culprit while the real culprit acted innocent. They are not worthy to be in your memory any more.
Let go of the memories that fill you with negativity. It is time to let go of the memory of the evil teacher who punished you in front of the whole class or lecturer who read your answer script amidst a lecture. Either they did not know your strengths or did not have time to assess your abilities. You have long grown out of the mould they identified you with. Logically, their power to overrule your life is something you shed when you ceased to be a student. And it is way too childish to cling into the scars of humiliations now.

Let go of the faces of those who make your blood boil. It may be true that we cannot be saints yet hold grudges that only end in the grave is not good for your health. Whatever wrong they have done to you, they do not deserve to be penalized continuously for one thing they had done and forgotten.
Let go of the stories that ended without proper endings. Stop cross-questioning yourself as to why things have to end that way. Let those who break away from your life be happy in what they do now. Stop trying to make others feel bad simply because things did not work out. Whether it was your fault or that of the other part, it is an expired past that can never be brought to life again.
Do not deprive yourself the joy of living by holding on to the past. The sun rises everyday; it is a matter of keeping your sky cloud-free to receive the sunshine.

May all the days be their days!


“Sometimes, as a batsman, you have days when you know it is going to be your day and this was one of those as I dropped into a rhythm right from the start. Conditions were perfect; the outfield was like glass,”
-Kumar Sangakkara- Serious Winning Business –August 3, 2003.

Even though eight long years have passed after the accolades were made, the Sinhalese Sports Club ground looked unchanged on the the warm, sunny Saturday when Sri Lanka played Australia in their third and final test. When the Lankan cricketing heartthrob made this comment after scoring his first century at the SSC, that came a few months after his maiden ton in Galle, he would have never thought that this would be the venue for his hundredth test appearance.
Perhaps that is what makes test cricket in Sri Lanka so much more special than the two other forms of the game. It certainly lacks the intensity and nail-biting anxiety. Yet, as the players who love playing the game, test matches have their inherent characteristics; for me, it is all about breaking the cords with the outside world and enjoying the Colombo heat and the occasional breeze that makes the Lion flags flutter with pride.
That was the dose of cricket I have been missing for so long: a strange, timeless fascination that sometimes bordered on madness. It seeped into my writing. When the season was on and the weekends were strewn with schedules that often dragged me to a shady pavilion at the SSC, I ate cricket, I breathed cricket and I lived on it.
My madness did not have a method. My family failed to see the logic behind my meditation on eleven men clad in white, running behind a ball under the merciless sun. They were oblivious to the beauty of a cover-drive coming out of Sangakkara’s bat or the magical spin of Muralitharan. My teenage fantasies were all about the home team walking away with the series win. And to this day, it has not changed.
It was a dream-come- true for me to sit again in a familiar pavilion on a mid September afternoon to see the home team having the upper hand in the game. I let pineapples indulge me. I can excuse myself to sip a fizzy drink and I get happy-feet when hearing baila and papare music. My heart swells with an innocent pride to be at a match that marked a milestone of a brilliant cricketer who boasts of Sri Lankan-ness with his every stroke, both in and out of the field.
On my way home, clutching at the tickets that will end up in my treasure box, I kept hoping, ‘May all outfields look like glass and may all the days be theirs!’