The theft

by Laki Rajapakse

The evening sky was gradually losing its brightness as darkness fell on the peaceful and quiet village hamlet. Old Alakka was seated on the mat she spread at the foot of the Buddha statue, in her tiny shrine room.

She had offered fresh flowers and lit the incense sticks, the lone oil lamp was flickering while spreading its light on the Buddha statue. She tried to concentrate on the serene beauty on the face of the pure white Buddha statue.

No other statue she venerated in life either in her village temple or any other place of worship had the same calming effect on her.

Suddenly, her concentration was broken and a sadness mixed with guilt was slowly engulfing her. A secret she thought she had forgotten and forgiven herself long ago was emerging on and off tormenting her.

Her mind flashed back to almost two decades, when she was young and in her late forties or so, was the much loved amme in a posh household.

She used to sweep and dust the rooms and furniture each day after the lady and master left home for work. The Buddha statue covered with a polythene sheet was kept on a cupboard in an unoccupied room.

The statue was taken out only during an alms-giving that took place perhaps once a year in the household. On such occasion it was kept on the table in the hall and the offerings were placed before it, before the bhikkhus were served Dane.

Once the ceremony was over the Buddha statue was back in its former place on the cupboard, covered with the polythene sheet which soon gathers dust, forgotten for another year.

Alakka would once in a way, while performing her duties in the mornings would creep in to the unoccupied room and take a look at the Buddha. The beautiful smile that remains unchanged over the years, and the serenity on the face of the Buddha statue warming her heart. And each time she entered the room he would never fail to kneel down and worship.

This was going on for a number of years. Once during the New Year vacation back at home, she joined her family on a pilgrimage to the Kelani Vihara, while walking back to the van, she noticed the Buddha statues in gleaming white in a stall in the market place.

They were so similar to the statue at her lady's house, but, none had the same serenity and beauty and were no where compared with it.

She bought a statue and brought it home. Back at work in the lady's house she replaced the statue on the cupboard in the deserted room with the new one and hid the former with her belonging to take home with her on her next visit to the village.

Months and years went by, no one in the household noticed any difference in the statue. In due course having reached the ripe old age Alakka retired from work and started her new life at home. With the money she saved she built her tiny shrine room and on a wooden table she placed her statue.

The one she could not bear to part with - the one that did not belong to her-but quite cunningly she made her own. She did not feel that she did any wrong. Here she was bestowing the full veneration on it. She would do her offerings without fail every morning and evening.

She recited all the Pali stanzas she knew by heart, gazing at the statue.

She could, before falling asleep each night, with her eyes closed see the Buddha statue in her mind, and wished each day that when it is time for her to die, she be able to breathe out her last breath while concentrating on the serene face of her Buddha statue.

She wondered why she was reminded of the incident again? She had long forgotten the wrong doing. Was it a big crime? Did she commit a big sin?

All these years she thought it best not to think about it. With a sigh she raised her head and looked at the statue feeling sad. Through the tears that welled up in her eyes, she saw the familiar serene smile on the face of the Buddha statue and her heart filled with warmth once again.

----

A tale of an exile

Tishani Doshi

I am sitting with Wole Soyinka, one of Nigeria's most famous literary sons, in the Four Seasons, a Chinese restaurant in Queensway, London.

The woman next to us is digging into a plate of spare ribs and rice with relish. Soyinka, eyeing her from the corner of his frames, leans over to me and says, "Oh, I wish my friend Femi Johnson was here to see this.

There was nothing he liked better than to watch someone enjoy their food." Soyinka's latest book, You Must Set Forth at Dawn, is a memoir. It opens with his return to Nigeria in 1998 after five years of exile, accompanied with the body of his friend Femi Johnson from Germany, whom he says he could not leave "like a stray without ties of family and friends."

The book is an elegiac tribute to lost friends and family, but it is equally, a renewed appeal for justice, which, for Soyinka, is the first condition of humanity. During our meal, some of which is shamefully wasted (Femi wouldn't have approved), there are things I learn about Soyinka that extend beyond the activist and writer. He is a beverage lover for one, barring water, which he despises: espressos, wines and whiskeys being his speciality.

He is the lightest traveller in the world - after effects from the Abachi regime when agents were known to plant contraband in luggage in order to arrest people. He calls his Blackberry a blueberry, goes to the opera to escape, and thinks the burgeoning Nigerian film industry Nollywood is "appalling and unoriginal." In 1967, at the beginning of the Nigerian Civil War, Soyinka was wrongly accused of assisting rebels in the breakaway republic of Biafra to purchase jet fighters.

