Tales about heroes
 Unhappy is the land that needs heroes, said no one else but Bertolt
Brecht.
Kathaven Kathava is a live talk show broadcast every last Friday with
roundtable talk of Prof. Sunanda Mahendra, Karunaratne Amarasinghe,
Amaradasa Gunawardena and Priyadarshani Vithanage. This time their talk
was on heroes.
 Who are the heroes? Interesting enough to listen to them.
It was the custom in that once upon a time country to sacrifice a
pretty damsel to the mountain demon for the sake of prosperity. Now this
came to pass in Gannoruwa in the Kandyan times.
This did not affect the girls born in Kandy, though. Welike Menike,
unfortunately, was not that lucky. She was the next in line for the
mountain demon. Menike was shuddering. There was no clock close by but
her heart was ticking fast enough. Time was nearing. And then she heard
a sound. Has the demon come earlier today? How come?
Her eyes were shut for the fear. Demon actually came down, she felt
his touch. But that touch was a little sensational. The demon started
running over suddenly. The girl’s eyes were still closed. The demon
spoke in a little while.
“Open your eyes darling, and see for yourself.”
She opened her eyes to see handsome Gajanayaka Nilame with her. It’s
then she discovered that the luck had favoured her with a prince
charming, who outmaneuvered the mountain demon, whoever it can be.
Who is hero in this story? Gajanayaka Nilame? Well, he saved an
innocent young girl from death. Whether it is for his personal gain or
not, I don’t know.
But what followed next was really heroic. It is about monk Kudapola
who was also known as Kanapola Hamuduruwo. Some of us already know he
was shot down before the Dalada Maligawa, and that is it. But you can
see more spice in the story.
The day his destiny was sealed, the monk woke up early in the
morning, performed the rituals in the Dalada Maligawa. He was never
scared of what was in store for him. We Sinhalese have that tradition of
heroes such as Keppetipola and Madduma Bandara who always braved the
death.
Lafcadio Hearne’s story about mountain of tears is very much precious
when you talk about family bonds. It is a story about a mother and a
son. In that country, the king wanted to get rid of all adults, that
were becoming a menace nailing down the country’s development. So he
ruled that every elderly citizen should be deported to a mountain by
their children.
However our hero son wanted to go beyond the ruling. Not that he
played the god with king’s ruling, he was wedged between the love for
mother and obligation for the king. His love for the mother was greater.
So he hid the mother under the bed and fed her everyday.
The king was stony-hearted. That’s why he wanted to give the
country’s peasants a real hard time when the harvest time arrived. He
wanted every peasant to produce an ash rope. No peasant would make it,
he knew. The son came home to break the news to mother. But the mother
didn’t get panicked. She asked the son to twist a rope tightly, put it
on a stone and burn it. “There you go”, she said, “this is the ash rope
you should show to the king.”
The ash rope bowled the king over. But still his feral desire to
torture the peasant was not complete. He wanted the peasants to send a
thread through the small holes in a conch.
This was again an absurd demand for the peasants. But this did not
crush the son’s determination, he had a strong backup. He went home and
his mother instructed him to gum a thread with a grain of wheat and put
it on one of the conch’s holes. After he obeyed, in a little while he
could see an ant approach the grain, go inside and come in another hole.
This way he could get the thread over every small hole.
This made the king even more astonishing. He was now interested in
getting to know how he could do these.
The son was honest and confessed, which made the king give a second
thought to his own ruling. Elderly generation is a menace, true, but
still they contribute intellectually, he thought. In an instance he
ruled out his previous command.
You can take part in this live talk show every last Friday 6.30 at
the SLBC’s Ananda Samarakoon studio. Next time’s talk is on thieves and
stealers - you should go there and share your stories. I think it’s
actually worthwhile.
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