My father

(a note to Mitsi)

‘The old house is still standing’

I recite, and she asks

‘so why do you have to say it?’

I’ve never been questioned on this,

for the grasses of home were always green-green

even in the driest months

and unkempt seasons

and though the paint was cracked and dry

at times

there was nothing to explicate

home was home,

familiarities don’t come off the walls

like plaster does,

and that’s why my appachchi,

your ‘Polo Aththa’

is firmly defying

his infirmities;

he’s an old house

paint-cracked

but here the grass

is green-green

and will be

as and when

they all,

we all come

to see him.  

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Nangi*

She was tiny

that’s my first memory of her:

tiny,

and over time

she grew smaller and smaller

not by the distancing of time

or continental shifts

tinier

for reasons of proximity

order of birth

tiny enough to command

pandered to, she was

indulged

but perhaps feared

I could hold her hand

or hold her in my palm

but maybe

that’s what she wanted me to think

she holds me too

in a heart-palm

made of mother

and friend,

but she’s tiny

this sister of mine.

*Upon reading the draft of her second novel and being utterly moved.

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Uma Shanthi

She came clinging

and falling out

of her father’s arms,

she was just seven

and said not a word

she showed love

by licking her father’s face

she was beautiful

this girl of seven

touched by some grace

without a name

named after a name

she would not know,

this Goldenhar girl,

just seven years old

running all over my heart

though she could not even walk.

Uma Shanthi,

seven then,

would be nine now

or thereabouts,

it does not matter;

she passed on

this purest of human beings

about whom her father said

‘she did not harbor one harsh thought

in all her life’.

This most beautiful of children

used to live

in Roxywatta.

Past tense.

She never cried

but I do now. 

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Summary Execution

This is not post-war

these times of claim and allegation

of selectivity and double-speak

of world-is-flat

and humans flatter theories

and theorists

these are times of self-righteousness

these are war-times

without explosives

suicide-bombers or assassinations;

these times came before another time

of a nation under siege

a time thirty years long

of everyday anxiety,

but this was a moment

a representative capture

of a summary execution

the world will not recognize,

the execution of kindness

unthinkable of a war criminal

the execution of the Manual of Hope

an introduction to the Book of Tomorrow,

the quintessential api venuwen api freeze.

It’s written not in act nor reception

but in the face of the saved.

Indelible.   

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War criminality*

War is simple:

killing and getting killed

threat and negating threat

an exercise where life is a breath held back

sometimes never to be released,

a love story unfolding

under a terrible sky

on an exploding earth

lovers making out as best they can

under an umbrella of bullets

and debris

war is blind to the precious

baby’s breath

mother’s milk fragrance

horror at the gaping wound

even after you’ve seen ripped out limbs

war is not delicate nor delicacy

and war criminals are divested

of tenderness,

they don’t care

and no mother, 

whether war-torn, bruised or poor

will gift baby to brute.  

*inspired by the photograph of a Tamil woman who had fled LTTE-controlled areas handing over her new born baby to a solder in a truck (presumably before she got in herself), smiling all the while.

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Sal Mal

[an animisa lochana poojawa]
 

From Lumbini to Kusinara

and long before

and long after too

a thorana that needs no song

no light

but is text complete

a story that slips

from the bana potha

and the jathaka katha,

a soft encounter

of tenacity and yield

with root that turns

into abiding fragrance

the being and breathing

through centuries and centuries,

made for the dana paramita

the giving beyond gift.

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*Pic courtesy www.imagelanka.com

An ode to Blueness

They say there are blue skies

not sky-blues,

blue waters, but not water-blues,

but our mountains are also blue,

so too, the road,

so widely bluescaped

blue-arteried by river,

blued by cloud and mist

and there’s engineered blue too,

a blue-spotted map

the wellassa of the hundred thousand waters

and the cross-pollination of blue

we are blue in embrace and resilience

is our many-blued land

an indelible signature surely

of the blue planet 
Earth.

[Inspired by the photography of Hiranya Malwatta]

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