Another kind of internally displaced

Octogenarian

It was a rather ghoulish newspaper advertisement that caught my eye the other day. The ad was for inviting Tenders for the removal and burial of unclaimed bodies that would be lying in government hospital mortuaries in the year 2010.

To plan for the future is all about searching for prosperity. But to plan to bury unclaimed bodies is rather macabre and frightful to think that more and more unfortunates are to die destitute and their bodies to be laid in mortuary freezers until the lowest bidder is given the contract to bury these bodies in unmarked graves. This invitation for bids is a sad indictment on our society.

There are hundreds and hundreds of homeless destitutes roaming the streets in sheer despair and misery, feeding off garbage bins and quenching their thirst off way side taps, neglected, despised and shunned by society.

Yes, for them too there is night and day, sunshine and rain but unlike for us hope lies dead and the sun no longer shines on them. Their blank faces and despairing eyes tell it all.

Nine out of ten of these unfortunate men and women reduced to rags and starvation are those who had left their homes out of sheer necessity only to lose themselves in an unfriendly world that shows no pity. There are others who have been cruelly abandoned and disowned by their loved ones with hardly a twinge making a dent on their conscience. Yet others have wondered off mentally deranged and others due to loss of memory. Nevertheless they all go to make up the tragic numbers of our internally displaced.

It is these poor souls who finally end up dead inside a bus shelter or sewer and given a pauper’s burial sans last rites, tears, flowers and orations. There are people who weep over the death of a pet but how many give a thought for these lost souls roaming our streets, unwashed, unkempt and starving. Yet let us not forget these unfortunates too are Sri Lankan citizens, neglected and shunned because they had been reduced to beggary through no fault of theirs.

Sometime ago I met a rather seedy looking man outside a well-known Temple. He was assisting selling flowers for a small wage. He shocked me when he spoke to me in fluent English and told me his unfortunate story. He was a retired mercantile employee living in Gampaha and was cruelly abandoned by his son and daughter-in-law in the temple premises.

He told me with a sob that he had been inhumanly treated and even deprived of a square meal, and though he could find his way back to Gampaha he preferred living here because he feels free and happy that he had been released from the cruelties inflicted on him. Like him there are hundreds of unfortunates.

We have only to talk to them and give them an ear to understand the tragedies that had blighted their lives. Much concern has been shown to the internally displaced of the North and East. It has even attracted international attention to the plight of these people. Tragically Government agencies, the many Human Rights Activists and Humanitarian Organizations seem blissfully unaware of the plight of these displaced people. They are actually the lost souls of our Nation living under conditions much, much worse than one could imagine. One wonders who would dare to take up the cause of these unfortunates.