He spent 22 months in solitary confinement in a cell measuring four feet by eight feet. During this time, to keep the "inertia of his mind" at bay, he observed the microscopic lives of lizards and ants, rediscovered mathematical principles that he hated as a child, and wrote notes on scraps of toilet paper, which would eventually become the classic prison memoir The Man Died. Soyinka is now 72-years-old, and it has been over 20 years since he became the first African to win the Nobel Prize for Literature - something he describes as a mixed blessing, because "everybody wants something as a result of that prize... you become the property of the world.

"If the constant ringing of his blueberry is anything to go by, he doesn't seem to have stopped moving since.

There are constant demands on his time to deliver interviews, keynote addresses and pronouncements.

And while he doesn't seem to show any signs of flagging, he does wish that he had more time to pursue some of his favourite solitary pastimes in his home in Abeokuta.

Excerpts from the interview:

In conversation with Wole Soyinka

Wole, how long did it take you to write this memoir?

It was written on a break. I've said again and again that I've never been interested in writing about myself. I find it tedious, sometimes painful, frustrating, recollecting things you'd rather not recollect.

Above all, the biography is supposed to be about you, but after a certain age, you cannot and should not write about everything because other people are involved, and I believe one has no right to intervene in other people's lives, those parts that have been private to them and to thrust them into the public.

Since one cannot tell the full story anyway, why bother with biography? Let others try to capture your life, that's their problem.

So why did you finally write it?

Politics. Before this, there were two biographies that again, I had no interest in writing. I wrote Ibadan in exile, mostly here in London, because I decided that I wanted to go back and join the others.

I also had the compulsion to set something down about a similar route of a problem for whatever its worth, which would speak to the younger generation.

The second Isara, again was written on the run, with Scotland Yard and an FBI minder and all of that. Living that kind of existence for two years led me deeper and deeper into it.

Besides, from time to time, whether you like it or not, you run into people at literary conferences - these people who are feeding on you.

A lot of the time it's pure fantasy.

They don't even know what the hell they're writing about. It goes in wild directions, and it could be amusing for a while, but afterward, when you get older and you're really on the knife-edge of existence, and when those idle flatterers who call themselves academics are writing about you in a way that has nothing to do with reality, you think it's better if you write it yourself, so at least, if they want to write some more, they can write operatively, from somebody who knows something about the subject.

How do you think your time in exile changed or affected your writing?

I don't believe that it changed my style, no but it certainly changed my rhythm. I had to extract time whenever possible. I worked everywhere and anywhere in cafes, in restaurants, on the plane. I developed a habit of shutting out the world completely. In terms of what I actually wrote, I don't believe it changed. I actually wrote those memoirs on the move.

You've written that there's an epidemic of religion in Nigeria and in the world. Do you think that the world would be better off without religion?

I think so. It would be less beautiful perhaps, because some religions have created really beautiful architecture, incredible music, some of the most moving dances stem from religion - this idea or acknowledgement of something that stems from something larger than yourself. But I have a feeling that the world would have found a way of substituting it or creating the same thing from a different source of inspiration.

Tell me about the recent Nigerian elections and the mood of the country when you last left it.

We've had bad elections before, but we've also had good elections. This time, I think we've plumbed the abyss. You know, we have someone (past President Olusegun Obasanjo) who believes that he is the answer to all Nigeria's problems and he is willing to subvert the constitution to perpetuate his control.

There is video evidence of police officers carting off ballot boxes, places where elections were never held but results declared - astronomical figures.

Let's see what the tribunal is going to do about it. But the mood is war-weary. Again and again, how we are going to go around this circle....

I've used the word insult before, because it's like stealing from the people and then slapping them in the face in the bargain.

What was and what continues to be your relationship with Obasanjo?

I think now, the final breach has taken place. I have no problem in forgiving personal wrongs, and this is a man who has done his best to have my life taken, but when you chose to belittle a committee to which I belong, then a certain line has been crossed. Since the elections, it's been war footing between him and me. There's no more pretence.

I consider him totally irredeemable.

What gives you hope?

I don't experience hope. I cannot remember a time when I thought that a situation was hopeful, but neither have I thought that a situation was hopeless.

I just don't think in such terms. There are moments when I undergo a sense of importance; what next can one do to effect change, but as long as organisational options are available, one doesn't get to a point of hopelessness or hopefulness.

I accept the condition in which I find myself. But I have a very clear vision of what things should be. The important thing is to keep thinking, to keep agitating. I feel anger, lots and lots of anger.

The other problem that I have is the problem of deciding when you are faced with no choice but to respond to violence with violence.

This is the overriding dilemma of my existence.

One does everything to avoid it, but there are certain moments, like when my friend, the writer Ken Saro - Wiwa and eight others were executed after a show trial in 1995. My colleagues and I decided that not only was violence justified, it was inevitable.